The Barsoom Project

She knelt there, whimpering, and watched without comprehension as the Terichik flickered and dissolved. As the moon disappeared from the sky above her. And the stars. And the distant mountains. All that had been heaven and horizon was now a blank white dome crisscrossed with enormous rectangles.

One building at a time, the abandoned Inuit village disappeared: the lodge, the smokehouse, the line of boats. The boathouse remained, but it was too far. Eviane whimpered and ran and hid again, this time beneath a heap of splintered wood and iron: the only remaining boat.

Over and over in an endless loop her mind screamed: What is happening? What is happening? I don’t under-ohgodohgod And then even the wreckage disappeared.

Eviane knelt on a blank field of white. Around her, her companions threw down their weapons and began to gather around the two bloodstained bodies.

At the edge of the dome, a door opened. Men and women in crisp orange uniforms entered. They mouthed phrases about “effects breakdowns” and “optical difficulties” as they hustled away the warriors and angakoks, the princess and the commoners, separated the quick from the dead. Eviane remained on her knees, unseeing, unhearing, even when she was lifted up and carried gently but firmly to the exit.

The bodies were covered, belted onto stretchers, and whisked away. Only blurred imprints and smears of red remained on the artificial snow.

Finally, men came to pick up the rifle. They handled it with infinite care, as if it were a sleeping viper or a live grenade, something that might awaken to wreak new and greater havoc.

As if it was a thing of magic in a world of technology, or of technology in a world of magic.

Chapter One

THE BARSOOM PROJECT

“ In the beginning.’ Three words spoken uncounted billions of times.”

The narrator’s voice echoed everywhere and originated nowhere. It filled the vast dark cavern of Gaming Area A with its rolling, resonant embrace. Alex Griffin peered into the blackness. Phantasmal carts danced about him in elaborate patterns, orange outlines in his infrared goggles. The carts glided through an endless, empty night, invisible to each other.

“ Yet they have never lost their magic, never diminished in majesty. Ever have we looked back to the roots of our cultures, the origin of our species, the genesis of our planet.

“ Come with us now, and peer into the past of our solar system, to the formation of our most distinctive neighbor-”

A darkened dome a few hundred meters across became a urn-verse: the stars emerged.

Above and below, they flamed in primal glory. Never had the skies of Earth been so fully or brightly populated. Blobs and streams of dark matter moved across the stars, dimming them. Never had the stars made any noise at all, but now Griffin’s bones rattled with the reverberations of the best sound system in the Western hemisphere.

One dim star abruptly flared brighter than all the rest. It was blinding… it was already dimming, while shells of lesser fire expanded from the supernova at ferocious speed. There were flame-colors in the shock waves.

Griffin chuckled quietly.

The thirteen hundred dignitaries gathered here by Cowles Industries and IntelCorp were in for a hell of a show. His chief deputy Marty Bobbick had a grip on his elbow. Marty’s round face was soft with wonder, and his eyes gleamed.

“ Though details differ, current theories agree that the solar system originated as a cold cloud of interstellar gas. There were snowflakes and snowballs, protocomets, scattered through it.

And so it remained until the shock wave from a nearby supernova disturbed its equilibrium.”

The supernova had died to nothing… no, not quite gone. Griffin found it as a tiny blinking dot. Then the shock waves arrived with a rolling crash that owed less to physics than to Dream Park magic. The vast interstellar dust clouds bowed before it; flattened, then began to collapse and condense. There were hurricane shapes at the centers. The viewpoint zoomed in on one of the whorls as streamers began to separate, giving it the look of a carelessly spray-painted archery target. The great storm sparkled like a fireworks display. The center began to glow.

“ Gravity and spin became the dominant factors. Stars began to form,” the unseen narrator said, but Griffin found his mind blanking out the words. The illusion was so overpoweringly real that his chest ached for breath.

A new sun blazed forth, awesomely bright within its murky sheath of dust and comets. In that terrible light Griffin could see lumps condensing along the rings that surrounded the sun. The solar system was still murky; comets moved through the viewpoint like white bullets.