The Barsoom Project

One stood. His face was very like Martin’s, leaner than a normal Eskimo face, with indented cheekbones and sunken eyes, as if he had not only Martin’s genes but the old shaman’s suggestion of deep sickness. He was shaven-headed. The dark eyes squinted in old hatred; the corneas looked milky. He reached into the pouch that hung from his neck, fumbling, and for a moment Eviane saw a tiny, withered pair of human legs in the pouch, and the rounded suggestion of a head. Then it vanished again, and Ahk-lut (who else could it be?) drew out a bar of chewing tobacco.

With dark, stained teeth Ahk-lut tore an enormous plug from the bar, masticated it, then spat a long, brownish stream into the fire. The flames leapt, and the smoke became a pillar of fetid dark green, masking and noxious.

“The young ones. Our children,” Martin said. “They were trying to heal a great wrong, but they were impatient. They wanted it quick and easy. They’ve done a dreadful thing…”

The Cabal passed the tobacco from hand to hand. One at a time every man in the lodge spat tobacco juice into the fire, until at last the smoke within the lodge was so deep that she could barely see faces at all.

Ahk-lut turned, picked up a robe, and swept it aside. The lump beneath glowed faintly blue. Ahk-lut picked it up-it was heavy-swung himself around, and set it in the center of the fire. Sparks sprayed outward.

Firelight masked the blue glow, but set the irregular mass gleaming. It was polished metal, with shattered edges like curved daggers, and thick tubing twisted and torn.

Above the fire, a huge face looked briefly through the smoke. It was part bird, part man: enough of man to show its astonishment.

Each man reached into the pouch hung around his neck, and from it drew a handful of powders and bone fragments.

With each handful there was a brief flash of a shape that roiled within the smoke and then vanished again, like a walrus rolling at the water’s surface before disappearing back into the depths. Here was a monstrous caterpillar, a writhing, multiarmed abomination. Smoke churned and became a killer whale with stubby human arms. It changed again, into the malformed corpse of a fetus pushing its flattened head against its amniotic membrane. A dead man clothed against bitter cold, face hooded, clothing and torso ripped open and empty. There were other, darker, bloodier images.

Higher within the pillar of smoke, the bird-face showed again. Its beak opened wide; it screamed silently, and faded, and then the shrill cry of a bird burst through the illusory smokehouse. The Cabal bellowed in triumph.

… When had they become nine?

Ahk-lut stepped into the circle, set his hands on a man’s shoulders, and pulled him to his feet. Eviane saw that the man’s arms and ankles were bound. He screamed like a bird. She saw, now, the suggestion of a beak in his pointed face.

Quite suddenly, the fire was out. An angular metal shape gleamed harsh blue within it. Shapes moved in the dark. A shadow occluded the glow, and fell into it-man-shaped, a bound man, writhing-and he was gone, and the blue glow was gone, and the firelight was the light of Martin’s qasgiq.

Chapter Eight

THE MISSION

The fire was down to coals, and the smoke was thinning. Some of the refugees began to remember their half-naked state but there were larger matters to consider.

Martin said, “We believe that the Raven’s children’s children tricked their grandfather. They piqued his curiosity until he assumed human form to spy upon them. They cast their spells upon him, then upon the sun. The sun’s death spells the end of your world, and the beginning of theirs.”

“Martin.” Within the smoky dark, who spoke? “What was the metal object that glowed blue?”

“That? A powerful talisman I traced when I was young. The Cabal has stolen it. It was a fragment of a thing that fell from the sky, in Canada.”

“That was no meteor.” Now Eviane recognized the voice of Orson Sands.

“No, it was a machine from Russia that fell before I was born. Talismans gain power from the distance they have traveled. I learned that this object had gone round and round the world until whatever held it up stopped working. So I sought it out. Now the Cabal is using it to throttle the sun.”

Eviane heard herself saying, “They’ll make the whole world into an Eskimo world.” She wondered how she knew. “Cold. No crops, only the animals. We’d have to learn…” Her prescient vision ran far ahead of her tongue.

Martin said, “Yes, you would have to learn. Ahk-lut would teach the white and black and yellow men our ways. Those who will not learn would starve. We have guessed that much. We can even guess why they have barred us from tending Sedna-”

“Sedna,” Orson Sands broke in. “Shouldn’t we know more about Sedna?”