The Barsoom Project

Then the worm-shape trumpeted with pachydermic fury. The ground roared and crumbled above a great shaggy skull. The creature heaved the ground up and away with such ease that it seemed capable of shouldering the very heavens aside. Tiny eyes glared. The rest of it climbed free of the earth, twelve feet tall and twenty feet long, shaggy brownish fur almost draping the ground, worn and cracked tusks curling up and around like the bow of a sousaphone.

“A mammoth! A goddamned mammoth! But-” was all that the Guardsman had time to say, and then it was on him and — and past. It shuddered as if in agony, twitching and throwing its head back and forth. Trumpeting, it ignored the Guardsman and went straight for Eviane.

She was firing steadily. At the last instant she turned to run. The beast reared up and landed on her with both front feet. She disappeared in a thundering avalanche of dust, and was just gone.

For two or three seconds the mammoth stood like a stop-motion model, and shimmied. Max could almost hear gears hum but Max was in motion, running to get past the great shield of its head, then screaming as he hurled his harpoon into its side, behind the short ribs, aimed at the heart.

The spear went through it, sailed out the other side, and clattered audibly to the ground.

The mammoth flickered back and forth as if incapable of making up its mind. Other Adventurers were attacking. Bowles whacked effortlessly through its leg with a war club… and suddenly it was in motion again. It flailed at Bowles with its trunk, then, with blood streaming from a dozen wounds, it crumpled to the ground and lay sagging like a half-empty rag doll.

Max looked at Snow Goose, and her face was drop-jawed silly. The Guardsman looked the same.

What in the hell?

The mammoth sagged further. It was dissolving. Within a minute it had become dust and bones, then nothing but dust. The torn ground around it healed, until there was no trace that something singular had happened.

And where Eviane had stood, there was no blood, no clothing, nothing but flattened earth. As if she had never existed at all.

“Oh, shit rocks,” Snow Goose said, blanching. “She’s dead.”

“What?”

“She’s dead. I…” Snow Goose looked up, bewildered, at twenty-six pairs of bewildered eyes. She said, “The burrowing mammoth has claimed her for his own. T-tonight we mourn.” The formal words sounded utterly alien in her mouth. She seemed uncertain of her next word or move. “I… I guess we can camp here. We ran it off. We should be safe now…”

With equal uncertainty, the others shucked their packs. Max distinctly heard the Guardsman mutter, “Well, if that don’t beat all-” before their eyes met. The Guardsman was an Actor… wasn’t he? But the consternation in his face was real.

As for Max, it was as if the fates, or Dream Park, had promised him Eviane and then reneged.

He prepared to make camp. What else could he do? But something had happened, even if he couldn’t figure out precisely what. Was it an accident, or a glitch in the programming, or more goddamn clues?

For once, the guides seemed more shaken than the Gamers!

Chapter Ten

I’VE HAD DATES LIKE YOU

Pins of fire leavened the darkness. That one, much brighter than the rest, had to be the sun. There was little else to catch the eye.. but here was a tiny twinkling point; there, another; there, a tumbling snowball marked with black fissures. Alex Griffin’s video wall was open to the realm of the protocomets.

Weird skirling music floated in and out, low in the background. A tiny voice spoke of billions of iceballs a few kilometers in diameter, spaced as far apart as Earth and sun, growing sparser yet as the sun dwindled aft. Compared to the inner solar system, the Oort Cloud was nearly as empty as interstellar space.

The view zoomed in on a world banded in black and dull reds, nested in a wide ring: Nemesis, a giant planet in a wide eccentric orbit, whose mass periodically hurled flurries of comets into the inner solar system. Nemesis was impure fiction. There was reason to think there might be a Nemesis, a world too distant to have been found by probes or telescopes.

The Oort Cloud presentation must have been infinitely more impressive in Gaming A this morning. Even so, the illusion was so deep and complete that Alex felt as if he and Millicent were sitting sideways above a pit. It surely had Millicent’s attention. Her hands moved like independent entities, bringing lobster to her mouth while comets buzzed her in the video wall.

He enjoyed watching her like that, in profile. He saw African and Spanish and English in her features, a recipe that brewed an almost irresistible meld of earthiness and intelligence. She was just what he needed to salve the day’s frustrations. But even if the doctor had prescribed her, the nurse still had to agree to the treatment…

Words from the screen caught his attention. “-probes will be driven by solar sails, powered by tremendous lasers stationed on Earth’s moon-”

“That bothered me,” he said.