The Barsoom Project

Snow Goose gestured to them again, impatiently. “Come on. We’re going to have to climb.”

Max didn’t look down. He could guess how many of the other Gamers were still at the bottom, staring up, thinking how impossible it all was. The rocks were not that badly tilted. It was like climbing a crude stairway, if each stair was a meter higher than the previous one. Hippogryph was climbing backward, pulling Charlene upward by her wrists; they both seemed to be enjoying themselves.

It got harder as Max got higher… but he couldn’t catch Eviane. She climbed steadily, unstoppable, panting through gritted teeth, pushing forward and upward toward what terrified her.

And now he saw that the wave of boulders spilled against a vertical rock wall. The wall rose seamless into darkness. It might have been a thousand miles high, the core of a hollow Earth.

“We have to breach the wall,” Snow Goose said. “Everyone needs to push. Come on.”

Swell. But Max could see what Eviane was doing: choosing a big, nearly flat boulder for her perch; setting her feet, hands flat against the monolithic wall. The boulders were not big enough for two. He chose one next to hers.

Charlene and Hippogryph took Eviane’s other side. Like Max, they tried to imitate Eviane. Strange, wasn’t it, that she always seemed to know just what to do? So she was just a bit quicker than anyone else. Was he the only one who noticed?

Kevin was giving it his all, but he had climbed no higher than Orson, who was sweating and glaring up at his brother. Trianna and Johnny Welsh had reached the top. Welsh said, “Hulk smash?”

Snow Goose grinned and nodded. Welsh chose a boulder and set his feet. “Push?”

“Push. All at once.”

“One, two, three, heave!”

They heaved. Max pushed with everything he had. He could sense the mass of his companions: if they had anything going for them at all, it was mass! But the mass of the stone wall felt infinite. And yet… there was a gritty, crunchy sound against his ear. They’d done something.

Orson and Kevin reached the top, paused a moment to suck air, then joined the effort. Push harder Snow Goose dropped back, gasping. “All right, take a rest. And then-”

The rest of Snow Goose’s sentence was lost in a growing rumble. The rocks began to shimmy.

Eviane’s eyes flew open. “Oh my gosh! This is about to-”

All at once and nothing first, the wall disintegrated. The pile of boulders spilled outward. Screams sounded muffled; bubbles streamed from their mouths; and the party was falling through dark water in a cloud of shattered rock.

The entire cavern had dissolved, crumbled. Max was on a falling boulder… for that matter, everyone was on a faffing boulder. They sank in a murky cloud of detritus, but they sank faster. Smaller boulders, rocks, pebbles, grit, all rose out of sight and left the view clear. Each Adventurer, astride his own individual boulder, sank sleekly into depths that graded from dark to utter black.

Max felt his ears pop. He laughed. That was too realistic! He hooted, and waved his arms to brother Orson, whose rock was spinning in a slow, lazy circle.

(He could breathe! He had only just noticed that. He was breathing underwater. Unself-consciously he rubbed the side of his neck, looking for gills. Nope, nothing there…)

Although they had to be far below the surface of the ocean, and the water was murky, shafts of light pierced the darkness like silver pillars. The travelers sank down into the depths on a gentle diagonal, slipping through dark and light, past the finny denizens of the deep.

A school of ugly blind fish cozied past him. Showing more good mammalian sense than their cold blood should have allowed, they waited for Trianna. They made kissing motions at her, following almost close enough to touch.

Vaguely through the murk, the bottom was taking shape. Max could almost… he could make out the titanic outline of a woman in repose, though the head was wrong: lumpy, misshapen.

A flutter of panic: the Paija? Nahhh. Too big.

It was a woman, and she was huge. Three hundred feet high if an inch. Bigger. Sedna.

The surrounding murk made anything but a vague impression difficult, but it seemed to him that she sat in an attitude of sorrow. Her arms and knees hid her face. She might have been carved of alabaster or of mud; it was just not possible to make out detail. Her shoulders were gently rounded, slumped.

Although she was a giantess, a goddess, Sedna, the mother of life, Max felt the burden which hung heavy upon her. He wanted to hold her, shelter her, protect her.

Well, damn-that was why he’d come, wasn’t it?

A wayward current was floating them down toward the gigantic head. He’d been right: Sedna’s head was misshapen. A pale brownish mass capped the back and left side of her skull and was spreading down her neck. It had an angular look, less like fungus than like a growth of crystals. White, veinlike threads intersected everywhere, like… roads?

Orson screamed, “Max! They’ve built a goddamn city in her hair!”

Charlene called, “We’re going past!”