The Barsoom Project

It grinned at him and skittered away; but another faced him, a bug with the body of a walrus turned inside out. And below that one was a lascivious woman-creature. It whistled at him-tiny, very high-pitched-and wriggled its two-inch-wide derriere suggestively.

Just what did you have in mind, honey?

Kevin choked back a face full of laughter. “What is all of this?”

“It’s the sins of mankind. I think I’ve seen vanity, and wasteful killing, and loose sexual practice.”

“Jesus,” Hebert hissed. By wriggling around in the net, Max could just make out his dark face. “I think you’re right. I’ve got murder, I think, and maybe theft.”

“All right, then. We know where we are, but what do we do?”

There wasn’t long to wait. The sins were busy around them busy, busy, busy… and from the roots of Sedna’s hair rose a city. They watched it form one shell at a time, built by carapaced creatures that flowed from every follicle. It was an array too vast and differentiated to even begin to categorize.

There was every sin that he could recognize: sloth and gluttony and greed and murder, and actions mimed but beyond his understanding. The creatures reached Sedna’s bald spot, and there they shed their shells and wriggled forth like glistening varicolored slugs. The shells built up and up in a heap. It grew like a coral reef. Hundreds upon thousands of individual beings contributed one bit at a time. A bizarre castlescape rose up and up while the sluglike occupants mingled in obscene pools or piles in front of the structure.

The castle ringed them, twice as tall as a human being, with walls several feet thick.

How many sins? How many ten-inch sins did it take to make a structure of that size? He searched his mind, the confusion drowning out the equations before he could come up with an answer… but the net was relaxing. He could move.

Max shucked the net smoothly, the way he would wiggle out of a full nelson. Sedna’s scalp was resilient, bouncy. Max crawled on hands and knees, found Eviane and helped her out of her net. This time she didn’t fight him, and her fingers stayed, warm on his wrist, for a lingering second.

Cityscape stretched around and above them, a megalopolis for rats. Sins were still swarming forth like denuded rats, writhing and fluxing in vile pools, in a moat of living tissue. The corners of Sin City were four parabolic arches, and the flat wall beneath each arch was bulging, sculpting itself…

Until four human figures faced them, standing in the corners of the miniature city like dark brothers of the four cardinal directions. The shells that shaped them were still occupied. Crawling sins even shaped a suggestion of faces; but the features moved restlessly, semi-independently.

European, African, Asian, Eskimo. The nightmare figures examined the Adventurers, reaching out of the architecture to poke and then drawing back as if the prospect of touching a human being was distasteful. They retreated back into their directional corners, and sighed heavily.

The European figure spoke, and Max could see a hundred mouths moving. Its voice was a buzzing composite. “We have… ” It wanted “s” sounds where there were none. The sibilance was disturbingly reptilian. It adjusted slightly. “Yesss. We have waited for you, long, long time. And now you are here. Yesss.” It turned to its brothers, lifted its arms jubilantly, and screamed: “Let the trial begin!”

Chapter Twenty-One

TEMPTATIONS

Dwight Welles watched, waiting, his fingers splayed over the keyboard like a concert pianist’s, bare feet gently touching the pedals.

He watched the four screens. Occasionally his eyes flicked to the bob stage where the entire Judgment scene was displayed in miniature.

Truth be told, he preferred the two-dee screen-it flattened and simplified the images, and thereby sped his responses. This was vital. Even though he had time-delays built into the program, he needed every split second to focus the massive power of Dream Park’s computer banks on the job at hand.

In play, and at his best, Dream Park’s chief computer wizard was a blur of motion, fingers and feet moving so swiftly that they dazzled the eye. But unlike a concert virtuoso, Welles was engaged in a piano duel in which the theme alone had been preselected. Melody, tempo, harmonies, and phrasing were all variable. It was the ultimate challenge, and only a Game as complex as Fimbulwinter could have lured Welles from his dry theorizing for three days of extemporaneous madness.

He felt drunk with power. Even the Lopezes would have flinched from running the next scene.

He flexed his fingers, wiped moisture on the pale T-shirt which read Nice computers don’t go down.

Hell. Sex couldn’t even come close.

Four composite creatures stood at the four corners of the clearing. Max Sands found it easy to guess which figures represented what.

One, positioned to what he assumed was the north, had stereotypical Eskimo features. The figure was short and pudgy and nut-brown.