Larry Niven & Steve Barnes - The Barsoom project

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This book is an Ace original edition, and has never been previously published.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is
purely coincidental.
THE BARSOOM PROJECT
An Ace Book published by arrangement with the authors
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without
permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
Ace books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New
York 10016.
The name "ACE" and the "A" logo are trademarks belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Quality Printing and Binding by:
Orange Graphics
P.O. Box 791
Orange, VA 22960 U.S.A.
CAST OF CHARACTERS AND GLOSSARY
Falling Angel
RICHARD ARBENZ: Ambassador from Falling Angel; Charlene Dula's maternal uncle.
Dream Park
MARTY BOBBICK: Griffin's assistant. Plays as Hippogryph.
ARTHUR COWLES: Founder of Dream Park.
ALEX GRIFFIN: Security Chief of Dream Park.
THADEUS HARMONY: Dream Park Director of Operations.
MITCH HASAGAWA: Dream Park Security. TOMISUBURO IZUML Dream Park R&D tech. CALVIN IZUMI: Brother
of Tom, deceased. SANDY KHRESLA: Head of Dream Park Maintenance Division.
CARY McGIWON: Alex Griffin's new assistant. MILLICENT SUMMERS: Formerly Griffin's secretary.
Now an executive in the Department of Financial Affairs.
DOCTOR VAIL: Dream Park psychologist. DWIGHT WELLES: Senior computer tech for Dream
Park; Game Master for the altered Fimbuiwinter Game.
Gamers
ROBIN BOWLES: Professional actor. Actor in the Fimbuiwinter Game. Talisman: caribou's ear, for
hearing.
CHARLENE DULA: Gamer from the zero-gray habitat Falling Angel, and friend to Michelle Sturgeon.
Talisman: a swatch of white fur, arctic seal, for invisibility.
EVIANE alias MICHELLE RIVERS alias MICHELLE
STURGEON: Veteran of the first Fimbuiwinter Game. Plays most of the game as a tomrait. Talisman:
semi-automatic rifle.
FRANCIS HEBERT: Marine, Major in the reserves. AVRAM HENDERSON: Gamer
MAZIE HENDERSON: Gamer.
OLLIE NORLISS alias FRANKISH OLIVER: Professional Gamer and MD.
MARTIN QATERLIARAQ alias MARTIN THE ARCTIC FOX: Sorcerer or angakok among the Inuit. Actor in the
Fimbulwinter Game.
GWEN RYDER alias CANDICE alias KANGUQ alias SNOW GOOSE: Professional actress. Married to Ollie
Norliss.
MAX SANDS: Gamer Professional wrestler under the name Mr. Mountain. Talisman: owl claw, for
strength.
ORSON SANDS: Max Sands's brother Gamer.
TRIANNA STITH-WOOD: Professional chef.
KEVIN TITUS: Computer programmer and computer gamer Talisman: a crumpled skin crusted with black
soot, for strength. "Soot is stronger than fire.
JOHNNY WELSH: Gamer; professional comedian. YARNALL alias THE NATIONAL GUARDSMAN:
Dream Park actor
Others
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ANDREW CHALA: Pan-African ambassador.
KAREEM FEKESH: Industrialist, suspected supporter of UMAF
ROBERT J. FLAHERTY: Producer of Nanook of the North, 1922.
TOBY LEE HARLOW JUNIOR: Alias of the person who disrupted the first Fimbulwinter Game.
LOPEZES: Legendary Game Masters, now semiretired.
TONY McWHIRTER: Computer whiz, incarcerated for industrial espionage against Cowles Industries.
MADELEINE: Mystery woman; a possible link to Kareem Fekesh.
RAZUL: Libyan ambassador
Glossary
AHK-LUT: Leader of the Cabal; son of Martin Qaterliaraq, brother of Snow Goose.
AMARTOQ: A headless troll.
ANANSI: A space shuttle, the object of a terrorist attack some years earlier
ANGAKOK: Sorcerer
BRANTA CANADENSIS alias Tuutangayak alias Canadian Snow Goose.
THE CABAL: The clique of evil sorcerers.
COWLES INDUSTRIES: The parent company of Dream Park
COWLES MODULAR COMMUNITY: Living quarters for Dream Park employees.
FALLING ANGEL ENTERPRISES: Industrial nation-state, off-Earth.
FAT RIPPER SPECIALS: Games modified for the reeducation of substance abusers.
HOLY FIRE: Terrorist organization, precursor to the UMAF
INTELCORP: The company formed by the partnership of General Electric and Falling Angel
Enterprises.
INTERNATIONAL FANTASY GAMING SOCIETY:
The governing body supervising the world of Adventure Gaming.
KOGUKHPUK: The Burrowing Mammoth.
LEVIATHAN IV: Mining rig proposed for use in terra-forming Mars.
MARK CARD: A widely accepted inter-Union credit card.
OFFICIAL IFGS KAMA SUTRA: A myth, a mere rumor. It doesn't exist. Forget it. Trust us.
PAIJA: Giant female demon.
PEWITU: Taboos.
PHANTOM FEAST: A Dream Park diet restaurant.
RAVEN: Progenerative force in Inuit mythology.
SEDNA: Goddess of the sea and of the sea's life.
SEELUMKADCHLUK: Where the sky meets the sea; the barrier between reality and the Inuit spiritual
world.
TERICHIK: A gigantic caterpillar-like monster; the spirit form of Ahk-lut.
TIN-MI-UK-PUKS, or THUNDERBIRDS: Fabulous Roc-like creatures.
TORNGARSOAK: Sedna's lover, Lord of the Hunt.
TORNR~4IT: Ghost who serves an angakok, usually as a source of information.
UNITED MOSLEM ACTIVIST FRONT or UMAF: A radical mideastem terrorist organization.
USIK: A weapon crafted from the pubic bone of a walrus.
WINIGO: Inuit Yeti.
WOLFALCONS: Hybrid creatures, half wolf, half giant bird of prey.
THE BARSOOM PROJECT
PROLOGUE
Like a raging mountain, the Terichik rose screaming from a frozen, nightdark sea. Its many-
sectioned, grotesquely wormlike body reared up; tons of water and ice thundered into the ocean
with a howl like the death of worlds. The black night swirled wind-whipped snow through mist that
tasted of salt. The Tenchik's mouth gaped cavernously. Endless rows of serrated teeth gleamed as
it shrieked its mindless wrath. Its breath was a cold and fetid wind.
The humans beneath it were warrior and wizard, princess and commoner. They were frail meat in the
Terichik's path, brittle fleshly twigs tumbled in an angry storm. They scrambled for safety, ran
back onto land, away from the sea. They fled past the wreckage of the shattered Inuit village:
rows of crushed houses, a great stone lodge with its roof stove in, boat hulls splintered and
scattered like insect husks.
Buiwar was the first Adventurer to die, and he died well. He was the greatest warrior among them,
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but foolish to think that his enchanted usik, the pubic bone of the sacred walrus, could stand
against the Tenchik. Even faced by a beast to dwarf ten killer whales, Bulwar roared defiance and
sprang forward. His ice-caked black beard flagged in the frigid air. His mightily thewed arms
coiled beneath the bear furs that lent him strength and courage. Buiwar had once been an ordinary
man, a "systems analyst" in the white man's world. Here where the heavens met the earth, he was a
great warrior, a great force for good.
His magic, his courage, his strength were not enough. The Terichik crushed him, savaged his body
with fanged cilia. His screams echoed in their heads long after his body had vanished into its
gaping maw.
The humans retreated. There were twelve now, people of the tundras and the people from the white
world beyond.
They ran until the sound of rifle shots split their screams. Two more of their number fell,
trapped in a withering crossfire.
Agile and lithe, beautiful Eviane rolled to safety behind an abandoned boathouse. Even as she hit
the ground, she unslung the automatic rifle from her back and braced the butt against her
shoulder.
She was a woman of flaming red hair and sparkling green eyes. Her mouth was generously wide, quick
to laughter or rage. Now it was flattened into a fighting grimace cold enough to freeze the stars
in the sky.
She peered along the rifle barrel and then glanced back over her shoulder. Her companions were
holding the Tenchik at bay. The sky shimmered with power, enchanted flame searing away the clouds.
It was Eviane's task to break the back of the ambush, to send the minions of the Cabal howling
back into the wastes.
The Terichik rose to blot out the moon and stars. Its screams shook the earth. Eviane's stomach
boiled acid with fear.
Now was not the moment to shirk! Now was the time to concentrate, to bring her wit and skill to
bear.
She sighted through the rifle scope. Through the driving snow, a black-speckled ridge of ice and
rock leapt into relief. Somewhere behind it were the men who held them pinned and vulnerable to
the awesome Terichik.
Her scope's crosshairs trisected a shadowed forehead. Eviane grinned: one of the Cabal's minions
was about to join his ancestors. The painted face, the glowing eyes were almost an invitation.
She inhaled deeply, held that breath, and squeezed the thgger.
The rifle jittered against her shoulder. Snow sprayed to the Cabalist's left. He jumped in
surprise. Before he could run she fired a second time. He threw his arms around his chest; his
mouth gaped wide. Recoil pulled Eviane's gun barrel upward. The Cabalist's head exploded.
Eviane was shocked. Tickled in an odd way, but shocked. Strange. Usually you just get the flash of
red. This time they're using prosthetic makeup effects. Kinda gag-out, but Wow!
Confusion reigned on the far side of the ridge, and the attack, the ambush, was breaking. It had
failed! The enemy was in rout! Eviane came to her feet, howling victory, and her companions rose
with her. Brandishing guns and spears they raced across the frozen ground. The night blizzard's
shrieks matched their own.
Another Cabalist rose, his hands raised to the air in the sign of surrender.
Take no prisoners! She laughed giddily, and fired from the hip. The Cabalist doubled over, holding
his stomach. He yelled something, something that seemed to take great effort to say, but the wind
was too loud to make out the words. His face was twisted with pain.
Eviane fired again, and his body straightened out as if hit under the chin with a baseball bat.
Twisting, he crumpled to the ground.
Eviane walked to her first target, moving more slowly now. She stared down at the body.
The wind's whistle was dying. The flakes of ice were settling to the ground. The air was warming,
but she shook.
She bent down, examining the wound she had inflicted. The man's forehead was gone.
What incredible. . . effects...
As if they had a will of their own, her fingers touched the dead man, crawled to the ghastly hole
above the still, staring eyes. They traced the edges- The wind died. Sound became silence, save
for the whimper of wounded and the growing murmur of the other warriors who approached with
lowered weapons. Mute, the titanic shape of the Terichik writhed in the sky behind them.
Eviane stood, eyes wide, mouth open but silent. Finally, as with a terrible effort she screamed,
and ran. She threw the rifle, the goddamned rifle, aside and hurled herself behind an upturned
stand of boats.
She knelt there, whimpering, and watched without comprehension as the Terichik flickered and
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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 infr~red 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
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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.
This was the big one, the project toward which Cowles had angled for over a decade, the beginning
of the largest venture in mankind's history. And Griffin was part of it. . . if only as the
security man who would keep these multinational billionaires from murdering each other. The 1,333
men and women taking their slow trips into the heart of the primordial solar system would be much
more a part of it, if they chose.
And if they didn't, there would be no Barsoom Project.
And if there were no Barsoom Project, then. . . very soon, by geological time, there might be no
life on Earth.
The turgid protostellar whirl was clearing now. Sunlight boiled away the nearer comets, leaving
residues that would become asteroids; boiled the atmospheres from even the closer planets. The
planets flashed and flamed from time to time as smaller bodies smashed into them. The viewpoint
moved toward one such body, a glowing, cratered, lumpy sphere that grew clearer as its atmosphere
dissipated.
Griffin wrenched his mind out of the illusion and brushed the controls before him in the cart. Of
the hundred and fifty cornputer-driven carts gliding through an embryonic cosmos, he and
Marty had the only cart equipped with manual override. In case of emergency, he could reach
another cart within moments. There was no reason to expect any such emergency, but...
He whispered to Marty, "Let's peek in on them." Marty nodded-he still had a death-grip on Alex's
elbow-and Alex rattle-tapped instructions to the heat-sensitive vidplate before him.
It lit. It became a quad splitscreen, and in each quadrant a cart appeared. Each cart seated ten
visiting dignitaries. At upper-left were intense, serious visitors from the United Kingdom. Only
one, a rotund woman in her fifties, was smiling broadly, clapping with childish glee.
Upper-right held officials from International Labor Union 207, the energy people. The
international unions were more powerful than some nations. Certainly they were prime candidates
for the offer that IntelCorp and Cowles wished to make.
Chitchat broke off, heads swiveled right, mouths gaped. A gargantuan gas-sheathed snowball roared
directly at 207's cart. A smaller cornet grazed it. A tenor scream split the air as the comet
flared blindingly and passed on the right.
They laughed and slapped each other on the backs, none knowing who among them had screamed.
Lower-left was the Pan-African coalition. . . members who were not currently embroiled in war.
What a mess. Africa was a jungle, all right. A jungle of artificially drawn lines, so complex that
things might not sort themselves out for another century. National boundaries, tribal boundaries,
industrial boundaries, and union boundaries all writhed and fluxed and left bloody tracks behind,
year after year for the past century. Project Barsoom might straighten them out
might give some of these political entities cause to fix them in place. A reason to forget the
past, for the sake of the future.
Lower-right, ten young Tolkien elves, inhumanly tall and slender, yelled and laughed and ducked a
passing comet. That was IntelCorp, the company formed by the partnership of Genera! Electric and
Falling Angel Enterprises.
Wiser heads within those companies, understanding that massive success and massive inertia are two
sides of a coin, had split off some of the best young minds from the GE think tanks. These maniacs
were backed with a hundred eighty million dollars and linked with the creative whirlwinds behind
Falling Angels, the rogue technological "nation" orbiting Luna. The zero-gravity laboratories of
Falling Angels were responsible for the Tokyo-Seoul expansion bridge, as well as a revolution in
high-tensile engineering.
The result was one of the most effective think tanks in history. They already held eight percent
of the most productive patents issued in the past decade, and the best was yet to come.
The sun had dimmed. The solar system was finally settling down. The cratered sphere in the
foreground was drifting closer. Its rocks had breathed forth a new atmosphere, pink in hue and not
thick enough to block the topography. . . and as the orange-red sphere grew huge, clean white
polar caps and a lacing of long gray-green lines were suddenly apparent. Two cratered moons rose
over the planet's eastern curve.
There was laughter from the carts. "ln 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed a
network of single and double lines crisscrossing the surface of the planet. Canali means
'channels' or 'grooves' in Italian, but the word was mistranslated into 'canals,' which implies
intelligent design. .
"Quite a show, eh?" Marty grinned in the dark: a new moon. "I want to sign up right now."
"Get out your Mark card if you've got the money. They'll be passing the hat pretty quick." Alex
continued to look at Marty's black silhouette. "We haven't done any mat work for over a month.
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摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Larry%20Niven/Larry%20Niven%20and%20Steven%20Barnes%20-%2The%20Barsoom%20Project%20UC.txtThisbookisanAceoriginaledition,andhasneverbeenpreviouslypublished.Allcharactersinthisbookarefictitious.Anyresemblancetoactualpe sons,livingordead,ispurelycoincidental.THEBARSOOMPROJECTAnAceBoo...

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