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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.Īnd if they didn't, there would be no Barsoom Project.Īnd if there were no Barsoom Project, then. if only as the security man who would keep these multinational billionaires from murdering each other. 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. The solar system was still murky comets moved through the viewpoint like white bullets. In that terrible light Griffin could see lumps condensing along the rings that surrounded the sun.
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The illusion was so overpoweringly real that his chest ached for breath.Ī new sun blazed forth, awesomely bright within its murky sheath of dust and comets. Stars began to form," the unseen narrator said, but Griffin found his mind blanking out the words. "Gravity and spin became the dominant factors. The great storm sparkled like a fireworks display. 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. There were hurricane shapes at the centers.
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The vast interstellar dust clouds bowed before it flattened, then began to collapse and condense. Then the shock waves arrived with a rolling crash that owed less to physics than to Dream Park magic. And so it remained until the shock wave from a nearby supernova disturbed its equilibrium." There were snowflakes and snowballs, protocomets, scattered through it. "Though details differ, current theories agree that the solar system originated as a cold cloud of interstellar gas. Marty's round face was soft with wonder, and his eyes gleamed. His chief deputy Marty Bobbick had a grip on his elbow. The thirteen hundred dignitaries gathered here by Cowles Industries and IntelCorp were in for a hell of a show. There were flame- colors in the shock waves. it was already dimming, while shells of lesser fire expanded from the supernova at ferocious speed. One dim star abruptly flared brighter than all the rest. 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. Blobs and streams of dark matter moved across the stars, dimming them. Never had the skies of Earth been so fully or brightly populated. "Come with us now, and peer into the past of our solar system, to the formation of our most distinctive neighbor-"Ī darkened dome a few hundred meters across became a universe: the stars emerged.Ībove and below, they flamed in primal glory. Ever have we looked back to the roots of our cultures, the origin of our species, the genesis of our planet. "Yet they have never lost their magic, never diminished in majesty. The carts glided through an endless, empty night, invisible to each other. Phantasmal carts danced about him in elaborate patterns, orange outlines in his infrared goggles. It filled the vast dark cavern of Gaming Area A with its rolling, resonant embrace. The narrator's voice echoed everywhere and originated nowhere. "'In the beginning.' Three words spoken uncounted billions of times." And there is a killer who wants to ensure Eviane never regains her memory. The players are struggling against the game master, one another, and their own demons. The Inuit mythology controlling the images is part of a "Fat Ripper Special" designed to implant new behavioral memes. But in Dream Park, nothing is what it seems. Haunted by the past, rebounding from a lengthy spell in a mental hospital, she has returned to Dream Park to exorcise a nightmare that has become reality. until the holograms she was shooting with live ammunition turned out to be solid flesh and blood. A Crash Course in the History of Black Science FictionĮviane's first visit to the-state-of-art amusement arena Dream Park ended in disaster: the special effects had seemed more real than life.200 Significant SF Books by Women, 1984-2001.