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 infrared 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.