It made its home in the deep forest near the village of Grommin, and all anyone ever saw of it, before the end, would be hard eyes and the dark barrel of its muzzle. The smell of piss and blood and shit and bubbles of saliva and half-eaten food. The villagers called it the Third Bear because they had killed two bears already that year. But, near the end, no one really thought of it as a bear, even though the name had stuck, changed by repetition and fear and slurring through blood-filled mouths to Theeber. Sometimes it even sounded like "seether" or "seabird."

The Third Bear came to the forest in mid-summer, and soon most anyone who used the forest trail, day or night, disappeared, carried off to the creature's lair. By the time even large convoys had traveled through, they would discover two or three of their number missing. A straggling horseman, his mount cantering along, just bloodstains and bits of skin sticking to the saddle. A cobbler gone but for a shredded hat. A few of the richest villagers hired mercenaries as guards, but when even the strongest men died, silent and alone, the convoys dried up.

The village elder, a man named Horley, held a meeting to decide what to do. It was the end of summer by then and the leaves had begun to disappear from the trees. The meeting house had a chill to it, a stench of thick earth with a trace of blood and sweat curling through it. All five hundred villagers came to the meeting, from the few remaining merchants to the poorest beggar. Grommin had always been hard scrabble and tough winters, but it was also two hundred years old. It had survived the wars of barons and of kings, been razed twice, only to return.

"I cna't bring my goods to market," one farmer said, rising in shadow from beneath the thatch. "I can't be sure I want to send my daughter to the pen to milk the goats."

Horley laughed, said, "It's worse than that. We can't bring in food from the other side. Not for sure. Not without losing men." He had a sudden vision from months ahead , of winter, of ice gravelly with frozen blood. It made him shudder.

"What about those of us who live outside the village?" another farmer asked. "We need the pasture for grazing, but we have no protection."

Horley understood the problem; he had been one of those farmers, once. The village had a wall of thick logs surrounding it, to a height of ten feet. No real defense against an army, but more than enough to keep the wolves out. Beyond that perimeter lived the farmers and the hunters and the outcasts who could not work among others.

"You may have to pretend it isa time of war and live in the village and go out with a guard," Horley said. "We have plenty of able bodied men, still."

"Is it the witch woman doing this?" Clem the blacksmith asked.

"No," Horley said. "I don't think it's the witch woman."

What Clem and some of the others thought of as a "witch woman," Horley thought of as a crazy person who knew some herbal remedies and lived in the woods because the villagers had drien her there, blaming her for an outbreak of sickness the year before.

"Why did it come?" a woman asked. "Why us?"

No one could answer, least of all Horley. As Horley stared at all of those hopeful, scared, and troubled faces, he realized that not all of them yet knew they were stuck in a nightmare.

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Author's NoteDear Reader:

When I was researching my Mars novels in the early 1990s, I kept running across references to Antarctica. It was the part of Earth most like Mars, and scientists studying Mars often went to Antarctica to do research. I had read about the classic Antarctic explorers when I was young, and now, reading about it again, my interest was rekindled. And in the acknowledgments of one book, the author said "Thanks to the National Science Foundation for sending me down to Antarctic as part of its Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program."

That caught my eye. I made inquiries, and the administrators at NSF told me that the artists and writers they sent south had to be doing art or literature that was specifically about Antarctica. They would not, for instance, send me down there to do research for a book about Mars (I asked). So, I thought, I'm going to have to write a book about Antarctica.

I made a proposal; the people at Bantam were agreeable, and NSF selected me for their program in 1994. In October of 1995 I finished Blue Mars, and within two weeks was flying to New Zealand, to wait for an LC-130 Hercules flight to Ross Island, Antarctica.

In the months preceding my trip I had contacted various Antarctic scientists who had helped me with my Mars books, and they had generously invited me to visit them at their research sites around the continent. But when I got down to McMurdo, I found that all my plans were in the air. Some of my scientists had not made it down themselves, and the Antarctic weather made all scheduling completely unreliable. Only at the moment of a flight could you be sure it was really going to happen. At first this was disorienting, even maddening. But when I became used to, I realized what it was: it was Freedom. I had no idea what I was going to be doing even three or four days in advance. Depending on weather, and other people's plans, I might be at the South Pole, I might be on top of Mt. Erebus, I might be in the Dry Valleys. But no way to tell in advance. It was completely unlike ordinary life in that regard.

So I relaxed, and had six weeks of unscheduled Freedom. I spent ten days in the Dry Valleys, helping glaciologists set weather stations on glaciers; I went to the South Pole, and partied with the crew there over a wild Thanksgiving. I helicoptered to the top of Mt. Erebus, and crawled inside a glacier with a mountaineer friend. I spent a glorious week with a team of geologists on Roberts Massif, a part of the Transantarctic Mountains that is like a rock island sticking out of the ice sea of the polar cap. I sat in a helicopter fighting winds to get back to McMurdo, and then sat in a hut at Cape Crozier when the winds proved too strong, eating emergency rations with a group of nematode scientists (wormherders) and trying to make radio coms with McMurdo. I got outrageously cold, and ate huge meals, and laughed a lot, and listened to a million stories.

And of course all the time I was thinking, what about my story? What story will I tell? I wanted Antarctica to be more than just an exotic backdrop for a story that could have happened anywhere. I wanted to do more than just retell the classic stories in updated form. I wanted to tell Antarctica's true story.

In this desire I found that science fiction was the perfect form for the subject. For one thing, Antarctica is a science fiction place already; it takes high tech to live there at all, and it looks like another planet entirely. Then again, the next hundred years down there are...

From the book

Cleansed and Set in Gold

MATTHEW STURGES

I'm on the ground, trying to breathe through a chest full of broken ribs. The only reason I'm still alive is because I happen to be invisible at the moment. Verlaine is dead. His body is twitching, trying to patch itself up, but the thing that killed him is chewing on his heart, its long tongue flicking. I can hear Verlaine's fingernails scratching against the rocks.

We all thought Verlaine was immortal. He wasn't.

Some low-level administrative assistant from the League of Heroes is trying to take a statement from me in my hospital bed. I'm sort of trying to comply, but each time I breathe it's like someone's sticking a giant fork in my chest. So I'm not as cooperative as I could be.

"How big was this thing?" he asks.

"Biggest one I've ever seen," I whisper, carefully mouthing the words.

"But still a Ghoul? Same physiognomy?"

"His 'physiognomy' is his face. You mean 'morphology.'"

The lackey scowls at me. "Sorry," he says.

"If you don't know what a word means," I say, "don't use it. Then you won't have to apologize."

He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, looking around the ICU ward, maybe hoping that there's some more desirable Leaguer that he can pester. But there isn't.

"Anyway, to answer your question, no. He wasn't like the others. He was bigger. He. . . his fist was like. . ." I hold up my fist and five needles of pain lace across my chest. I notice that the nail on my left index finger is bent backward, nearly disconnected. They've put a bandage on it. This bothers me more than the ribs for some reason.

"His fist was the size of your head," I finally say. "He put it through Verlaine's chest like Verlaine was as mortal as you."

The lackey puts his minirecorder on the table by my bed. His hand is shaking. "How many of them were there? This new variety."

"I just saw the one. He was leading the others, though. Can you imagine that? A leader. A Ghoul King."

The next day, the headlines read GHOUL KING KILLS RUSSELL VERLAINE. I can imagine the League's PR people going back and forth on this. "Is it worse if we admit that there's some kind of new mutant giant Ghoul running around, or if we imply that Russell Fucking Verlaine was murdered by some regular Ghoul?" I don't envy them.

After I leave the hospital--against medical advice; which, whatever-- I take a taxi back to my apartment. A few unpleasant bites choked down and a potent healing factor kicks in, spreading warmth throughout my battered bones and knitting everything together in seconds. Oh, God. Yes.

I decide that it's best not to appear too healthy at Verlaine's funeral, so I take care to walk slowly and gasp for breath every few paces. I've even gone so far as to put on fresh bandages around my chest. In case someone uses their X-ray vision to look under my shirt, I guess. Although if they could do that, they could see that my bones aren't actually broken anymore. It doesn't matter, though, because all of the people who're capable of doing so wouldn't care. And anyway, one of them is lying dead in a box in front of me.

I'm sitting on a cold metal folding chair, pretending to be hurt, watching them lower Verlaine into the ground. It turns out that they need a special crane and a steel-reinforced casket for all of this, because Verlaine's body is so dense that he weighs just over three tons. The news media are fascinated. Jesus, Russell Verlaine makes good TV, even dead.

When you think "hero," you think...

The chalky ore was mined in Dorvalla's tropical equatorial regions.
Lommite Limited's base of operations was in Dorvalla's western
hemisphere, in a broad rift valley blanketed with thick forest and
defined by steep escarpments. There, where ancient seas had once held
sway, shifts in the planetary mantle had thrust huge, sheer-faced tors
from the land. Crowned by rampant vegetation, by trees and ferns
primeval in scale, the high, rocky mountains rose like islands, blinding
white in the sunlight, the birthplace of slender waterfalls that plunged
thousands of meters to the valley floor.

But what was once a wilderness was now just another extractive
enterprise. Huge demolition droids had carved wide roads to the bases of
most of the larger cliffs, and two circular launch zones, large enough
to accommodate dozens of ungainly space shuttles, had been hollowed from
the forest. The tors themselves were gouged and honeycombed with mines,
and deep craters filled with polluted runoff water reflected the sun and
sky like fogged mirrors.

The ceaseless work of the droids was abetted by an all but indentured
labor force of humans and aliens, to whom the mined ore served as a
great equalizer. No matter the natural color of a miner's skin, hair,
feathers, or scales, everyone was rendered white as the galactic dawn.
All agreed that sentient beings deserved more from life, but Lommite
Limited wasn't prosperous enough to convert fully to droid labor, and
Dorvalla wasn't a world of boundless opportunities for employment.

Still, that didn't stop some from dreaming.

Copyright © 2001 by Lucasfilm Ltd.