Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (15 page)

This time the gods of Mars grant your wish.

But something is terribly wrong. . . .

You’re standing in familiar surroundings on a yellow, mossy plateau overlooking Helium. The huge city is in flames, its crown of gold and crystal spires shattered. Gaily colored, fire- bombing aerostats circle in the smoky sky above, two-masted catamaran warships crowd the River Iss, and armies swarm like ants around Helium’s breeched fortifications. Although the wind is high at this elevation—keening and whistling through the stunted blood-colored trees and quartz outcrops—you can still hear the distant thunder of bombs exploding, arms clashing, and men screaming in bloodfury.

Your eyes burn and tear in the strong Martian sunlight as you look around Tars Tarkas’s camp. There are no chariots, mastodons, warriors, women, or children to be seen. All the tents are gone, except yours, and the campfires are long dead. You turn your gaze back to the burning city. You are certain that your friends, human and Thant alike, are down there fighting the invading hordes of lizard men and white apes, and you must find them. They rode to battle upon their mastodons and eight legged, white- bellied riding beasts, but yours is nowhere to be found. No matter, because your muscles—which are conveniently adapted to the much stronger gravity of Earth—give you the strength to vault and leap as if you were wearing seven-league boots.

As you’ve no time to waste, you dress quickly. You collect your saber, knife, and carbine (which shoots radium projectiles), and then you step outside and take a deep breath of the clean Martian air. Now you finally, finally feel like your true self.

You’re the John Carter who saves his friends.

You’re the John Carter who will save his sister.

And so you run, bounding over gullies and crevasses that ordinary Martian riders would have to go around, vaulting over hills, trees, and settlements. With every gravity-defying step you take, the clangor of iron and steel and the cries of men and monsters become louder and louder . . . and the clouds of dust and smoke kicked up by the fighting hordes and carried hither and thither by the wind become incrementally closer. After an hour, your legs begin to ache, you’re out of breath, and a wall of dust and smoke looms up and over you. One step, two steps, three, and now you’re right in the fray. Lizard men astride two-headed octopeds the size of hippopotamuses attack you, but you have no time to waste: You must find Tars Tarkas.

With lightning-fast sweeps of your saber, you decapitate the heads of the nearest octoped and, in quick succession, shoot three of the reptilian beast-riders with your carbine. Then you take a great leap over the other beast-riders and land just inside the breached fortifications. But you are almost knocked to the ground by a mob of deserters. You’re surprised because the warriors are wearing the emblems, brassards, and purple and rose colors of Helium guards. You stop one of the deserters and ask him for the whereabouts of the Thant fighters. He looks at you, shakes his head, laughs, and then disappears into the dust- swirling miasma of fighting men and beasts.

You press forward toward an open area where the clash of weapons is the loudest. And it is there—in the slaughtery that had once been the Queen’s private gardens—that you find Thant warriors fighting lizard men and white apes. Although greatly outnumbered, the jade- skinned Thants— unlike men—will not retreat.

And neither will you.

“Tars Tarkas!” you shout as you cleave and hew, as you and the outnumbered Thant warriors begin to turn the advance of these beastriders and white apes into a rout. “Tars Tarkas!”

Your voice is hoarse. Your hands are slippery with blood. “Tars Tarkas!”

“Ah, welcome, John Carter of Foster. I was afraid we would not 
look upon each other again.”

You feel (rather than hear) his responding call; and you fear the worst, for you know that Tars Tarkas is loathe to reveal his telepathic sigil to anyone.

“But you must make haste, Earth friend, if we are to fight and— with the blessing of the great River Iss—die together in battle.”

You leap across the gardens and fight your way past the Queen’s treasury and the shattered halls of governance, but you’re too late: No Thant (not even Tars Tarkas) standing alone without carbine or cannon could overcome a troop of lizard men astride their twoheaded, shark-jawed octopeds. Before you can reach him, one of the octopeds bites through his lower right arm and slams him to the ground. But Tars Tarkas slashes at the creature with his other arms. The huge beast rears back, squealing in pain and dislodging its rider, who was positioning himself to take Tars Tarkas’s head as a prize.

You shoot the stinking, flesh-hungry beast.

It dies open-jawed, revealing Tars Tarkas’s dismembered arm, which seems to be reaching out to you from the rows of bloodied, needle- sharp teeth. Its dismounted rider rushes toward you. You barely have time to deflect his poison-tipped spear. But as you decapitate him with a roundhouse swing of your saber, you hear someone sound the call. A dozen Thant warriors materialize out of the smoke and dust; and as they slaughter the lizard men and their beasts, you try to carry your friend to safety.

“No, John Carter,” Tars Tarkas says in a thick, raspy voice. He presses one of his remaining large, nail-less hands against his wound to stem the flow of blood. “I must die here, standing and fighting. Gird me to fight. Help me, Earth friend, as I would help you.”

You tourniquet his wound with your belt and then gently lift him to a standing position. Leaning back against a blood-smeared wall, he grimaces—which is the Thant version of a smile—grips his sapphire-pommeled battle- axe in one hand and his scimitar and spear in the others, and says, “I suppose these will have to do. One of the octos ate my rifle, anyway.” Then he shakes his head twice, a gesture of great sadness and serious import. “You came to help us in our time of need, but, alas, I will not be able to reciprocate. Your sister . . . you must save her yourself, you must—”

The white apes attack, and as you stand together fighting, you sense the instant that Tars Tarkas dies. You feel the whisper of good- bye, and you know that the greatest Thant warrior on Mars was not defeated by his enemies: His two great hearts simply stopped beating. And still, even in death, he stands upright.

But you . . . you fight on alone until a war hammer crashes into flesh and bone. Your flesh and bone.

And thus you fall back to Earth.

Back into the sunken garden . . .

Into the long sunlight of a winter afternoon.

You open your eyes and then turn your head away from the sun. You have a terrible, pounding headache, and your arms and legs feel stiff and tingly. You look toward the Dickhead’s house and wonder what happened.

Every other time you’ve gone to Mars, even when you’ve spent days and weeks there, you’d always find yourself back on Earth within a few minutes (Australian Eastern Standard Time). This isn’t Saturday night, and you know you’re in trouble. No sense trying to sneak back into the Dickhead’s house; you’ll just have to think this through.

But you don’t even know what day this is. It could be Sunday or next week. You can tell Mom and the Dickhead that you fell asleep and somehow got amnesia like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall or Gregory Peck in Spellbound. Or that you were abducted like the kid in Ransom . . . or that you ran away because you want to be an entrepreneur or a writer and don’t want to go to school anymore; but then, hallelujah, you saw the light of reason (the Dickhead’s reason) and decided to come back home.

Or you can just tell them that you were on Mars—they would believe that!

As you stand up, your mind suddenly reels with memory and grief. Now you feel it. Now you know it. Now you believe it.

Tars Tarkas is dead!

Although you feel small and weak and alone, although you feel every one of your twelve and three-quarter years, you walk big as life through the garden to the house. You open the front door with such force that the brass knocker bangs up and down. And as you stand in the checkerboard-tiled hallway, you feel exactly as you did when you heard Tars Tarkas’s telepathic whisper of farewell.

You walk into the reception room.

“Hello? Is anybody home?”

You check the living room, library, study, kitchen, mudroom, pantry, and dining room. Then you run upstairs, up the curved staircase and through the hallway, past the guestrooms and entertainment center. Click. You open the door to your mother and the Dickhead’s bedroom. You smell strong, sweet perfume: Joy. The mirror on the wall over your mother’s dressing table is all cracked, and a triangular splinter sparkles on the carpet. Perfume bottles and your mother’s favorite jade lamp are also all over the carpet. The bed isn’t made, and your mother’s bras, stockings, underwear, and dresses are strewn across the pink- and-black sheets. You don’t see any of the Dickhead’s clothes, though, and suddenly you’re scared.

Something is wrong, very wrong . . .

You step on a yellow-lined notepad—what’s that doing on the floor?—as you rush back into the hallway, pass under the archway and up three steps into the servants’ quarters. You open the door to your sister’s room. You know it’s silly, but you’re afraid that she’s dead, that the Dickhead has hurt her again, only this time . . . this time . . .

The room is empty, the house is empty, and you imagine—silly as it is to have such thoughts—that the world is empty, and you’ll be alone forever. You call out your sister’s name, just to hear the sound of it.

“Julia.”

You listen to the house sounds and call again, “Julia? Sis?” You want to tell your sister that you tried to bring Tars Tarkas back to help her.

If only . . . if only you could have returned to Earth as your true self this one time: But you always return as the small and weak and guilty you. And right now you wish that you could keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller until you just . . . disappeared.

You go back to the Dickhead and your mother’s room. Something is niggling at you. The yellow note pad. You pick it up and see the indentations like writing without ink on the top sheet. You know the trick of reading secret writing, so you take the pad back to your room, sit down at your built-in desk and ever so lightly rub a soft number-two pencil over the indentations.

Dear Mother,

I’m sorry I’m really sorry but I have to leave. You KNOW why and if you really don’t then you must be blind well then I just don’t know. Dick hurts me and he hurts Jon and I would have taken him with me if he hadn’t already run away somewhere. You should get

That’s all you can make out, but it’s enough, enough to let you know that it’s all your fault and that she thinks you ran away and left her with the Dickhead.

You hear the door open downstairs.

You’re shivering and your hands are shaking, but you go into your closet, reach up, up, stretching, and grab a hammer that you’ve hidden behind a bunch of stuff on the top shelf. It’s just a regular hammer, not a war hammer like the one you carried on Barsoom, but it will have to do. Quiet as a cat, you slip out of your room and down the hall. Your only chance is surprise. You’ll have to jump out and crack the Dickhead on the head before he knows what happened. Then you can . . . well, you’ll worry about what to do once he’s dead.

But it’s not the Dickhead. You can tell by the clattery-clack of your mother’s high-heeled shoes on the tiles. You see that she’s alone, and you drop the hammer onto the carpet. When she sees you, she shouts, “Oh, God, oh, thank God you’re all right,” and she drops her keys, patent leather handbag, and groceries, and smothers you with a hug. Then she pulls away from you, but doesn’t let go of your arms. Her eyes are glossy with tears, her usually clean and frizzy autumn brown hair is straggly and pulled back with an amberina comb, and her right eye and cheek are swollen and black and blue. “Wherewere you, Jon? I was so sick with worry.” She hugs you again, and you can smell a kind of sour- sweet perspiration on her blue cashmere sweater.

“I . . . I didn’t mean to be gone so long,” you say. “What day’s today?”

She looks at you the way she does when she thinks you’re telling a whopper. “It’s Wednesday. You’ve been gone four days. You must be starving.”

You are kind of hungry.

“Where’s the . . . where’s Dick?”

Your mother gets a closed, almost sly look . . . just like your sister’s. “You don’t have to worry about— He won’t be back. I promise.”

“Cross your heart and hope to die?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.” She hugs you again and makes a wailing sound. When she’s done, you pick up her groceries and follow her into the kitchen. You notice that there are dirty dishes in the sink: She’s never left dirty dishes in the sink before.

“What about Julia?” you ask as you put the plastic grocery bags on the counter. Just saying her name makes you want to cry. But you don’t cry, even though it’s all your fault.

“Oh, she’s out. But she’ll be back soon.” Your mother doesn’t look at you when she says that. She takes a stack of frozen dinners out of one of the bags, puts them in the freezer, and then she looks at you. “Now, Jon, you must tell me where you’ve been. Did your stepfather try to . . . did anybody try to—” She sobs, and you don’t want to worry her, so you tell her that nobody tried anything and you ran away because you didn’t want to go to school. But you finally saw the light of reason and came back home. “But . . . where did you go? Where did you sleep? What did you eat?”

You make something up that doesn’t involve Tars Tarkas—you can’t say his name either without feeling like something hard has caught in your throat—and after dinner you promise that you’ll never, ever leave her again.

Even though you know that’s a lie.

The radium dial on your alarm clock glows
_3:07
am thursday
₁₄
jun. Without bothering to dress, you get up and quietly go downstairs. You open the door to the garage, pull your 6061 aluminum- frame, eighteen-speed pearl white mountain bike off the wall rack, and then walk it back into the house and out the servants’ side door. It’s a chilly, moonless morning, and clouds obscure most of the stars. You look out over the Southern Ocean, but can’t see Barsoom. Even if you could, there would be no lights spinning and twinkling in Helium. You turn away, walk your bike over the lawn to the laneway, and you’re off, pedaling hard through the gears, now pedaling down O’Grady’s Ridge Road, and then Fish Creek Road. Half an hour later, you come to your turn-off. You go around the big sawhorses blocking the dirt road that winds its way to a high perch overlooking the sea. From there you can see everything.