Under the Moons of Mars (18 page)
Read Under the Moons of Mars Online
Authors: John Joseph Adams
It’s not impossible that when I come to Mars I travel in time as well as space, deep into the past, so that everything I do here is to present-day Earth, as the deeds of the ancient Martians are to me. Or—and I have not confided this even to Dejah Thoris, my heart’s other half—it is possible I travel into a future Mars, to a time when my own Earth is a desert wasteland or ball of ice. The Martians, so proficient in medicine and aeronautics, have not developed a telescope powerful enough to scrutinize the Earth’s surface, but scholarly texts from millennia past describe flashes of light that began and ended over a period of days. When I looked through the lenses in Erem Prianus’s laboratory I seemed to see mist, blue water, and a single massive continent like a blind eye.
I awoke with the sun hot on my face, my back resting in dry sand. I assumed my violent loss of consciousness had triggered a return to Earth, but when my eyes opened I saw the smaller, paler sun of Mars, and rolling to my side I saw the nailless green toes of a Green Martian. Finally, I heard the guttural bass voice of my oldest friend on Mars, Tars Tarkas, call out, “He’s awake!”
Again I had escaped! I bounced lightly to my feet, fearing to show any weakness before the savage Tharks, who
were as like as not to execute the wounded or infirm. The Tharks were camped in the desert, and bore the signs of a recent fight.
Tars Tarkas rubbed his bald skull, and grinned toothily. “My friend! How came you here? We found you lying in the shallows of a river that cascades from the mountain range that borders the southern desert.”
“Tars Tarkas, I might ask the same of you,” I added.
“We journey south in response to the strange phenomenon we witnessed in the sky,” he replied, “a light that streaked toward the southern lands and then vanished. The spoken traditions of our people reach back millennia and they predicted at this time a portent of great change, and perhaps great danger as well. They bid us find its cause and make it our own, no matter the cost.”
“For my part I care nothing for any lights or portents,” I responded, “But Dejah Thoris and her father have set out in search of this thing as well, and you know I go where my princess goes.”
Tars Tarkas folded his median limbs and considered me before speaking. “Aye, it was ever thus. John Carter, I tell you plainly we may yet become enemies despite the many years we have fought side by side, for no Red Martian lays claim to what we hold sacred. And I know, fool that you are, you will side with your queen even against the Tharks who first welcomed you to Barsoom.”
“I fear it is so, old friend, though I fight out of loyalty, not rancor.”
This left us with an awkward hitch in the conversation, such as I had not known since our first encounter before I had learned the common language of Barsoom. I sought for eye contact but a Green Martian’s eyes are on either side of his head. We waited while the distant sun peeked out from behind a rare cloud. With an upper hand he scratched his
nub of a Martian nose, a poor try at distracting me from a lower limb inching toward the gilded pistol he wore strapped to his thigh.
Even as he drew it in a flash of emerald motion, I sprang and landed a hundred feet across the sand. I heard him fire, but the shot went hopelessly wide and before the startled Tharks could begin to move I was in one of their fliers. My hands blurred automatically through the activation sequence, grappling with a control scheme built for a four-armed pilot. By luck, I was in Tars Tarkas’s personal vehicle, one which I knew well and that could outdistance its fellows. I taxied across the flat sands, scattering warriors before me, and then I was aloft, trailing a spatter of mis-directed fire. The buzz of its semimystical engine filled my ears and thrummed between my knees. I circled the camp, twice waggled my wings, and was away. South.
If I could resurrect and speak to any person no longer living it would be the ancient woman whose body I discovered in the Arizona cave from which I was first translated to Barsoom. I returned to find her desiccated remains propped before a copper brazier containing a curious green residue. I now own three hundred square miles of desert in that region, but I never found it again.
There were other bodies hanging there—previous travelers? Supplicants found unworthy? Sacrifices? When I discovered her body, my mind was still occupied with the slow strangulation of Barsoom’s entire population as the atmosphere failed and Therns, Tharks, and Black Martians were all dying together. It was years before I learned the truth, that I had saved them all.
Barsoom by air is a stirring sight. The land that at ground level seems like an endless expanse of red-orange dust from the air reveals itself in bands and shadings and swirls of red, white, gray. Canyons, mountains, and plains are like a map
of Mars’s forgotten waterways, and you can almost see the world that used to exist.
The natives say that Barsoom began to die a long, long time ago, and no one knows why. Where so many Earthly mythologies speak of a flood, Barsoom’s defining catastrophe was a great desiccation, a dry apocalypse. The White Martians were seafarers, and when the waters receded they changed, interbred with less civilized races. They became hard, warlike, and short-lived; they lost the qualities of friendship, empathy, and mercy. The old secrets were lost (except to a few scattered, degenerate conclaves), but the contemporary Martians have built a new one, a technology of strange rays, miraculous healing, and telepathy, the new science of a dry, fallen world.
Barsoom’s southern hemisphere is sparsely settled. Over half the day passed as I flew slowly toward the pole, scanning the terrain below me for a sign of my beloved, and with nothing but wind and pale sky around me I fell into a contemplative, semihypnotic state. In the end my target was not hard to find. The impact crater was large enough to see without difficulty although the winds were already blurring its outline. A cluster of fliers had already settled nearby. I landed my flier next to them, and descended to join the small group standing at the edge of the hemispherical depression.
There at last stood the Jeddak of Helium, and by his side was my wife, Dejah Thoris, clad only in silver-linked chains that held a crimson cape in place. She greeted me formally, hiding any emotion she might be feeling, as is her way. I behaved the same. The gray-bearded mathematician Erem Prianus stood a short way away, and five or six attendants. No one spoke.
Courtly Martian speech is highly formalized and complex beyond my ability, but I haltingly broke the silence.
“What new mystery is this?” I inquired.
A gust of wind announced the arrival of another flier, this one less welcome. Tars Tarkas and an attendant Thark climbed slowly out; each aimed twin pistols in our direction. Seeing we had brought no weapons, they lowered theirs. I knew they would kill us at their leisure without hesitation should logic or custom dictate.
There was nothing I could do. I ignored them and leapt lightly down into the crater, stumbling only a little on the sand, to inspect the object that had fallen to the Barsoomian surface. The others crowded to the crater rim. The two Tharks approached behind them, craning over the Red Martians, lost in wonderment, an expression foreign to their savage physiognomies. “By the ninth ray!” I heard someone breathe, but did not turn to see who.
The eighth Barsoomian ray is propulsion, the seventh is disintegration; the fifth, revivification; the third, time.
The thing lay half buried in the sand on the shores of a dead sea. It was a rough spheroid, ridged and finned, its body four feet across, composed of a white metal badly carbonized during its descent. It had four cup-shaped triangular fins a few feet across which projected on metal rods. Two of them had broken off. The exterior had cracked, revealing an interior space and a tiny wheeled cart like a child’s toy, like an unborn chick in a monstrous egg.
There were raised characters molded on the inside edge of one ring circling the shattered sphere. Unfamiliar at first, but gradually I began to know them. I served in the occupation of Berlin in the weeks after the second world war, and I puzzled out the Cyrillic script as far as
MARS 2 LANDER
and a string of numbers. They’d done it now, and there would be
more. Whatever happened, Mars would never be the same. I had never before realized quite how much I prized the mysteries of Barsoom, and how much I stood to lose. I turned away from Dejah Thoris to hide ridiculous tears I did not understand, that came suddenly, and then racking sobs bent me over, dripping, heaving, streaming down my face, the deep unforeseen, unexplained waters of Mars. I bent over until my forehead rested in the sand.
I could hear the others shuffling, muttering, but I couldn’t look up at them. I felt as if waking from a nonsensical dream, and they were just bizarre, naked strangers now. What was I doing here? It was minutes before I could even straighten up. Erem Prianus cleared his throat in the silence.
Dejah Thoris approached. “What ails you, my prince?” she asked, puzzled.
“I . . . I know not, for it seems—I seem to see—oh, damn it. Oh, god damn.” I could barely form the words in Martian.
“Is it a device of our enemies? Sent to bedevil us?” She put her hand on my arm, but I shook it off.
She tried again. “Is it Olovarian make, or perhaps Zodangan?”
After a long time, I replied with an effort. “Aye, it may well be.”
“Is this the return of our deadliest foe?”
“ . . . Nay. Best leave the thing for the Green Men to do with as they will. The less we see of it, the better.”
“But—”
“It is theirs now, and for whatever time remains to this planet. Leave it be, my love.” I told her, “Let’s away to the north, and pleasanter pursuits.”
We led our party back to the fliers without opposition, leaving the broken artifact behind us. Tars Tarkas watched us go with a knowing inscrutable gaze, then turned and gave orders to his barbaric cohort. They began to dig.
One night, years ago while in lethal pursuit of Matai Shang, Father of the Therns, I was walking in the far northern region late into the night, bleary-eyed, recent wounds scabbing over, near collapse. All of a sudden I saw a darker mass against the dunes, its mountainous bulk bigger than any Martian beast. I crept closer and it obscured the stars. It was so large I had difficulty deciding how far away it was and I ran up against it by mistake, catching my breath and scraping my knuckles on the cool, rough stone.
I stepped back to see it fully, and knew what it was. It was a Barsoomian sphinx, a statue with the long body of a crouching Banth, with its five legs on either side, and the bald and tusked and bug-eyed head of a Green Martian. Nameless, it stood astride a small canal that might once have fed a small farming community. The ancient Martians knew much that has been lost, and the sphinx meant something to them—a mystic, profane union of Barsoomian opposites. I spent the rest of the night asleep between its forepaws, and in the morning I ran on.
I
t’s a terrible thing to be the son born of a great love story, perhaps the greatest in the recent history of Gathol—to be the son of Pan Dan Chee, the only Orovar to leave the hidden sanctuary of ancient Horz in hundreds of thousands of years, who offered his sword to my mother at first glance, and then fought his way across the rugged terrain of Barsoom. After protecting her honor the entire way, he arrived just in time to break the siege of Gathol, which was under attack by millions of the frozen men of Panar. If that were not enough of a burden, it is even more terrible to be the great-grandson of the most famous warrior of Barsoom. Yes, my mother was Llana of Gathol, the granddaughter of the Jeddak of Jeddaks, John Carter, whose accomplishments and legends are so vast as to be beyond enumerating . . . as well as unbelievable to those who do not know him.