Under the Moons of Mars Read online

  Before me, I saw a valley ringed by mountains. I had come from dry gullies and ravines, but here there were ighur plants, even small bushes and trees growing over the valley floor and up the sides of the mountains. And in the distance I saw—could it be possible? Sunlight glinting on what looked like a lake in the middle of the valley.

  I stared in amazement. Where had I come to? And how had I gotten here?

  “In the name of Lal, who are you, stranger?”

  I heard the voice in my head. It was low, melodious, like no voice I had ever heard before, except perhaps when our mother sang us lullabies, my clutchmates.

  I looked around. There, standing by a bush with red leaves, were three—were they calots? They looked like me, and yet they were smaller, their hides not bare but covered with fur of various colors. One was orange, one brown, and one a sort of pale cream. The orange one was striped, and the brown one had patches of lighter brown. They had no tusks.

  “I am Woola, son of Awala,” I sang. “I fled from Thark but was captured by the Zodangans. Again I fled, and was wounded by their projectiles. By moonlight, I crawled into a cave in the side of the mountain. When I crawled out again, I found myself here. By Lal, since you know our Great Mother, tell me where I am. What is this place?”

  “I am Azorn, son of Razd,” sang the orange one. “Come with us, Woola. We will take you to Orda, who will tell you what this place is. It has been a long time since we have seen one of our kind from beyond the mountains. Orda will want to know what is happening in the world outside. You are injured and hungry, so we will tend to you and feed you, for that is the way of our kind. Follow me.”

  Bewildered, I followed, slowly because of the pain in my leg. The projectile of the Red Warrior had wounded me more severely than I had realized. Azorn and the brown one, who I learned was called Har, son of Hoorda, walked ahead, while the cream-colored one walked beside me.

  “I am Lilla, daughter of Tal,” she sang. Her mindsong was the most melodious I had ever heard. “Do you realize what this place is, Woola?”

  “I cannot imagine,” I responded. “Unless this is the Valley Lal, about which my mother Awala sang to us, when we were still in the egg.”

  I heard a high tinkling, as though bells were ringing all together, and realized that Lilla was laughing. “This is indeed the Valley Lal, where our Great Mother laid the first egg. Woola, you have come home.”

  I walked beside her in stunned silence, scarcely knowing whether to believe her. But the plants around me, their red and purple leaves swaying in the sunshine, and the fresh, scented air I was breathing—these could not be dreams.

  “You crawled into a cave and fell asleep, you told Azorn. You must have woken and crawled the other way, to the cave’s other entrance. There are several caves that go right through the mountain walls, where they are narrow. Once, they were used to communicate with the outside world, but they have not been used for a thousand years.”

  “Then, you have lived here all your life?” I asked her. For the first time I remember, I felt shy and awkward. She was like no calot I had ever seen, soft of fur rather than hard of hide, and her tusklessness made her seem even more gentle. I had never seen such a beautiful creature.

  She asked me about Thark, and I told her our story, my clutchmates. She was shocked at the cruelty of the Tharks, and when I told her how we had been separated, so that we could no longer sing together, she almost wept.

  “You must tell this story to Orda,” she sang. “We did not know that the children of Lal were so cruelly treated. Orda will know how to act, what we must do. We are not thoats or ulsios, to be treated in such a way by the Green warriors.”

  By this time we had come to a place where there were many dens dug into the sides of small hills, within sight of the lake. And I saw something, my brothers and sisters, that gave me a pain in my chest, around the region of my hearts. I saw clutchmates playing together, rolling in the dirt in mock battles, then lying together in the sun. Together, as we should have been.

  So many of them gathered around me and greeted me, wanting to hear my story, that Azorn told them to follow us to my meeting with Orda—although I still did not know who or what that might be.

  But I soon learned. We came to the largest den of all, dug into the side of a hill. Sitting before it was the oldest calot I had ever seen. Her hair was entirely white, and so thin that I could see her hide, which was white also.

  “Greetings, Woola,” she said as we approached.

  I wondered how she knew me, but she sang, “Even as you slept in that cave, I heard your mindsong. It was I who confused you so that you went the wrong way, into our valley rather than back into the hands of the Zodangans. I hope you can forgive me for reaching into your mind, causing you to come to us. But in your mind I saw such images! Calots enslaved, separated from their clutchmates, forced to kill and die in the arena. We did not know that our brothers and sisters outside this valley had fallen into such a state! I am old, and I can hear your mindsong in a way the others cannot. Tell them, Woola. Tell them your story so they can hear how calots live in the world outside.”

  I told them then—my story and our story, my brothers and sisters. As I told them, I could hear from their own minds sounds of wonder and sorrow. I concluded, “I am glad you brought me here, Orda. I never imagined that the valley of our mindsongs was real, or that I would see calots living in such a way—and looking so different from calots among the Tharks.”

  “Once, all calots looked like us,” sang Orda. “Do you know the story of the calots, Woola? I hear in your mind that you do not. In this valley, we have always lived as you see, since the first clutch was laid by Lal. But long ago, when the Orovars built their cities and sailed the seas, calots were their companions. They could hear our mindsongs, and we traveled with them to distant lands, or hunted with them and guarded their houses. We sat beside their chairs and lay at the foot of their beds, participating in their lives. But as the seas dried up and the Orovars died out, they created the Red and Green warriors, who could not hear our mindsongs. We could not be companions to them. The Red warriors left us alone, but the Green warriors still used us for hunting and guarding. I see from your mind that over a thousand years, since we last heard from the outside world, the Green warriors have grown more savage, and they have treated our kind with the same savagery. And worse, I see from your hide and your tusks, which can gore an ilthur, that the Green warriors have changed the calots, breeding them for fierceness, to become fighters. This cannot continue.”

  “Orda,” I sang, “if you have heard my mindsong, you have also heard of John Carter. In his mind, I found the story of a great war, a war for freedom that was fought in the place where he comes from. Can we not fight for the freedom of the calots?”

  “We can, Woola,” she sang. “But I have no wish to see calots die, even for freedom. No, what I wish is for the calots of Thark and Warhoon and Torquas, and the other cities that once belonged to the Orovars, to learn of this valley and plan for escape. Let them come here to study our history and our ways. And then, if they choose, let them go back into the world again, but as free calots. If they must fight, let them fight. But let them first learn what they are fighting for. My children,” she sang to the calots seated around us, “will you help with this plan? Will you welcome calots from the outside world into this valley, so they can learn and grow strong, so they can free themselves?”

  I could hear their minds together: one clear, ringing song of affirmation.

  “Then I will go back, Orda,” I sang. “I will spread this story to every calot, and it will spread through song so that all calots will come to know that the Valley Lal is real, and will welcome them. But before I can do so, I must find my master, John Carter, if indeed he is still alive, and help him to rescue Sola and Dejah Thoris.”

  “First you must rest, Woola,” she answered. “You are tired and hungry, and you must heal before you can return to the outside world.” And so for many days I reste
d in the Valley Lal, learning from the calots there, allowing my wound to heal. I saw how loving their clutches were, heard what songs they sang as the moons rose. I ate my fill and swam in the lake with the other calots. And Lilla became my friend.

  “Come back to me, Woola,” she sang when I had recovered my strength and was ready to return, to begin on the mission Orda had given me. “I would like to see what strange-looking calots hatch from our clutch! Will they have fur, do you think? Or tusks? Or both?”

  I purred deep in my throat. That night we lay side by side, fur to hide, in a hollow we had dug in the earth by the shore of the lake. The next morning I bade her farewell and crept back through the cave in the mountain. I felt sad to be leaving the Valley Lal, but also hopeful that my mission would succeed, and I would come back to see Lilla again.

  I had not forgotten my promise to Dejah Thoris, so I headed toward Warhoon, hoping that I would find John Carter alive. It was a long journey, and I was hungry and thirsty again by the time I saw, by the light of the first moon, a gar fighting—was it a Red warrior? No, it was John Carter! At last, I had once again found my master. I fought the gar and drove my tusk through its throat. Afterward, I sat beside John Carter, sharing food and drink, and I thought that he was not truly my master, but my companion, as the calots once were to the Orovars. Perhaps, with time and patience, I could teach him to hear my mindsong.

  Would that he could hear it now!

  I do not know where he is, my clutchmates. At the edge of the city of Zodanga, he bade me return to Thark, and although I wished to go with him to rescue Sola and Deja Thoris, I obeyed. So here I am, fulfilling Orda’s mission. I am singing you the song of the Valley Lal. Go and sing it to the other calots who are held here in captivity, and tell them to sing it to their clutchmates and the other clutches, so that the song spreads, calot to calot. Let all calots know that there is a day when we shall be free.

  Will I see John Carter again? Will he have rescued Sola and Dejah Thoris? I do not know. We do not know our fates, although we must fulfill them. My task now is to spread this story among you. Spread it to the calots of Thark, and then begin to disappear. Calot by calot, one by one, go across the desert to the north, toward the star we call Ird. There you will find a mountain with two jagged peaks. The calots of the Valley Lal will be waiting for you, singing. Follow their songs, and you will find our ancient home. There, learn and plan, so that one day all calots may be free. And the blessings of Lal go with you.

  One fact of life on Barsoom is that any form of organized religion usually turns out to be a cruel hoax. When they reach the age of a thousand, most Martians float down the sacred River Iss, believing they’ll arrive in a heavenly paradise called the Valley Dor. What they find instead is a nightmarish deathtrap full of hideous monsters and ruled over by a clan of cannibalistic priests. In The Master Mind of Mars, Earthman Ulysses Paxton encounters the people of Phundahl, who worship the god Tur. Their absurd rituals include bumping their heads against the floor and crawling madly in a circle. They also have two chants, “Tur is Tur” and “Tur is Tur.” When Paxton observes that these two chants are in fact identical, he’s accused of having a lack of faith for being unable to appreciate the important differences between the two. Burroughs was an atheist who often expressed dislike for churches and who wrote a newspaper article in defense of schoolteacher John Scopes (when Scopes was put on trial in Tennessee for teaching evolution), but Burroughs also believed that an author’s first responsibility was to entertain, and he felt that some of his contemporaries, such as Sinclair Lewis, had gone too far in promoting their own anti-religious views. Though organized religion on Barsoom is always a dodgy proposition, the world is nevertheless suffused with a powerful sense of wonder and mystery, which our next tale explores to great effect.

  THE RIVER GODS OF MARS

  BY AUSTIN GROSSMAN

  I walked through the night beneath the twin tumbling moons of Barsoom, gaining on my deadly pursuers even as I led them farther and farther out onto the dead sea Korus and closer to my goal, the spiral towers of the accursed city of Pra-Ohn. Kai-Wen and his ragged band of Warhoons followed me doggedly, though I had twice mauled them in previous encounters only to retreat in the face of superior numbers. In the still air of the Martian midwinter the remainder of his barbarian crew would have no trouble following the prints I left in the smoothly piled sands, which even by moonlight sparkled dully with a mineral unknown to terrestrial science.

  I had lost my supplies in the first encounter, and since then I had journeyed for a day and a half with little rest under a cloudless sky. I was nearly dead of thirst when I beheld at last the starlit azure spires and ivory domes of Pra-Ohn, once the greatest port on the mightiest ocean on the face of the red planet, before Barsoom’s southern ocean receded into who knew what dark areological cavity.

  It stood on a granite cliff next to what was once the titanic waterfall where the river En-Kah-Do, sacred to the deity of that name, tumbled into the sea after its thousand-mile journey from the Mountains of Zont. I climbed from rock to rock up the dry cascade, then stood on the docks looking out over the dead sea. The beached hulls of antique watercraft lay scattered across the sand like chips of bark, double-hulled pleasure-barges and Martian ships of the line bristling with cannon. Immense skeletons of cetaceans whose half-buried ribs arched forty feet into the air and whose spines stretched the length of a football field, greater than any Earthly whale.

  For a quarter million years Pra-Ohn had stood empty and abandoned, shunned alike by the Red, Green, and Yellow races of Barsoom. It remained to be seen whether the Warhoons would follow me into that accursed place, or if superstition would keep them at bay. I contemplated laying a trap for the dozen or so warriors behind me, but pressed on instead for fear of taking a disabling wound. I had perhaps two hours’ grace before they reached me and took their long-postponed vengeance, and I could not stop moving for an instant.

  The Warhoons were not my true concern. It was a full week since Dejah Thoris, princess paramount of Helium, had vanished together with her father and seven red Martian loyal attendants, so it was there I would go, though all the spirits of ancient Mars forbade it. I had thought of little else since my latest arrival on this planet.

  The planet Barsoom knows gods of every possible description, and no one has named them all. They inhabit mountains, lakes, caverns, rivers, sizable rocks. They are worshiped through idols, carved symbols, cities, seasonal winds, and masked pretenders. There are hundreds, but all agree that the greatest of all were the ones the ancient White Martians worshipped: gods of radiation and healing, of trivia, of tides, of mystery.

  I paused in my march, just to smell the dry Barsoomian air and revel in the feeling of having returned to my spiritual home. Mars again! The transfers happened an average of about once per decade, but there was a great deal of variation. The shortest interval was a mere two weeks. Once, it took twenty-eight years—a whole quarter-century spent standing outside each night in supplication before the red star, before I was again caught up and carried away in the ineluctable Barsoomian rapture.

  I have long, long outlived my close contemporaries, my nieces and nephews and their children, and anyone with whom I could plausibly claim kinship. I fought in the War Between the States and the wars that followed, each time anticipating it would be my end. I have come to know psychoanalysts, hedge funds, napalm, and John Updike. I have learned French and Russian and Arabic, seen Henry Ford’s production lines, pepperoni pizza, Bruce Lee films, and failure.

  The only constant figures in my life have been Dejah Thoris, princess of Mars; her father; Tars Tarkas, chieftain of the Tharks; my son, Carthoris and daughter, Tara; and all the host of Martians. And always, always, there is the red planet called Ares, called Al-Qahira, called Labou, called Nirgal, called Mars, called Barsoom.

  This time it took four years, eight months, and six days for me to return, transferred spectrally across the intervening void in the year nineteen hundred an
d seventy-one. When I arrived, I was found naked and snoring outside the city gates. As I hastened to don Martian garb, the people of Helium explained: Dejah Thoris and her father were on a scientific expedition to learn all they could of a moving light in the sky that flared and died. According to ancient writings, such lights were predictors of terrible changes, perhaps disaster, so she and her father set out along the line of its descent into the southern hemisphere.

  I followed, of course. Dejah Thoris had lately read much of the ancient texts, so I could not guess what she hoped to find there. I knew only that she was ahead of me and I would find her. A few years ago I saw an analyst who spoke at length about the curious dynamics of our relationship—pursuer and pursued, maiden and rescuer. Was she trying to communicate with me? Did she, perhaps, “need a little space”?

  I have little time for such reflections. Simply another mystery of Mars! I stalked the streets of Pra-Ohn for almost a full day, sword in hand, happy simply to be alive and hunting. I found no trace of my beloved, but I was strangely drawn to the structure at the city’s heart; its walls were deeply incised with chiseled runes but whether it was palace or fortress or temple I could not say.

  All the while, I knew, a deadly enemy was closing in behind me, and still there was no sign of my beloved. As the day waned I gave in to impulse. The broad stone steps were dusted with sand blown in from the desert. Enormous bronze doors inlaid with lapis lazuli hung loose on their hinges, and in the dry air I caught an unexpected whiff of that most precious substance—water! I drew my curved blade and entered.

  Less than two thirds of Barsoom has been explored by the Red Martians. The remainder is a wasteland of dead cities, drained oceans, salt flats, inaccessible mountains, forests infested by blue plant-men, apt-riddled cave complexes, accursed river valleys, golden cliffs, Thark-menaced plainlands, psychic heads, pretend deities, enclaves of the elder Martians, Rovers, Therns, Lotharians, and Martians, Yellow, Black, and White. And then there are the Kangaroo Men.