Under the Moons of Mars Page 13

  The space within rivaled the Earthly Hagia Sophia in Istanbul for splendor; the vaulted ceiling was almost lost in the gray dimness; pillars were topped with grotesque carvings of Red, Green, and Yellow Martians, white apes, and things stranger still. Golden light, somehow both thinner and more illuminating than its Earthly equivalent, poured through tall vertical slits in the walls. The floor was tiled with a complex mosaic in blue and peach, not unlike the Roman mosaics recovered at Pompeii, displaying fantastical beasts from Barsoom’s distant past, so that I seemed to stride over ancient oceans. Murals on either side showed an Arcadian landscape of green grasses, canals, collonades, humanoids in pastoral attitudes—all the joys of long-lost water-rich Mars.

  Archway after archway receded before me toward a distant altar where, at the limits of vision, a struggle seemed to be taking place. I ran forward as only an Earth-born man on Mars can run, and as I grew closer I saw in the swirl of wrestling bodies first the face of a hooded Yellow man of Mars, and next the full lustrous raven hair of my own, my beloved, Dejah Thoris. The Yellow Martian held a long dagger gripped overhand. The princess held fast to his wrist; his other hand held her hair. Between them, unconscious or dead, lay her father, Jeddak of Helium. In the concentration of battle her lip quivered, and her eyes were huge. I saw her take her opponent in an Asiatic wrestling hold I had shown her, but before I could see the outcome, a Warhoon, a terrible Green Man of Mars, enemy of the Tharks, rose up before me.

  The Warhoon’s eyes, placed on either side of his head, scanned the room from a height of fifteen feet. The Green Martians are the most alien of Mars’s sentient life. They are hexapods, with two legs, a pair of arms, and a stronger intermediate pair of limbs in between. He wore a complex harness ornamented with jewels where its straps met in front and back, and long bronze daggers hanging at waist level. He gripped two silvered longswords in an orthodox two-handed fighting stance familiar to me from countless duels for status and survival, the right-hand sword raised and the left extended, and he waited, bug-eyed and determined.

  I don’t remember the first Earthman I killed, it was too long ago, perhaps in the War Between the States. I remember the first Green Martian, though—I did it bare-handed and without realizing it. I was a captive of the Tharks and he pulled me roughly to my feet, so I struck him with my fist and he fell to the ground. It was only days later I learned that I had killed him, and that his name was Dotar. I inherited his clothes, weapons, and women, and in some contexts I am still addressed by his name. Since that time I have learned that the weaker gravity here allows the Martians to grow to enormous height but leaves them comparatively weak.

  Hand-to-hand combat with a Green Martian is rather like fighting a tree in high winds. The trunk and limbs bend and whip around in fast motion, and the swords follow in terrible rapid slashing arcs and land with tremendous force. I gave ground, parrying desperately and hoping for a moment of opportunity. Our swords clashed and for many minutes the ancient temple rang with sound like a factory floor.

  When I sensed the temple wall close behind me, I shoulder-rolled under a backhand swing and struck an overhand blow. My opponent anticipated me; he had already whirled around and met the assault with crossed swords, but nonetheless he staggered. The Martian now knew who he was fighting. He showed no visible apprehension, but he gave off the distinctive floral reek of Green Martian sweat.

  Over my many sojourns on Barsoom I have lost some of the Terran muscle tone that made me an unbeatable force in countless battles, but I am still far stronger than any indigenous Martian, and far more experienced than when I first arrived in this place. The defect of the Warhoonish Orthodox is that it is designed for fighting fellow Green Men, or for hewing off the heads of hapless Red Martians in brief engagements such as happen in a pitched battle. In a prolonged duel against a human opponent, the unarmed lower limb tends to be neglected and open to attack (of course, such duels are seldom prolonged, as the Warhoons are surpassingly deadly). I have left more than one three-handed corpse on the Martian sands, and this was to be no exception. He took two slashes, the first taking off a nailless Martian finger, the next taking the limb off nearly to the forearm. My opponent shuddered, but no Green Martian knows fear and so he sprang at me again and fought until he was too weak to continue.

  Blood covered the tiled floor by the time it was over. Blood coated me as well; it had got into my nose and mouth, a coppery taste. I hastened to the altar, but by then the robed man lay dead, and Dejah Thoris and her father were gone.

  Every female animal and sentient being on Mars is oviparous. The woman I have given my heart to was born from an egg, as were both of my children. Mars knows no mammal but myself.

  When I gained the top of the dais I could not comprehend how Dejah Thoris had escaped me. An enormous stone idol stood seemingly carved entirely from jade into the shape of a four-armed ape, its mouth open, frozen in a shriek of fury. I stood before it, then abruptly felt the stone slab tilt and fall away beneath me. Martian gravity pulled me down a glassy tube, down and down through absolute darkness, the stone growing colder until it gave way to empty air. I thrashed in black space a full four seconds before I hit the water. Salt! I spluttered and tasted for the first time the cold, bitter seas that lie beneath the Martian desert.

  I swam blindly and soon I detected the sound of waves crashing ahead of me. I hastened my strokes until my hand found a smooth stone surface and I pulled myself, gasping, onto a shore which lay at the edge of a cavernous space. A row of canoes woven from the dry reeds of Mars stood before me, and I saw by the light of phosphorescent fungal ridges that I stood near the cave’s outlet, a swift, massy tongue of water disappearing down into further depths.

  A splash and a clatter of wooden oars against stone turned my head, and I again caught a glimpse of my dear, my only, Dejah Thoris, a flash of coppery shoulder and painted nails as the current bore her from me, down into the swirling cascade and away.

  I don’t know what I am. No one knows how or why I come to Barsoom, or what it means. It could be a dream; or perhaps Earth is the dream. It could be a psychotic episode, or the last feverish hallucination of a man dying in an Arizona cave. Barsoom has divided my life at the root, and I’ll never know the person I would have been if I hadn’t become a prince of this lush alien planet. A weaker man, maybe, but one with more capacity for reflection. A man I might despise, or admire. The man who stayed home.

  The tunnel swept me along, south by my reckoning, with no need to paddle. After a long interval, an hour perhaps, I began to hear the bass roar of a subterranean cataract ahead of me. The river was descending to a lower level, some deeper subterranean pocket. As I was swept along, I glimpsed a torchlit dock, a stone stairway ascending from the river, and Dejah Thoris standing on the topmost step watching me pass. A moment of parted lips, clear golden eyes, pupils wide in the darkness, and then gone. Or had she winked at me?

  The white noise of the Martian waterfall grew louder and louder. I could see only forty feet in front of me, but the water around me deepened and the wind blew harder against my face. The stone tunnel was smooth on either side of me; I paddled against the current but it was useless even for me. I passed two more landing areas but too fast to do anything about it. I passed a place where the walls and ceiling of the cave had been carved to form a giant’s face with an open mouth, its eyes faceted jewels of incalculable worth. In the end I sat in the bow and waited as the water grew green and translucent and white, and then in an instant I was over the falls and falling through a cavern whose far wall was invisible. To my left I saw a titanic castle carved into the stone, and a strange flying vehicle hanging aloft in the subterranean air, a hooded figure at the controls. For a moment I was excruciatingly conscious that this must be the last moment of my unnaturally extended life.

  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 nail-less 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.

  “I know not, my prince,” answered Dejah Thoris, “Nor has the wisest scholar of our people has been able to say.”

  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 rea
lized 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.