Under the Moons of Mars Read online

  The buildings and their spires rose up high, but not to the roof of the caverns, which I now realized were higher than I first thought. There were vast windows at the tops of the buildings; they were colored blue and yellow, orange and white, and gave the impression of not being made of glass, but of some transparent stone.

  Dragon crafts, large and small, flittered about in the heights. It was a kind of fairy-tale place; a vast contrast from the desert world above.

  The most spectacular construction was a compound, gold in color, tall and vast, surrounded by high walls and with higher spires inside. The gold gates that led into the compound were spread wide on either side. Steam rose out of the construction, giving it the appearance of something smoldering and soon to be on fire. Before the vast gates was a wide moat of water. The water was dark as sewage, and little crystalline things shaped like fish swam in it and rose up from time to time to show long, brown teeth.

  A drawbridge lowered with a mild squeak, like a sleepy mouse having a bad dream. As it lowered, steam came from the gear work and filled the air to such an extent that I coughed. They carried me across the drawbridge and into the inner workings of the citadel, out of the fairy tale and into a house of horrors.

  For a moment we were on streets of gold stone. Then we veered left and came to a dark mouthlike opening in the ground. Steam gasped loudly from the opening, like an old man choking on cigar smoke. There was a ramp that descended into the gap, and my bearers carried me down it. The light in the hole was not bright. There was no glowing moss. Small lamps hung in spots along the wall and emitted heavy orange flames that provided little illumination; the light wrestled with the cotton-thick steam and neither was a clear winner.

  In considerable contrast to above, with its near-silent clockwork and slight hissing, it was loud in the hole. There was banging and booming and screaming that made the hair on the back of my neck prick.

  As we terminated the ramp and came to walk on firm ground, the sounds grew louder. We passed Red Martians, men and women, strapped to machines that were slowly stripping their flesh off in long, bloody bands. Other machines screwed the tops of their heads off like jar lids. This was followed by clawed devices that dipped into the skull cavity and snapped out the brain and dunked it into an oily blue liquid in a vat. Inside the vat the liquid spun about in fast whirls. The brains came apart like old cabbages left too long in the ground. More machines groaned and hissed and clawed and yanked the victim’s bones loose. Viscera was removed. All of this was accompanied by the screams of the dying. When the sufferers were harvested of their bodily parts, a conveyer brought fresh meat along; Red Martians struggling in their straps, gliding inevitably toward their fate. And all the time, below them were the armored warriors, their steam-puffing faces lifted upward, holding long rods to assist the conveyer that was bringing the sufferers along, dangling above the metal men like ripe fruit ready for the picking.

  The cage where they put me was deep in the bowels of the caverns, below the machines. There were a large number of cages, and they were filled mostly with Red Martians, though there were also a few fifteen-foot-tall, four-armed, green-skinned Tharks, their boarlike tusks wet and shiny.

  The armored warriors opened a cage, and the two gold warriors, who had followed my bearers, sprang forward and shoved those who tried to escape back inside. I was unbound and pushed in to join them. They slammed the barred gate and locked it with a key. Men and women in the cage grabbed at the bars and tried uselessly to pull them loose. They yelled foul epithets at our captors.

  I wandered to the far side of our prison, which was a solid wall, and slid down to sit with my back to it. Though I was weak, and in pain, I tried to observe my circumstances, attempted to formulate a plan of escape.

  One Red man came forward and stood over me. He said, “John Carter, Jeddak of Helium.”

  I looked up in surprise. “You know me?”

  “I do, for I was once a soldier of Helium. My name is Farr Larvis.”

  I managed to stand, wobbling only slightly. I reached out and clasped his shoulder. “I regret I didn’t recognize you, but I know your name. You are well respected in Helium.”

  “Was respected,” he said.

  “We wondered what happened to your patrol,” I said. “We searched for days.”

  Farr Larvis was a name well-known in Helium: a general of some renown who had fought well for our great city. During one of our many conflicts with the Green Men of Mars, he and a clutch of warriors had been sent to protect citizens on the outskirts of the city from Thark invaders. The invaders had been driven back, Farr Larvis and his men pursuing on their thoats. After that, they had not been heard of again. Search parties were sent out, and for weeks they were sought, without so much as a trace.

  “We chased the Tharks,” Farr Larvis said, “and finally met them in final combat. We lost many men, but in the end prevailed. Those of us who remained prepared to return to Helium. But one night we made our camp and the gold ones came in their great winged beasts. They came to us silently and dropped nets, and before we could put up a fight, hoisted us up inside the bellies of their beasts. We were brought here. I regret to inform you, John Carter, that of my soldiers, I and two others are all that remain. The rest have become one with the machine.”

  He pointed the survivors out to me in the crowd.

  I clasped his shoulder again. “I know you fought well. I am weak. I must sit.”

  We both sat and talked while the other Red Martians wandered about the cell, some moaning and crying, others merely standing like cattle waiting their turn in the slaughter-house line. Farr Larvis’s two soldiers sat against the bars, not moving, waiting. If they were frightened, it didn’t show in their eyes.

  “The gold men, they are not men at all,” Farr Larvis told me.

  “Machines?” I said.

  “You would think, but no. They are neither man nor machine, but both. They are made up of body parts and cogs and wheels and puffs of steam. And most importantly, the very spirits of the living. Odar Rukk is responsible.”

  “And who and what is he?” I asked.

  “His ancestors are from the far north, the rare area where there is ice and snow. They were a wicked race, according to Odar Rukk, fueled by the needs of the flesh. They were warlike, destroying every tribe within their range.”

  “Odar Rukk told you this personally?”

  “He speaks to us all,” said Farr Larvis. “There are constant messages spilled out over speakers. They tell his history, they tell his plans. They explain our fate, and how we are supposed to accept it. According to him, in one night there came a great melting in the north, and the snow and much of the ice collapsed. Their race was lost, except for those driven underground. These were people who found a chamber that led down into the earth. It was warmer there, and they survived because the walls were covered in moss that gave heat and light. There were wild plants and wild animals, and the melting ice and snow leaked down into the world and formed lakes and creeks and rivers. In time these people populated all of the underground. They found gold. They discovered hissing vats of volcanic release; it’s the power source for most of what occurs here. They built this city.

  “But in time, the time of Odar Rukk, the people began to return to their old ways. The ways that led to their destruction by the gods. And Odar Rukk, a scientist who helped devise the way this city works, decided, along with idealistic volunteers, that there was a need for a new and better world. Gradually, he changed these volunteers into these gold warriors, and then they captured the others and changed them. The goal was to eliminate the needs of people, and to make them machinelike.”

  “All of them under his control?” I said.

  “Correct,” Farr Larvis said. “Ah, here comes the voice.”

  And so it came: Odar Rukk’s voice floating out from wall speakers and filling the chambers like water. It was a thin voice, but clear, and he spoke for hours and hours, explained how we were all part of a new futur
e, that we should submit, and that soon all our needs, all our desires for greed and romance and success and war, would be behind us. We would be blended in blood and bone and spirit. We would be collectively part of the greatest race that Barsoom had ever known. And soon the gold ones would spread out far and wide, crunching all Martians beneath their steam-powered plans.

  I do not know how long we waited there in the cell, but every day the gold ones came and brought us food, which was more of the gruel. They gave us water and we made our toilet where we could. And then came the day when the speakers did not speak. Odar Rukk’s voice did not drone. There was only silence, except for the moaning and crying from the captives.

  “The gold ones come today,” Farr Larvis said. “On the day of Complete Silence. They take the people away and they do not come back.”

  “I suggest, then, that we do not let them take us easily,” I said. “We must fight. And if they should carry us away, we should fight still.”

  “If it is at all possible,” Farr Larvis said, “I will fight to the bitter end. I will fight until the machines take me apart.”

  “It is all we can do,” I said. “And sometimes, that is enough.”

  True to Farr Larvis’s word, they came. There were many of them, and they marched in time in single file. They brought a gold key and snicked it in the cell lock. They entered the cell, and the moans and cries of the Red Martians rose up.

  “Silence,” Farr Larvis yelled. “Do not give them the satisfaction.”

  But they did not go silent.

  The gold ones came in with short little sticks that gave off shocks. I fought them, because I knew nothing other than to fight. They came and I knocked them down with my fist, their armor crunching beneath my Earthly strength. There were too many, however, and finally I went down beneath their shocks. My hands were bound quickly with rope in front of me, and I was lifted up.

  Farr Larvis fought well, and so did his two men, but they took them, and all the others, and carried them away.

  Along the narrow path between the cells we went, in their clutches, and then a curious thing happened. The half a dozen gold ones carrying me, giving me intermittent shocks with their stinging rods, veered off and took me away from the mass being driven toward the Meat Rooms, as Farr Larvis called them: the place of annihilation.

  I was being separated from the others, carried toward some separate fate.

  Farr Larvis called out: “Good-bye, John Carter.”

  “Remember,” I said back. “We still live.”

  They hauled me into a colossal room which was really a cavern. The walls sweated gooey liquid gold, thick as glowing honey. There were clear tubes running along the ceiling and they were full of the yellow liquid. In spots the tubes leaked, and the fluid dripped from the leaks and fell in splotches like golden bird droppings to the ground. The air in the room was heavily misted with gold. It gave the illusion that we were like flies struggling through amber. There was a cool wet wind flowing through the cavern, its temperature just short of being cold.

  I was carried forward to where a domed building could be seen at the peak of a pyramid of steps. On the top of the dome was an immense orb made of transparent stone, and it was full of the golden elixir. It popped and bubbled and splattered against the globe. Up we went, and finally, after giving me a series of shocks to make sure my resistance was lowered, they laid me on the ground and stood around me, waited, looked up at the dome and globe.

  A part of the dome’s wall lowered with the expected hiss of steam. A multi-wheeled machine rolled out, and in it sat an obese, naked, red-skinned man with a misshapen skull. The skull was bare except for a few strands of gray hair that floated above it in the gold-tinted wind, wriggling like albino roach antennae. The eyes in the skull were dark and beady and rheumy; one of them had a mind of its own, wandering first up, and then down, then left to right. His massive belly looked ready to pop, like an overripe pomegranate. He was without legs. In fact, from his lower torso on, he was machine. Hoses and wires ran from the wheeled conveyance to the back of his head, and when he breathed, steam issued from his mouth and nose like a snorting dragon. His long, skeletal fingers rested on the arms of the chair, in easy reach of a series of buttons and switches and levers and dials. Off of the chair trailed transparent tubes pulsing with the gold fluid, and red and blue and green and yellow wires. All of this twisted back behind him, along the ramp, and into the dome, and I could see where the wires and horses curled upward toward the globe. All of this ran out from the globe and into the wall behind it.

  Having recovered somewhat from the electrical shocks, I slowly stood up. Two of the gold men moved toward me.

  “Leave him,” said the man, who I knew to be Odar Rukk. I had heard his voice many times over the speakers in the walls. “Leave him be.”

  He fixed his good eye on me. “Your name?”

  I pushed out my chest and stuck out my chin. “John Carter, Warlord of Mars.”

  “Ah, that obviously means something to you, but it means nothing to me. Do you know who I am?”

  “A madman named Odar Rukk.”

  He smiled, and the smile was a glint of metal teeth and hissing steam. “Yes, I am Odar Rukk, and I may be the only sane man on Barsoom.”

  “I would not put that up for a vote,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. My golden army would agree.”

  “They neither agree or disagree,” I said. “They blindly obey.”

  “As do all armies.”

  “Armies and men fight for beliefs and for purpose.”

  “Oh. You titled yourself Warlord of Mars. Do you not enjoy battle? War?”

  I said nothing. He had spoken the truth. It was not all about ideals.

  “I brought you here because my golden warriors have been recording in their memory cells all that they saw you do. They know you single-handedly brought down my flying machine, destroyed one of their kind in the crash, another with your swordsmanship. Those events they recorded in their heads and now those events are in my head.”

  Odar Rukk paused to tap his skull with the tip of his index finger.

  “They brought those images to me, and with but a twist of a dial and the flick of a switch, they come into my head and I see what they have seen. They showed me a man who could do extraordinary things. Before I take those things from you, tell me, John Carter, Warlord of Mars, why are you so different?”

  “I am from Earth. The gravity is heavier there. It makes me stronger here. And most importantly, I do what I do because I am who I am. John Carter, formerly of a place called Virginia.”

  “You, John Carter, will be my personal fuel. I will suck out your spirit and your abilities and into me directly they will go.”

  “You will still be you. Not me.”

  “I do not wish to be you, John Carter. I wish to take away your spirit, your powers. I will use them to live longer yet. I will use them to change this planet for the better. Soon, I will spread our empire. I will take away the insignificant needs of men and women. I will eliminate hunger and fear and war, all the negative aspects.”

  “Except for yourself,” I said. “You remain very manlike.”

  Odar Rukk smiled that steamy, gleaming smile again. “Someone must rule. Someone must control. There must be one mind that oversees and does not merely respond. That is my burden.”

  “What you have done here is nothing more than an exercise in vanity,” I said.

  “Have it your way,” he said. “But soon your strength, your will, shall be contained inside of me, and I will be stronger than before. When I saw what you could do, your uniqueness, I decided it would be all mine. Not spread out among the others. But all mine.”

  “Being unique somewhat spoils your vision of everyone and everything being alike, does it not?”

  “I have no need to argue, John Carter,” he said. “I have the power here, not you. And in moments, when you are strapped in and sucked out and all those abilities are pumped into me, you wil
l cease to exist, and I will be stronger.”

  The shocks had worn off, and the ropes they had tied me with had loosened. They had not been tied that well to begin with, but still, they were sufficient to hold me. No matter. I had decided I would give my life dearly before I let this monster take away my spirit, my abilities, my blood and bones and flesh.

  And then, when I was on the verge of hurling myself at Odar Rukk, knocking him out of his chair with my body, with the intent of trying to bite his throat out, there was an unexpected change of situation.

  There was a noise beyond our cavern, a noise that echoed into our huge chamber and clamored about the walls like a series of great metal butterflies clanging against the walls. It was the sound of conflict from beyond our cavern. Somehow, I knew it was Farr Larvis and his two warriors. They were managing to put up a last hard fight.

  In that moment, with Odar Rukk’s head twisting about, trying to find the source of the sound, the gold ones having turned their attention to the back of the cave, I jumped toward the nearest gold one, grabbed his sword with my bound hands, and pulled it from its sheath. I sliced at him, catching him beneath the helmet and slicing his head off his shoulders. There was a spurt of gold liquid from his neck, a spark from a batch of severed wires, and he went down.

  I managed to twist the sword in my hand and cut my rope and free my hands. Then I turned as they came at me. I wove my sword like a tapestry of steel. Poking through eye slots, slicing under the helmets, taking off heads, chopping legs and arms free at joint connections where the armor was thinnest.

  I spun about for a look, saw Odar Rukk had wheeled his machine about and was darting up the ramp, back into the dome. Already the ramp was rising. Soon he would be safe inside. I leapt. My Earthly muscles saved me again, for the horde of gold men were about to be on me, thick as a cluster of grapes, and even with all my skill, I could not have fought them all. I landed on the ramp. It was continuing to lift, and it unsettled my footing. I started to slide after Odar Rukk, who had already driven himself inside the dome.