Lord of the Spiders or Blades of Mars

by Michael Moorcock

  LORD OF THE SPIDERS

  Michael Moorcock

  For Henry Morrison and Robert Silverberg

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘We must not fail!' I looked up sharply. The speaker was a handsome giant of a man with burning, diamond-blue eyes. He was bending over one of the strangest devices I had ever seen. About the size of a telephone box, it was covered with dials and switches. A large coil suspended above it pulsed with power and on the right, in a dark comer, a dynamo of unusual design fed it with energy.

  The tall man sat in a kind of cradle affair that was also suspended from the roof of the makeshift laboratory -really the cellars of my Belgravia house. I stood beneath the cradle, reading out to him the information given on the dials.

  We had been at work on the machine for many weeks -or rather he had been at work. I had merely put up the money for the equipment he needed, and followed his instructions in doing the simple tasks he permitted me to do.

  We had met fairly recently in France, where he had told me a strange and wild story about his adventures in - of all places - the planet Mars! There he had fallen in love with a beautiful princess of a city called Vamal of the Green Mists. He had fou^t against gigantic blue men called the Argzoon, finally succeeding in saving half a continent from their savage domination.

  Put as baldly as this, the whole thing sounds like the paranoiac ravings of a madman or the lurid lies of a smooth-tongued tale-teller. Yet I believed it - and still do.

  I have already recounted this first meeting and what became of it - of how Michael Kane, the man who now 139 worked in the cradle suspended above my head, had been a physicist in Chicago doing special research on something he called a 'matter transmitter'; of how the early experiment had gone wrong and he had been transmitted not to another part of the lab, but to Mars.

  It was a Mars, we believed, eons in the past, a Mars that thrived before Man ever walked this planet, a Mars of strange contrasts, customs, scenery - and beasts. A Mars of warring nations possessing the remnants of a once mighty technical civilisation - a Mars where Kane had come into his own. An expert swordsman, he had been a match for the master swordsmen of the Red Planet; a romantic despising his own dull environment, he had rejoiced at the luck which fate brought him.

  But fate - in the guise of his fellow scientists - had also brought him back to Earth - back to here-and-now, just as he was about to marry his Martian sweetheart! The other scientists in Chicago had adjusted the fault in the transmitter and managed to recall Kane. One moment he had been sleeping in a Martian bed - the next he was back in the laboratory looking into the smiling faces of his fellow researchers! They thought they had done him a favour!

  No one had believed his story. This brilliant scientist had been discredited when he had tried to convince the others that he had really been to Mars - a Mars that existed millions of years ago! He was not allowed near his own invention and he was given indefinite 'leave of absence.' Weighed down with despair of ever seeing his beloved Mars again, Kane had taken to wandering the world, aimlessly, thinking always of Vashu - the native name for Mars.

  Then we had met by accident in a small caf6 overlooking the French Mediterranean. He had told me the whole story. At the end of it I had agreed to help him build privately a transmitter similar to the one in Chicago so that, with luck, he would be able to return.

  And now his device was almost ready!

  'We must not fail!’ He repeated the phrase, speaking half to himself as he worked with frowning concentration.

  He would be taking his life in his hands if the experiment went wrong. He could have been flung through time and space at random the first time - he had only the flimsiest evidence to support his theory of spacio-temporal warp 140 being affected by a special tuning of the transmitter, tuning which had existed during the first experiment. I had reminded him of this - that even if the transmitter worked there was scant likelihood of it sending him to Mars again. Even if it did send him to Mars, what chance was there of it being the same Mars of the time he had left?

  But he held to his theory - a theory based, I felt, more upon what he wished than what actually was - and he placed all his faith on it working - if he picked the right time of year and day, and the right geographical position.

  Apparently a spot near the city of Salisbury would be ideal - and tomorrow at eleven-thirty p.m. would be an excellent time. That was why we worked with such frantic haste.

  So far as the actual equipment was concerned, I was sure it was all right I did not pretend to understand his calculations but I trusted his character and his reputation as a physicist

  At last Kane looked away from the cone he*d been tinkering with and fixed me with that melancholy yet burning gaze with which I had become so familiar.

  "That's it,' he said. ‘There's nothing else we can do except ship it to our location. Is the power-wagon ready?’

  ‘It is,’ I replied, referring to the transportable dynamo we would use to power Ms device. 'Shall I phone the agency?’

  He pursed his lips, frowning. He swung himself out of the cradle and dropped to the floor. He looked up at his brain-child and then his face relaxed. He seemed satisfied.

  'Yes. Better phone them tonight rather than the morning.' He nodded.

  I went upstairs and put through a call to the employment agency, who were hiring us the 'muscle-power' we needed to get our equipment to its ultimate destination on Salisbury Plain. The men would be at my front door in the morning, the agency assured me.

  When I returned I found Kane slumped in a chair, half asleep.

  'Come along, old man,* I said. 'You'd better rest now or you'll be unable to do your best tomorrow.'

  He nodded mutely and I helped him upstairs to bed. Then I retired myself.

  Next morning the men arrived with a large van. Under Kane's somewhat nervous supervision the matter-transmitter 141 was taken out and secured inside the van.

  Then we set off for Salisbury with me driving behind the larger vehicle in what Kane had chosen to call our power-wagon.

  We had selected a spot not far from the famous Circle of Stones, Stonehenge. The great primitive pillars - thought by many to be one of the earliest astronomical observatories - stood out boldly in the sharp light of early morning.

  We had brought a large tent to protect our equipment both from the weather and from prying eyes. We erected this with the help of the men, who then drove off with our instructions to return with their van in the morning.

  I was a restless day and the wind beat at the canvas of the tent as Kane and I worked to set up the equipment and give it a few tests to make sure it was working efficiently. This took us the best part of the day, and night was falling as I went to the van to switch on the dynamo in order to test the transmitter.

  As the hours slipped by. Kane's face set more and more grimly. He was tense and kept reminding me of what I had to do when the time came. I knew it by heart - a simple business of checking certain instruments and pressing certain switches.

  Shortly before eleven-thirty I went outside. T
he moon was high, the night wild and stormy. Great banks of black cloud scudded across the sky. A night of portent!

  I stood there smoking for a few minutes, huddled in my overcoat My mind was half numb from the concentration of the previous weeks. Now that the experiment was about to take place I was almost afraid - afraid for Kane. He stood to lose if not his life, at least his hopes if we failed. And with the loss of hope. I felt. Kane would cease to be the man I admired.

  He called to me from inside the tent.

  When I went back I could see that his normal calmness was still not so apparent, partly due to his near-exhaustion, partly to evident realisation of the same things I had been dunking.

  'We're almost ready, Edward.'

  I stamped out my cigarette and looked at the weird machine. The matter transmitter was alive now, humming J42 with power. The scanner-cone at the top glowed a ruby red, giving the interior of the tent a bizarre appearance. Reflected in this glow, Kane's handsome face looked like that of some noble but unearthly demigod.

  ‘Wish me luck.' He smiled with an attempt at Tightness. We shook hands.

  He entered the transmitter and I closed the panel behind him, sealing it shut. I glanced at my watch. One minute to go. I dared not think - dared not consider, now, what I was about to do!

  As the seconds ticked by I carefully recalled all his instructions, studied the instruments as needles quivered and dials glowed. I reached out my hand and depressed a button, flicked a switch. Simple actions, but actions which could either kill a man or consign him to limbo, either physical or mental.

  There came a sudden, shrill note from above and the needles flickered frenetically. I knew what it meant. Kane was on his way!

  But where? When? Perhaps I would never know! But now it was done. I walked slowly from the tent. I lit another cigarette and smoked it. I thought about Kane, about his tales of high adventure and romance on an ancient planet. I wondered, as I had done before, if I had been right to believe him and help him. I wondered if I had been wrong.

  Also I felt a loss - as if something strong and important had been removed from my life. I had lost a friend. Then, suddenly, I heard a voice from within the tent! With a shock I recognised Kane's voice - though now it had a different note to it.

  So we had failed. Perhaps he had not gone anywhere. Perhaps his calculations had been wrong. Half in relief and half in trepidation, I stumbled back into the tent - to receive another shock! The man who stood there was almost naked. It was Kane - but not the Kane with whom I had shaken hands only minutes before.

  I stared in astonishment at this apparition. It was clad in a leather harness of some sort, and it was decorated with strange, glowing gems which I could not recognise as any I knew. Across the broad, muscular shoulders was draped a light cloak of a wonderful blue colour. At its left hip the figure wore a long sword with a basket hilt - a sword suspended from a wide loop of thick leather but naked, unscabbarded. On his feet were heavy sandals laced up the calves to just below the knee. His hair, I now noticed, was longer, too. Upon his body were scars, some old and some fresh. He smiled strangely at me, as if greeting an old acquaintance from whom he had been separated for some time.

  I recognised the gear from Kane's earlier descriptions. It was the gear of a pakan - a Warrior of Mars!

  'Kane!’ I gasped. ‘What has happened? Only a few moments ago you were ... ‘ I broke off, unable to speak, able only to stare!

  He strode forward and grasped my shoulder in his powerful grip.

  ‘Wait,' he said firmly, ‘and I will explain. But first, can we return to your house in London? You might need that tape-recorder again!'

  By means of the power-wagon we drove back to Belgravia, this strange, naked warrior with his long blade and alien, jewelled war-harness, sitting next to me.

  Luckily we were unobserved as we entered my house. He moved lithely, his bronzed muscles rippling - a graceful superman, a hero from the pages of Myth.

  My housekeeper does not live in so I prepared him a meal myself and brought him some strong, black coffee which he seemed to relish a great deal.

  I switched on the tape-recorder and he began to talk. Here is the tale he told me, edited only as to my questions and his asides - and some of the more secret scientific information - so as to present his own continuous narrative.

  EPB.

  Chester Square, London, 3.W.L April, 1969

  *See City of the Beast, the first volume in this series.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Barren Plain

  After I had entered the matter transmitter I felt a tinge of fear. I realised fully for the first time just what I could lose.

  But then it was too late. On your side of the transmitter you had done your work. I began to experience the familiar sensations associated with the machine. There was no difference save that this time I had no certainty of where I was going - you will remember that on my first trip I had thought I was merely being transmitted to a 'receiver' in another part of the laboratory building. Instead, I had been transported to my Mars. Now where was I bound? I prayed that it should be Mars again!

  Strange colours spread themselves before my eyes. Again I felt weightless. There came a period during which I felt in communion with - everything. Then came the feeling of being bodiless, and yet hurtling through blackness at incredible velocities. My mind blanked out.

  This tune I awoke to comparative darkness. I lay face down on a hard, stony surface. I felt a little bruised, but not badly. I rolled over on to my back.

  I was on Mars!

  I knew it the moment I saw the twin moons - Umoo and Garhoo in Martian, Phobos and Deimos in English - lighting a desolate landscape of chilly rocks and sparse vegetation. Over to the west something glinted - something that might have been a vast stretch of placid water.

  I was still in the clothes I was wearing when I entered the transmitter. Its scanner broke down and translated into wave-form everything placed inside the machine. I even had some loose change in my pockets, and my watch. 145

  But something was wrong.

  Gingerly I sat up. I was still a little dazed but already the suspicion was dawning on me that something had gone seriously wrong.

  On my first two-way trip I had arrived just outside the city of Vamal on Southern Mars. And it was from Vamal that I had been snatched when my ‘helpful' brother scientists drew me back to Earth.

  But this wasteland was unlike any I had seen on my Mars!

  Mars it was, of course - the moons proved that. Yet it did not seem to be the Mars of the age I had known - a Mars that had existed when dinosaurs still walked the Earth and Man had yet to come to dominance on my home planet

  I felt desperate, helpless, incredibly lonely. I had cut off all hope of ever seeing my beloved, betrothed Shizala again or of living in peace in the City of the Green Mists.

  The Martian night is long and this seemed the longest of all until, when dawn began to appear, I finally rose and looked about me.

  Nothing but sea and rock greeted my gaze whichever way I turned!

  As I had guessed, I stood on a barren plain of brown-orange rock that stretched inland from a great, cold sea that moved slightly but restlessly, grey under a bleak sky.

  Whether this was in the past or future of the Mars I knew I cared not. I only knew that if I was, as I suspected, on the exact geographical spot where once had stood - or once would stand - Vamal of the Green Mists and the Calling Hills, then all was lost to me! Now a sea rolled where the hills had rolled, rock occupied the place of the city.

  I felt betrayed. It is difficult to describe why I should feel this. It was my own fault that I was here - and not even now embracing my sweetheart in the palace of the rulers of the Kamala.

  I sighed, suddenly weary. Uncaring of what befell me, I began gloomily to walk inland. I had no purpose, it seemed, but to walk until I dropped from weariness and hunger. The barrenness of the landscape seemed to reflect the barrenness of ambition in myself.

&
nbsp; All hope was dashed, all dreams vanished. Despair alone consumed me!

  It was perhaps five hours - or approximately forty Martian shatis - later that I saw the beast. It must have been stalking roe for some time.

  The first thing I noticed about it was its weird, coruscating skin that caught the light and reflected it with all the colours of the rainbow. It was as if the beast were made

  of some kind of viscous, crystalline substance, but that was not so. Strange as it was, a second glance showed it to be of flesh and blood.

  It was about eighteen to twenty kilodas - roughly six feet - high and thirty kilodas long. It was a powerful beast with a huge, wide mouth full of teeth that gleamed like crystal too. It had a single, many-faceted eye - an attribute of several Martian animals - and four short, heavily-muscled legs ending in big, clawed paws. It had no tail, but a kind of crest, perhaps of matted fur, oscillated along its back.

  It was bent on having me for its lunch, that was clear.

  Now my mood of despair left me as this danger threatened. I had no weapons, so I stooped and grabbed large rocks in each hand.

  With an effort of will I faced the beast as it began to stalk slowly towards me, the crest oscillating quicker and quicker as if in anticipation of its meal. Yellowish saliva dripped from the open mouth and the single eye was fixed intently on me.

  Suddenly I yelled and flung my first rock, aiming at the eye, following this shot with my second. The creature vented an incredible wailing cry, half of pain, half of anger. It reared on its hind legs and made lashing movements with its forelegs.

  I picked up two more rocks and flung them at its soft underbelly. Evidently these did not have the same effect as those I had hurled at the eye. The beast dropped to all fours again and held its ground - as I held mine - regarding me balefully.

  It seemed to be stalemate for the moment.

  Slowly I stooped and felt around for more ammunition. I found one rock - there were no more.

  Now the crest trembled and fluttered, the mouth opened still wider and the drooling increased. Then the creature took several steps backward but I could tell it was not retreating was merely preparing to spring.