Sea Kings of Mars

by Leigh Brackett

  The scene shifted from Sinharat to a desolated stretch of desert coastline beside the shrunken sea. The land had once been populous. There were the remains of cities and towns, connected by paved roads. There had been factories and power stations, all the appurtenances of an advanced technology. These were now rusting away, and the wind blew ocher dust to bury them.

  "For a hundred years," said the Rama voice, "it has not rained."

  There was an oasis, with wells of good water. Tall brown-haired men and women worked the well-sweeps, irrigating fields of considerable extent. There was a village of neat huts, housing perhaps a thousand people.

  "Mother Mars has killed far more of her children than we. The fortunate survivors live in 'cities' like these. The less fortunate . . ."

  A long line of beasts and hooded human shapes moved across a bitter wasteland. And the Dryland chiefs cried out, "Our people!"

  "We will give them water again." said the Rama voice.

  The spool ended. In the brief interval before the next one began, Woodthorpe coughed uneasily and muttered, "This was all long ago, Carey. The winds of change . . ."

  "Are blowing up a real storm, Woodthorpe. You'll see why."

  The tapes began again. A huge plant now stood at the edge of the sea, distilling fresh water from the salt. A settlement had sprung up beside it, with fields and plantations of young trees.

  "It has gone well," said the Rama voice. "It will go better with time, for their short generations move quickly."

  The settlement became a city. The population grew, spread, built more cities, planted more crops. The land flourished.

  "Many thousands live," the Rama said, "who would otherwise not have been born. We have repaid our murders."

  The spool ended.

  Woodthorpe said, "But we're not trying to atone for anything. We . . ."

  "If my house burns down," said Carey, "I do not greatly care whether it was by a stroke of lightning, deliberate arson, or a child playing with matches. The end result is the same."

  The third spool began.

  A different voice spoke now. Carey wondered if the owner of the first had chosen death himself, or simply lacked the heart to go on with the record. The distilling plant was wearing out and metals for repair were poor and difficult to find. The solar batteries could not be replaced. The stream of water dwindled. Crops died. There was famine and panic, and then the pumps stopped altogether and the cities were stranded like the hulks of ships in dry harbors.

  The Rama voice said, "These are the consequences of the one kind act we have ever done. Now these thousands that we called into life must die as their forebears did. The cruel laws of survival that we caused them to forget are all to be learned again. They had suffered once, and mastered it, and were content. Now there is nothing we can do to help. We can only stand and watch."

  "Shut it off," said Woodthorpe.

  "No," said Carey, "see it out."

  They saw it out.

  "Now," said Carey, "I will remind you that Kharif was the homeland from which most of the Drylands were settled." He was speaking to the Committee more than to Woodthorpe. "These so-called primitives have been through all this before, and they have long memories. Their tribal legends are explicit about what happened to them the last time they put their trust in the transitory works of men. Now can you understand why they're so determined to fight?"

  Woodthorpe looked at the disturbed and frowning faces of the Committee. "But," he said, "it wouldn't be like that now. Our resources. . . ."

  "Are millions of miles away on other planets. How long can you guarantee to keep your pumps working? And the Ramas at least had left the natural water sources for the survivors to go back to. You want to destroy those so they would have nothing." Carey glanced at the men from the City-States. "The City-States would pay the price for that. They have the best of what there is, and with a large population about to die of famine and thirst . . ." He shrugged, and then went on, "There are other ways to help. Food and medicines. Education, to enable the young people to look for greener pastures in other places, if they wish to. In the meantime, there is an army on the move. You have the power to stop it. You've heard all there is to be said. Now the chiefs are waiting to hear what you will say."

  The Chairman of the Committee conferred with the members. The conference was quite brief.

  "Tell the chiefs," the Chairman said, "that it is not our intent to create wars. Tell them to go in peace. Tell them the Rehabilitation Project for Mars is canceled."

  * * *

  The great tide rolled slowly back into the Drylands and dispersed. Carey went through a perfunctory hearing on his activities, took his reprimand and dismissal with a light heart, shook hands with Howard Wales, and went back to Jekkara, to drink with Derech and walk beside the Low Canal that would be there now for whatever ages were left to it in the slow course of a planet's dying.

  And this was good. But at the end of the canal was Barrakesh, and the southward-moving caravans, and the long road to Sinharat. Carey thought of the vaults beyond the fallen block of marble, and he knew that someday he would walk that road again.

  Afterword

  Enchantress of Worlds by Stephen Jones

  Take the swashbuckling interplanetary heroes of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline; add the sword and sorcery of Robert E. Howard, the cosmic horrors of H.P. Lovecraft and the lost civilisations of Abraham Merritt; mix together with the rich and decadent language of Clark Ashton Smith, and introduce a pinch of tough feminism that is entirely the author's own, and what you have is the work of Leigh Brackett.

  Leigh Douglass Brackett was born on 7 December 1915, in Southern California. As a child she was something of a tomboy, and would often play at being a pirate in front of her grandfather's old beach house.

  'The beach where we lived was a wonderful place to grow up in,' she recalled. 'In those days there was a handful of little houses, an overarching sky, wind and sun and seagulls, and I loved it. There were winter gales that never seem to blow anymore, and beautiful fogs so thick you could bite them and taste the salt. It was a place where I could be alone. I used to walk out to the end of a long jetty and sit on the stringer with my feet in the ocean, feeling it breathe, looking out to where the Pacific ran over the edge of the world and dreaming great dreams ...'

  Brackett began to write fiction at an early age, as she revealed: 'I became a writer because, I suppose, I couldn't help myself. From earliest childhood I had a compulsive desire to fill up blank pages in copybooks. When I was seven or eight, I wrote a sequel to a Douglas Fairbanks film because I wanted more and there wasn't any. Infantile scribbling on odd bits of paper, but still, a beginning. At thirteen, I made a mature, reasoned decision to be a professional writer. Ten years later I sold my first story.'

  After graduation, she moved to another school where she taught swimming and drama until a copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Gods of Mars (1918), given to her as a gift, provided an inspiration. Stimulated by the alien exploits of adventurer John Carter, she soon began weaving her own exotic tales of Mars and, later, Venus and Mercury.

  'In the beginning of my writing career, I tried my hand at nearly everything and failed miserably,' Brackett admitted. 'I hadn't enough experience of writing or anything else to compete in the adventure field, for instance. I had been advised to try this market or that market but not science fiction, because there wasn't much money there. Finally, I decided I was going to do what I wanted to do, which was to write fantasy and science fiction, where I could really let my imagination go ... even if I starved to death.'

  Self-deprecatingly, she recalled some early advice from established SF author Henry Kuttner that helped her writing, '... part of which was a gentle insistence on buying more purple pencils to cope with my purple prose.'

  But Kuttner's guidance paid off and, in late 1939, her first two stories were bought in one week by legendary pulp magazine editor John W. Campbell, Jr. 'Martian Quest' appeared in the Fe
bruary 1940 issue of Campbell's influence Astounding Science Fiction. It was quickly followed by 'The Teasure of Ptakuth' in the April edition.

  There were not that many women writing science fiction or fantasy in the 1940s (Catherine Moore was a rare exception, and even she hid her femininity behind the asexual byline 'C.L. Moore'), but it helped that Brackett wrote like a man, with tough though flawed no-nonsense heroes who, more often than not, ended up with neither the girl nor the prize.

  Anthony Boucher (real name, William A.P. White), the renowned writer and founding editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, called Brackett 'The acknowledged mistress of the flamboyant interplanetary adventure'. However, not everyone appreciated the author's particular brand of 'space opera', as she explained: 'Space opera, as every reader doubtless knows, is a prejorative term often applied to a story that has an element of adventure. Over the decades, brilliant and talented new writers appear, receiving great acclaim, and each and every one of them can be expected to write at least one article stating flatly that the day of space opera is over and done, thank goodness, and that henceforth these crude tales of interplanetary nonsense will be replaced by whatever type of story that writer happens to favour — closet dramas, psychological dramas, sex dramas, etc, bus by God important dramas, containing nothing but Big Thinks.

  'Ten years later, the writer in question may or may not still be around, but space opera can be found right where it always was, sturdily driving its dark trade in heroes.'

  Although she only sold one further tale to Campbell's Astounding (The Sorcerer of Rhiannon') and a single horror story to Strange Stories (The Tapestry Gate'), Brackett's action-packed planetary romances soon began appearing regularly in such SF adventure pulps as Thrilling Wonder Stories, Astonishing Stories, Super Science Stories, Startling Stories and, most notably, Planet Stories.

  'For fifteen years, from 1940 to 1955, when the magazine ceased publication, I had the happiest relationship possible for a writer with the editors of Planet Stories,' the author remembered.

  'They gave me, in the beginning, a proving-ground where I could gain strength and confidence in the exercise of my fledgling skills, a thing of incalculable value for a young writer. They sent me cheques, which enabled me to keep on eating. In latter years, they provided a steady market for the kind of stories I liked best to write. In short, I owe them much.'

  Brackett also wrote a number of crime stories for such magazines as Flynn's Detective Fiction, New Detective, Thrilling Detective and Mammoth Detective, and her first novel was a mystery, No Good from a Corpse (1944), which led directly to another career as a screenwriter.

  That same year, Brackett had finished half a novella when she received a call to work in Hollywood. She gave the story to her friend and fellow Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society member, Ray Bradbury, to finish.

  'Leigh called and asked me to finish a novella which she had just begun for Planet,' Bradbury recalled. 'In ten days I wrote the last half.'

  'Lorelei of the Red Mist' appeared under both authors' bylines in the Summer of 1946 issue of Planet Stories.

  'Years later,' said Bradbury, 'I hand a copy to friends and dare them to find the paragraph in the middle of the story where Brackett stops being Brackett and becomes Bradbury. Can't be done. Even I have problems finding that exact place.'

  'He had nothing to go on but what I had down on paper,' admitted Brackett, who used to meet Bradbury every Sunday afternoon at the beach, where they would read each other's manuscripts. 'I never worked from an outline in those days (and often regretted it) and I had no idea where the story was going. Ray took the story and finished it, completely on his own.

  'I never read a word of it until he handed me the manuscript, and I never changed a word after that. I'm convinced to this day that he did a better job with the second half than I would have done.'

  She also later revealed that she regretted using the Celtic name 'Conan' for their traitorous protagonist as it had become so strongly identified with the very different character created by Robert E. Howard.

  Having first been introduced in 1940 by their mutual agent Julius Schwartz and mutual editor Mort Weisinger, six years later she married fellow SF writer Edmond Hamilton, who was eleven years older than Brackett and had been writing professionally a dozen years longer. Ray Bradbury was best man at their wedding.

  The newly married couple lived in Venice, California, in a beach house amongst the oil wells and sand dunes.

  Despite his extensive experience as a prolific pulp author, Hamilton was among those who credited his wife for improving his own writing skills.

  'It might seem that for two full-time professional writers to marry and set up housekeeping together would create problems,' recalled Hamilton. 'But it never did. As we both knew how hard it is to write a story, we respected each other's work-habits from the first. When one of us goes into a workroom and to a typewriter, everything else is ignored and we don't interrupt one another.'

  In 1964, Brackett and Hamilton were co-Guests of Honour at the World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland, California.

  As well as publishing two novels set on an ancient Mars, Shadow Over Mars (aka The Nemsis from Terra, 1951) and The Sword of Rhiannon (1953), Brackett moved into hard-boiled space operas during the 1950s and '60s with The Starmen (aka The Galactic Breed and The Starmen of Llyrdis, 1952), The Big Jump (1955) and Alpha Centauri — or Die! (1963). Widely considered her best work, The Long Tomorrow (1955) was set in a post-Apocalyptic United States.

  Although she only wrote around sixty short stories in all genres, some of Brackett's best work is collected in The Coming of the Terrans (1967), The Halfling and Other Stories (1973) and Martian Quest: The Early Brackett (2002), while No Good for a Corpse (1999) was a collection of her crime and mystery stories introduced by Ray Bradbury. She also paid tribute to her roots by editing the 1975 anthology The Best Planet Stories # 1. Unfortunately, it did not sell well enough to warrant further volumes in the series.

  Shortly before his death in 1977, Edmond Hamilton edited The Best of Leigh Brackett in a hardcover for the Nelson Doubleday book club, and his wife returned the favour by editing The Best of Edmond Hamilton the same year.

  As Hamilton explained in his Introduction, 'When Leigh was working on a story and I asked her, "Where is your plot?" she answered, "There isn't any ... I just start writing the first page and let it grow." I exclaimed, "That's a devil of a way to write a story!" But for her, it seemed to work fine.'

  'Ed always knew the last line of a story before he wrote the first one,' explained Brackett, 'and every line he wrote aimed straight at that target. I used the opposite method — write an opening and let it grow. Outlining a plot seemed to kill it for me.''

  Brackett and Hamilton officially collaborated on only one story, 'Stark and the Star Kings', which revolved around a meeting between their respective favourite heroes. It was written in the mid-1970s for Harlan Ellison's long-overdue anthology Last Dangerous Visions, and was finally published as the title story of a 2004 collection containing the work of both authors.

  Two of Brackett's stories, 'Queen of the Martian Catacombs' (Planet Stories, 1949) and 'Black Amazon of Mars' (Planet Stories, 1951), both featuring her wild and brooding hero, Eric John Stark, were reputedly expanded by Hamilton into the book-length novels The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman, both published in 1964. They were later reissued as the 1982 omnibus Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars.

  As science fact began to overtake science fiction when it came to knowledge of our solar system, Brackett gamely maintained that 'Mars is still fun. So is Venus — not, perhaps, as the actual and factual worlds so named, but simply as creations of a writer's imagination, full of wonders that may perfectly well exist on some world, somewhere.'

  With Mars and Venus no longer the romantic locations they had once been thanks to NASA's probes, in the mid-1970s Brackett revived her most popular character, Eric John Stark, as an interstellar buccan
eer in a trio of new novels: The Ginger Star (1974), The Hound of Skaith (1974) and The Reavers of Skaith (1976). These were collected in the book club omnibus The Book of Skaith (1976).

  Never content to be restricted as a genre writer, Brackett also ghosted the mystery Stranger at Home (1946) credited to the actor George Sanders, and wrote a couple of Westerns: Rio Bravo (1959), based on the Howard Hawks film she co-scripted, and Follow the Free Wind (1963). She also published a series of crime novels: An Eye for an Eye (1957), The Tiger Among Us (aka Fear No Evil and 13 West Street, 1957; filmed as an Alan Ladd movie in 1962) and Silent Partner (1969, the basis for the CBS-TV series Markham).

  'I never had any trouble at all constructing or plotting mystery stories,' Brackett revealed. 'But it's more like working out an equation; given a certain event, other events will inevitably follow, and variables are limited by the space-time framework in which these events occur. In science fiction, the space-time framework has to be invented and the variables are what you make them. Which is of course why it's more fun to write science fiction, though the discipline of the murder mystery has its own special joys.'

  During the 1940s, Leigh Brackett enjoyed a second career as a Hollywood scriptwriter. A friend of Brackett's, who worked in a Beverly Hills bookstore, ensured that a copy of her crime novel No Good from a Corpse was in a stack of thrillers he sold to legendary film director Howard Hawks.

  Hawks, who once said: Tor me, the best drama is one that deals with a man in danger,' obviously recognised a kindred spirit in Brackett's work and he quickly summoned the thirtyyear-old writer to Hollywood.

  After some uncredited work on Hawks' To Have and Have Not (1944), Brackett soon found herself collaborating with the distinguished American novelist William Faulkner on the screenplay for the now-classic murder mystery The Big Sleep (1946, but actually made two years earlier), also starring Humphrey

  Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and based on Raymond Chandler's first novel.