Under the Moons of Mars

by John Joseph Adams

  “For Zodanga! Death to them! Death, death!” he screamed.

  Steel clashed; there was only room for one, and no room for fancy footwork at all. Jalvar and Sivas stood within arm’s reach of each other, Sivas on the lower step, and point and edge wove a deadly tapestry between them. Sivas was confident as well as mad with rage; he had beaten Jalvar nine times in ten when they sparred.

  Within seconds both men were bleeding from minor wounds. Sivas’s men raved behind him, giving him no room to retreat—not that he had shown the slightest desire to do so.

  Jalvar used a daringly minimal parry that rang the Zodangan’s sword upward just a hair from the line of its thrust and counterthrust in turn.

  The narrow point speared through Dur Sivas’s eye and stopped only when it punched into the rear of his skull; even the Master Mind’s perfectly engineered hormad body could do nothing to save him from such a blow.

  I let you win those sparring matches, Jalvar thought. Farewell, Dur Sivas. You were a brave man, if an evil one, and you deserved a warrior’s death.

  Jalvar raised his sword in salute and then stood, motionless except for a slight fighting smile, blood dripping from his blade and arm as the corpse of their leader tumbled backward.

  There was a moment of silence, and then a scream from below: “The Heliumites! The warlord’s fleet! John Carter is come!”

  The air split with the rumble of bombs and the whirring of the great propellers of the battleships of Helium.

  PART V

  JASOOM (ABOVE EARTH)

  Jalvar Pan woke eagerly, even when the grogginess of cold sleep still held his mind a little. The long voyage between the worlds was over, and soon he would be the first Barsoomian—or mostly Barsoomian—ever to set foot on the soil of Jasoom, of Earth.

  He tossed off the restorative drink before he noticed the grim looks on the faces of those around him.

  “Prince Jalvar, you must come to the bridge immediately,” Tars Sojat said.

  He nodded; whatever he needed to know would be best seen there. The corridors were more active than he had seen them since they rose from the shipyard at Helium; the whole crew would be awake now, of course. More sober looks greeted him on the bridge; even so, for a moment he lost himself in the sight of Jasoom turning like a great blue-and-white shield through the viewports that wrapped around half of the semicircular compartment. Then he swung himself into the commander’s chair. A circular screen lit, and a familiar Jasoomian face confronted him.

  “Admiral Julian!” Jalvar said.

  The face of the commander of the Peace Fleet of the Anglo-American Co-dominium was that of a man in his middle years by the fleeting standards of Earth, hard and competent, but there was a haunted look to his eyes. The bustle of a warship’s bridge showed behind him, and on a bulkhead two crossed flags, one starry, the other made up of overlapping crosses.

  “Prince Jalvar. I wish I could greet you in the name of the peoples of Earth, but instead I must warn you to turn back.”

  “We cannot,” Jalvar Pan said. “We need to recharge our tanks of the Ninth Ray; the reserve is not enough to allow us to return to Barsoom.”

  Julian’s face grew still more grim. “Earth is under attack.”

  “The whole of Jasoom? But under attack from where—ah!”

  Jalvar had studied Jasoom closely, of course. Its single huge moon was hollow, and inhabited by several intelligent species, one of them very similar to Barsoomian and Jasoomian humans. For that matter, Barsoom’s main moon, Thuvia, was also peopled; John Carter had traveled there.

  And it was on Jasoom’s moon—Luna, they call it—that the ship called the Barsoom that they tried to send to us was wrecked. Deliberately wrecked; but I thought that the man who did so perished there!

  Julian followed his swift thoughts. “The traitor Orthis has not wasted the last twenty years; and he was always a brilliant engineer. Mad with a spirit of revenge, he has armed the inhabitants of the hollow interior of our moon, the savage Kalkars and Va-gas, and a great fleet has attacked us in the past few days. Even now transports are landing millions of them, burning and killing and destroying, and Orthis’s perverted genius has equipped them with terrible weapons. Earth is helpless before them; this fleet is its only armed force, and it is intended to put down bandits, not fight wars. We have been too long at peace. I blame myself for leaving Orthis alive when the Barsoom left the moon to return to Earth.”

  “Blame those leaders who would not let you build more ships of space,” Jalvar said.

  “I do, prince,” Julian said, and smiled with a warrior’s grim cheer. “But they are mostly dead now, and those who aren’t will be shortly.”

  Jalvar nodded respectfully. “I would join your fight,” he said. “But the Jasoom is an exploratory vessel, not a warship. We have only a few light guns and torpedoes.”

  “I thank you for your offer. I would advise you to return to Mars immediately, but . . .”

  But we need to refurbish, resupply, and take on more Ninth Ray. We were counting on the aid of Earth’s shipyards and factories. Now . . .

  “I can only advise you to make for the estate of an old friend of the family,” Julian said.

  He transmitted coordinates in the Earthly system of longitude and latitude, then bade a curt good-bye; Jalvar could hear him beginning to give orders even as the screen blanked.

  “Well, it seems we’ll be landing in the middle of a war,” Jalvar said.

  Tars Sojat patted his sword-hilt and barked the cruel laughter of the Green hordes.

  “What a pity! Who is this friend that Jalvar sends us to?”

  “I know the name,” Jalvar said. “John Carter told me of him; the kinsman of the warlord’s here on Jasoom who wrote the tale of his adventures on Barsoom, and who he visited, also told this man’s story. Burroughs, was that the name? His was a strange tale—he was raised in the wilderness, by creatures not unlike our great white apes—and the man is a mighty warrior.”

  Tars Sojat frowned. “Are not these Jasoomians short-lived? That was several of their lifetimes ago.”

  “Most of them are. Not all. John Carter is one, and evidently this man is another. He has many names. Tarzan is one of them.”

  PART VI

  BRITISH EAST AFRICA

  The Jasoom’s great length pressed its landing struts into the tawny grass of the pasture; it had crushed a few odd-looking flat-topped trees. Not far away was a lake of water confined by a dam, bordered with more trees. A neat village of cottages lay beyond it, and beyond that a sprawling red-tiled mansion surrounded by very beautiful gardens, obviously the estate of a nobleman despite all the differences of detail. Surrounding all were tilled fields of unfamiliar crops, and others where odd-looking four-limbed beasts grazed. It was a lush landscape by Barsoomian standards, and not far distant loomed a primeval forest such as the red planet had not known for over a million years.

  Only in the Valley Dor, at the end of the River Iss, is there anything like this. Yet their Earth has so much of it!

  Prince Jalvar Pan felt the heavy tug of Jasoom’s gravity holding him as he strode down the landing ramp, but his hormad body made nothing of it—he was as nimble now as he had been in his normal existence on Barsoom.

  The air was thicker than normal, but not impossibly so—this was a high plateau, six thousand sofads above the level of Jasoom’s impossibly abundant seas. It smelled pleasantly of growth and greenness, and a little less so of burning from the wrecked Kalkar battleship that burned some distance to the westward, sending a plume of black smoke into the odd blue sky.

  “Kaor!” Jalvar said to the master of the estate.

  “Welcome,” the man said in English. Jalvar spoke it himself, and all the Jasoom’s crew had learned a fair amount.

  “And thank you of disposing of that,” the man said, nodding toward the smoke-plume.

  “They did not anticipate our shielded torpedoes,” Jalvar said. “The Flying Death, we call it; invented by Phor Tak of Jaha
r. Not sporting, but they fired on us without warning.”

  “The Kalkars are dull-witted enough. But that does not matter; there are more than enough of them, well-armed, and we have little to resist them with. Nairobi has already fallen, I hear.”

  The man spoke sternly, but without fear. He was Jalvar’s height, six foot two in the Earthly measurement system. Apart from that he looked not unlike John Carter, with dark hair—worn to the shoulders of his Jasoomian garments—and gray eyes. A great scar crossed his forehead, and others showed on his face and hands; he smiled slightly as he greeted Tars Sojat with calm friendliness, weird though the Green Man must appear to an Earthling. His grip was strong and precisely judged, and he moved like a hunting banth.

  This is a warrior, Jalvar decided. Despite what Admiral Julian has said of Earth’s decadence.

  Several young men of the same stamp stood behind the man, and their women; one was strikingly lovely, with long blond hair, but cradled a rifle with casual ease. The troop behind them all looked formidable as well, and half-familiar to Barsoomian eyes. They were black of skin and sharply handsome of feature like the First Born nation of Barsoom, and wearing little but loincloths and feather headdresses that made them seem more homelike still. They were heavily armed as well, with long spears as well as firearms, and they looked at the Barsoomians and their great ship with alert interest.

  “My Waziri warriors,” the Earthman confirmed, indicating them. “I have kept up the old ways with them, and the authorities winked at it, since I am their chief and responsible for public order in this district. Now that may save us, or at least let us sell our lives dearly.”

  Jalvar nodded. “I and my crew are at your disposal. The Jasoom cannot leave atmosphere again without extensive refitting, but we can sail anywhere on this world, if you know of a place of refuge. We can take several hundred, at a pinch, Lord . . .”

  “Forgive me, Prince Jalvar,” the man said. “I am John Clayton, Lord Greystoke. My wife, Lady Jane, my son, Korak . . . there will be time later, I hope.”

  A black warrior came up, trotting easily despite the sweat that poured from his face.

  “Tarzan!” he said, addressing the tall gray-eyed man, and then more in a language that Jalvar had not studied.

  Greystoke’s face turned more grim still. “But your ship may yet save us all. A column of Kalkars and Va-Gas approaches, with ground fighting machines in support.”

  Jalvar felt a keen stab of interest. “Admiral Julian thought that the Kalkars would overrun the earth.”

  “The surface of the Earth, yes,” Lord John said. “But the Moon is not the only hollow globe. Earth also has a land within it, one I have visited before. Let me tell you of a place called Pellucidar. . . .”

  The opening section of A Princess of Mars includes a note from the author Edgar Rice Burroughs explaining the circumstances by which he obtained the manuscript. He relates that since childhood he has known “Uncle Jack,” i.e., Captain John Carter, and recalls with fondness the way that the man was equally at ease playing with the children or galloping a horse. According to Burroughs, Carter seldom spoke of the days he’d spent prospecting for gold in the Arizona hills, and sometimes a look of the most intense sadness and longing would pass across his face, and Burroughs once saw him staring up at the night sky and raising his arms as if in supplication. Burroughs also remarks that in all the years he knew John Carter the man never aged a day. Carter identified Burroughs as his heir, and left behind very specific instructions for the disposition of his body after death—that is, that he be placed in a special tomb of his own devising, one that was well ventilated and which could be opened, curiously enough, from the inside. Burroughs states that he received the manuscript for A Princess of Mars in a sealed envelope, with instructions not to reveal its contents until twenty-one years had passed. Our next tale also opens with an author’s note explaining the provenance of a peculiar manuscript, albeit one that casts a distinctly different light on the events described by John Carter.

  COMING OF AGE ON BARSOOM

  BY CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

  To the Reader of this Work:

  In submitting to you the strange soliloquy of Falm Rojut, Jeddak of Hanar Su, I feel it necessary to add a few remarks.

  This manuscript came into my possession through several twists and turns of coincidence. I had struck up a correspondence with a librarian in Chicago due to our mutual interest in archival issues relating to the early pulp authors. In the basement of her library my friend had discovered an astonishing number of books, magazines, periodicals, pamphlets, and other paper materials dating from the infancy of science fiction. One could hardly have stumbled onto a cave full of golden cups and sapphire crowns and come away with more awe and delight than that librarian felt, walking up the metal staircase and out of that dusty industrial cellar. Obviously, the new collection belonged to the library proper, but some of the documents proved to be of little value even to the most dedicated soul, being either undecipherable or in such a pitiable state that even scanning into the digital collection might be the death of the poor things. Among the latter were several manuscripts that we both suspected belonged to Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose margins contained some scribbles in his handwriting or which bore one of his pseudonyms. Among those lay one peculiar collection of pages—I couldn’t in fairness call it a book. My friend informed me of it: that it was mixed in with a number of ERB’s papers, that it was not in English or any dialect she recognized, and that it was short but not in too bad a state of rot. Would I like to come to Chicago and see what I could make of it? (My librarian friend was aware that I made a great study of ancient languages when I was younger, and if my vocabularies are not what they once were, I can still fake my conjugations with the best of them.)

  I put aside the novel I had been working on and went west, meeting my friend in person and having a wonderful dinner downtown before happily ensconcing myself in one of the private study rooms of the library. Unfortunately, the document was far beyond the abilities of a lapsed classicist—I actually laughed when I saw it: five pages, inked on both sides, covered in hieroglyphics and ideograms I could not begin to guess at. I could not even say what language they might be, or what region of the world might have influenced the rounded, complex characters. I handled the pages carefully, examined them as best I could, but honestly, I am only human, and I hadn’t even finished my doctorate.

  As is my habit, I posted a description of my Chicago adventure to my blog and thought little more of it. ERB is not my favorite of science fiction’s grandfathers, after all. Yet I found I could not forget the graceful, bulbous hieroglyphs. They floated in my dreams, huge and green, like living things, promising illumination to a more determined scholar. Having always been prone to insomnia I found I could scarcely sleep for a moment without those phantasms appearing behind my closed eyes and waking me with a start—soon I simply ceased to sleep at all.

  In the midst of this misery an e-mail arrived in my inbox, bearing the subject heading: Emergency Translation Services, Available Day and Night. Even if it were spam, I was curious (and possibly desperate, certainly exhausted) enough to open the message. I reproduce it here verbatim:

  Having read of your linguistic troubles we wish to offer a cipher which we believe will offer some succor. Please do not ask us where we discovered such a valuable piece of information. We could not possibly share our sources. Really, it is beyond our morality to betray such confidences. Well, perhaps your insistence has swayed us. While traveling in Arizona we chanced upon an old woman whose costume was decorated with bones and skulls in a quite unsettling way, selling charms and trinkets, bits of silver and turquoise such as are common in the Southwest. Our sister enjoys silver and we purchased several bangles, a large red stone pendant, and two rings. Much later our sister informed us that the pendant proved to be a kind of locket, and within a carefully folded piece of parchment bore strange marks and a kind of code. Upon examination we of course immediately recog
nized the handwriting of Edgar Rice Burroughs, may he rest in peace and all sovereignty, and felt certain the paper was a Rosetta Stone for the purpose of translating Tharkian to English and vice versa. We are happy to offer these services to you free of charge, as a fellow traveler and believer. Signed, ————

  At the time, I could not say what belief I was meant to have in common with my strange and earnest translators, but I accepted their offer and, cipher in hand, I made the following translation of the (incomplete, as I came to understand) document, a scanned copy of which my librarian friend was kind enough to send me. I possess no originals of the following, and as to my linguistic benefactors I have only guesses and wild speculation, as I have heard nothing further from them, even after the publication of Falm Rojut’s strange words.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Catherynne M. Valente

  A CHILD OF THARK

  BY FALM ROJUT, JEDDAK OF HANAR SU TRANSLATED BY CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

  Inside the egg I could taste the sun. It was dry and dusty and soft, like sweet ash. I sucked on the sun and the sun was a yolk and it passed into me and out of me and the world was my egg and I was my egg and I was the world. I was somewhat aware of other eggs, other worlds, rustling around me, their occasional dreaming movements filling the world that was me and the yolk and the sun and the egg with a gentle kind of music. I was content in the egg, and from the sunny ashy yolk I drew both the strength of my six limbs and the greening shade of my skin, but also a sure knowledge of my heart, and a purpose that tasted thick like blood and thick like fat and thick like the weight of a mate held with the second pair of arms.

  John Carter could never understand us. He never slept in the egg.