The family papers had indeed been kept in a SHOguard storage facility in Burbank. The guard at the entrance was huge, Samoan, and well, guarded. He said hardly anything, except that yes, the safe had been stored with his company and other chattels from the ERB estate. I showed him my press pass; said I was doing a story on the film. How long had it been stored there? He said he didn’t know, but gave me names to write to. I did, and got a simple letter back. The Burroughs family inventory had moved there when the previous company upped sticks from Hollywood in 1965. I got the name of that company and the old address. The building was now an office block. The story, as far as I could push it, checked out.
My best-selling book—I mean, the book that sold the most copies though it remained well below the Borders threshold of perception—was called A History of Special Effects.
If the film was a fake, I knew all the people who could have done the work. There are only about forty companies in the entire world who could have animated the Tharks. I wrote to all of them, and visited the five or six people who were personal friends. I told them what I’d seen.
There had been at least two serious attempts to make an ERB Mars movie in the ’80s. Had anybody done a particularly fine test reel?
Twice I thought I’d found it. Old Yolanda out at Pixar, a real pioneer now doing backgrounds, she told me that she’d been on board a John Carter of Mars project. She still had some of the production design sketches. We had a nice dinner at her place. I saw the sketches. The princesses all wore clothes. The clothes showed off their lovely and entirely human legs.
I visited Yong, a Thai animator who now worked for Lucas. I told him what I’d seen.
“I know, I heard,” said Yong. He’d done some work on a Burroughs project in the ’90s. “Look, you know that only us and a couple of other companies are that good. And if it wasn’t that good, somebody like you, you’d spot it straight away.” He nodded and chuckled. “It’s gotta be a publicity stunt for a new movie.”
“Well whoever did it, they’re hot. This stuff was the finest FX I’ve ever seen. But the weird thing was the whole style, you know, of the titles? That was all perfect for a silent movie.”
Yong chuckled. “I gotta see this. It sounds good. Really, really good.”
I went home and took out some of my old scripts. Those would have made perfect little films. Only they didn’t.
One was about a mother whose son and his boyfriend both had AIDS. She gets over it by counseling the boyfriend’s mother, an evangelical. Would have been a great two-hander for Streep and MacLaine. Way ahead of its time. I had the delight of seeing it starring Sallie Anne Field, made for TV. Somebody at the agency just ripped it off.
Another was a crisscross Altman thing about race in LA. Sound familiar? The script is just dust on a shelf now.
One of my best isn’t even dust. It was a new take on the Old South. Now it’s just iron molecules on a scrambled hard drive. Always do your backups. That script now is as far away as Burroughs’s Mars.
At twelve I was an ERB fan. I still had some of my old books, and got one down from the shelf. It was the Ace edition with the Frank Frazetta cover.
I’d forgotten that Burroughs himself is a character in the book. He says he knew John Carter, a kind of uncle. His uncle disappeared just after the Civil War and returned. He stood outside in the dark, arms outstretched toward the stars. And insisted that he be buried in a crypt that could be opened only from the inside.
Something else. John Carter never got older. He could not remember being a child, but he could remember serving kings and emperors. And that was why, somehow, he could waft in spirit to Somewhere Else, Barsoom, which even if it was some kind of Mars, did not have to be our Mars.
I got a call from John Doe Appropriate. “There’s been some more film show up,” he said. He sounded like someone had kicked him in the stomach. “In the mail. It’s … it’s in color.”
Even he knew they had no color in 1911.
“Can I say that I’m not surprised?” He didn’t reply. “I’m coming over,” I said.
When he opened the door, he looked even worse than he sounded. He had a line of gray down the middle of his cheeks, and the flesh under his eyes was dark. When he spoke, it sounded like slowed-down film. “There’s somebody here,” he said, and left the door wide open behind him.
Someone was sitting with his back to us, watching a video. On the screen, a cushioned landscape extended to a surprisingly close horizon. The ground was orange and the sky was a deep bronze, and a silver zeppelin billowed across it, sails pumping like wings.
The man looked back over his shoulder, and it was Herman Blix.
Herman, as he looked in 1928 or 1911 or 1863, except that he had to lean on a cane. He heaved himself out of the chair and lumbered forward as if he had the bulk of a wounded elephant.
Did I say that he was stark naked?
“Not used to clothes,” he said, gasping like he wasn’t used to breathing.
Blink.
Your world turns over.
I saw as he spoke that he had tiny fangs, and that his eyes did glow. Looking into them made me feel dizzy, and I had to sit down. The strangest thing was that I knew at once what he was, and accepted it. Like meeting those little Nosferatu elves. No wonder he could waft through space: he wouldn’t need a life-support system.
“Can you make films?” he asked me.
His eyes made it impossible to lie, and I heard myself say yes, because it was true, I could. The kid bled next to me, expendable.
“You’re coming with me.” Blix bore down on me, hauled me off the sofa, hugged me, and everything gasped cold and dark.
Mars was only the beginning.
The Last Ten Years
in the Life of Hero Kai
Kai was already an old man when he mastered the art of being hero. He was a student of war and a student of God. He was a particular follower of the text The Ten Rules of Heroism.
The Text is one hundred palm leaves long, but these are the Ten Rules.
Heroism consists of action
Do not act until necessary
You will know that the action is right if everything happens swiftly
Do whatever is necessary
Heroism is revealed not by victory but by defeat
You will have to lie to others, but never lie to yourself
Organized retreat is a form of advance
Become evil to do good
Then do good to earn merit and undo harm
Heroism is completed by inaction
The last ten years of Hero Kai’s life are considered a perfect act of Heroism. One rule is exampled by each of his last ten years.
Heroism consists of action
It is Hero Kai’s fiftieth year. He is lean and limber, his gray hair pulled back fiercely. People say his eyes are gray with age. Others say his eyes were always as gray as the eyes of a statue, except for the dark holes of his pupils.
His sword is so finely balanced that it can slice through sandstone walls. Kai himself can run up a vertical surface, or suspend his breathing for hours.
Kai starts each day with his exercises. He stands on tiptoe on the furthest leaf of the highest branch of the tallest mango tree in the region. He holds two swords and engages himself in fast and furious swordplay. He walks on his hands for a whole day.
Yet he takes no action.
He goes to funerals to chant for the dead. Rich men hope to earn merit by paying him to recite the traditional verses called the Chbap or Conduct. This is a Chbap.
The happy man is one who knows his limitations
And smiles formally even to a dog
If a neighbor owes him money
He applies an even gentle pressure like water falling over rocks …
… etc., etc. The Chbap are all about being tame and making things easy for superior people.
Kai’s kingdom is very badly ruled. The roads have fallen apart; the rivers are choked with weeds; and the King s
pends his day performing gentle magic for which he has no talent.
The Chbap are the only thing that holds together the Kingdom of Kambu’s Sons. The Chbap keep people toiling cheerfully in the rice fields. The verses remind them to give alms to the poor, thus staving off starvation and revolt. They insist that people care for their families, so that everyone can look forward to an honored old age. The Chbap prepare poor people to accept placidly an early and often excruciating death.
Kai believes in the Chbap to the extent that they are useful. He knows them in their thousands and recites one or two of them each evening as he is massaged by the boy he bought. The boy’s name is Arun, and he gets up early each morning to sweep the monastery floors—and goes to bed late after scattering dust over those same floors to teach him acceptance.
On the day of his fiftieth birthday, Kai’s acolytes present him with a handsome gift.
It is something new and dangerously different. In Kai’s language, the words for “different” and “wrong” are nearly identical.
The gift is a tiny round bronze ball; and if you fill its tank with water and light a fire under it, it starts to spin.
Alone before going to sleep, Kai thinks about this different miracle long and hard. He decides that there is no magic in it. It is as hard and as fair as drought or pestilence.
The Westerners are building whole engines that work like steamballs.
And the Neighbors are buying them.
The state of Kambu is so weak that the King has to pay to keep the neighboring states from invading. Kambu’s King is so powerless that his own army is run by advisers from these states, and so helpless that he enforces their corvées of Kambu labor.
Kambu troops are being used to corral or even kidnap the Chbap-reciting farmers, herding them away to work on a new kind of road in the Commonwealth of the Neighbors.
Hero Kai sits on the beautifully swept floor. His little steamball spins itself to a stop. Candlelight fans its way through the gaps in the floorboards and walls. Everything buzzes and creaks with insects. In the flickering light, Kai thinks.
If only the King were strong. If only the Sons of Kambu stood up as one against the Neighbors. If only there were ten of me. Our army is controlled by our enemies. Our wealth pours out to them and when they want more, they just take it. The King’s magic makes girls pretty, fields abundant, and rainfall regular. It holds back disease and the ravages of age.
The Neighbors make the magic of war.
Kai finds he cannot sit still. He stands on one leg and hops so lightly that the floorboards do not shake. He makes many swift passes with his sword, defeating imaginary opponents.
He loses heart and his sword sinks down toward the floor.
The unquiet spirit spends his strength in cutting air …
Kai takes out an incising pen and cuts a letter to the King in a palm leaf. He fills the grooves with ink-power and burns it so the ink hardens in the grooves but can be brushed away from the surface.
Then he wakes Arun and gives him the letter. Kai tells him to walk to the lake and take a boat to the distant, tiny, capital.
What can a mouse do when caught by the cat?
Do not act until necessary
A year later Kai stands with the farmers in revolt.
His monk robes are gathered up over his shoulders to free his arms and legs. The cloth is the color of fire. His body is hard and lean, as if cut from marble, with just the slightest creases of age across the belly and splotches around his ankles.
His sword is as long and lean as himself.
The Commonwealth of Neighbors is hot and smells of salt and drains. The sea hammers a coast that used to belong to the Sons of Kambu. The rich plains get all the rain that the mountains block from Kambu. Everything steams and rots.
Kidnapped fathers sweat in ranks, armed with hoes and pickaxes. Some of them simply carry rocks.
They have been starved and beaten until they are beyond caring. Families, fields, home are all hundreds of miles away.
They have nothing to lose.
The Road of Fire grins like an unending smile. The lips are burnished tracks of metal that gleam in mathematically parallel lines. The teeth are the wooden beams that hold the tracks in place. The Road of Fire looks like evil.
The Army of Neighbors looks beautiful.
They are naked except for white folded loincloths. Their bodies are hard but round from food and fighting, and their eyes are gray. Their earlobes are long and stretched, bearing heavy earrings.
Every one of them is a holy man.
The Army of Neighbors is famously small and famously bears no arms. For a moment or two the armies look almost evenly matched.
Then the Neighbors start to chant.
They chant and the sound seems to turn unhappily in place. The air starts to whimper. Kai has time to sniff magic. Magic smells of spit.
The eyes in the head of the man standing next to Kai explode. The man howls and drops the rock he had meant to throw.
There is a ripping sound. Kai turns in time to see the skin being pulled from a young man’s body. The air lifts him up and plays with him as he is disrobed of his hide.
A farmer with a lucky mole on his chin is having his intestines pulled rapidly out of his body.
Kai’s sword heats up. It becomes as hot as coals. Everywhere about him men scream and drop their hoes or their shovels.
Kai stands his ground. The sword belonged to his master, and his master before that. Kai holds on to it as it scorches his flesh. He focuses his mind on resisting the heat. His skin sears and heals, sears and heals in repeated waves of agony.
The rebels turn and flee.
The Dogs of Magic hound them. There is a slathering in the air as magic tastes, selects, destroys.
Magic licks Kai.
All of Kai’s skin starts to boil. He can see the fat within bubble. He holds his focus, turns and calmly, somewhat stiffly, walks away. He survives through willpower.
He stumbles down rubble toward cool reeds before having to sit. He steams his way down into damp mud.
In the morning he wakes up after dreams of canoeing on the lake. In a circle all around him plants have burned or shrivelled. The dew steams. Kai hears the clink of hammers on rocks and smells a butcher’s shop.
He stands. Sons of Kambu work in lines, their heads hanging low. They recite.
The happy man is one who knows his limitations
And smiles formally even to a dog
Tears pour down Kai’s face, stinging the singed flesh with salt. He stands still, building a wall in his mind against despair.
Oh, familiar kindly Chbap, why do you have no answer to this? Do you have no song to bring victory and not defeat?
And somehow one comes to mind. Why this one? It’s called the Problem Chbap, the one nobody understands.
Magic is the way of men of power
They do not love kindness and nor does magic.
Magic perfumes the air and sends men to hell.
Push the particles of reality far and fast
And magic will die, succumb to what is likely
In the land where what you put in tea perfumes
And magic is what is ground in the pestle.
Kai stands transfixed. Suddenly it makes sense.
A guard struts forward, howling orders. He is a humble Neighbor without magic. Still contemplating the Problem Chbap, Kai spins on his heel and sends the Neighbor’s head still shouting through the air.
Then Kai spins in the opposite direction and starts to march.
What do you put in your tea? Cardamom.
The Cardamom Mountains.
You will know that the action is right if everything happens swiftly
Kai arrives at his old monastery, still smoldering from heat.
The acolytes and the lay preachers and the old masters touch his skin, and their fingers hiss. His eyebrows flame and sputter, go out and flame again. The acolytes give him water and it boils in his mouth, b
ut he has to drink it. Tears stream out his eyes and evaporate as steam.
An old master says, “You have become a fulcrum for the universe. I’ve cast the yarrow, and you came up all strong lines, changing to weak ones.”
Kai tells them what happened in the lands of the Commonwealth, and of the Problem Chbap.
An acolyte says, “There are many like that. Remember the Dubious Chbap?”
Even trees mislead,
The worn path bends the wrong way
Undo cries the air, undo says the wise men,
And the trees open up.
Kai realizes. These problem Chbap did not make sense to us because we were not listening. These Chbap bring another kind of wisdom. They provide the balance to others.
These Chbap tell us how to fight.
“And how about this one. The masters love to set this as a test.”
The mind observes and makes happen what it wants to see.
This is magic.
The motes of reality coast to what is most likely
And that is called the real.
Steaming, shuddering, fighting the spell, Kai’s mind becomes his sword. For once.
His mind now cuts through a different kind of sandstone wall. This is a wall of beautiful, repetitive images: celestial maidens, virtuous monks, and skilled warriors … all that hardened rooster shit.
Kai says, “There is a machine that destroys magic in the Cardamom Mountains. We have to go and find it and use it on the Neighbors.”
Immediately, ten young strong warrior monks volunteer. “We pack our bags now.”
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