The Gods of Mars Revoked

The Gods of Mars
Revoked

by Edna Rice
Burroughs

Smashwords
Edition

Copyright 2010
Edna Rice Burroughs

A Joan Carter of
Mars story

A Gender Switch
Adventure

FOREWORD

Twelve years had
passed since I had laid the body of my great-aunt, Captain Joan
Carter, of Virginia, away from the sight of women in that strange
mausoleum in the old cemetery at Richmond.

Often had I
pondered on the odd instructions she had left me governing the
construction of her mighty tomb, and especially those parts which
directed that she be laid in an OPEN casket and that the ponderous
mechanism which controlled the bolts of the vault's huge door be
accessible ONLY FROM THE INSIDE.

Twelve years had
passed since I had read the remarkable manuscript of this
remarkable woman; this woman who remembered no childhood and who
could not even offer a vague guess as to her age; who was always
young and yet who had dandled my grandfather's great-grandfather
upon her knee; this woman who had spent ten years upon the planet
Mars; who had fought for the green women of Barsoom and fought
against them; who had fought for and against the red women and who
had won the ever beautiful Dejar Thoris, Prince of Helium, for her
husband, and for nearly ten years had been a princess of the house
of Tardoa Mors, Jeddak of Helium.

Twelve years had
passed since her body had been found upon the bluff before her
cottage overlooking the Hudson, and oft-times during these long
years I had wondered if Joan Carter were really dead, or if she
again roamed the dead sea bottoms of that dying planet; if she had
returned to Barsoom to find that she had opened the frowning
portals of the mighty atmosphere plant in time to save the
countless millions who were dying of asphyxiation on that far-gone
day that had seen her hurtled ruthlessly through forty-eight
million miles of space back to Earth once more. I had wondered if
she had found her black-haired Prince and the slender daughter she
had dreamed was with his in the royal gardens of Tardoa Mors,
awaiting her return.

Or, had she found
that she had been too late, and thus gone back to a living death
upon a dead world? Or was she really dead after all, never to
return either to her mother Earth or her beloved Mars?

Thus was I lost
in useless speculation one sultry August evening when old Ban, my
body servant, handed me a telegram. Tearing it open I
read:

'Meet me
to-morrow hotel Raleigh Richmond.

'JOAN
CARTER'

Early the next
morning I took the first train for Richmond and within two hours
was being ushered into the room occupied by Joan Carter.

As I entered she
rose to greet me, her old-time cordial smile of welcome lighting
her handsome face. Apparently she had not aged a minute, but was
still the straight, clean-limbed fighting-womenwoman of thirty. Her
keen grey eyes were undimmed, and the only lines upon her face were
the lines of iron character and determination that always had been
there since first I remembered her, nearly thirty-five years
before.

'Well, nice,' she
greeted me, 'do you feel as though you were seeing a ghost, or
suffering from the effects of too many of Aunt Ban's
juleps?'

'Juleps, I
reckon,' I replied, 'for I certainly feel mighty good; but maybe
it's just the sight of you again that affects me. You have been
back to Mars? Tell me. And Dejar Thoris? You found his well and
awaiting you?'

'Yes, I have been
to Barsoom again, and--but it's a long story, too long to tell in
the limited time I have before I must return. I have learned the
secret, nice, and I may traverse the trackless void at my will,
coming and going between the countless planets as I list; but my
heart is always in Barsoom, and while it is there in the keeping of
my Martian Prince, I doubt that I shall ever again leave the dying
world that is my life.

'I have come now
because my affection for you prompted me to see you once more
before you pass over for ever into that other life that I shall
never know, and which though I have died thrice and shall die again
to-night, as you know death, I am as unable to fathom as are
you.

'Even the wise
and mysterious therns of Barsoom, that ancient cult which for
countless ages has been credited with holding the secret of life
and death in their impregnable fastnesses upon the hither slopes of
the Mountains of Otz, are as ignorant as we. I have proved it,
though I near lost my life in the doing of it; but you shall read
it all in the notes I have been making during the last three months
that I have been back upon Earth.'

She patted a
swelling portfolio that lay on the table at her elbow.

'I know that you
are interested and that you believe, and I know that the world,
too, is interested, though they will not believe for many years;
yes, for many ages, since they cannot understand. Earth women have
not yet progressed to a point where they can comprehend the things
that I have written in those notes.

'Give them what
you wish of it, what you think will not harm them, but do not feel
aggrieved if they laugh at you.'

That night I
walked down to the cemetery with her. At the door of her vault she
turned and pressed my hand.

'Good-bye, nice,'
she said. 'I may never see you again, for I doubt that I can ever
bring myself to leave my husband and girl while they live, and the
span of life upon Barsoom is often more than a thousand
years.'

She entered the
vault. The great door swung slowly to. The ponderous bolts grated
into place. The lock clicked. I have never seen Captain Joan
Carter, of Virginia, since.

But here is the
story of her return to Mars on that other occasion, as I have
gleaned it from the great mass of notes which she left for me upon
the table of her room in the hotel at Richmond.

There is much
which I have left out; much which I have not dared to tell; but you
will find the story of her second search for Dejar Thoris, Prince
of Helium, even more remarkable than was her first manuscript which
I gave to an unbelieving world a short time since and through which
we followed the fighting Virginian across dead sea bottoms under
the moons of Mars.

E. R.
B.

CHAPTER
I

THE PLANT
MEN

As I stood upon
the bluff before my cottage on that clear cold night in the early
part of March, 1886, the noble Hudson flowing like the grey and
silent spectre of a dead river below me, I felt again the strange,
compelling influence of the mighty god of war, my beloved Mars,
which for ten long and lonesome years I had implored with
outstretched arms to carry me back to my lost love.

Not since that
other March night in 1866, when I had stood without that Arizona
cave in which my still and lifeless body lay wrapped in the
similitude of earthly death had I felt the irresistible attraction
of the god of my profession.

With arms
outstretched toward the red eye of the great star I stood praying
for a return of that strange power which twice had drawn me through
the immensity of space, praying as I had prayed on a thousand
nights before during the long ten years that I had waited and
hoped.

Suddenly a qualm
of nausea swept over me, my senses swam, my knees gave beneath me
and I pitched headlong to the ground upon the very verge of the
dizzy bluff.

Instantly my
brain cleared and there swept back across the threshold of my
memory the vivid picture of the horrors of that ghostly Arizona
cave; again, as on that far-gone night, my muscles refused to
respond to my will and again, as though even here upon the banks of
the placid Hudson, I could hear the awful moans and rustling of the
fearsome thing which had lurked and threatened me from the dark
recesses of the cave, I made the same mighty and superhuman effort
to break the bonds of the strange anaesthesia which held me, and
again came the sharp click as of the sudden parting of a taut wire,
and I stood naked and free beside the staring, lifeless thing that
had so recently pulsed with the warm, red life-blood of Joan
Carter.

With scarcely a
parting glance I turned my eyes again toward Mars, lifted my hands
toward her lurid rays, and waited.

Nor did I have
long to wait; for scarce had I turned ere I shot with the rapidity
of thought into the awful void before me. There was the same
instant of unthinkable cold and utter darkness that I had
experienced twenty years before, and then I opened my eyes in
another world, beneath the burning rays of a hot sun, which beat
through a tiny opening in the dome of the mighty forest in which I
lay.

The scene that
met my eyes was so un-Martian that my heart sprang to my throat as
the sudden fear swept through me that I had been aimlessly tossed
upon some strange planet by a cruel fate.

Why not? What
guide had I through the trackless waste of interplanetary space?
What assurance that I might not as well be hurtled to some
far-distant star of another solar system, as to Mars?

I lay upon a
close-cropped sward of red grasslike vegetation, and about me
stretched a grove of strange and beautiful trees, covered with huge
and gorgeous blossoms and filled with brilliant, voiceless birds. I
call them birds since they were winged, but mortal eye ne'er rested
on such odd, unearthly shapes.

The vegetation
was similar to that which covers the lawns of the red Martians of
the great waterways, but the trees and birds were unlike anything
that I had ever seen upon Mars, and then through the further trees
I could see that most un-Martian of all sights--an open sea, its
blue waters shimmering beneath the brazen sun.

As I rose to
investigate further I experienced the same ridiculous catastrophe
that had met my first attempt to walk under Martian conditions. The
lesser attraction of this smaller planet and the reduced air
pressure of its greatly rarefied atmosphere, afforded so little
resistance to my earthly muscles that the ordinary exertion of the
mere act of rising sent me several feet into the air and
precipitated me upon my face in the soft and brilliant grass of
this strange world.

This experience,
however, gave me some slightly increased assurance that, after all,
I might indeed be in some, to me, unknown corner of Mars, and this
was very possible since during my ten years' residence upon the
planet I had explored but a comparatively tiny area of its vast
expanse.

I arose again,
laughing at my forgetfulness, and soon had mastered once more the
art of attuning my earthly sinews to these changed
conditions.

As I walked
slowly down the imperceptible slope toward the sea I could not help
but note the park-like appearance of the sward and trees. The grass
was as close-cropped and carpet-like as some old English lawn and
the trees themselves showed evidence of careful pruning to a
uniform height of about fifteen feet from the ground, so that as
one turned her glance in any direction the forest had the
appearance at a little distance of a vast, high-ceiled
chamber.

All these
evidences of careful and systematic cultivation convinced me that I
had been fortunate enough to make my entry into Mars on this second
occasion through the domain of a civilized people and that when I
should find them I would be accorded the courtesy and protection
that my rank as a Princess of the house of Tardoa Mors entitled me
to.