Under the Moons of Mars (29 page)

And with that, the Princess of Mars, the cavalry captain, the emerald-skinned lord of the Tharks, the one-armed general, the chief of the Chiricahua Apache, and his best friend charge forth—to save this world that was once my home from a ghost of ancient Barsoom.

Edgar Rice Burroughs possessed a powerfully fecund imagination. When he first dreamed up Barsoom, a dying world full of airships, abandoned cities, and many-limbed foes, he was just getting started. The later Barsoom novel
The Master Mind of Mars
deals with the mad scientist Ras Thavas, who transfers brains into genetically engineered bodies. Burroughs also wrote books that weren’t part of the main Barsoom sequence, such as
The Moon Maid
, in which a crew of Earthmen led by a man named Julian travel to the moon and do battle with Va-gas (horselike creatures who can wield weapons with their forelimbs and who have human faces) and Kalkars (evil humanoids). In its sequel
The Moon Men
, the leader of the Kalkars, Orthis, launches an invasion of earth. (The series was initially conceived as an attack on Soviet Communism, but Burroughs was forced to change the villains from Russians to Moon Men at the insistence of his publishers.) Burroughs also wrote a series about Pellucidar, the land inside the Earth. In these stories, the Earth is hollow and contains a second sun at its center, so that the inside surface experiences eternal daylight. The sole exception is The Land of Awful Shadow, a region where the light of the inner sun is blotted out by a single geostationary moon. Burroughs created all these strange lands and peoples, and many more besides. Our next tale pays tribute to the majestic sweep of Burroughs’s imagination.

H
elium awoke. The swift dawn of Mars was over, and all across the city homes were lowering themselves from their nighttime height to street level. The blaze of radium lights faded from palace and tower, giving way to the sparkle of sunlight from jewel and carved stone, the tossing of foliage blossom in gardens and parks. The smooth quiet rush of the ground-fliers through the air fifty or sixty feet above the broad moss-paved thoroughfares sent a subdued whirring sound through the thin, cool air.

Crowds thronged the streets, emerging from the underground stations of the pneumatic transport system; riders on thoat-back slid along with the smooth rippling gait of their eight-legged mounts; fliers swarmed through the skies over all, from small one-man types through gorgeously appointed yachts to the huge craft of commerce and war that carried thousands from city to city throughout the planet.

And in a high garden on a flange of the immense scarlet five-thousand-foot tower that dominated the city of Greater Helium two men stood and watched the unique panorama. The tower was more singular in that its golden twin in Lesser Helium was still not fully rebuilt after the terrible storm that had toppled it many years ago; from here you could see men and machines swarming about it, doll-tiny in the distance southward where the sister-city lay.

They leaned on a balustrade of carved stone and looked out past the city to the green strips of farmland that bordered the two great canals that met here. John Carter’s face was grim.

“I think that the politicians on Earth . . . Jasoom . . . have grown even more feebleminded, cowardly, and corrupt than they were when I lived there more than a century and a half ago. Which is no mean feat! To abandon the attempt to establish travel between our worlds after only one failure. And that due to sabotage, not any fault in the ship!”

Prince Jalvar grinned at him. “You mean that there, at least, Jasoom is more advanced than Barsoom, great-grandsire?” he said. “In the production of great swordsmen like yourself, and poor statesmen like the ones you are damning so harshly?”

“And about equal in the production of young scamps like you,” the warlord of Mars said, smiling back.

John Carter laughed aloud. “Anyone would know your line of descent through Llana,” he said. “Even if it were not visible in your face. Though if you are handsome, that is the legacy of the incomparable Dejah Thoris and your own mother.”

In truth they were both men who might attract a second glance, even among the comely folk of Helium. The warlord looked to be a man in the prime of his strength, with a regular square-jawed face and a build like a hunting cat, long in the limbs, broad-shouldered, and narrow in the waist. His eyes were an odd gray color and his skin a suntanned white as pale as a Thern’s, but his close-cropped hair was as raven-black as any of the Red race who dominated Barsoom.

Prince Jalvar Pan was the other man’s height almost to an inch and of similar build, but his hair was lighter, a dark-brown color, and his skin of a similar hue, with only a trace of burnished red-brown that gave it a hue almost like bronze. His mother was John Carter’s granddaughter Llana of Gathol, but his father was Pan Dan Chee, a warrior of the Orovars—the fair-haired, white-skinned race that had ruled Barsoom when it was young and oceans rolled where only ochre moss and savage Green Men roamed now, and who had been thought extinct until the last lost colony of them in the dead city of Horz had been discovered.

Both wore the harness of warriors, supple tooled-leather straps that carried shortsword, longsword, dagger, and pistol, and beside those, the metal of their rank—gold and silver and platinum carved and inlaid with the strange, lustrous jewels of Barsoom in the insignia of Helium and Gathol and the sigils of their princely houses.

Jalvar nodded eagerly. All Barsoom—or at least the civilized parts—had been agog with the news that the Jasoomians, after forty years of two-way communication, had at last launched their ship of space. John Carter had been instrumental in establishing that communication, and in encouraging the launching of the first unsuccessful Martian ship.

But he felt its loss very keenly,
Jalvar knew.
John Carter would; he has ever hated to send men into peril he did not share.

“And now the loss of the
Barsoom
on its maiden voyage toward us,” the warlord said. “Some malign curse seems to operate to keep the worlds apart.”

“But that need not be, my great-grandsire!” Jalvar said eagerly.

“Ah,” John Carter replied. “I think I see what you have in mind, my reckless descendant.”

“You would have done the same at . . . well, you know what I mean.”

The warlord shook his head ruefully. “I was never your age. I have always been as I am now—on Earth, they would say a man of thirty years. I remember no youth, no childhood, no origin. Only the life of a fighting man. Virginia I called my home, and I fought for it in the War of Secession, but I remember it when it was only a wilderness, and I set foot on it from the little ship
Susan Constant
with the first Englishmen to settle there. I remember fighting England’s battles; the Armada, at Flodden Field . . . and more, back further, further. It fades into dreams. . . .”

“But age has not made you cautious,” Jalvar said. “Nor would you be happy if your descendants were.”

John Carter laughed and clapped a hand on the other man’s shoulder.

Jalvar signed assent. “Gathol is rich, but it does not have the scientific resources of Helium, or the shipyards,” he said.

“Five brave men died in our last attempt,” John Carter said grimly. “Do you think you can do better?”

“With the advances the Jasoomians made in
their
ship, yes. Your son Prince Carthoris thinks so as well.”

The Warlord’s agreement held a pardonable pride; Carthoris was a notable inventor in the aeronautic field, developer of the directional compass and several other major improvements in the long-static technology of flight. Some said he was the greatest designer of fliers since the discovery of the gravity-canceling Eighth Ray, nearly a thousand years ago.

“And,” Jalvar said, “I have thought of one thing that we did
not
consider in our last attempt.”

That was tactful; it meant something that John Carter and the savants of Helium had not taken into account.

“You have demonstrated many times the marvelous strength your Jasoomian origins give you,” Jalvar went on.

“If I had not, I’d have died on the point of a Thark lance about five minutes after I arrived here,” John Carter said reminiscently.

I hope I don’t dwell on the past as much when I’m five hundred years old,
Jalvar thought.

Of course, though his natural span would be a thousand or so, he was unlikely to reach it. Death by natural causes was not all that common on Barsoom even today.

“All fourteen feet of him,” the warlord said. “That is a serious problem. Unless you intend your visit to Jasoom to be spent in a hospital bed, and to leave Tars Sojat at home . . . which, if I know the grandson of Tars Tarkas, would be a foolhardy thing to do.”

Jalvar shuddered. Being a paralytic cripple was not what he had in mind when the phrase
great adventure
crossed before his inward eye. And he could not ask Tars Sojat to remain behind; that was unthinkable.

John Carter frowned. “It is a fortunate coincidence that you mention this now, my descendant. But there have been many such in my life. . . . News has recently come to the Jeddak and myself of a plot against me and the royal house of Helium; a strange plot, and one that has a bearing on your plans. Like many such, it begins in Zodanga. . . .”

He explained, and Jalvar’s eyes lit. “I had thought of Ras Thavas, but . . . do you really think he would lend himself to such treachery and treason?”

“Perhaps not treason,” John Carter said. “But there is evidence that he is indeed creating hormads again, artificial men.”

“Monsters, hideous and deformed.” Jalvar shuddered. “Ulysses Paxton, your compatriot, had his brain transplanted to the body of one such. That makes him a braver man than I! I had thought Ras Thavas a reformed man, or at least a chastened one.”

“We are not certain if he is truly involved; or if he is, whether he is a free agent or a captive. But it is of the first importance if he is. For we have information that the hormads he can now create are
not
monsters. They have the full semblance of humanity. Indeed, they can be made to resemble any individual as closely as a twin.”

“Yes, he was not called the Master Mind of Mars without reason. But the hormads are still of monstrous
strength
.”

Jalvar laughed aloud. “Strength enough to survive under Jasoom’s greater gravity!”

“Yes. And strength enough to be matchless warriors, able to carve their way through far superior numbers. You see why Helium cannot let such wizardry fall into the hands of enemies of the peace of Barsoom.”

“And if we find Ras Thavas and free him . . . then this work of his genius will be the missing piece needed to make our expedition to Jasoom a success.”

“In times past I would have investigated this myself, but alas the days when John Carter could disguise himself as the wandering panthan Dotar Sojat with a little dye for his skin are long past.”

Jalvar nodded; John Carter’s adventures in that role were legendary . . . which meant that any enemy would be on guard for precisely such a mercenary.

“Whereas I am little known in Helium and its dependencies; Gathol is far, and traffic thence still light,” Jalvar said. “And if I disguise my appearance, few would think to link the Prince of Gathol to a soldier of fortune.”

“Exactly. Will you accept this mission?

“Need you ask?” Jalvar said. “I would accept it gladly as my duty to you; and now I have a doubled reason.”

“I knew the answer, but I
did
need to ask; this is not something that can be ordered.”

“And the ship itself, the
Jasoom
?” Jalvar said. “I do not ask that any great effort be made until I have solved this problem, only that preliminary design and research is begun.”