Under the Moons of Mars (5 page)

Having recovered somewhat from the electrical shocks, I slowly stood up. Two of the gold men moved toward me.

“Leave him,” said the man, who I knew to be Odar Rukk. I had heard his voice many times over the speakers in the walls. “Leave him be.”

He fixed his good eye on me. “Your name?”

I pushed out my chest and stuck out my chin. “John Carter, Warlord of Mars.”

“Ah, that obviously means something to you, but it means nothing to me. Do you know who I am?”

“A madman named Odar Rukk.”

“I would not put that up for a vote,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know. My golden army would agree.”

“They neither agree or disagree,” I said. “They blindly obey.”

“As do all armies.”

“Armies and men fight for beliefs and for purpose.”

“Oh. You titled yourself Warlord of Mars. Do you not enjoy battle? War?”

I said nothing. He had spoken the truth. It was not all about ideals.

“I brought you here because my golden warriors have been recording in their memory cells all that they saw you do. They know you single-handedly brought down my flying machine, destroyed one of their kind in the crash, another with your swordsmanship. Those events they recorded in their heads and now those events are in my head.”

Odar Rukk paused to tap his skull with the tip of his index finger.

“They brought those images to me, and with but a twist of a dial and the flick of a switch, they come into my head and I see what they have seen. They showed me a man who could do extraordinary things. Before I take those things from you, tell me, John Carter, Warlord of Mars, why are you so different?”

“I am from Earth. The gravity is heavier there. It makes me stronger here. And most importantly, I do what I do because I am who I am. John Carter, formerly of a place called Virginia.”

“You, John Carter, will be my personal fuel. I will suck out your spirit and your abilities and into me directly they will go.”

“You will still be you. Not me.”

“Except for yourself,” I said. “You remain very manlike.”

Odar Rukk smiled that steamy, gleaming smile again. “Someone must rule. Someone must control. There must be one mind that oversees and does not merely respond. That is my burden.”

“What you have done here is nothing more than an exercise in vanity,” I said.

“Have it your way,” he said. “But soon your strength, your will, shall be contained inside of me, and I will be stronger than before. When I saw what you could do, your uniqueness, I decided it would be all mine. Not spread out among the others. But all mine.”

“Being unique somewhat spoils your vision of everyone and everything being alike, does it not?”

“I have no need to argue, John Carter,” he said. “I have the power here, not you. And in moments, when you are strapped in and sucked out and all those abilities are pumped into me, you will cease to exist, and I will be stronger.”

The shocks had worn off, and the ropes they had tied me with had loosened. They had not been tied that well to begin with, but still, they were sufficient to hold me. No matter. I had decided I would give my life dearly before I let this monster take away my spirit, my abilities, my blood and bones and flesh.

And then, when I was on the verge of hurling myself at Odar Rukk, knocking him out of his chair with my body, with the intent of trying to bite his throat out, there was an unexpected change of situation.

In that moment, with Odar Rukk’s head twisting about, trying to find the source of the sound, the gold ones having turned their attention to the back of the cave, I jumped toward the nearest gold one, grabbed his sword with my bound hands, and pulled it from its sheath. I sliced at him, catching him beneath the helmet and slicing his head off his shoulders. There was a spurt of gold liquid from his neck, a spark from a batch of severed wires, and he went down.

I managed to twist the sword in my hand and cut my rope and free my hands. Then I turned as they came at me. I wove my sword like a tapestry of steel. Poking through eye slots, slicing under the helmets, taking off heads, chopping legs and arms free at joint connections where the armor was thinnest.

I spun about for a look, saw Odar Rukk had wheeled his machine about and was darting up the ramp, back into the dome. Already the ramp was rising. Soon he would be safe inside. I leapt. My Earthly muscles saved me again, for the horde of gold men were about to be on me, thick as a cluster of grapes, and even with all my skill, I could not have fought them all. I landed on the ramp. It was continuing to lift, and it unsettled my footing. I started to slide after Odar Rukk, who had already driven himself inside the dome.

“This is your day of reckoning, Odar Rukk,” I said.

From somewhere he produced a pistol and fired. The handguns of Barsoom are notoriously inaccurate, as well as few and far between, but the shot had been a close one. I leapt away. The gun blasted again, and its beam came closer still. I threw my sword and had the satisfaction of seeing it go deep into his shoulder. His gun hand wavered.

Leaping again, I drove both my feet in front of me. I hit Odar Rukk in the chest with tremendous impact. The blow knocked him and his attached machine chair backward, tipping it over. Odar Rukk skidded across the floor. The part of him that was machine threw up sparks. Hoses came unclamped, spewed gold fluid. Wires came loose and popped with electric current. Odar Rukk screamed.

I hustled to my feet and sprang toward him to administer a death blow, but it was unnecessary. The hoses and wires had been his arteries, his life force, and now they were undone. Odar Rukk’s body came free of the chair connection with a snick, and he slipped from it, revealing the bottom of his torso, a scarred and cauterized mess with wire and hose connections, now severed. The fat belly burst open and revealed not only blood and organs, but gears and wheels and tangles of wires and hoses. His flesh went dark and fell from his skull and his eyes sank in his head like fishing sinkers. A moment later, he was nothing more than a piece of fragmented machine and rotten flesh and yellow bones.

I recovered his firearm, cut some of the wire from the machine-man loose with my sword, used it to make a belt, and stuck the pistol between it and my flesh. I recovered my sword.

I looked up at the pulsing globe that rose through the top of the dome. I jumped and grabbed the side of the dome, in a place where my hands could best take purchase, and clambered up rapidly to the globe, my sword in my teeth.

Finally I came to the rim below the globe. There was a metal rim there, and it was wide enough for me to stand on it. I took hold of my sword, and with all my strength, I struck.

The blow was hard, but the structure, which I was now certain was some form of transparent stone, withstood it. I withdrew the pistol and fired. The blast needled a hole in the dome and a spurt of gold liquid nearly hit me in the face. I moved to the side and it gushed out at a tremendous rate. I fired again. Another hole appeared and more of the gold goo leapt free. The globe cracked slightly, then terrifically, generating a web of cracks throughout. Then it exploded and the fluid blew out of it like a massive ocean wave. It washed me away, slamming me into the far wall. I went under, losing the pistol and sword. I tried my best to swim. Something, perhaps a fragment of the globe, struck my head and I went out.

When I awoke, I was outside the dome, which had collapsed like wet paper. I was lying on my back, my head being lifted up by a smiling Farr Larvis.

“When you broke the globe, it caused the gold men to collapse. It was their life source.”

“And Odar Rukk’s,” I said.

I grinned at him. “We still live.”

There isn’t much left to tell.

Simply put, all of us who had survived gathered up weapons and started out as the machinery that Odar Rukk had invented gradually ceased to work. The drawbridge was down. All the gates throughout the underground city had sprung open, and had hissed out the last of their steam. The gold ones were lying about like uneven pavement stones.

We found water containers and filled them. We tore moss from the walls and used it for light, made our way up the long path out. After much time, we came to the surface. We gathered up fruit and such things as we thought we could eat on our journey, and then we climbed higher out of the green valley until we stood happily on the warm desert sand.

It was a long trip home, and there were minor adventures, but nothing worth mentioning. Eventually we came within sight of Helium, and I paused and stood before the group, which was of significant size, and swore allegiance to them as Jeddak of Helium, and in return they swore the same to me.

Then we started the last leg of our journey, and as we went, I thought of Dejah Thoris, and how so very soon she would be in my arms again.

Here on Earth you can basically expect that any large animal you see is going to have four limbs. How dull! Fauna on Barsoom is much more colorful, with a profusion of limbs everywhere you look. The Barsoomian lion, called the banth, has ten legs, and the Barsoomian horse, a reptilian creature known as a thoat, has eight. The Barsoomian dogs, called calots, have six legs. (John Carter’s faithful pet Woola was one of these.) There are also the four-armed white apes who haunt the abandoned cities. Burroughs never specifies how many legs the ratlike ulsios have, nor how many are possessed by the elephantine zitidars, but it seems likely that both have more than four. (Many artists have depicted them with six.) And of course, most notably of all, the Green Men have six limbs—four arms and two legs. For those of us who grew up on Earth, it usually seems that four limbs is plenty, and we look upon the many-legged beasts of Barsoom as exotic oddities, but of course the denizens of that world would surely regard our own planet as strange, particularly with regard to Earth’s parsimonious distribution of appendages. Our next story explores the idea that having two hands can seem like a terrible burden when you’ve lived your whole life with four.

T
his is a tale of Mars, which the Martians call Barsoom—a dying planet that clings to life only through the striving of its most civilized inhabitants, the Red Men, who maintain its grand canals and atmosphere plant.

This is a tale of the wild Green Men of Mars, four-armed giants who roam in great hordes across the dead sea bottoms and who dwell amid the ruins of ancient cities.

This is a tale of three deaths.

Our story begins on the day that a small band of Warhoon scouts crossed paths with John Carter of Virginia, and Ghar Han, one of the greatest warriors of the Green Men, challenged the Earthman to single combat. By all the laws of Mars such a challenge may not be refused, and the man so challenged must choose a weapon that is no better than that wielded by his adversary.

Ghar Han held swords in each of his four hands, and the skulls of half a dozen great warriors rattled upon his harness, for he had won many battles, and added the names of many a vanquished foe to his own. He towered over his opponent, and gazed with contempt upon the Earthman, who held but a single blade, and who seemed small and freakish with his strange pale flesh and black hair. Around them stood a ring of Green Men, including two young warriors, the arrogant Harkan Thul and the sly Sutarat. Nearby, the mounts of the Green Men, the eight-legged reptilian thoats, grazed upon the yellow grass that stretched away in all directions.