Read Under the Moons of Mars Online
Authors: John Joseph Adams
His wide reading in several languages had prepared the ape-man for the low gravity and lighter air pressure on Mars; but all the same, the movement involved merely in rising to his feet almost took him off the ground, and his very first step caused him literally to bounce two or three feet into the air, and then to fall on his face with the second step. Practice, and a good deal of falling down, eventually allowed him to evolve a method of cautious, slogging progression, punctuated by sudden inadvertent kangaroo hops of as much as nine or ten feet straight up. It was at the zenith
of one such hop that he discerned the curious glass-roofed structure over the low hills to his right. This being the only suggestion of habitation of any sort, Tarzan determined to make his way to it.
While the distance was not great, achieving his goal took him well over an hour, since the bounces he was only slowly learning to control frequently took him off in one undesired direction or another. Finally arriving at the building, he recognized it as a kind of giant incubator, containing, as best he could enumerate them, several hundred eggs, all between two and three feet across. Tarzan had seen—and eaten—ostrich eggs from time to time; any one of these would have fed a family of Mangani for over a week.
Tarzan dropped onto his haunches and scratched his head. A hundred million miles from Big Ben, his only clock was his stomach, and that organ was informing him that interplanetary travel—however long it had actually taken him—was a hungry business. Those eggs undoubtedly belonged to someone, but Tarzan’s stomach belonged to him, and the moral issue was never really up for discussion. He pried open the entrance to the incubator—of glass, like the roof—selected the nearest egg, brought it back outside, and, with his mouth watering in anticipation, used the haft of his knife to crack it open.
Unfortunately the embryo curled inside the egg was far too developed—and infinitely too ugly—for even a ravenous ape-man to consider eating. It looked to him rather like a cross between an Earth vulture chick and a dinosaur out of Pal-ul-don or Pellucidar. Tarzan found it so revolting that he promptly buried it in the sand, as deeply as he could. His stomach was just going to have to wait for better times. Tarzan of the Apes had gone hungry before.
Sleep, however . . . sleep was another matter, easier to deal with. Without hesitation—and having some notion of
how cold Martian nights must be—the ape-man reentered the incubator and dug down into the soft, warm reddish soil that cushioned the great eggs. Food would be something to consider when he awakened. Snug in his shallow burrow, the ape-man matter-of-factly closed his eyes and went to dreamless sleep.
He awakened abruptly, guardian senses detecting the presence of enemies even down through the sands of Mars. He had clearly slept through the night, for the sun was just above the horizon and there was still a morning chill in the air. He blinked his eyes, not to clear his vision—Tarzan of the Apes always woke with all his jungle-trained senses completely alert—but because he perceived that the incubator was now surrounded by such beings as he had not seen since he encountered the Ant-Men of Minunia, who had briefly enslaved him and reduced him to their own size. But these creatures were the complete opposite of the Minunians, standing anywhere from twelve to fifteen feet high and very nearly as naked as he. Their skins were all various shades of dark green; each had an additional pair of arms, set approximately at waist level, and their red-eyed, expressionless faces were each furnished with a set of hoglike tusks jutting upward from the lower jaw. Their mounts were almost as formidable: Some ten feet high themselves, they had four legs on each side, which gave them something of the air of carnivorous caterpillars, since their enormous mouths seemed to stretch all the way to the back of their heads. The great green riders’ air of menace was distinctly heightened by the lances and projectile weapons of some sort that each carried—and that were all trained on him as he rose, breathed deeply, and left the incubator to stand before them, certain and unafraid.
Only two figures stood out among the twenty or so of
this outlandish crew, by virtue of their relatively small size and their human features. One, though clad like the gigantic Martians, was obviously an Earthman: tall, dark-haired, and gray-eyed, like Tarzan himself, with a certain arrogance of bearing that made the ape-man dislike and distrust him on sight. The second . . . the second, red-skinned or no, was the loveliest woman Tarzan had ever seen, and he had known beauties from the highest English society to American movie sets to the mines and palaces of Opar. He had never considered allegiance to any woman other than his Jane Porter, never broken faith even in his imagination. But this one, from her cloud of black hair to her delicate feet, with her expression a blend of pride and wonder, of serenity and innocence . . .
Tarzan shook his head, conscious of his nakedness for the first time since his arrival in this strange world. The Earthman riding beside the red woman dismounted and strode toward Tarzan, plainly more at ease than he in the low Martian gravity. Halting some yards before the apeman, he asked, speaking with an unmistakable Tidewater accent, “Do you speak English, sir?”
“I do,” the ape-man replied evenly. “And French, and German, Arabic and Swahili and the tongues of the Mangani and the pithecanthropi of Pal-ul-don . . .” He was just starting to enumerate the several dialects of Pellucidar when the Earthman waved him impatiently to silence, saying, “English will do. I am John Carter, of the Virginia Carters. This”—he gestured toward the red-skinned woman—“is my wife, the Princess Dejah Thoris of Helium.”
His wife
. . . Tarzan drew himself erect and bowed formally to both of them. “I am Tarzan of the Mangani.” As Dejah Thoris appeared puzzled by the appellation, he added, “Tarzan of the Apes. I also speak some Russian, though with a rather coarse Siberian accent, I’m afraid—”
“We thought better of it.” The ape-man kept his voice level, his manner courteous.
“We lost the War because of your treachery.” John Carter’s growl might have been that of Kerchak, king of the apes among which Tarzan had been raised, regarding a rash upstart—and, in time, Tarzan himself. The ape-man could feel the old red scar on his brow beginning to throb dangerously—
I killed Kerchak, broke his neck
—but he controlled himself still, answering only, “I was in Africa, myself, during that regrettable confrontation. Perhaps civilized people may agree to disagree on that point. As we do in the House of Lords.”
“The House of Lords?” The unexpected phrase clearly brought John Carter up short, but he rallied quickly, with a dry chuckle. “Well, you’re not in any House of Lords here, Mr. Tarzan of the Apes. You’re facing a squad of Tharks—friends of mine, if they’re friends of anyone, even each other—and they’re very upset to see that you’ve broken into their nursery, what with their newest generation being so near to hatching. I don’t mind telling you that if you weren’t a fellow Earthman, and if you weren’t our guest, I’d as soon—”
“But he
is
!” Dejah Thoris’s voice was as quiet and steady as her eyes. “He
is
our guest, my lord—and plainly your countryman.” She continued to regard Tarzan as she spoke, and the ape-man bowed his head in acknowledgment of her courtesy. This time, when he raised his head, he stared back boldly, until it was she who looked away.
John Carter noticed none of this silent exchange. He was musing, “Remarkable, how after one person transmigrates, suddenly everyone starts doing it. Your body’s up in a tree in Africa somewhere, I suppose? Mine’s in a cave in Arizona,
with a bunch of Indians outside, waiting for me to come out.” His laugh was no more than a quick, short bark. “They’ll be very old Indians by the time I do.”
“I have no idea where my body is,” Tarzan admitted candidly. “Is this not my real body? It certainly feels like my body.”
“What you’re standing up in—that’s your
astral
body,” John Carter informed him. “The astral body can go anywhere, once you know how to project it—to the outer planets, to the stars! Mine”—he placed a possessive arm around the slight shoulders of Dejah Thoris—“is staying right here on Barsoom. As we Martians call it.” Turning briefly, he gestured toward the tusked riders ranged in a semicircle behind him. “The Princess and I were accompanying our green friends on a quick inspection of the hatchery before we start home to Helium. You’d best come along with us—I don’t imagine you’d last long among the Tharks. They’re fighters, not tree-climbers. And
they
keep their promises.”
The last words set the ape-man’s scar burning once again, but Jane Porter had spent a long time sweetly and lovingly domesticating the wild creature he knew himself to be. With some trepidation—and the aid of a large boulder as a mounting block—he got up behind one of the Tharks (“When a thoat gets to know you, he’ll kneel down for you to get on,” John Carter told him), although straddling the beast’s spine stretched his mighty quadriceps painfully. But the eight-legged stride, much like that of the pacers he sometimes bet on when in England, was surprisingly smooth—perhaps because the thoat’s well-padded feet absorbed the jolt of the Martian desert surface easily—and Tarzan quickly grew accustomed to the rolling rhythm.
John Carter, with Princess Dejah Thoris riding behind him, kept pace with the ape-man’s mount, keeping up conversation with a tone that made Tarzan’s mighty teeth hurt.
“Odd, you fetching up at exactly the same place where I arrived. Might be some sort of harbor for transmigrating astral bodies, eh?”
“Perhaps.” Tarzan kept his own tone noncommittal. “I have seen stranger things.”
“From up in your tree, chattering and scratching with your monkey friends?” John Carter chuckled again. “I’ll tell you what would have been strange—seeing a few British warships sailing into Charleston Bay, Mobile Bay. Seeing the British standing up like men, instead of howling away across the ocean like a flock of monkeys—
that
would have been strange, don’t you think?” He slanted his glance sideways at Tarzan, his contemptuous chuckle continuing.
Tarzan of the Apes, Lord of the Jungle, would have flown at his throat well before now, merely for the look of his eyes, ignoring his words. John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke, alone, friendless, weaponless, and naked on Mars, kept his temper, replying simply, “We desired your cotton, certainly, but the price was too high. England has done well enough without slave labor for some while now.”
John Carter’s Virginia accent grew more pronounced; his skin seemed to grow taut with anger. “Wasn’t long ago that our cotton was good enough for you, no matter where it came from. Now suddenly you’re all heart-bleeding hypocrites.” He spat, narrowly missing Tarzan’s bare foot.
“I was a slave myself once,” the ape-man mused aloud. “Never liked it much.”
“The War was never about slavery!” John Carter jabbed his forefinger at Tarzan as though it were a sword blade, or the barrel of a pistol. “The War was about states’ rights to refuse to be told how to live, what to think, what to grow, how to grow it . . .” His face was flushed, and he was literally spluttering with furious disgust. “It was a second American Revolution, is what it was, and our Cause was
just as honorable as theirs! Deny
that
, Sir House-of-Lords, and—” He checked himself abruptly, and his voice slowed and quieted to a menacing drawl. “Deny that, and we might quarrel.”
It was Dejah Thoris who hastily changed the subject, describing the magnificence of the old city to which the ape-man was being escorted, so that by the time the caravanserai arrived there, toward evening, he was well prepared for the long, low marble buildings, brilliantly illuminated by the two Martian moons—both shockingly near, from an Earthman’s perspective—and for the wide streets, now filling with the tusked green natives who spilled out into them to welcome their countrymen (and especially the great John Carter) back from their expedition into the barren wasteland.
Tarzan’s mighty lip curled slightly to watch the Virginian visibly swelling under their praise, but he had to admit that the Tharks’ previous experience with one Earthman made it a good bit easier for him to move around freely among the Martians—though every so often, he was waylaid and, with gestures toward John Carter, requested to
sak
, like his compatriot. Once it finally penetrated his comprehension that
sakking
meant bouncing straight up to fully the height of a Thark, he complied vigorously, and was eventually left alone, free to wander the city: no prisoner, but merely a visiting diplomat of some sort. He was well aware that he owed this privilege to John Carter’s intervention, which pleased him not at all; but it amused him greatly, all the same, to feel snug around his bare shoulders the fur cloak that Princess Dejah Thoris had tossed to him off her own back against the cold of the Martian night—and to recall the look that John Carter had thrown him with it. Smiling to himself, he strolled toward the deserted-looking building that crouched at the end of the
street in the brilliant shadows cast by the Martian moons.
For someone who habitually slept curled up in the fork of a jungle tree, or stretched out along a branch like Sheeta the leopard, the ape-man took a serious interest in architecture. The structures he had seen so far looked so much beyond the conception of any of the Tharks he had met so far that he desired to prowl for clues to their original creators: perhaps the extinct race that had once dwelled therein, when the empty Martian seas were full and high, and teeming with life.
They couldn’t have built all this. They can’t even build furniture. . . .
He was halfway crouched, examining the unusual configuration of some broken steps plainly never made for Thark feet, when all his jungle-trained senses suddenly had him off his own feet and rolling to the side, so that the creature silently dropping on him from above missed him almost entirely. Coming instantly erect, Tarzan gaped in amazement at the beast facing him. It stood as tall as any Thark he had yet encountered, and seemed equally as firm on its hind legs—but it was an ape, beyond any possible doubt, for all that it looked more like a hairless gorilla than a Thark, and even more, to Tarzan’s eyes, like a being from Earth, six arms or no. With a scream like that of a leopard that has just made a kill, the thing rushed upon the ape-man, hands reaching out to clutch and strangle and rend.