Under the Moons of Mars (34 page)
Read Under the Moons of Mars Online
Authors: John Joseph Adams
Jalvar felt a keen stab of interest. “Admiral Julian thought that the Kalkars would overrun the earth.”
“The surface of the Earth, yes,” Lord John said. “But the Moon is not the only hollow globe. Earth also has a land within it, one I have visited before. Let me tell you of a place called Pellucidar. . . .”
The opening section of
A Princess of Mars
includes a note from the author Edgar Rice Burroughs explaining the circumstances by which he obtained the manuscript. He relates that since childhood he has known “Uncle Jack,” i.e., Captain John Carter, and recalls with fondness the way that the man was equally at ease playing with the children or galloping a horse. According to Burroughs, Carter seldom spoke of the days he’d spent prospecting for gold in the Arizona hills, and sometimes a look of the most intense sadness and longing would pass across his face, and Burroughs once saw him staring up at the night sky and raising his arms as if in supplication. Burroughs also remarks that in all the years he knew John Carter the man never aged a day. Carter identified Burroughs as his heir, and left behind very specific instructions for the disposition of his body after death—that is, that he be placed in a special tomb of his own devising, one that was well ventilated and which could be opened, curiously enough, from the inside. Burroughs states that he received the manuscript for
A Princess of Mars
in a sealed envelope, with instructions not to reveal its contents until twenty-one years had passed. Our next tale also opens with an author’s note explaining the provenance of a peculiar manuscript, albeit one that casts a distinctly different light on the events described by John Carter.
T
o the Reader of this Work:
In submitting to you the strange soliloquy of Falm Rojut, Jeddak of Hanar Su, I feel it necessary to add a few remarks.
This manuscript came into my possession through several twists and turns of coincidence. I had struck up a correspondence with a librarian in Chicago due to our mutual interest in archival issues relating to the early pulp authors. In the basement of her library my friend had discovered an astonishing number of books, magazines, periodicals, pamphlets, and other paper materials dating from the infancy of science fiction. One could hardly have stumbled onto a cave full of golden cups and sapphire crowns and come away with more awe and delight than that librarian felt, walking up the metal staircase and out of that dusty industrial cellar. Obviously, the new collection belonged to the library proper, but some of the documents proved to be of little value even to the most dedicated soul, being either undecipherable or in such a pitiable state that even scanning into the digital collection might be the death of the poor things. Among the latter were several manuscripts that we both suspected belonged to Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose margins contained some scribbles in his handwriting or which bore one
of his pseudonyms. Among those lay one peculiar collection of pages—I couldn’t in fairness call it a book. My friend informed me of it: that it was mixed in with a number of ERB’s papers, that it was not in English or any dialect she recognized, and that it was short but not in too bad a state of rot. Would I like to come to Chicago and see what I could make of it? (My librarian friend was aware that I made a great study of ancient languages when I was younger, and if my vocabularies are not what they once were, I can still fake my conjugations with the best of them.)
I put aside the novel I had been working on and went west, meeting my friend in person and having a wonderful dinner downtown before happily ensconcing myself in one of the private study rooms of the library. Unfortunately, the document was far beyond the abilities of a lapsed classicist—I actually laughed when I saw it: five pages, inked on both sides, covered in hieroglyphics and ideograms I could not begin to guess at. I could not even say what language they might be, or what region of the world might have influenced the rounded, complex characters. I handled the pages carefully, examined them as best I could, but honestly, I am only human, and I hadn’t even finished my doctorate.
As is my habit, I posted a description of my Chicago adventure to my blog and thought little more of it. ERB is not my favorite of science fiction’s grandfathers, after all. Yet I found I could not forget the graceful, bulbous hieroglyphs. They floated in my dreams, huge and green, like living things, promising illumination to a more determined scholar. Having always been prone to insomnia I found I could scarcely sleep for a moment without those phantasms appearing behind my closed eyes and waking me with a start—soon I simply ceased to sleep at all.
In the midst of this misery an e-mail arrived in my inbox, bearing the subject heading: Emergency Translation
Services, Available Day and Night. Even if it were spam, I was curious (and possibly desperate, certainly exhausted) enough to open the message. I reproduce it here verbatim:
Having read of your linguistic troubles we wish to offer a cipher which we believe will offer some succor. Please do not ask us where we discovered such a valuable piece of information. We could not possibly share our sources. Really, it is beyond our morality to betray such confidences. Well, perhaps your insistence has swayed us. While traveling in Arizona we chanced upon an old woman whose costume was decorated with bones and skulls in a quite unsettling way, selling charms and trinkets, bits of silver and turquoise such as are common in the Southwest. Our sister enjoys silver and we purchased several bangles, a large red stone pendant, and two rings. Much later our sister informed us that the pendant proved to be a kind of locket, and within a carefully folded piece of parchment bore strange marks and a kind of code. Upon examination we of course immediately recognized the handwriting of Edgar Rice Burroughs, may he rest in peace and all sovereignty, and felt certain the paper was a Rosetta Stone for the purpose of translating Tharkian to English and vice versa. We are happy to offer these services to you free of charge, as a fellow traveler and believer. Signed, ————
At the time, I could not say what belief I was meant to have in common with my strange and earnest translators, but I accepted their offer and, cipher in hand, I made the following translation of the (incomplete, as I came to understand) document, a scanned copy of which my librarian friend was kind
enough to send me. I possess no originals of the following, and as to my linguistic benefactors I have only guesses and wild speculation, as I have heard nothing further from them, even after the publication of Falm Rojut’s strange words.
Yours very sincerely,
Catherynne M. Valente
BY FALM ROJUT, JEDDAK OF HANAR SU TRANSLATED BY CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
I
nside the egg I could taste the sun. It was dry and dusty and soft, like sweet ash. I sucked on the sun and the sun was a yolk and it passed into me and out of me and the world was my egg and I was my egg and I was the world. I was somewhat aware of other eggs, other worlds, rustling around me, their occasional dreaming movements filling the world that was me and the yolk and the sun and the egg with a gentle kind of music. I was content in the egg, and from the sunny ashy yolk I drew both the strength of my six limbs and the greening shade of my skin, but also a sure knowledge of my heart, and a purpose that tasted thick like blood and thick like fat and thick like the weight of a mate held with the second pair of arms.
John Carter could never understand us. He never slept in the egg.
We were so strong. We were so beautiful.
Before us stood a long line of enormous gorgeous gods. Our mothers and fathers, their arms outstretched to us—and to remember this pains my chest—my whole life spooling out in a line and my people standing guard, standing sentinel on that line, willing me to survive and live and thrive, and all of them loving me equally, caring nothing for who laid my egg, only that I was theirs, profoundly and completely. I was their family and their future, all of us were. And we ran to them, to our lives, on legs muscled already and twitching to move, just to move over that red moss, into those green arms.
The human John Carter who came to Barsoom like a storm cloud passing back and forth over the sun, over our strength and our purpose, witnessed the generation after mine performing that first radiant dance. He was horrified. He said we had no good qualities because we could not know who our parents were. Because our families did not look like his. Because it seemed to him nothing but random chance who caught up which child into their arms.
But I have learned to write in the old way so you may understand me. It seems to me that writing in this fashion is a very slow and inefficient way to accomplish what the Green Men do with a glance and a thought: that glimmering net of shared experience and memory that is our collective heartspace. I write and you read and it is almost as though we stand on a broad red plain together while the moons set and the thoats warble at the stars.
That gauntlet is not merely a tangle of green arms. It is a mesh of thoughts and passions snapping like ropes of light cut in half, waiting for one of us to catch the frayed end and connect, knot ourselves together. They call to us, the mothers and fathers, they say: Be my child. Be my future. Battle me with your laughter and pinching and sneaking out to hunt the banth when you are not nearly ready, fight me with your every breath, your every kiss, while I struggle to make you grown and you struggle to die as quickly as possible, and then when I am grown old take my metal and my name and go on while I recede.
I admit it looks careless, as though children do not matter to us, much more than a sleeping fur. But the human John Carter could not truly enter the heartspace. He was certain he could, that he could read our thoughts with perfect correctness, but you cannot be part of a herd and yet stand outside it. We could not read his thoughts, and so in the shimmering crosshatch of our communal dreaming, he was a terrible blank space, a void, and in his eavesdropping he only ever heard a garbled fraction of what passed between the Green Men. Yet what he heard, miserably diminished, he
repeated as though total truth, and in the end this was what drove me from Thark to find my own community, a place where the Earthman had not yet told us what we were with his tiny nose in the air.
I asked him once what he had been doing just before he came to Barsoom. He answered that he had killed a great number of Indians, which were like the Red Men, but of Earth.
Why? I asked him. What had they done to you? Did you take their places in their tribe, their metal and their name, their wives and their retinue, their responsibility to guide their people and help them survive the winter? You must be a great Jeddak of these Apache, if you killed so many.
No, the rules of battle are different on Earth. I simply left them, and came here. As to what they had done to me, they were my enemy, and had killed my friend.
Was not your friend their enemy, if you were theirs? Was not killing him their duty?
And John Carter did not answer me but went about his business with his wicked war-princess. But I was baffled—he called us barbaric and yet he left those people without their warriors and took up no position among them, did not replace their strength with strength, their valor with valor? What kind of a man was he?
What would he do to us, if we became his enemy?
I remember the day his war-princess Dejah Thoris spoke to us with her honeyed words, coaxing us to join her people in amity and fellowship, to unite Barsoom and be clasped to her bosom. I was but young and yet I recall the black boom of hate and anger that sizzled through the heartspace, and how when Tars Tarkas stood to join her we felt such betrayal. The Red Men killed our children! In war they sought out the incubators and smashed the eggs, they wiped out whole communities, reducing the Green Men inexorably toward extinction. Never once had a Red Man deigned
to take the place of one he killed, they only moved on, to destroy more babies and mock us as animals. No wonder the human John Carter found such brotherhood with them.