Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (6 page)

Amtor—ERB’s Venus—is a watery jungle world, and its hero is blond Carson Napier, who set out for Mars but forgot to take the gravitational field of the Moon into account and wound up on Venus. The villains in the first book were (well-disguised) communists, and the villains in the third of the four books were parodies (but deadly parodies, paradoxical as that may seem) of the Nazis. Here Richard Lupoff, long-time Burroughs scholar and author of two nonfiction books about ERB’s worlds, comes up with a new menace to our hero.

—Mike

Scorpion Men of Venus

Richard A. Lupoff

(dedicated to Dave Van Arnam)

Jagged-edged and venomous thorns tore at our clothes and deadly vines swung from the dripping limbs of towering deciduous pitcher-trees—seeking as if intelligently motivated—to capture Duare and myself. Armed only with machetes, their blades honed from Venusian ironwood trees, the courageous sable-tressed Venusian maiden and I beat back our vegetable attackers.

“I am weary, Carson,” the lovely Duare gasped. “I do not know how much longer I can continue.” For a moment she collapsed into my arms. Seeming to draw strength from our momentary embrace, she drew a deep breath and, uttering an oath in her native tongue, swung her weapon at a sinewy green creeper that had made its way across the jungle floor and was attempting to wrap itself around her ankle.

“Do not lose hope, O Princess,” I encouraged her. “While yet we draw breath, there remains a chance that we will win free of our pursuers.”

“Princess.” Duare spoke with bitter irony. “What matters it be I princess or slave, should I be sawed to bits by blade-thorn bushes or, worse yet, captured by a pitcher-tree and digested alive!” She wiped perspiration from her brow, swung her blade once more at a clutching vine, and strode ahead.

Behind us we could hear the eager cries of the brutal Andaks of Kattara. Half-human, half-beast, each of these nightmarish monsters resembled a mad attempt to blend a human being with a gigantic arthropod. Imagine if you can a man with the claw-tipped limbs and deadly stinging tail of a monstrous scorpion. They had no voices in the sense which you would recognize as such. Instead they communicated by a combination of clicking mandibles and weird, ear-piercing screeches, and we could hear them now, a hunting party close on our trail.

“Press on, my Princess,” I urged Duare. I took up a position with my back to her, ready to face the lead Andak, who seemed to have been sent ahead of his monstrous fellows as a kind of advance guard. Pushing aside a tangle of writhing vines, it stood facing me, its terrible mandibles opening and closing, its weird, faceted eyes blazing eagerness and hatred.

It reached for me with a pair of pincers that I slapped aside with my machete. The other pair of pincers snapped, snagging the sleeve of my garment. Ignoring the threat, I lunged with my fire-tempered weapon, wishing futilely for a steel-bladed sword, or better yet a firearm.

Straight for the monster’s eye I lunged. The Andak dodged aside, and my blade passed harmlessly over its naked, scaly shoulder. Frustrated in its attack, it emitted a screech that all but stunned me, clearly a weapon with which evolution had fitted these monsters to use as they closed in combat with their enemies.

“Carson!” I heard Duare’s scream of warning. “Beware! Above you!” I jerked my head and saw the Andak’s deadly curving tail plunging downward toward me. This time it was I who dodged to the side. It drew its tail back, a few drops of its deadly venom dripping onto my arm, where they burned and hissed, emitting a sickening stench of death and instant decay.

In the throes of its continuing attack, the Andak had yanked its claw free of my sleeve. It reared back, its segmented, chitinous tail arching overhead in another attempt to strike at me. I barely managed to leap aside, my shoulder colliding with the trunk of a nearby
crann
tree, a Venusian giant roughly comparable to a Florida palmetto.

The Andak’s tail swung toward me, and as I threw myself flat, it thudded into the trunk of the tree, the twin knifelike shafts that it used to administer venom to its prey trapped for the moment in the pulpy
crann
wood.

In response to the twin jolts administered to the
crann
tree by my shoulder and the monster’s venomous tail, a green shaft no thicker nor longer than an ordinary lead pencil tumbled from a limb of the tree, landing on the back of the Andak. It was followed by another and yet another, until I saw that the green shafts were raining down upon it, burying their tips in its flesh until it resembled an Earthly porcupine or spiny sea urchin.

The green shafts, I realized, were Venusian
nathair culebras,
or tree snakes. Among the deadliest of the venomous creatures that infest the jungles of Earth’s sister planet, they covered the body of the Andak and were soon squirming like the snakes on a Gorgon’s head.

Even as the Andak writhed and emitted the ear-piercing screams of its death agony, I lost no time in grasping Duare by the wrist and half dragging, half-carrying her ahead. Our determination to persevere was quickly rewarded as we burst from the forest into a grassy clearing surrounded by towering
crann
trees and giant, wind-tossed ferns.

We made our way to the center of the clearing, believing for the moment that we had reached safety, but our relief proved to be short-lived, as the very ground beneath us began to move, at first with gentle tremors almost too slight to be felt, then with perceptible ripples, finally heaving itself as if it were the back of a giant beast and Duare and myself annoying pests of whom it was trying to be rid.

“Duare,” I cried, “what is this? What is happening, O my princess?”

She had gone suddenly pale, her normally healthy olive-hued complexion becoming almost corpse-like in its pallor. “Carson,” she gasped, clutching my arm and pulling me to the far side of the clearing. “Carson, it is a
fearmharr arrachtach
! We can’t stay here. It means sudden death!”

“What do you mean?” I queried. “What is a
fearmharr arrachtach
?” Again I asked, “What is happening?”

“Never mind,” she urged. “We must get away from here. Please, my beloved, our very lives are at stake!”

She pulled me toward the surrounding forest even as the grassy area beneath began to rise up in ridges and mounds that rippled and flowed together, forming erections as tall at first as a common house cat, then as high as our knees, then as our waists, rippling and shifting until, to my astonishment and horror, I saw one of them shaping itself into a perfect simulacrum of Duare and another into a duplicate of myself.

“Are they alive?” I shouted.

Duare shook her head. “They have the semblance of life but are mere simulacra of you and of me, O my Carson. They are dangerous. Do not trust them. Quick, we must get away.”

“But the woods are full of hunting Andaks and deadly
nathair culebra
snakes!”

There we stood, trapped between the deadly advancing simulacra, which moment by moment seemed to be perfecting their resemblance of us. If you have never seen a perfect duplicate of yourself suddenly appear from the very ground beneath your feet and advance toward you with murder in its eyes, you can only imagine the horror that Duare and I felt at that moment.

Trapped between our murderous doppelgangers, the hunting scorpion-men, and the incredibly deadly
nathair culebras
, Duare and I stood, ready to meet our fates together. At that moment whatever gods there may be had at least granted us the final boon of permitting us to die together.

I took Duare in my arms and drew her lush, pulsing body against my own.

“My princess,” I murmured, “I die happy for having found you and won your love!”

“O my Carson,” she replied, pressing her lips upon my own, “my champion from a distant world, I will go anywhere with you, even unto the great beyond from which none return!”

At this moment a light flashed from above, and together Duare and I turned our faces upward to behold the most amazing sight of all the amazing sights I had beheld since my arrival upon Venus.

A giant dragonfly was circling above us. Its gossamer wings caught the diffuse gray daylight that the twin cloud covers of Venus permit to reach the surface of that planet. A beam of light of an intense ultramarine hue flashed down, brilliantly illuminating one of the simulacra that had mere seconds before threatened the lives of my glorious beloved and myself.

The
fearmharr arrachtach
threw its arms upward as if trying to reach the dragonfly and draw it down to the ground, then slumped and lay briefly at my feet. I gazed down into a perfect copy of myself, from my thick blond hair to my muscular arms and powerful torso to my heavy jungle boots.

The beast writhed once, twitched, tremored briefly, then subsided back into the grassy covering of the clearing. I stood, thunderstruck, as a simulacrum of the splendid Duare was caught in the ultramarine ray, duplicating the agony and ultimate demise of my own duplicate.

The process continued until the clearing had returned to its original innocent-seeming appearance. I looked skyward at the dragonfly and saw the ultramarine ray pointing at myself. There was no time to avoid its brilliance. As it struck my body, I felt an icy tingling, from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. I looked down and saw myself bathed in a brilliant blue glow, but other than the frigid tingling I was unharmed.

The ray was withdrawn from my body and aimed at Duare.

“Do not be afraid, my princess. It will not harm you!”

Nor did it.

With a whirring of its mighty wings, the giant dragonfly circled lower and lower, finally settling to the grass.

Side by side, Duare and I advanced toward it. Duare reached to touch the creature’s shell, then drew back her hand. Now it was she who asked me, “What can it be, O Carson? What can this thing be?”

“This is no insect,” I replied. I turned to study the dragonfly. “This is a machine. The creation of some clever artisan, but it is not a living thing.”

We advanced toward the head of the segmented, seeming beast. As we stood staring awestruck into its huge faceted eyes, one of them rolled back like a gigantic eyelid to reveal a cockpit and a set of controls, and seated at the controls a pilot clad in flight-suit, complete with helmet and goggles.

“Thank you,” I stammered. “You saved us. But—who are you, and what does this mean?” Never in my time on Venus had I seen any sign of the technological development necessary to build so advanced a flying craft as this magnificent artificial creature.

Searching my memory for details of my studies of the insectivora of the world during my sometimes ill-spent college days, I recognized this machine as a remarkable mechanical recreation of
Odonata Anisoptera Synthemistidae
. Its four gossamer wings shimmered in the pearl-like glimmering of an Amtorian afternoon. Its six legs held it in precarious balance.

The pilot did not respond to my query, but instead gestured with one gloved hand to the compartment behind the cockpit. Nodding his head, this mysterious figure indicated clearly that Duare and I were to climb into the dragonfly and prepare for flight.

When you have been saved from a Hobson’s choice between two forms of death each more horrible than the other by a total stranger who invites you to join him in a magnificent aircraft, you do not quarrel. Duare and I accepted this mysterious stranger’s invitation with alacrity.

We climbed into the aircraft, and the pilot reached for a handle and swung the artificial eye back into place. He threw a switch, and the mechanical dragonfly raised and lowered its wings twice. Another switch, and I could feel the six legs flex, then straighten, and the artificial dragonfly was airborne.

Looking ahead over the pilot’s shoulders we could see that the faceted false eyes of the dragonfly were transparent when viewed from inside the craft. By craning my neck I was able to get a view of the terrain over which we passed.

We crossed mile after mile of lush jungle, but eventually this gave way to a grassy savannah—not populated by any more of the deadly
fearmharr arrachtachs
that had menaced Duare and myself and from which this mysterious aviator had saved us, or so I hoped.

Giant beasts grazed on the rich plant life beneath us. Huge Venusian—Amtorian—mammals such as roamed the Americas before the last ice age gazed skyward to see this strange object passing overhead, then returned to their grazing, unconcerned.

We rose toward the planet’s perpetual cloud cover and passed over a ridge of jagged granite peaks, then dipped again to skim the ground in the next valley. As if Nature had separated the two adjacent lowlands, this next savannah was populated by an even more astonishing array of beasts. If not dinosaurs, then surely these creatures were Amtor’s analogs of them. I saw something that looked remarkably like a triceratops placidly grazing until it was surprised by the attack of a bonapartenykus—a feathered dinosaur whose fierce claws and teeth belie its otherwise benign appearance.

I would have been curious to observe the battle between these two giant beasts out of Earth’s multimillion-year past, but the dragonfly continued onward, our pilot never taking his eyes off the controls and the passing landscape, totally ignoring Duare and myself.