Under the Moons of Mars

by John Joseph Adams

  Sivas came into view, standing at the base of the table. Jalvar did not recognize him at first; the facial scar was missing, and the man’s skin was smooth and unmarked. Barsoomians did not show age until they reached nearly the end of their thousand-year span, but they did accumulate damage. A warrior could become more scar than skin, in time.

  Something had removed Sivas’s scars. Jalvar looked down frantically; by craning his neck he could see his left hand. The fingers moved when he commanded them, everything seemed normal . . . except that the little divot that a shortsword had taken out of his second fingertip was gone. Sheer willpower forced back a scream, and Sivas nodded respectfully.

  “Do not worry, Gor Kova,” he said. “Already you show less fear than most who are surprised so.”

  It took an instant for Jalvar to remember his own alias; fortunately the stare of horror at his hand covered the lapse.

  “Do not worry?” he said, with a rage that was entirely believable because it was quite genuine.

  “Nothing has been done to you that has not been done to me also,” he said. “To me and my men.”

  “You chose this! I did not!”

  Sivas laughed. “Let us see if you will curse me when you discover what has been done,” he said. “You are a warrior, and you will find your new body marvelously suited to your trade. And if you do not wish to keep it . . . well, when this enterprise of ours is over, you may have the old one back. And rich rewards besides. Now, if you are released, will you be sensible?”

  There were two men behind Sivas with their hands on the hilts of their swords. Sullenly, Jalvar nodded.

  Ras Thavas signaled to his slave assistants. They came forward and pulled the sheet off Jalvar and unbuckled the straps; as he had expected, his body was naked. It was also the reddish tawny color of a Red Man; he strongly suspected he had Thavas to thank for that. He felt normal; better than usual, in fact—rested and alert, though a little hungry. He pushed himself up . . .

  And went soaring several feet into the air. With a shout of alarm he grabbed for the surface of the table and glared around him. An attempt to walk had him bouncing around like a struck handball rebounding from a goal disk. Sivas chuckled again.

  “You do not know your own strength,” he said. “Come, these men will help you out of these narrow quarters.”

  The warriors took their hands from their swords and instead each gripped Jalvar by the upper arm. It proved humiliatingly necessary, as his body tried to skip upward with every pace.

  “Make less effort!” Sivas said. “Imagine that you weigh only as much as a child newly hatched!”

  Jalvar tried that, and gradually the grip on his arms slackened. They traveled down a corridor cut through the reddish sandstone that was everywhere about, and into a great natural cave hundreds of sofads across and nearly a hundred high, brilliantly lit. The floor was sand, and men were practicing at arms—the air was full of the clash of swords and the cries of the warriors.

  “Watch,” Sivas said, before Jalvar could speak.

  Sivas turned and ran, bounding, then leapt. Jalvar’s eyes went wide as the Zodangan soared fully thirty sofads into the air, five times his own height. That was like nothing the Gatholian prince had ever seen, save by—

  “The warlord!” he blurted, when Sivas bounced back. “You have duplicated the strength of John Carter!”

  “And Paxton,” Sivas agreed. “Or rather, Ras Thavas has, once suitably . . . encouraged. He has done as much before.”

  Inwardly the shock was fading, and he bubbled with delight. I have penetrated the conspiracy. And if . . . admittedly a large if . . . we foil it and escape, we have solved the problem of existence on Jasoom!

  Jalvar looked down at his body. Save for the color of his skin, it was as like his own as two coins, except that it was himself as he had been when only a decade or two from the egg.

  “I have heard of Ras Thavas’s synthetic men, the hormads,” he said, though Thavas’s synthetic men had been grotesque monsters, misshapen and twisted. Jalvar looked over his body again. Perfect and spotless . . .

  “As you can see, his art has improved,” Sivas said. “You were unconscious for many months, while your new body was prepared. It has more advantages than mere strength. Observe this.”

  He turned and signed to one of his men. Grinning, the warrior drew his longsword and lunged. The sharp blade transfixed Sivas just below the ribs for an instant, and Jalvar bit off a started exclamation of horror and alarm. The wound bled, but not very much; Sivas coughed, spat out a clot, and straightened.

  “The brains of the new hormads are still not of the first order, but since we use the bodies only after human brains have been transplanted to them, that is of little importance. What is important is that these bodies—Ras Thavas has long explanations of how he takes the template from within our own cells and modifies it—are inhumanly strong, and just as important, inhumanly resistant to damage. Only the destruction of the brain or the total removal of a vital organ can kill them. They heal with great speed too. A force of such men can cut their way through the guards and eliminate our enemies!”

  He wheeled, straightening and drawing his own sword, thrusting it into the air: “Death to John Carter! Death to the warlord!

  And then, from a thousand throats came the roaring reply: “DEATH TO THE WARLORD! DEATH TO JOHN CARTER!”

  PART IV

  THE MASTER MIND

  Ras Thavas’s quarters were segregated from those of the core of Sivas’s Zodangan diehards, and those in turn from the panthans who made up the bulk of the hidden force. A month’s time was enough for Jalvar and Tars Sojat—who had been also been transplanted into an improved hormad version of his original body—to learn the layout of the cave complex; it was like a large set of interconnected buildings carved from a ridge of solid rock. They had learned the guard routines as well, and also to fully master their new bodies and their strengths and weaknesses.

  Mostly the former, he thought idly. But by my first ancestor, how I eat now! Like a starving banth! I suppose the strength and rapid healing must be paid for somehow.

  Now Jalvar crept through the darkness outside the gate they had forced, with only the pale light of one hurtling moon to show the way. They were committed to triggering the beacon and calling the warlord’s forces now, with a dead man in their wake, and he felt the freedom that comes with casting yourself headlong into action. Their feet moved through the mud and shallow water of the swamp, ooze flowing up through their toes; it was an unfamiliar and unpleasant sensation, as was the abundance of insects. So was the constant dank smell.

  “If this is what Barsoom was like when water was abundant, I will cease to complain of its present state,” Sojat grumbled very quietly.

  Then they were on dry land again, and ahead loomed the nearly vertical surface of this side of the rocky ridge that contained the insurgent base. It might have been carved and planed smooth, long ago—hundreds of thousands of years ago by the Orovars, his father’s people. Erosion was swifter here in this last sad remnant of Barsoom’s oceans than in most, and this wasn’t very hard stone, nothing like the imperishable granites and almost metallic basalts from which the dead cities were built.

  Now it just looked very steep. So steep that nobody in his right mind would try to climb it, and so high to the single slit window near the top that even their Jasoomian-style muscles wouldn’t take them halfway to the top. Jalvar grinned. He’d been called light-minded as a youth, but nobody had ever said he wasn’t imaginative.

  About thirty sofads up there was a small ledge where a section of rock had scaled away long ago; you could still see the rubble below. They’d both noted it during a training march not long ago, just after they’d figured out where Ras Thavas’s quarters were. Before they came here it would have been completely out of reach to either of them, without a ladder or steel pegs to drive into cracks in the rock. Now . . .

  “I go first as we planned, my brother,” Sojat said.
/>   He backed up, crouched, and ran forward with the slithering speed of a charging banth, both his legs and the longer middle pair of limbs driving him forward. Then he leapt. It was astonishing to see the great body soar so, but even then only the fingers of his upper hands went over the edge. They clamped down, and then he was holding with both hands and his chin. Javlar held his breath as Sojat lay still for an instant, then swung sharply to one side. That might tear his hands loose . . . but it didn’t, not quite, and his left middle hand went on the stone as well. Then the right, and soon he was standing on the ledge with his back to the rock, testing the footing. He grinned, an alarming sight even at that range, and his mobile stalklike ears cocked forward. Then he bent his knees slightly and braced both pairs of hands together, all four palms linked low before him.

  Jalvar backed up himself, carefully testing the ground with his eyes and with questing bare feet as well; they wouldn’t have more than one chance. He also checked that his weapons were securely strapped and fastened in at least two places to the links and buckles on his harness. Like all warriors of noble birth he had trained in running, leaping, and gymnastics virtually since he hatched. And since Gathol was a state of many herdsmen, he’d also practiced tricks like jumping on and off the back of a galloping thoat. The past few months had been spent getting used to his new thews. Even so . . .

  Even so, it must be done, he thought, and crouched into a runner’s starting position. Then he was bounding forward, faster and faster, and then coming down, the muscles in his thighs coiling like springs, and a tearing effort and a huff of utter effort as he leapt—

  Soaring through the night. Drawing his legs up again as he flew, the glint of Sojat’s tusks as the Thark adjusted his position. Suddenly shockingly close, the stone wall coming at him, and then he was hanging, poised his own height above Sojat’s head, the great mobile eyes tracking him as he fell forward.

  Smack.

  His feet struck his friend’s four crossed palms. The Thark uncoiled like a catapult, all the force of his fourteen sofads of height behind the throw, and the strength of arms reinforced by Ras Thavas’s scientific wizardry. Jalvar put everything he had into the leap as well. Now he shot upward like the shell from a flier’s cannon; he hoped he wouldn’t have the same splintering impact, spilling blood and bone and guts instead of explosive radium. His quickened healing wouldn’t help an iota if he left his brains spattered over the rock like a bowl of porridge. Darkened stone rushed past him, and then the thick metal grille over the narrow window.

  Too high! he thought urgently.

  The lip of the ridge flashed past, and for a moment he was hanging in the air beside it. The startled face of a sentry gaped at him, and then he was falling. His hands flashed out and gripped the grille.

  And it broke, the six thumb-thick bars set into the stone along the top snapping like so many dried reeds. Three of the ones below broke as well, and the others began to bend. Jalvar yelled in alarm as the twisting metal bit into his left hand—there was no need for secrecy now.

  The sentry leaned over the top of the cliff twenty sofads up, leveling a rifle. The muzzle flash left a strobing image in Jalvar’s vision, but the man missed—like most Red Men he was a terrible shot, and it was a difficult target in the dark and aiming almost vertically downward.

  Jalvar drew his pistol as he hung from the slowly bending grille and fired back; since the other man had used a firearm first, it was permissible for him to shoot. The weapon kicked against his hand, and almost in the same instant the sentry bent double and fell forward, turning over and over as he pitched down the face of the cliff.

  Jalvar Pan was a very good shot. Gatholians often were, since they spent much time managing their herds in the wild. And despite being the greatest swordsman on two worlds, John Carter had insisted on such training for all his descendants; evidently it was a custom in Virginia, the kingdom on Jasoom where he had lived before his mysterious transplanting to Barsoom. Jalvar blessed the long hours of tedious practice most nobles considered a waste of time that might be spent with the sword.

  Another sentry leaned over the cliff edge. Below Jalvar, the Thark rifle barked, and the man’s head vanished in a spray that would have been red in daylight and was black beneath the light of Thuria. Jalvar ignored it; anyone who showed himself along the edge was going to die, and that was all that he needed to know. Instead he holstered his pistol and began to draw his dagger, to hammer through the glass of the window.

  It opened instead, and a hand extended through. Jalvar grabbed the man’s wrist just as the last of the grillwork parted with a short unmusical tung. The grille spun away and clattered on the broken rock below. Jalvar was drawn upward by the man’s strong arm; he was young and handsome, but there was something very old and very cold behind his eyes.

  “What has taken you so long?” Ras Thavas grumbled. “Yes, yes, of course I weakened the grille. Did they think that mere metal bars would confine the greatest intellect of Barsoom when he had access to laboratory acids?”

  By my first ancestor, he probably is the greatest intellect on Barsoom. But he will never be famed for his charm or humility.

  Jalvar fastened the rope coiled over his shoulder to a wall bracket and tossed it out. It was the thin, unbreakably strong type used for boarding actions in the air. Seconds later Tars Sojat was swarming up it, even as rifles barked from the cliff above. He pushed his own weapon through and then followed it inside.

  “They should have thrown rocks at me,” he sneered, stretching; the ceiling was just high enough for him. “That would have been more dangerous.”

  “Quick!” Jalvar said, turning to Ras Thavas. “You have the device?”

  “Of course,” the scientist said. “I detected and removed it during my preliminary examination of you. Unfortunately I have not yet broken the code.”

  He produced a cylinder the size of his thumb. Jalvar seized it, unscrewed the top, and then shone his belt light into the tiny pinhole opening in a series of precisely modulated clicks.

  “Now we wait,” he said.

  “Now they will come to kill us,” Tars Sojat said cheerfully, hefting his rifle. “But we shall be well avenged.”

  “How far away is the warlord’s fleet?” Ras Thavas asked in alarm.

  “That depends on how far they tracked us when we left Zodanga,” Jalvar said cheerfully, tucking the beacon into a pouch. “And how long they maintained a strong patrol. If they came close, and remained in strength, we have a chance. If not . . .”

  He shrugged and slapped Sojat on one of his shoulders. “As my bloodthirsty friend here said. Now, show us the layout before the guards come. And tell me: Can your helpers be trusted?”

  “You are relying on this bandit scum to act honorably,” Tars Sojat grumbled a xat later.

  “No, I am merely hoping that they are,” Jalvar said. “Also that when they learn the truth they will find it too unsatisfying to merely shoot us. They will want to feel us die upon their steel.”

  “Or possibly take us prisoner and torture us for a cycle or so,” Sojat said with gloomy relish; Tharks were perhaps a little less given to that themselves these days, but for most Green Men torturing prisoners was one of life’s main amusements. “Our rapid healing would give them weeks of laughter.”

  Ras Thavas’s quarters were well-appointed; there were half a dozen rooms, besides the kitchens and servant’s quarters, all carved from the living rock and the walls covered in rich hangings, where they weren’t a scatter of books and instruments. Thavas swore that his slaves were loyal; two of them were keeping watch on the window. This entranceway led to doors made of double-leaved skeel.

  “They do not need me anymore,” Ras Thavas said. “They will not attempt to break down the doors, they will merely use an explosive device. What a tragedy, if my intellect were lost to Barsoom!”

  Ras Thavas had already lived more than a thousand years; he remembered the launching of the first flier. His current body was not the one which
had broken his egg so long ago, though it was distinctly odd to think of the Master Mind of Mars as a merry, playful hatchling in any case.

  “So,” Jalvar said, laying his hand on the locking device. “We must persuade them otherwise.”

  Jalvar thrust the door open and ducked. Two bullets slammed into the wood, splintering it but not penetrating; skeel was hard. Then he thrust out his hand from behind the protection, with his sword in it.

  One more shot barked, and then a furious argument broke out below, voices raised. Jalvar caught calot of a spy deserves no consideration and honor demands. Then he stepped out onto the narrow landing. The stair below was narrow too, a tunnel full of furious faces and barred steel.

  Sivas stood at the head of his men. “Gor Kova, you calot! How much did the Heliumites pay you?” he growled.

  Nobody violated the Barsoomian honor code by shooting down a man armed with a sword; he had earned that much, at least for a moment, by showing himself where they could shoot him down.

  “Nothing,” he replied proudly. “My name is not Gor Kova, any more than you were called Dur Sivas by your parents. I am Jalvar Pan, son of Llana of Gathol and Pan Dan Chee the Orovar, a Prince of Gathol and great-grandson of John Carter, Warlord of Mars!”

  A howl of rage went up from the assembled insurgents; he thought he saw looks of alarm exchanged farther back, among the panthans. His companion stuck his head around the door and leered, an alarmingly effective expression for a Green Man with shining white tusks and red-pupiled eyes.

  “And I am Tars Sojat of the Thark horde, grandson of Tars Tarkas, destroyer of Zodanga, you ruin-haunting, incubator-destroying ulsios,” he added. “Do you have any families here I might slaughter after we kill you all?”

  Sivas’s face lost its usual cunning. Instead it twisted in a scream of unbearable hatred. He bounded up the stairs with his longsword in his hand.