by Mike Resnick
Before I slept myself, I helped Dek haul in the sea-anchor and stow it, helped the men to rig the sail, and got the boat turned about and pointed in the direction Mirina wished us to go—which agreed with the compass.
We knew we were not out of peril yet. There are many strange races living on the islands. Some are peaceful and friendly. Some are wary and hostile.
And some are deadly.
Also, there were the great beasts of the sea.
No, we were by no means celebrating, except in that we celebrated going down the throat of the storm and coming out alive.
I flung myself down on the deck and slept, as Dek and the others made for home.
It was Dek kicking me in the ribs that woke me. A quick glance at the hurried preparations for combat told me why.
“Astern,” Dek said, briefly, and took the tiller.
Now, the good thing about being a sailing ship with only four rowers is that most of the time the rowers do not need to work; the wind does it all for you. The bad thing about being a sailing ship with only four rowers is that when you are being overtaken by a dozen islander canoes of the sort with the pods on the side, and the wind is scarcely a breeze, then you know that the canoes are going to win this race. We Thurians did not know many folk with that sort of canoes—only one of our island allies had such, and these were too far to be our allies.
I glanced up. Mirina was hanging quiver after quiver full of arrows on the top of the mast at her usual perch. Good. She would be able to stay out of reach, at least until they swarmed us. What would happen to her then . . .
I got my sword and my club, and a tiny shield I fastened on my wrist. I was of little use with distance weapons. The rest armed themselves with their guns—alas, we had not brought much ammunition for them, since they were all but useless against the sea-beasts—and put spears, bows, and their swords at their sides in readiness. We turned to face the foe. There was no point in trying to race them, and our harpoon gun and cannon faced forward. We might as well use them while we could.
As soon as the first canoe was in range, we fired the cannon. It was both a lucky and a good shot; it hit the canoe squarely, and the thing exploded in flying splinters and falling bodies.
That took our foes aback; we could see them gesturing to one another vehemently, and the paddlers slowed or stopped. But they must have been made of stern stuff; before long the paddlers dug their oars into the water, and they came at us again.
But of course this had given us plenty of time to reload and aim, and the second shot hit another canoe before they had gotten properly underway. This time our attack was met with fierce howls of rage.
We got off two more shots, both scoring direct hits, before we knew there would be no time to reload for a fifth. But now they were in harpoon range, and Dek ran to that gun, taking careful aim before firing.
It was a terrible sight.
The harpoon not only struck the man he had been aiming for, it passed through him and impaled the second man in the canoe as well. Dek had used one of the harpoons that had no line fastened to it, as those were more accurate, so the two men thrashed together, screaming and bleeding, before they finally fell overboard, still pinned together.
This only enraged the attackers, but Dek managed to get off a second harpoon before they were on us.
But we had narrowed the odds against us, somewhat. There had been a dozen canoes, with two men to each; the cannon had taken four, and the harpoon one. That left but seven, with fourteen men to our four, plus Mirina, though to be honest, I did not think she would be of much use.
We began to hurl spears, but those were deflected by the bark shields the men put up as they came alongside. We four put our backs to the mast and prepared to fight as we were surrounded by canoes and their occupants swarmed the sides of the boat.
A strange sound came to my ears as they screamed and boarded us. I looked up. It was Mirina. She was flying!
Hovering, rather, using what little wind there was to help her stay aloft. And with a grim look upon her face, she was carefully sighting and loosing her arrows down into the mob around us.
Her bow was light, and her arrows, perforce, were just big enough to take down birds or hare. They were hardly man-killers, unless she got off a lucky shot.
But they were man-cripplers.
And she had the advantage of height and the knowledge that even if one of them got past us and up the mast, he could not reach her. She could take her time sighting, and pick her target—their arms, their necks, their heads. One arrow in a bicep made it hard to wield the club-like, shell-edged wooden swords they were using. Two made it almost impossible. They could not use their shields to protect themselves from her arrows without opening themselves to our swords.
But I could not watch her further, as we were fighting for our lives.
It was hard, bloody work.
Those curved, bark shields were effective. I had never seen the like. They were light, and flexible, so when you hit them, your blow rebounded, giving the man or one of his fellows a chance to strike at you while you were still recovering from what had happened. If it had not been for Mirina, I think we would have lost.
But her steady firing weakened the enemy. Shields drooped, giving us openings; men found their swords dropping from nerveless fingers. We were bleeding from a hundred shallow cuts, but they could not manage a fatal blow, while we slowly took them down, one at a time.
Finally someone realized that they were but five to our four, and the little archer above was showing no signs of running out of arrows. One of them yelled, and the remainder retreated to their canoes, cutting them loose and pushing off. In very little time, they were but specks in the distance.
Mirina dropped to the deck of the boat, heedless of the blood, spent.
She collapsed there, wings sprawling, body heaving with pants and shuddering with the pounding of her heart. Dek ran to her, seizing a waterskin on the way, and cradled her in his arms, putting it to her lips.
She had not even the strength left to drink, so he used a little of the water to gently bathe her face.
For a moment I feared that she had overtasked her strength, defending us, and that her frail heart would fail.
But then she took a deep and shuddering breath, and looked up at Dek. And that was when I saw it happen, when he looked at her for the first time, and saw, not the strange birdlike creature, nor the seeming-child. He looked at her and saw the woman in the slender body, and looked on her, not as a man looks on a child, but as a man looks on a woman.
She saw it, too, and her eyes widened. Her hands started to move in that language of signs, but he forestalled anything she might have “said” by kissing her.
Well, that is all that there is to the tale. The rest was commonplace; we heaved the bodies of our unknown enemies overboard, cleaned the decks of blood, and tied the captured canoes behind us, for they were exceptionally well-made, and more than made up for the loss of the sea-beast. The wind finally rose in our favor. Between the compass and Mirina’s inner sense, we returned to our own shores, and Dek presented Mirina to his father as his mate. Nor did Kolk appear displeased with this.
And as for me . . . well, this tale has given me new hope. For if a man of Thuria can have his mate fall from the sky to him, a mate half-bird and half-girl, then surely there can be a mate out there for me.
After all, what in Pellucidar is less likely—a female Sagoth as intelligent as I—or a girl with wings?
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.
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�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.
