by Mike Resnick
Tarzan gave a raw leg of the deer to their flying stallion of sorts, and then he and his friends sat down to eat.
“That flying thing is quite amazing,” said Zuppner.
“For his size he is astonishingly light,” Tarzan said. “His bones must be hollow. And yet, it is strong.”
“I think we should name him,” Zuppner said.
“I never name anything I might have to eat,” said Tarzan.
Once they were filled with food, fresh water, and rested, they took to the air again, flew over the great inland sea. It took some time, but they finally reached the opposite shore. They rested again for a while, and come morning they flew on with no set destination, just making sure they were putting space between themselves and the cannibals.
After a few days of travel and stops to hunt and eat, they came to the great, rock wall that surrounded the land that time forgot. Tarzan landed the beast. There was jungle and plenty of game along the edge of the wall. They made a good camp there. When the mist that surrounded the strange world thinned, they could see the ocean raging against the rock barrier below.
“How do we go home?” Zuppner said.
“Swimming won’t do,” Tarzan said.
Zuppner laughed. “I suppose not.”
Zamona turned and looked back at the jungle and said nothing.
They built a fine hut that housed them comfortably and had plenty of room left over. They left a gap at the top of it to let out the smoke. They built a well-made corral with a roof for the flying creature, and kept it fed with game, of which they found plenty. From time to time they flew in trio on the back of the beast, looking to see what they could find, but never traveling too far from camp.
After many days, the three of them walked to their spot on the wall, the place where they liked to look out at the ocean. As they stood there, watching the pounding waves break against the blockade of stone, Tarzan said, “When we were first carried off by the winged things, I saw below us a place with wooden walls, like a fort, with buildings inside of it. It looked to me that it might be a kind of civilized settlement. I thought I might try and go there. It will take many days, and I would have to stop to find water and food, but perhaps there might be someone there who could help us, or assist us. If so, I will come back for you. They might be enemies. On this world that seems more likely. But I thought I might try. I must find a way to go home. I must see my wife, Jane.”
Zuppner looked at Zamona, then back at Tarzan.
“This may sound odd, Tarzan,” Zuppner said, “but Zamona and I, we want to stay. Right here. Where the game is thick and there seem to be fewer dangerous predators. Most importantly, we have each other. This is a world not too unlike the one from which she came, and I have nothing to go back to. And to be honest, I have learned to love this life. All that I need is right here, with her. We talked it over and decided a few days back. We have wanted to tell you for quite some time, and now we must.”
Tarzan almost smiled. “I have suspected. And I understand. If Jane were with me, I might stay. If she is by my side, I can be anywhere in the world and find happiness.”
Tarzan clamped Zuppner on the shoulder and smiled at Zamona. “Have your life and your love, but I must go. I must find a way to leave and go home to Jane.”
When the morning light came, the mist was heavy. Tarzan and Zuppner and Zamona were all at the corral. Tarzan saddled up and reined the beast, guided it out through the open gate. It walked with a hobbling motion on its slightly bent legs. By the time he led the creature clear of the corral, the sun had started to penetrate the mist, but still they could not see the sky.
Tarzan had made himself a bow and arrows and a quiver of wood, and he had fashioned fresh spears with flint points to replace the broken ones from the quiver that was strapped to the reptile’s saddle. He still had the knife he had made from one of the spears, the broken part of the shaft now wrapped in hide and strapped to his side in a sheath he had made from wild boar skin. He wore a loin cloth of spotted antelope hide. He arranged his weapons, the bow over his shoulder, the quiver strapped to his back, the knife at his side, the spears tucked tight into the sheath next to the saddle. He climbed on top of the beast and looked down at Zuppner and Zamona.
“Make a life,” he said.
“We will,” said Zamona, looking beautiful in the gossamer-veiled light. “We still live.”
Tarzan tugged at the reins. The dragon flapped its wings, lifted into the air, and finally high into the mist where it was swallowed up, wrapped tight in white. Zuppner and Zamona could hear the monster’s wings beating for a while, and then there was only silence, leaving them to their life, and Tarzan to further adventure.
Story Notes
(1) Tarzan’s adventure on the lost world would have taken place about 1929, when planes were nowhere as advanced or as able of flying long ranges. Besides, it’s very likely that Tarzan’s universe is an alternate universe that only crisscrosses ours from time to time.
(2) The sun of Pellucidar, the world inside our world, is always central and always bright. Pellucidar is a world of constant daylight.
(3) Although Tarzan could not discern the purpose of the pools, they are part of the evolutionary process of The Land That Time Forgot. When humans of a certain evolutionary scale are ready and prepared to move to a higher form, they enter the pools, and come out transformed. For more information on these pools, check out THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, THE PEOPLE TIME FORGOT, and OUT OF TIME’S ABYSS by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
(4) He’s looking down on Ft. Dinosaur, built by previous adventurers. Again, see the books in the LAND THAT TIME FORGOT series by Burroughs.
Authors Bios
Kevin J. Anderson
Kevin J. Anderson has published one hundred twenty books, more than fifty of which have been national or international bestsellers. He has written numerous novels in the Star Wars, X-Files, and Dune universes, as well as a groundbreaking steampunk fantasy novel, Clockwork Angels, based on the new album by legendary rock group Rush. His original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series, the Terra Incognita fantasy trilogy, and his humorous horror series featuring Dan Shamble, Zombie PI.
Matthew V. Clemens
Matthew V. Clemens has collaborated with Max Allan Collins as forensics researcher and co-plotter on eight USA TODAY-bestselling CSI novels, two CSI: Miami novels, as well as tie-in novels for the TV series Dark Angel, Bones and Criminal Minds. He and Collins have published over a dozen short stories together (some gathered in their collection My Lolita Complex, as well as the Thriller Award-nominated You Can’t Stop Me and its sequel, No One Will Hear You. He is the co-author of the true-crime regional bestseller, Dead Water. He lives in Davenport, Iowa, with his wife, Pam, a teacher. He cites Tarzan as one of the major fictional creations of all time, ranking with Sherlock Holmes and Batman.
Max Allan Collins
Max Allan Collins is the author of the New York Times bestselling graphic novel Road to Perdition, made into the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. His other credits include such comics as Batman, Dick Tracy and his own Ms. Tree; film scripts for HBO and Lifetime TV; and the Shamus-award-winning Nathan Heller detective novels. His tie-in novels include the bestsellers Saving Private Ryan, Air Force One and American Gangster, and he is working with the Mickey Spillane estate to finish a number of works by Mike Hammer’s creator. He lives in Muscatine, Iowa, with his wife Barb, with whom he writes the popular “Trash ’n’ Treasures” mystery series (Antiques Roadkill). His novel The Pearl Harbor Murders features Edgar Rice Burroughs as an amateur sleuth, and he credits Burroughs as a major influence on his storytelling technique.
Peter David
Peter David still remembers being ten years old, standing in his parents’ backyard at the end of some really bad days, and staring longingly at the red planet, Mars, hoping to be hauled magically to its surface so he could hang with Tharks. The fact that he was likely staring at the Washington, D.C. shuttle
into LaGuardia was kind of irrelevant. In any event, not being hauled up to Mars, he settled for remaining on this world and conjuring up stories involving green skinned monsters, alien space travelers, and exotic women. He even had a chance to visit Barsoom in producing the four-issue John Carter limited series for Marvel Comics, a prequel to the live-action film.
Robert T. Garcia
Bob Garcia worked at Cinefantastique magazine, Mayfair Games, and First Comics (as Senior Editor) before founding Garcia Publishing Services with his wife Nancy. They won the World Fantasy Award in 1983 for American Fantasy™ magazine, which spun off into American Fantasy Press, with books by Moorcock, Gaiman & Wolfe, Resnick, Etchison, and Zambreno. In 2000, AFP released the World Fantasy award-winning novella The Man on the Ceiling, by Steve Rasnic & Melanie Tem, which also went on to win the IHG and the Stoker awards, the only story ever to do so. He’s edited the anthologies Temporary Walls (with Greg Ketter), Chilled to the Bone, Unrepentant: A Celebration of the Writings of Harlan Ellison®, and edited/packaged the first US edition of Vargo Statten’s Creature From the Black Lagoon™. It was the great Joe Kubert Tarzan adaptations for DC Comics which introduced him to the worlds of ERB, and he has kept on visiting them all his life, with a special fondness for the savage world of Pellucidar.
Sarah A. Hoyt
Sarah A. Hoyt cut her teeth on her grandfather’s library of Dumas and Burroughs. The leatherbound volumes would never be the same again. But having acquired a taste for books, she went on to write them herself. Now she lives in Colorado and has close to thirty books to her credit. Her most recent work is a space opera from Baen Books: Darkship Renegades, sequel to the award-winning Darkship Thieves. There is also A Few Good Men, the first in the Earth Revolution, a sister series to the Darkship series.
Mercedes Lackey
Mercedes Lackey was born in Chicago, Illinois, on June 24, 1950. The very next day, the Korean War was declared. It is hoped that there is no connection between the two events. In 1985 her first book was published. In 1990 she met artist Larry Dixon at a small Science Fiction convention in Meridian, Mississippi, on a television interview organized by the convention. They moved to their current home, the “second weirdest house in Oklahoma,” also in 1992. She has many pet parrots and “the house is never quiet.” She is a New York Times bestselling fantasy author with over eighty books in print.
Joe R. Lansdale
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and two hundred short pieces including fiction and non-fiction. His work has been adapted to film and comics and stage plays. He has written for Batman: The Animated Series, and is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, including the Edgar, two New York Times Notable Books, nine Bram Stoker Awards, the Grinzani Cavou Prize for Literature, and many others. He also was given the opportunity to finish Tarzan: The Lost Adventure, an unfinished novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Richard A. Lupoff
Richard A. Lupoff became a leading figure in the Burroughs Revival of the 1960s when he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Canaveral Press. He was responsible for the editing and publication of many posthumous Burroughs works, including Tales of Three Planets, Tarzan and the Madman, Tarzan and the Castaways, and John Carter of Mars. His studies of Burroughs and his creations, Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure and Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision, have become standard works of scholarship and criticism. His many other books include The Great American Paperback and Writer at Large, as well as many science fiction and mystery novels, and more than 100 short stories. In recent years he has held editorial posts at Canyon Press and Surinam Turtle Press, and on magazines including Organ, Ramparts, Science Fiction Eye, and Locus.
Todd McCaffrey
Todd Johnson McCaffrey wrote his first science-fiction story when he was twelve and has been writing on and off ever since. Including the New York Times bestselling Dragon’s Fire, he has written eight books in the Pern universe both solo and in collaboration with his mother, Anne McCaffrey. His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. He is currently working on a Scottish steampunk alternate history. Visit his website at http://www.toddmccaffrey.org
Mike Resnick
Mike Resnick is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award-winner, living or dead, for short fiction. He is the winner of five Hugos, a Nebula, and other major awards in the USA, France, Japan, Poland, Croatia, and Spain. Mike is the author of seventy-one novels, more than two hundred fifty short stories, and three screenplays, and the editor of more than forty anthologies. His work has been translated into twenty-seven languages. He was the Guest of Honor at the 2012 World Science Fiction Convention.
Ralph Roberts
Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ralph Roberts have several things in common—they’re both writers, they both like Tarzan and John Carter of Mars and they both served in the same army unit, the 7th Cavalry, Custer’s old outfit. ERB served in the 1890s, out in Arizona territory, which explains the birth of Shoz-Dijiji, War Chief of the Be-don-ko-he Apaches, son of Geronimo. Ralph was with the unit in a later time of war, Vietnam. After the 7th Cav, ERB began writing Tarzan and John Carter novels, while Ralph worked with NASA during the Apollo moon-landing program, then proceeded to write more computer books than Burroughs, something over one hundred. With “Apache Lawman,” Roberts and ERB come back together again, old cavalry brothers of different mothers and separate times . . . but of one mind about that noble savage, Shoz-Dijiji—and, thus, the Black Bear lives and loves his white goddess, Wichita Billings, once more.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Kristine Kathryn Rusch read her first Tarzan novel in the summer of her twelfth year. That year she also discovered Andre Norton, Victoria Holt, and boys. It was a good year. Since then, she’s become a bestselling author whose novels have been published in fifteen languages. Her short fiction has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, which she also won for editing. For more information, please go to her website at www.kristinekathrynrusch.com.
F. Paul Wilson
F. Paul Wilson is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of forty-plus books and many short stories spanning medical thrillers, sf, horror, adventure, and virtually everything between. More than nine million copies of his books are in print in the US, and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. He also has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media. He was introduced to the worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs in high school via the Ace reprints with the cool Frazetta and Krenkel covers and devoured each new title as soon as it was released. His latest thriller, Cold City, stars the notorious urban mercenary Repairman Jack, and is the first of The Early Years Trilogy. Dark City follows soon. He currently resides at the Jersey Shore and can be found on the Web at www.repairmanjack.com.
