Lin Carter - The Man Who Loved Mars Read online

  And those minor oddities of pigmentation and eye and hair somehow blend together: they fit somehow; they look ���right. It comes over you with a weird shiver of mysterious awe that they could almost be a lost division of mankind … one more race, like the black, the brown, the yellow and the white … a race somehow lost or mislaid or strayed curiously afar in time’s forgotten dawn.

  When ChristofEsen first got here and made contact with the White Hawk nation, he recorded with amazement and wondering speculation in his journal the essential human-ness of the Martians. The very last thing the scientists had expected to find on the desert world was an intelligent indigenous race: that hoary old dream was a primitive plot concept that even the science fiction writers of the last century had long since abandoned. But there they were …

  Even today the experts have no workable theory to explain it. Any number of schools of thought exists on the subject. The followers of Cantwell argue that homo sapiens is simply the only practical design for intelligent life. They muster impressive biological reasons why any race that is intended to develop a high civilization has to evolve into an erect, warmblooded, oxygen-breathing, mammalian biped with binocular vision, an opposing thumb, and a carbon-based body chemistry. But they are really building their arguments out of a self-justification; if the only two civilized races yet discovered share these similarities, it takes on the weight of natural law.

  The followers of Diego de Renza, however, discount the whole argument due to insufficient evidence. De Renza points out that any G-type star is likely to have its own planetary system, and that the chances of life evolving on some of them are statistically overwhelming. Perhaps a million planets in the galaxy are inhabited, he teaches, and when we have encountered a few hundred more, then��� and only then���can we start talking about natural law.

  The anthropologists, and some of the more mystical archaeologists, are rather evenly divided in their opinion that some lost, forgotten, preglacial civilization colonized both worlds before succumbing to the Ice Age. One school of thought argues that Earth was colonized from Mars. The other, that Mars was settled by prehistoric Earthmen. And there is even a splinter group to claim that both planets were merely colonies of the mythical fifth planet, Aster, which destroyed itself in a nuclear war and broke up to form the Asteroid Zone.

  The one indisputable fact in all this morass of opinion is that nobody really knows for sure.

  Before the sun had reached the zenith, we approached the walls of Farad.

  I was surprised to discover that the Moon Dragon nation was a city-dwelling people. Most of the others had regressed down the long slope from urban civilization to the edges of barbarism. The Martians had once been a world empire. Ages passed, and they split into national units; with more ages the nations disintegrated first into city-states and then all the way back to wandering nomadic warrior clans.

  This too had fascinated the scholars and the scientists, giving them exciting raw material for more theory spinning. It would seem that million-year-old civilizations tended to repeat the march of history���from tribe to empire���in reverse at the close of their history.

  But Prince Kraa’s people yet dwelt within the walls of one of the age-old Martian cities. Outside of the little-known Golden Lion nation, which lives somewhere in the polar regions of the north, none of the Nine Nations still clung to urban ways.

  The city, therefore, was still inhabitable and even in repair. As we came riding up the long paved way, lined with those peculiar Martian sphinxes that look so much like enormous crouching insects of stone, we could see that the great outer wall was still standing, and we glimpsed impossibly slim towers soaring beyond.

  Dr. Keresny was alive with scholarly enthusiasm, his eyes sparkling with excitement. His lips moved slightly, as if he was already phrasing out the opening paragraphs of the monograph he would write when all this was over. 1 grinned a trifle grimly: at least he would take that much back with him. The treasure might be an empty myth, but here was a discovery of considerable scientific value.

  As we drew nearer, we could see that our first impressions of immemorial Farad were untrue. Once it had been an immense metropolis���the Babylon or the Carthage of antique Mars, perhaps. But that was very long ago. A million years had passed since that long-gone and glorious day, and the once-mighty people who still inhabited the city had shrunken into a pitiful remnant of what they had once been. Entire quarters of the city lay crumbling in ruin; sand had drifted in to choke superb boulevards lined with the chipped and broken eidolons of time-vanquished emperors.

  Only a small portion of the city was still inhabited and still kept in some semblance of repair, and that was the caravanserai area near the main gates. Far back, crowning a hilly height, the moldering pile of rubble that had once been the magnificent palace complex of ancient Farad slumped in wreckage. There, perhaps as recently as the Pleistocene, the remote ancestors of Prince Kraa had reigned in sumptuous grandeur.

  Now their descendants dwelt in a three-story stone building they might have considered little better than a hovel.

  But the wall still stood, its megalithic stone blocks, each weighing as much as a ton, so perfectly smoothed as to fit together without the use of mortar. The gates were built on the grand scale. Soaring pylons of black marble rose to the moon, like black obelisks, and the hieroglyphs were still visible upon their faces, although geological epochs had passed since they had been newly carved.

  The portals themselves were immense doors of cast bronze. Once they had been sheathed in gold plating, or perhaps covered with something akin to gold leaf. For here and there the shining metal, paper thin, still remained upon the inaccessible upper edges.

  The gates stood open, and we rode between them, entering upon a broad avenue lined with perhaps three thousand men and women and children. We rode in triumph up that avenue; banners broke from window ledges, balconies, rooftops. Again I drank in the many-throated thunder of the hai-yaa, the Salute of Kings.

  The Great House opened upon a great square like an old Roman forum. Along its front ran a great colonnade with a sort of stoa behind the row of stately columns. The arched portal was supported by two stone titans like caryatids. It was grand, surely, but the ages had not left it unscathed. Deep-cut glyphs adorned the massive pillars, and the passage of centuries had worn and pitted the sleek marble until the glyphs could scarcely be read.

  We drew up before the House of Kraa, and there in ceremonial robes stood grizzled Kuruk to greet us, his heavy face beaming. The boy, Chaka, stood with him. He had eyes only for me, the boy, in all that princely throng.

  I caught his eyes and called him to me with a gesture. Then I told the priests and chamberlains of the House to stand away, and let the boy hold the bridle of my slidar as I dismounted.

  It was an honor, of course. His eyes shone with pride, and much the same light was in the proud gaze of Kuruk.

  And so it was I came to Farad …

  A magnificent suite was placed at my disposal. My companions were to have rooms below, among the cubicles of the slaves. I told the priests and chamberlains that my friends would stay with me, and as there was plenty of room, this was no inconvenience. I thought it wiser to keep us all together; I could not see Ilsa curled shivering on a pallet, and it seemed prudent to keep Bolgov away from the natives as far as could be managed. His ignorant dislike of the People and his explosive temper might get Keresny and llsa in trouble. I wanted no duels or blood feuds to complicate our relations with our host.

  While we unpacked our gear, the Doctor was bubbling over with scholarly excitement. In truth the room was like something painstakingly reconstructed for a museum. The worn, faded old tapestries had been bright and new before Babylon was born; the tessellated pave had been designed by artisans before Egypt emerged from the Neolithic. The inscriptions on the marble walls were in a language so ancient that no one alive could read them. The very air was sweet with incense burned tens of thousands of
years ago.

  “My boy, this is fantastic! A living city, still inhabited after all these ages! My colleagues would be mad with jealousy if they knew I were here. Why, Le Corbeiller would give his right arm … And we are on the right track, by all the gods!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The treasure, of course. Didn’t you notice those black obelisks that framed the city gate?”

  I shrugged. “I saw them, yes. But I didn’t notice anything in particular out of the ordinary. Why?”

  “The inscriptions, my boy! Do you mean to say you rode past them without reading them?”

  I nodded.

  He leaned close, eyes glistening.

  “Thank heaven one of us kept his wits about him!” he chortled. “We filed through slowly enough for me to translate them, roughly, of course, but I managed to grasp the essential message.”

  His voice dropped to an awed, and somehow gloating, whisper, and he repeated the inscription:

  ” ‘Here stands Farad, that guards the road to Ilionis, the Gateway of the Gods.’ “

  And it was then, I think, that a strange forboding touched my heart…

  That evening the Prince gave a great feast in our honor. Lord Kuruk entered the suite, bearing ceremonial robes for all of us. My companions would be gowned in the blue robes of guests; but for the Jamad there were garments of another sort.

  The heavy man opened a case of fragrant winewood and drew them out with careful, reverent hands.

  “The Queens of Farad wove them over a thousand generations ago,” he said, “when the world was young.”

  Ilsa drew in her breath, marveling.

  The robes were delicate tapestries whereon were pictured scenes from the Book of Kings; each scene was done with ten thousand stitches, so fine that the eye could scarce make out any single stitch. They were done of royal silks, in colors so rich and vivid that the very blending and dyeing of them had been a lost art for countless centuries.

  Any museum in the System would trade half a dozen Rembrandts for the thing: it was a miracle of great art.

  And I was to wear it for dinner!

  Kuruk bowed and left. We cleansed ourselves of dust and began to prepare ourselves.

  Ilsa shivered. “They hate us so much! I could feel it in their eyes, as they escorted us here. All but you … They love you… But you are a Hated One too!”

  “I was once. Now I am the Jamad.”

  She regarded me curiously. “That means ‘emperor,’ doesn’t it?”

  “More or less. God-king or priest-king, something like that. Sort of like pope and emperor all in the same man. You see, the Martian people are divided into nine great clan-groups, very frequently at each other’s throats. They are united only in their veneration of the Jamad Tengru. I am temporal monarch and spiritual leader at once, and the spiritual part comes in because they regard me as the incarnation of all the Jamad Tengri who have reigned before me since time began …”

  “Not without reason, though,” Ilsa said slyly.

  I nodded reluctantly; I disliked speaking of these matters.

  “The Iron Crown,” I said. “You saw the great crystals on it. Well, they are thought records of a kind. A thought record, like the one your grandfather found, is a paper-thin wafer of metallic crystal, imperishable and indestructible. The crystals in the Crown are of the same substance, but with thousands of times the capacity.”

  I could see she understood none of this.

  “Each Jamad wears the Crown when in council or enthroned in state or when dispensing justice. The Crown is attuned to his thoughts, and the crystals record what is in his mind in those moments of high decision. When each Jamad dies, he selects his own successor and attunes the Crown to that person. The crystals bear the imprint of his mind, the sum total of his experience and something of his character and personality too. With his Power upon him the next Jamad has access to all the knowledge, the statesmanship, and the wisdom of all the emperors who reigned before him … He is all of those wise and great men, in a very real sense. And thus all Mars regards him as holy.”

  “However did they come to choose you?” she asked bluntly. Bolgov sniggered at the expression on my face. Keresny smoothly interceded.

  “The story goes that the Colonial Administration took the last native Jamad into, ah, 1 believe the euphemism is ‘protective custody.’ For his own good, of course,” he explained.

  I smiled without mirth. “Yes; just as Cortez imprisoned Montezuma for his own ‘protection.’ And made the Aztecs ransom him by filling a room with gold. Thyoma was a saintly old man and frail. He could not believe the Administrator General was as treacherous as his counselors warned; he delivered himself into the hands of the Hated Ones.”

  My face was bleak, I suppose. She shrank from the look in my eyes.

  “They tortured him with electroshock and drugged him with neopentothal. They were after treasure, of course. But Earthside drugs react unpredictably on Martians. They were killing him,” I said softly. “So I set him free, killing a guard or two in the process. I stole a skimmer and got him out; but he was dying, inch by inch. We holed up in some ruins, and I did what I could for the old man. But it was soon over.”

  Her eyes clung to my face.

  “Before a Jamad dies, he has to bestow the Crown on someone. If he dies without doing so���without performing the Ritual that attunes the telepathic receptors of the Crown to the mental frequencies of the next Jamad���then the Crown dies too. And can never be used again. The crystals would go dead, and all that those million-year-old memories, all the wisdom of ancient kings, would be lost forever.”

  I drew a deep breath.

  “I was the only one with him as he lay dying. So he passed the Crown to���me.”

  “And they … accepted you, an Earthman?” she asked in a faint, wondering voice.

  “Yes. But not easily. The priests were against it. But the warriors learned that I had slain my own people to set the old man free and that I had tended him as he lay dying. They named me Jamad, and the Princes of the nations swore fealty to me. I was willing to pass the Crown along to another and to perform the Ritual for him … for who was I, to claim the empire of Mars?”

  “But they would not let you,” Keresny said softly. I nodded slowly.

  “They refused. They said that his Power had been upon him when he chose me as Jamad. They said the wisdom of a million years of royalty spoke through his lips in that moment and that the Timeless Ones had selected me to be the deliverer who would mediate between the two worlds.”

  I laughed a bit wildly.

  “I was of Earth blood, but my own people called me ‘outlaw’ and ‘traitor,’ and my own government disowned me! I was the Jamad Tengru of all Mars, but no clan or nation called me brother! Alone in a limbo of two worlds, and I���I���am supposed to bring them together in peace!”

  “But they did accept you and came to love you!”

  “In time, yes. I tried to bring the claim of the People before the Mandate, to win simple justice for them. All we wanted was self-rule; the Earthmen could stay, the Colonies could have their land. Mars was big enough for both races, I said. But they refused to recognize my authority. They put a price on my head and tried to hunt me and those who rode with me. So there was no other course but to raise the war banner against all the occupation force, CA cops and simple Colonists as well. First, it was only Prince Thuu’s people, the Red Mountain clans, who fought at my side against the Earthmen. But before very long, the White Hawk nation joined us, and toward the end of it all, four nations had joined me in the holy war. We came surprisingly close to winning too, but the Hated Ones were too strong for us. We had nothing but bronze swords and spears and the strength of our hatred.”

  1 laughed bitterly.

  “That doesn’t count for much, against beta cannons and fission bombs.”

  “But now you have come back, and new supporters have joined your cause,” the Doctor reminded me sof
tly.

  I nodded. “Yes. Prince Kraa has recognized me, and the warriors of the Moon Dragon nation will join the four nations, and the war can begin again.”

  “And where will it all end this time?” the girl asked, somberly. “In more fighting and killing���in more dying?”

  “Yes. But this time, before the war banner is lifted, I will enlist all of the nations. Prince Kraa will dispatch emissaries to those nations that have not yet joined in my cause. When we are done with this sorry business of the Ilionis treasure, I will raise all of Mars in a holy war. And we outnumber the Earthmen by many hundreds to one.”

  Keresny nodded sympathetically. “But they still have beta cannons and fission bombs,” he said.

  “True. But this time they will not take me alive, thus ending the battle. This time we will fight to the last living warrior. And I can’t believe that even the Mandate will be able to stand before the massed weight of public opinion. Genocide is the dirtiest word in the lexicon of politics. They would have to murder a whole world to stop us.”

  I broke off as the door swung inward, displaying a pompous chamberlain. It was time for the feast.

  8. The Hall of the Moons

  The feasting was held in a vast, column-thronged chamber that resembled the great hypostyle hall of Karnak at Thebes.

  The Hall of the Moons, it was called. Two beaten discs of ancient silver adorned one wall, their dully gleaming surfaces fantastic with curling arabasques and complicated symbols. The People have accumulated a famous ephe-meris of the lunar cycles, for to them, with their great, light-gathering eyes, the dim, small, hurtling moons are visible. And from the complex orbital patterns the twin moons weave, their sorcerers and shamans foretell the future. The science of the inoons is to the People what astrology once was to the primal nations of the Earth (and still is to some benighted souls).