A SWORDSMAN OF MARS
by Lin Carter
THE MYSTERIOUS MESSAGE
During July and August, when the heat and humidity make living in the city somewhat less than pleasant, I am accustomed to renting a cabin in the woods around Lake Carlopa in upstate New York. I simply carry along food and cigarettes, plenty of books to read, and my favorite dog, a bull terrier named McGurk. We explore the woods and swim in the lake, and enjoy the rustic solitude and the scenery, which is spectacular.
The nights grow chilly, regardless of the month, so after dinner I build a fire in the big fieldstone fireplace and stretch out with a book, while Gurk basks on the hearth, dreaming his doggy dreams.
On this particular occasion I had brought along several new books I had not yet read, and a few old friends with whom I wished to familiarize myself again—Jack Williamson’s Legion of Time, Van Vogt’s The Book of Ptath, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, and some volumes of verse.
On the night it happened, July 17th, I had been browsing through the verses of one of the most interesting of all the poets of the East, the Syrian poet Abu’l-Ala, who wrote his lovely and haunting quatrains in the last years of the tenth century, a generation before the birth of Omar Khayyam, whom he so much resembles. In his quatrains he examines the claims of religion and mysticism and explores the mysteries of life and death and of the life beyond. I remember being struck by two quatrains in particular, these two:
I cannot explain why, but those lines stirred profound depths of thought within me. I took up the yellow ruled tablet I keep close to hand when reading in case I wish to make a note or jot down a quotation for future use, and the pen that lay beside it. These I rested against my knee, and, with uncapped pen in hand, fell into a somber reverie.
My body was utterly relaxed, my mind clear and lucid but deep in thought. Then there fell over me something strange and eerie, a trance-like state, a waking dream. For I was wide awake and fully aware of my surroundings. I could hear the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece, the rustling of leaves in the wind, the crackling of the fire, the whines of my dog as he chased rabbits in his dream.
Without volition, my hand began to move rapidly across the page of the tablet, inditing line after line in a neat, tight script very very unlike my own ungainly scrawl. I was aware of this but it neither frightened nor concerned me. Page after page of handwriting followed in this manner.
Two hours later, or a bit more, I aroused myself from this weird trance, drenched in perspiration and shaking with exhaustion, my right hand and arm numb and trembling from strain. I got up and went to bed, falling at once into a deep and dreamless sleep from which I awoke the next morning, rested and refreshed. Only then, over a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs and Canadian bacon and buttered toast, did I read what my hand had written.
It was the opening pages of the book you are holding at this moment, four or five thousand words of clear, legible handwriting in a hand not my own.
I have no explanation for this, nor do I really expect anyone to believe me. The phenomenon is well known, and a copious literature exists upon it. It is called automatic writing. The psychologists have one explanation for it, involving the creative powers of the subconscious mind; the occultists and spiritualists have another, concerning communications by disembodied spirits in the next life.
I have no explanation to offer, and cannot quite accept either of the alternative answers given by science and religion.
Night after night thereafter, at the same time, again there came upon me that uncanny waking sleep, and each morning more and more of the narrative had written itself.
To this account, I have but one more thing to add. My friend Dr. Kenneth Franklin, the astronomer in residence at New York’s famous Hayden Planetarium, told me in answer to my question that the fourteen days beginning on the night of July 17th are the period of the year when the planet Mars comes closest to the Earth.
—LIN CARTER
Chapter I
On Another World
My name is Jad Tedron, dator or prince of Zorad on the planet you call Mars, but which we who roam its dying surface know by the name of Barsoom.
But I was not born Jad Tedron and neither is Zorad truly the city of my birth. My story is a strange one and may indeed be unique in the annals of human experience, for aught I know. I have encountered many mysteries in my life upon the Red Planet which no one can readily explain, and I least of all. But I shall narrate here the tale of my adventure as best I can, confident in the knowledge that no one can do any better than his best . . .
To begin, then: I was born in a town called Logansville in the Texas panhandle. My father, Matthew Dexter, was a physician who moved to this town after graduating from a small medical school in St. Louis. Here he met and came to love the woman who, in time, became my mother. She was a lovely, gracious woman, the daughter of the town banker, but as she died in introducing me into this world, I am afraid that all my memories of her are merely second-hand.
My father’s practice ranged over a hundred square miles of arid, sun-baked prairie, and very often I did not see him from dawn to dusk, and in lieu of any other playmate I was forced to amuse myself not only by inventing my own games but also a host of imaginary playmates to enjoy them with.
These were lonely years, as you can imagine, but they were happy years as well. We were not poor, since my mother had inherited a comfortable income from my banker grandfather. Just before my high school graduation, however, there came upon us that phenomenon known as the Great Depression, and the doors of the Logansville bank closed forever upon the stocks and bonds my grandfather had so assiduously gathered for all those years. At one stroke my father was made penniless, and gone were all his dreams of sending me to college and then, perhaps, on to medical school, so that I might carry on in his footsteps in the practice of that profession which has always seemed to me the noblest and most useful of any known to man, the healing of sickness, the comforting of the ill or injured.
I found a job as a roustabout with a small, rundown traveling circus which carried me, in the years that followed, the length and breadth of Texas and Oklahoma and even Kansas. This unlikely profession was not one of my choosing, but I soon came to love the cheap, garish, carefree life of the circus, and with my strapping inches and rugged physique, it was a profession for which nature, if not inclination, had ably prepared me.
My father never quite recovered from the loss of his fortunes, and although I weekly sent home what few dollars I could spare from my meagre earnings, he began to fail, it was not so much a matter of bodily health, for he had always been robust and hearty, with the stamina of two men, as it was the results of the black mood of melancholy and the feeling that life itself had defeated him. He died soon after my twenty-first birthday. I made my last trip home to the small town which had nurtured me in my boyhood, to bury him . . .
He sleeps forever under the green sod of the small country church beside my mother. God bless them both, and may their eternal sleep ever be bright with joyous dreams.