When the Green Star Calls
Lin Carter
Part 1
THE BOOK OF KARN THE HUNTER
Chapter 1
THE VOICE FROM BEYOND
Night after night, I heard that strange and inward call. It sang deep within me, as I tossed and turned, striving to sleep. It called and beckoned within my troubled dreams.
From the night sky it came. From the wintry dark, where cold stars blazed like ice-blue diamonds strewn upon black velvet. From the depths of space itself … from the farthest corner of the universe … where a Green Star flamed and a weird world hung amid the void.
Like some siren, calling from the dark and silent abyss between the stars, it sang. Exquisite and pure was the crystalline music of that siren’s song. It pulled at my heart; it sang within my very brain.
Only I alone, of all men, could hear the luring music of that voice calling from beyond; for only I, of all men, had voyaged thither, swift as disembodied thought, to that far and fantastic world of marvel and mystery. There, upon that strange world of eternal mists, of titanic trees and jewel-box cities, I had been born anew in the body of a gigantic warrior of legend. Together, he and I had embarked on the strangest adventure ever told, had ventured deep into the mist-veiled world, had loved and lost the most beautiful of princesses.
He had died, there on the World of the Green Star.
I—I had been drawn back across the star-spaces, to my empty envelope of flesh, to the world of my birth.
I was nearly dead when they aroused me from my trance-like slumbers. For too long had my wandering spirit been absent from my slumbering body. Almost had the dark gates of Death opened to receive me… but not quite.
For I still lived; but never could I return.
For weeks the doctors hovered about me, thrusting their needles deep into my veins, helping me to regain my withered strength, my exhausted vitality. During the enforced leisure of my long convalescence I passed the weary hours setting down in my journal an account of the marvels and mysteries I had witnessed on my journey to the Green Star, and the perilous adventures I had survived on that cloud-enveloped world of strange monsters and even stranger men.
Now, at last, they pronounced me fit and whole again. Or as fit and whole as any man may be, who has been confined to his wheelchair, a hopeless cripple since childhood.
The narrative of my explorations and exploits on the World of the Green Star I have locked away in a secret vault. No eye but mine shall ever look upon it until after my death; then the vault may be opened, the narrative brought to light—and the world may make of it what it will.
The savants will scoff at its fantastic marvels, and denounce it as the ravings of a lunatic. The men of science will put it down as an amateur’s venture into extravagant fiction; men of sanity and logic will ascribe its origin to the cravings of a helpless cripple to play the part of a man of action, if only on the written page.
The world may think what it likes of my tale. Only I shall ever know the truth of it, and the beauty of Niamh, Princess of Phaolon, whom I wooed and won in the body of another man, and in his name.
I do not mean ever to return to the Green Star; there is nothing for me to go back to. Nothing but futility and pain and sorrow… sorrow of broken dreams, the pain of a lost love, the futility of striving for that which cannot be regained.
Yet night after night…I hear the Green Star call!
Sometimes I ask myself, why did I record that narrative of my strange adventures on a distant world, since I mean never to voyage there again?
Perhaps it is, simply, that I wished to preserve the memory of those weird, unearthly experiences, before they began to fade from my memory—their brilliant colors dimming, like the fresh hues of a withering flower. I wanted to record it all as I remembered it, the awe and beauty, the strangeness and terror, the marvelous adventure only I had lived,
But now I am not sure; it may well be that to relive the marvels and mysteries of my venture into the unknown was a symbolic return to the Green Star—a voyage into memory, to retrace the voyage through space that I have sworn never to perform again.
My reasons are complex and illogical. But, after all, I am only a man. Logic is cold argument in matters of the human heart.
The trouble, quite simply, is this; I had ventured to the World of the Green Star, a disembodied spirit, and thereon had found a body awaiting my coming—or the coming of some other spirit from the vast deep. That body I entered, slipping into it as a hand enters a waiting glove. And thus I assumed the body and name and identity of a mighty hero of the mythic past, the great warrior Chong, whose spirit had been severed from its body by the malignant spells of an envious magician and cast away to drift forever among the nameless stars.
In that body I had loved the Princess of Phaolon—Niamh the Fair—and she had returned my love!
For love of her I had been thrust into a thousand perils, battling terrific monsters and wicked men to protect the flowerlike beauty who went ever at my side.
But in the end I had betrayed the child-woman I loved. I had failed of her trust, there at the last. Trapped among the outlaws of the sky-tall trees, helpless to face the wrath of the Amazon girl, Siona, I had been struck down in the hour of ultimate peril. And I had died, there on the World of the Green Star… leaving my princess helpless and alone amid a thousand terrors, hunted on all sides by merciless and ruthless enemies… while my sad soul went drifting back to the body it had left behind, on the planet of its birth!
How could I return to that far world again—and for what reason? To float, a disembodied spirit, in homage before the tomb of the girl I loved? Or to look on, helplessly, as she struggled against dangers and foes against which my hovering spirit was but a wisp of air?
These things were undeniably true—yet reason and sanity and logic are poor solace for a tormented heart. By day the memory of my lost love haunted my waking hours and by night, the Green Star called like a siren through my dreams…
Life on the planet of my birth held little to interest me. True, I am young and handsome, and wealthy—as most men measure wealth. The first is an accident of heredity, the second a matter of inheritance—neither have anything to do with me.
Crippled with polio as a child, in the years before the perfection of the Salk vaccine, I could live out my years in comfortable boredom, surrounded by every luxury that money can buy. The fortune of my father, the country estate of my family, these both are mine to enjoy. But I chafe against the weary futility of this life of cushioned ease; I yearn to be thrust into the wilderness, pitting my strength and courage and cunning against a thousand perils. For only in such moments have I found life worth living.
I was born for the life of wandering adventure… but fate chained me to the body of a hopeless cripple.
It was this longing for escape that first drove me to pursue the curious art the Oriental sages call eckankar—soul-travel—the liberation of the astral body. The secrets of that lost art were set down in Old Uighur in a strange and precious book written immeasurable ages before Narmer the Lion welded the Two Lands together under one crown, and Egypt was born.
With the resources of vast wealth mine to draw upon at will, I commissioned agents to scour the East for any trace of that age-lost and world-forgotten book. Seven years and two hundred thousand dollars later, it was found in an obscure, minor lamasery. Lost in the confusion when the Dalai Lama and his court fled the invading Red Chinese for refuge in India, the ancient codex had gone astray.
But wealth can open many a long-closed door. And thus, at last, the mysterious Kan Chan Ga came into my hands. In those parchment pages, a prehistoric sage had set down the occult wisdom of a forgotten civilization… with time, I made that wisdom mine.