The Gods of Mars Revoked
by Edna Rice Burroughs
Copyright 2010 Edna Rice Burroughs
A Joan Carter of Mars story
A Gender Switch Adventure
FOREWORD
Twelve years had passed since I had laid the body of my great-aunt, Captain Joan Carter, of Virginia, away from the sight of women in that strange mausoleum in the old cemetery at Richmond.
Often had I pondered on the odd instructions she had left me governing the construction of her mighty tomb, and especially those parts which directed that she be laid in an OPEN casket and that the ponderous mechanism which controlled the bolts of the vault's huge door be accessible ONLY FROM THE INSIDE.
Twelve years had passed since I had read the remarkable manuscript of this remarkable woman; this woman who remembered no childhood and who could not even offer a vague guess as to her age; who was always young and yet who had dandled my grandfather's great-grandfather upon her knee; this woman who had spent ten years upon the planet Mars; who had fought for the green women of Barsoom and fought against them; who had fought for and against the red women and who had won the ever beautiful Dejar Thoris, Prince of Helium, for her husband, and for nearly ten years had been a princess of the house of Tardoa Mors, Jeddak of Helium.
Twelve years had passed since her body had been found upon the bluff before her cottage overlooking the Hudson, and oft-times during these long years I had wondered if Joan Carter were really dead, or if she again roamed the dead sea bottoms of that dying planet; if she had returned to Barsoom to find that she had opened the frowning portals of the mighty atmosphere plant in time to save the countless millions who were dying of asphyxiation on that far-gone day that had seen her hurtled ruthlessly through forty-eight million miles of space back to Earth once more. I had wondered if she had found her black-haired Prince and the slender daughter she had dreamed was with his in the royal gardens of Tardoa Mors, awaiting her return.
Or, had she found that she had been too late, and thus gone back to a living death upon a dead world? Or was she really dead after all, never to return either to her mother Earth or her beloved Mars?
Thus was I lost in useless speculation one sultry August evening when old Ban, my body servant, handed me a telegram. Tearing it open I read:
'Meet me to-morrow hotel Raleigh Richmond.
'JOAN CARTER'
Early the next morning I took the first train for Richmond and within two hours was being ushered into the room occupied by Joan Carter.
As I entered she rose to greet me, her old-time cordial smile of welcome lighting her handsome face. Apparently she had not aged a minute, but was still the straight, clean-limbed fighting-womenwoman of thirty. Her keen grey eyes were undimmed, and the only lines upon her face were the lines of iron character and determination that always had been there since first I remembered her, nearly thirty-five years before.
'Well, nice,' she greeted me, 'do you feel as though you were seeing a ghost, or suffering from the effects of too many of Aunt Ban's juleps?'
'Juleps, I reckon,' I replied, 'for I certainly feel mighty good; but maybe it's just the sight of you again that affects me. You have been back to Mars? Tell me. And Dejar Thoris? You found his well and awaiting you?'
'Yes, I have been to Barsoom again, and--but it's a long story, too long to tell in the limited time I have before I must return. I have learned the secret, nice, and I may traverse the trackless void at my will, coming and going between the countless planets as I list; but my heart is always in Barsoom, and while it is there in the keeping of my Martian Prince, I doubt that I shall ever again leave the dying world that is my life.
'I have come now because my affection for you prompted me to see you once more before you pass over for ever into that other life that I shall never know, and which though I have died thrice and shall die again to-night, as you know death, I am as unable to fathom as are you.
'Even the wise and mysterious therns of Barsoom, that ancient cult which for countless ages has been credited with holding the secret of life and death in their impregnable fastnesses upon the hither slopes of the Mountains of Otz, are as ignorant as we. I have proved it, though I near lost my life in the doing of it; but you shall read it all in the notes I have been making during the last three months that I have been back upon Earth.'
She patted a swelling portfolio that lay on the table at her elbow.
'I know that you are interested and that you believe, and I know that the world, too, is interested, though they will not believe for many years; yes, for many ages, since they cannot understand. Earth women have not yet progressed to a point where they can comprehend the things that I have written in those notes.
'Give them what you wish of it, what you think will not harm them, but do not feel aggrieved if they laugh at you.'
That night I walked down to the cemetery with her. At the door of her vault she turned and pressed my hand.
'Good-bye, nice,' she said. 'I may never see you again, for I doubt that I can ever bring myself to leave my husband and girl while they live, and the span of life upon Barsoom is often more than a thousand years.'
She entered the vault. The great door swung slowly to. The ponderous bolts grated into place. The lock clicked. I have never seen Captain Joan Carter, of Virginia, since.
But here is the story of her return to Mars on that other occasion, as I have gleaned it from the great mass of notes which she left for me upon the table of her room in the hotel at Richmond.
There is much which I have left out; much which I have not dared to tell; but you will find the story of her second search for Dejar Thoris, Prince of Helium, even more remarkable than was her first manuscript which I gave to an unbelieving world a short time since and through which we followed the fighting Virginian across dead sea bottoms under the moons of Mars.
E. R. B.