Swords of Waar Page 2

  I’d just finished describing One-Eye, the big alpha male Aarurrh who had been the leader of the hunting party, when Eli burst out laughing.

  “Tiger-Taurs? Are you—?” He laughed again. “Shit, sweetheart, you really had me going there for a while.”

  I blinked at him, pulling myself out of my memories. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sayin’ you picked the wrong guy to tell somebody else’s story to.” He motioned toward the bookcases in the living room. “I have read all of those, y’know.”

  I still didn’t get it. “Somebody else’s story?”

  Delia was frowning too. “Be nice, Eli. Jane’s been through a lot. Don’t—”

  “Yeah, but she ain’t been through this!”

  I balled my fists. I didn’t expect them to believe me. But I didn’t expect them to be so bare-faced about it either. “Are you calling me a liar?”

  Eli held up his hands. “Now now, don’t get your panties in a twist. I’m not saying you’re lying. Maybe you got knocked on the head and you dreamed a book you read once.” He laughed again and shook his head. “I’ll give you credit for picking an obscure one, though. Most people haven’t even heard of that one, let alone read it.”

  He hadn’t calmed me down one bit. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t hit my head, Eli. I didn’t read about it in a book. It all happened. To me. Where do you think I’ve been for the past six months?”

  Eli looked me in the eye for a long second, then sighed and put down his drink. He stood up. “Wait here.”

  Delia and I watched him go back into the house, then exchanged a glance.

  “I’m sorry, Jane. It usually takes him to the second bottle before he’s this ornery.”

  I shrugged. “It’s fine. I didn’t think you’d believe me. I just had to tell it is all.”

  “Well, when he comes back you can tell the rest of it. I want to find out what happens next.”

  There it was. I could hear the pity in her voice. She was being kinder about it than Eli was, but she didn’t believe me any more than he did. She thought I was sick or something. I drank off another shot and turned away from her, looking up at the sky. There were a lot more stars out now. I had a lot more to wish on.

  After about five minutes of silent sitting, Eli came back through the door.

  “Here it is.” He held out a book. “Knew I had it somewhere.”

  I took it and looked at it. It was battered old paperback. The title didn’t mean too much to me—Savages of the Red Planet by Norman Prescott Kline—but the illustration made my heart do a back flip. Against a Ty-D-Bol blue sky, a big, square-jawed hero wearing nothing but a loincloth and an armored sleeve was fighting two half-man half-tiger centaurs, while a hot purple-skinned chick looked on all wide-eyed in the background. I turned it over. A sentence on the back jumped out at me. “Stranded on Mars, which its inhabitants call Wharr…”

  CHAPTER THREE

  HOPE!

  I stared at the word for for a full minute, my mind spinning like a stripped clutch, then flipped the book over again and stared at the cover for another minute. The cen-tigers in the painting looked absolutely nothing like Aarurrh. They looked more like zebras with tiger-faced men where their necks should be, but combined with the armored sleeve, the purple chick in the corner, and motherfucking “Wharr” on the back cover, it was kinda hard to buy that it was all just some crazy coincidence.

  I looked up at Eli, my jaw hanging by one hinge. “What is this? What the fuck is this?”

  He sat back down in his chair. “That’s the story you been tellin’. Except it was written in 1909 or so, by the guy whose name’s on the cover, Norman Prescott Kline.” He chuckled. “I still don’t know how you got your hands on one of those. There ain’t many copies around anymore.”

  “I’ve never seen this before. I told you.”

  “Well then maybe you heard someone talking about it some time.” He nodded toward the book. “Lancer brought that out in the mid ’60s, hoping to ride the Conan wave, but it tanked. Everybody thought it was just another Burroughs rip-off. Thing is, a lot of the hard-core fans think Burroughs ripped off Kline.”

  “Uh, who’s Burroughs?”

  Eli rolled his eyes. “You never heard of Edgar Rice Burroughs? The guy who invented Tarzan, and John Carter of Mars, and Carson of Venus? One of the fathers of science fiction?”

  I shrugged. I’d heard of Tarzan, of course, but the rest of it meant nothing to me. I was more of a true crime gal. “I guess I have.”

  “Kline wrote Savages in 1909 and it was serialized in some crap pulp magazine, and Kline fans claim Burroughs must have read it before he wrote his own Mars stories.” He sipped his tequila. “Anyhow, Kline’s version didn’t see the light of day again ’til Lancer Books went searching for old pulps to repackage in the sixties. Like I said, it didn’t do too well for ’em—though it’s a collectable now.”

  I shook my head, wishing I hadn’t had quite so many shots on top of so many beers. It felt like the world had just pulled a rabbit out of a hat, and I couldn’t figure out the trick. Had I made it all up after all? Had I heard somebody talking about this cheap-ass book back in the day, and just dug it out of my subconscious? I could swear I’d been to Waar. Hell, I had the scars to prove it, didn’t I? But were they proof? I could’a got those scars anywhere. Maybe I’d hit my head when those dogs swarmed in and I fell in the cave. Maybe I’d spent the last six months in some kind of schizophrenic dream and I’d just now came out of it. But, no. That would mean Lhan wasn’t real, and I wasn’t ready to believe that. Not yet.

  I held up the book. “Can I read this?”

  Eli raised his glass. “Enjoy. Just go easy on the spine. It’s the only one I got.”

  I got up, then realized I was being rude. “Uh, sorry. I—I just—I really want to…”

  Delia waved a hand. “Go ahead, Jane. Go on. There’s a bed made up in the Airstream. We’ll see you in the morning.”

  I gave her a grateful look, then saluted Eli with the book. “Thanks, Eli. I don’t… Well, goodnight.”

  “Night, Jane.”

  “Get some rest, girl.”

  ***

  I didn’t get any rest. I read that book cover to cover in about six hours, then turned off the light inside the Airstream around 4am, but that don’t mean I slept. I didn’t. I lay there staring at the curved metal ceiling of the trailer until the sun came up, seven little words running through my head on an endless tape loop—Norman Prescott Kline had been to Waar.

  I saw why the book had been a flop. It was a terrible story. Boring and predictable and corny at the same time. After the civil war, Captain Jack Wainwright, southern gentleman and officer of the Confederacy, heads out west to escape a bunch of evil carpetbagging creditors, and finds a strange object while prospecting for silver in Nevada. The thing transports him to “Wharr,” which for some reason he thinks is Mars, and he falls in love with a local girl—a princess named Alla-An, who immediately gets kidnapped by an evil prince, and for the rest of the book, Captain Jack chases the bad guy from place to place, fighting his minions and trying to rescue Alla-An. Then in the end he saves her and they get married, even though they’ve said, like, three words to each other in the whole book.

  Anyway, the fact that it was a stupid story didn’t really matter, because behind all the noble speeches and the other hero bullshit, every detail about Waar was just how I remembered it. It was all there, the Aarurrh, the airships, the names of things. The princes were called Dhanans, the birds everybody rode were called krae, the big-ass gila-monster pit-bull bastards were called vurlaks. Some things sounded a little different. For instance, Kline spelled Ora’s capital city Armlau, where I’d heard it as Ormolu, but shit, close enough, right?

  All that book did was make me sure that this guy had been to Ora, and if he had, he might know the way back. I had to find him. I’d beat it out of him if I had to.

  Around 6:30, I heard the back door
of the house open, and boots crunching across the gravel of the yard. I got up and looked out a port hole. Eli was tip-toeing toward his truck, beer cooler and jacket in hand. I pulled on my jeans and t-shirt and stepped out barefoot, holding the book.

  “Hey, Eli.”

  “Shit. I was tryin’ to let you sleep.”

  “Forget it. I was awake. I, uh, finished the book.”

  He threw his jacket and cooler in the truck. “Uh-huh. Like it?”

  “Ha. It was shit, but… but it was right.” I held up the book. “Where can I find this guy? I need to talk to him.”

  Eli snorted. “Better find yourself a seance, then. Kline died broke sometime in the fifties, raving ’til the end that Burroughs and all the rest had ripped him off. Never even got to see that book published.”

  I sagged. Of course the guy was dead. He wrote the fucking thing in 1909. It had just seemed so immediate that I’d forgot, like nothing had changed on Waar for a hundred years.

  “Well, does he have any family, then? Anybody I could talk to?”

  Eli laughed and swung up into the truck. “I haven’t exactly made the man my life’s work, girl. I only know what I read in the fan mags, back in the day.” He pointed toward the house. “You wanna look him up, there’s a computer in Delia’s office. Go nuts.”

  The look on his face as he drove away said he thought I already had.

  ***

  I helped Delia feed her three horses and all the various dogs before she went off to work—she was an inventory manager for a company that rented camera cranes and lighting rigs to movie people—then made myself a cup of coffee and a bowl of Cheerios and sat down at her computer.

  I am not what you’d call computer savvy. I’ve never owned one. Always felt riding a Harley with a laptop in my saddle bag was a little… wrong. But I have used one before. Whenever I’ve had to do any job hunting I’d go to the public library and use theirs and check the want ads, and I borrowed a friend’s computer after Don died to sell his parts bike on eBay. Anyway, it wasn’t hard to get the hang of it, and pretty soon I had a list of Google results for Norman Prescott Kline.

  It got harder from there, slogging through sites owned by people with similar names, store sites offering his books for sale, forums for science fiction fans with post after post by people who really needed to get out more tearing each other new assholes over the most minuscule bullshit. I wasted an hour paging through those before I realized I wasn’t going to find anything useful there.

  I found a Wikipedia page for him, but it didn’t have much more than what Eli had told me and his bibliography. Finally I found a fan site dedicated to him. It had a picture of him—a scrawny little guy with spectacles and a big mustache—and a more detailed biography than the Wikipedia page had. It also mentioned that his granddaughter, someone named Leigh Gardner, maintained a museum of his memorabilia at his old house, which was in Altadena, California. There was even an address and phone number.

  I stared at the phone number for a minute, my heart pounding, then picked up Delia’s phone and dialed. Someone answered in Spanish. They’d never heard of Norman Prescott Kline. I cursed. The number had been changed. Had Leigh Gardner moved? Did somebody else live in Kline’s house? Was it even still there? There was only one way to find out.

  I googled the address, which was on a street called Holliston, and scribbled down the directions, then went out to the yard. There were a couple of bikes out there that actually worked. I picked one, and was hunting around for a helmet when I realized what I was doing. If I found a teleport gem, I wasn’t coming back. I guess I coulda left a note telling Eli to pick up his bike at Leigh Gardner’s house if I didn’t come back, but that seemed a pretty lame thank you for all his hospitality.

  Instead I took ten bucks from the top of Eli’s dresser, grabbed my hoodie, and went back to the computer to look at bus routes. It didn’t feel right to be charging back to Waar on the Metro, but it was more right than stealing Eli’s bike. I left the copy of Savages of the Red Planet on the kitchen table along with a note:

  Delia and Eli,

  Think I found a way back 2 Waar. If I don’t come back U know I did. Thanks for everything. Especially the book!

  Jane

  P.S. Took $10

  ***

  The Kline house was the kind of quaint, two-story bungalow that yuppies paint dark green or deep red and fill with fake craftsman furniture. No yuppies had got to this one yet. It was white, with a white picket fence and a white wicker porch swing, all a bit dusty and old-ladyish.

  So was the gal who answered my knock. She was shaped like like an eggplant, narrow at the top and wide at the bottom, and very pink and grandmotherly. She wore a gray twin set and pearls, with white meringue-pie hair and a cardigan around her shoulders though it was the middle of summer. From what I could see beyond her, the house looked as dusty and old-fashioned as she was—couches with afghans over the back, dainty side tables with candy dishes, beaded lamps, a fireplace, the works.

  She gave me a nearsighted once-over—holding for a while on my hoodie and the Jack Daniel’s t-shirt I’d borrowed from Eli—then smiled like she was afraid I was going to set her house on fire. “May—may I help you?”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it. I’d been so busy praying that the old girl had one of the glowing clock-thingies lying around that I hadn’t thought how I was going to ask her about it once I got here. “Say, did your grandfather leave a teleport device lying around somewhere?” probably wasn’t going to cut it.

  I finally managed a grin. “Uh, hi. Is this Norman Prescott Kline’s old house?”

  “Yes, it is. But—”

  “Oh great. Well, I’m a big fan, and I heard you had a—a kind of museum here. Of all his stuff. I was hoping….” I trailed off as I saw her face go all sad and apologetic.

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry.” She sounded like Julia Child. “I thought everyone knew by now. I no longer maintain the museum. There just weren’t enough people coming. I—I hope you haven’t come far?”

  “You wouldn’t believe. But, listen. I don’t suppose you’d make an exception since I’m here already. I won’t take too much of your time. I just want to see if—”

  She looked like she was going to cry, she was so sorry. “But I’m afraid there isn’t anything to see. I auctioned off all of my grandfather’s effects five years ago. It was in the news. If you want to see them, you’ll have to go to—” She frowned. “Oh, I don’t know where it went—Iowa or some place like that.”

  I stared at her, open-mouthed. “Iowa?”

  “Iowa. Idaho. I don’t remember now. I’m terribly sorry. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for you.”

  She gave me another sad smile and started to close the door. I stopped it with a hand.

  “Please. Just one more question. Did they take everything? Are you sure they didn’t leave anything behind? Something that might have looked like a—a glowing clock, or a hood ornament, or a lamp?”

  Her lips pursed like she was going to get mad, but then she pulled up short and looked at me again, kinda uneasy. “Are you talking about the transmigration ray?”

  My heart leapt. That’s what Norman Prescott Kline had called the teleport gems. “Yes! The transmigration ray! I need to find one! Do you have one?”

  I realized as soon as I said it that I should have been more discreet. That uneasy look spread all over her face and became the same kind of smile Eli and Delia had given me when I was telling them about going to another planet—that tight little, “Get the net!” grimace. I was getting sick of it.

  “You do know that my grandfather wrote works of fiction. There is no such thing as a transmigration ray. He made it up.”

  Maybe I could have played it off and said I knew it was fake, that what I meant was that I was looking for a “prop,” as a memento, but I could tell, like a transvestite can tell when the red-necks in the corner have clocked her as a guy, that there was no putting the cat back in the bag. Nothin
g I could say now was going to convince Leigh Gardner I wasn’t crazy, so I went for it.

  “That’s not true, and you of all people should know it! Norman Prescott Kline went to Waar, and he used the transmigration ray to do it!”

  She backed up like I was going to hit her. I eased back, holding up my hands.

  “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to shout, but come on. Even if you don’t believe it, I bet there were rumors. Family stories. He must have told somebody. Was it you?”

  Her face got very stiff. I’d hit a nerve. She started to close the door. “I will not discuss my grandfather in this way. He was a very sick man. Goodbye.”

  “Sick? Ha!” I shoved my foot in the door. “So there were stories! He did say he’d gone to Waar. Did he say how? Did he say he had a transmigration ray?”

  Her pink face was turning red as she tried to crush my foot and close the door. “Please, if you don’t leave, I will call the police!”

  I was practically crying with frustration. I swear I put my hands together and pleaded like a schoolgirl begging for a pony. “Lady, Mrs. Gardner, please. I don’t want to scare you, and I don’t want to steal anything. I just want to look at the transmigration ray. If it doesn’t do what I think it will, I’ll leave. If it does… I’ll leave even quicker. Please. It’s the quickest way to get me out of your hair.”

  Leigh stopped pushing on the door and looked me in the eye. “Nothing like that was found among Grandfather’s things. He claimed he had one, and said he intended use it to go to Waar and live forever before he got old and frail, but he never produced it. He died in his bed at eighty-one.”

  My heart sank. “And nobody’s ever found one?”

  “Never. Now would you please go?”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry.”

  I pulled my foot out and the door slammed. I sighed and just stood there, head down, boiling with frustration. Was she lying? Did she know where the teleport gem was but didn’t want to tell me? I kinda doubted it. She didn’t seem like the lying type. Kline must have hid it before he died. Or maybe he lost it. Either way, I was at a dead end. Leigh Gardner didn’t know where it was. Was I going to have to schlep all the way out to Iowa? That would take weeks! And there was no guarantee the thing would be there once I got there. And even if it was—and it worked—would Lhan still be alive after all that time when I got back to Waar?