Paradise Tales (2 page)

“Pre-Hays Code,” Amy murmured, amused.

Another blip.

Blix is now wearing a helmet, the hollowed-out head of a Thark. There’s bits hanging down, and speckles of gore on his shoulders, but Blix looks bemused. He starts forward in surprise.

The silver screen fills with the image of a woman. Her head is lowered. Then suddenly she looks up, jerks in quick time as if the film were speeded up. The audience giggled. But not like they do at Princess Beloved in
Intolerance
. This was a nervous blurting chuckle. Because one stony stare from that woman and something around your heart stopped.

The Incomparable Jahde Isthor
, said the titles.

Think Garbo, or Hepburn, but with no makeup. No 1920s bee-stung lips, no ornate metal twirls to cover the nipples. The cheekbones are too high, too large, and the eyes look like a plastic surgeon has pulled them too far back, all the way to the ears.

THE PRINCESS OF MARS!

Her tongue flickers like she’s tasting the air. She wears what looks like a cap of snow white feathers.

The camera pulls back and she’s naked, too, but her pudenda have a fan of white feathers clamped over them.

Amy giggled. “She looks like a stripper.”

The Princess sees Herman, and all the feathers on top of her head stand up, like the crest of a cockatoo.

Jahde Isthor was no kind of actress. She bounced forward, a kind of bunny-hop, and you could see her glance down at the floor.

She was looking for her mark.

The hero moves closer to her and bows, but she isn’t looking at him. She’s peering right into the camera, as if wondering what it is.

Right, first find your deformed Greta Garbo and make sure she can hop. Acting might be well down your list of priorities.

That’s what I’m thinking when, gathering herself up, Jahde suddenly jumps two-footed like a giant robin onto the top of a table. She reaches up for a hanging lamp and under her arms is a web of skin, like she has residual wings. They’re tufted with flightless feathers. Jahde Isthor holds up the lamp and points it at the human.

The camera looks at his illuminated legs, his genitalia held in an unflinching gaze.

Our hero’s face moves to speak and a title panel intervenes.

I am a man but not of this world.

“This is unbelievable,” said Amy.

I am Herman, Lord of the Tharks.

At that point, the audience just loses it. They howl.

The camera eyes up the Princess’s legs. Her knees double back in the wrong direction and she has the thick thigh muscles of a swan. Her shins are as long and thin as a walking stick, covered with scales. She has the feet of a whooping crane.

“It’s different from the books,” I said. “She laid eggs, but she didn’t have feathers. She had ordinary legs.”

“She laid eggs? Yuck!”

“Her name is different, too. All the names are different.”

Jahde Isthor looks at the camera with the expression of an ostrich, and snaps forward. She’s pecked at the lens.

The film ended suddenly, bang.

There were forty reels of that? It would have cost millions even at 1911 prices. In 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs was still selling pencil sharpeners in Chicago and the story was only just being serialized in magazines for the first time.

In 1911 there was no film grammar for something that long.
The Birth of a Nation
had not yet been made. Naw, naw, naw, that was 1927 at the earliest.

The applause was light, scattered. People were in shock. It had been too good. It had been too weird.

I knew I had my story. “That’s a fake, and I’m going to prove it.”

After the next screening, a particularly nauseating silent version of Jack the Ripper, I talked to Mr. Appropriate. God, was he ever. Fresh-faced, I would say, like Andy Hardy on smart drugs.

He was indeed a distant relative of Burroughs, and he claimed with UCLA-freshman directness to have gone to do the inventory himself. So I said how convenient it was for everybody that the safe opened itself.

I couldn’t dent his wide-eyed innocence. “That’s the weirdest thing! It had a time-lock, and it could only be only opened from the inside.”

He made me feel old and mean, and down and cynical, but I thought, “Gotcha, kid!”

I looked him up in the UCLA directories and found him, guilelessly open to public inspection. It said he was studying dentistry. Come on, I thought, you’re a film major.

Like I’d been. So now I’m a journalist. Who only writes about film.

I know how it goes. Nobody gives you a break, so you fake something to get some publicity, maybe get your toe in the door. What’s your story? You got a famous relative? Your, what, great-great-uncle twice removed? Cash in!

The family papers had indeed been kept in a SHOguard storage facility in Burbank. The guard at the entrance was huge, Samoan, and well, guarded. He said hardly anything, except that yes, the safe had been stored with his company and other chattels from the ERB estate. I showed him my press pass; said I was doing a story on the film. How long had it been stored there? He said he didn’t know, but gave me names to write to. I did, and got a simple letter back. The Burroughs family inventory had moved there when the previous company upped sticks from Hollywood in 1965. I got the name of that company and the old address. The building was now an office block. The story, as far as I could push it, checked out.

My best-selling book—I mean, the book that sold the most copies though it remained well below the Borders threshold of perception—was called
A History of Special Effects
.

If the film was a fake, I knew all the people who could have done the work. There are only about forty companies in the entire world who could have animated the Tharks. I wrote to all of them, and visited the five or six people who were personal friends. I told them what I’d seen.

There had been at least two serious attempts to make an ERB Mars movie in the ’80s. Had anybody done a particularly fine test reel?

Twice I thought I’d found it. Old Yolanda out at Pixar, a real pioneer now doing backgrounds, she told me that she’d been on board a
John Carter of Mars
project. She still had some of the production design sketches. We had a nice dinner at her place. I saw the sketches. The princesses all wore clothes. The clothes showed off their lovely and entirely human legs.

I visited Yong, a Thai animator who now worked for Lucas. I told him what I’d seen.

“I know, I heard,” said Yong. He’d done some work on a Burroughs project in the ’90s. “Look, you know that only us and a couple of other companies are that good. And if it wasn’t that good, somebody like you, you’d spot it straight away.” He nodded and chuckled. “It’s gotta be a publicity stunt for a new movie.”

“Well whoever did it, they’re hot. This stuff was the finest FX I’ve ever seen. But the weird thing was the whole style, you know, of the titles? That was all perfect for a silent movie.”

Yong chuckled. “I gotta see this. It sounds good. Really, really good.”

I went home and took out some of my old scripts. Those would have made perfect little films. Only they didn’t.

One was about a mother whose son and his boyfriend both had AIDS. She gets over it by counseling the boyfriend’s mother, an evangelical. Would have been a great two-hander for Streep and MacLaine. Way ahead of its time. I had the delight of seeing it starring Sallie Anne Field, made for TV. Somebody at the agency just ripped it off.

Another was a crisscross Altman thing about race in LA. Sound familiar? The script is just dust on a shelf now.

One of my best isn’t even dust. It was a new take on the Old South. Now it’s just iron molecules on a scrambled hard drive. Always do your backups. That script now is as far away as Burroughs’s Mars.

At twelve I was an ERB fan. I still had some of my old books, and got one down from the shelf. It was the Ace edition with the Frank Frazetta cover.

I’d forgotten that Burroughs himself is a character in the book. He says he knew John Carter, a kind of uncle. His uncle disappeared just after the Civil War and returned. He stood outside in the dark, arms outstretched toward the stars. And insisted that he be buried in a crypt that could be opened only from the inside.

Something else. John Carter never got older. He could not remember being a child, but he could remember serving kings and emperors. And that was why, somehow, he could waft in spirit to Somewhere Else, Barsoom, which even if it was some kind of Mars, did not have to be our Mars.

I got a call from John Doe Appropriate. “There’s been some more film show up,” he said. He sounded like someone had kicked him in the stomach. “In the mail. It’s … it’s in color.”

Even he knew they had no color in 1911.

“Can I say that I’m not surprised?” He didn’t reply. “I’m coming over,” I said.

When he opened the door, he looked even worse than he sounded. He had a line of gray down the middle of his cheeks, and the flesh under his eyes was dark. When he spoke, it sounded like slowed-down film. “There’s somebody here,” he said, and left the door wide open behind him.

Someone was sitting with his back to us, watching a video. On the screen, a cushioned landscape extended to a surprisingly close horizon. The ground was orange and the sky was a deep bronze, and a silver zeppelin billowed across it, sails pumping like wings.

The man looked back over his shoulder, and it was Herman Blix.

Herman, as he looked in 1928 or 1911 or 1863, except that he had to lean on a cane. He heaved himself out of the chair and lumbered forward as if he had the bulk of a wounded elephant.

Did I say that he was stark naked?

“Not used to clothes,” he said, gasping like he wasn’t used to breathing.

Blink.

Your world turns over.

I saw as he spoke that he had tiny fangs, and that his eyes did glow. Looking into them made me feel dizzy, and I had to sit down. The strangest thing was that I knew at once what he was, and accepted it. Like meeting those little Nosferatu elves. No wonder he could waft through space: he wouldn’t need a life-support system.

“Can you make films?” he asked me.

His eyes made it impossible to lie, and I heard myself say yes, because it was true, I could. The kid bled next to me, expendable.

“You’re coming with me.” Blix bore down on me, hauled me off the sofa, hugged me, and everything gasped cold and dark.

Mars was only the beginning.

It is Hero Kai’s fiftieth year. He is lean and limber, his gray hair pulled back fiercely. People say his eyes are gray with age. Others say his eyes were always as gray as the eyes of a statue, except for the dark holes of his pupils.

His sword is so finely balanced that it can slice through sandstone walls. Kai himself can run up a vertical surface, or suspend his breathing for hours.

Kai starts each day with his exercises. He stands on tiptoe on the furthest leaf of the highest branch of the tallest mango tree in the region. He holds two swords and engages himself in fast and furious swordplay. He walks on his hands for a whole day.

Yet he takes no action.

He goes to funerals to chant for the dead. Rich men hope to earn merit by paying him to recite the traditional verses called the Chbap or Conduct. This is a Chbap.

The happy man is one who knows his limitations

And smiles formally even to a dog

If a neighbor owes him money

He applies an even gentle pressure like water falling over rocks …

… etc., etc. The Chbap are all about being tame and making things easy for superior people.

Kai’s kingdom is very badly ruled. The roads have fallen apart; the rivers are choked with weeds; and the King spends his day performing gentle magic for which he has no talent.

The Chbap are the only thing that holds together the Kingdom of Kambu’s Sons. The Chbap keep people toiling cheerfully in the rice fields. The verses remind them to give alms to the poor, thus staving off starvation and revolt. They insist that people care for their families, so that everyone can look forward to an honored old age. The Chbap prepare poor people to accept placidly an early and often excruciating death.