The Man Who Loved Mars. Lin Carter

      Copyright Information

      Copyright © 1973 by Lin Carter.

      Published by permission of Lin Carter Properties. For more information, contact Wildside Press.

      www.wildsidepress.com

      Dedication

      The Man Who Loved Mars is for Isaac Asimov, Lester Del Rey, George O. Smith, and the rest of my friends in my favorite club, The Trap-Door Spiders.

      1. Ivo Tengren

      Lilac and violet and velvety purple, the arcade lies drowned in shadows where I sit in the late afternoon, sipping resinous brandy, the murmurous, familiar litany of the shoeshine boys coming toward me as they drift among the tables, blending with the curdled, plaintive moaning of plump, breathless pigeons waddling in the sun.

      Beyond the arcade the plaza of San Pietro lies stunned in the blinding day, a pool of motionless white light. The cheap brandy bites my tongue, tart and heavy. I shake my head to the boy who pauses inquiringly before my table, and he moves on to the next tourist.

      The bells of the old and hideous cathedral break into their jangled thunder, saluting the hour. All the pigeons rise from the sun-soaked tiles in the same instant, as if galvanized by the cacophonous cadence of the bells that they have heard all their brief lives and yet somehow have never become accustomed to. In a great startled cloud, a snowstorm of black confetti, they swoop up, flapping from the square, and swing in a loose, revolving astronomy of black motes, wheeling around the pink stucco spires of the cathedral where four bird-limed saints stare without expression over the red rooftops of Venice.

      I drained the last drop of the brandy and set the tumbler down with a click on the wrought-iron table and pulled a crumpled pack of aromatiques out of the pocket of my sweat-stained shirt. Selecting one, I sucked on it until the tip ignited.

      A noisy group of American tourists entered the cool, shadow-drowned arcade. Coming into the purple gloom of the arcade from the brilliance of the sun-lit street beyond, where heat settled in dusty layers on the worn old stones like volcanic ash, they were struck by the difference and found it enormously comic. One of them, a fat man of fifty or so, with a very expensive depth camera slung around his red neck, went stumbling around, bumping into tables in a pantomime of blindness that sent the frowsy females of the group into paroxysms of mirth. At length, with a noisy clatter of iron chairs, they settled themselves, calling loudly for a waiter.

      I turned around to catch the waiter’s eye and pointed an eloquent thumb at my empty tumbler. He nodded to me…and then a small wintry wind began blowing up my spine.

      Two men had entered the cool gloom of the arcade behind the Americans. I got a good look at them when I turned to signal the waiter. One was youngish, mid-thirties, tall and husky and handsome in a dark, coarse, Slavic sort of way. He wore a gray suit of shiny kyrolan with black, wet patches under the arms. I only caught a quick glimpse of him as I turned back: beefy neck, swarthy face, short, neatly trimmed black beard, and cold hard eyes like the points of gimlets.

      He spotted me and grabbed his companion’s arm. The other one peered at me. He was older, perhaps in his sixties, with a gaunt gentleman’s face, tanned and leathery, and a beautiful head of silver hair.

      I pretended not to have noticed, and I don’t think they saw that I had spotted them, for I turned away from my waiter-fetching in one smooth motion and sat there with my back to them, my heart drumming, and a cold despair settling like lead in the depths of my gut. After all that time it still got me hard. But I should be used to it.

      I sat and smoked and stared at nothing, and the small cold wind was still blowing up my spine… Still, what did I have to fear from the rotten swine after all these years? They have done all they could do to me, taken everything I own from me. My purpose, my people, my livelihood, friends, even my self-respect. Everything. Except my life. Except my life…

      But that was arrant nonsense! They could have had that too, along with all the rest, years ago when I was still kicking feebly between the jaws of the courts and the grasping claws of the lawyers. When they brought me back from Mars in the Mandate craft, I fully expected the death penalty. And even if they were afraid of doing it in the full eye of the press and the public, I knew full well one of the crack Colonial Administration assassination teams could have picked me off after the trial and the publicity died down, and no one would have cared. No. I have nothing to fear from them anymore.

      So I sat and sweated and stretched out my legs, trying to relax the muscles that kept tensing for action. I crushed out the butt and ignited another aromatique, pulling the tobacco-flavored, noncarcinogenic smoke deep down into my lungs, enjoying the mild bite and letting it out slowly. I stared at the sun-drenched Piazza del San Pietro, where the pigeons settled down to earth again, to waddle and bob and cluck and coo their meandering way over the shimmering tiles, undisturbed until the next hour and the next explosion of the cathedral bells. Let them watch, if they like, I thought to myself without emotion. I have done nothing; there is nothing they can do to me anymore…

      The waiter brought my drink on a small black plastic tray, gathering up a damp collection of currency, and padded away, slippers flopping, bearing off the empty glass. I smoked and sipped the tart brandy and watched the lilac shadows lengthen from the old arcade and soak the plaza’s steaming tiles in their pools of stagnant purple. Are they still watching? I will not turn and look…

      I tried to regain the mood of somnolence and comfort, but it would not come.

      For some reason my mind drifted to the great stone lion, the winged lion of marble, brought here in the twilight of the seventeenth century from the Piraeus near Athens; the Winged Lion of St. Mark that is at once the guardian, the emblem, and the genius of Venice. I thought too of the neat lines of runes carved upon it, the inscription cut in the worn old stone nearly a thousand years ago by the hands of Viking warriors somehow strayed from their cold fjords to the crystalline bays of Greece:

      They cut him down in the midst of his force but in the harbour the men cut runes in memory of Horsa, a good warrior, by the sea.

      The Swedes set this on the lion.

      He went his way with good counsels gold he won in his travels.

      The warriors cut runes coloured them in memory of Horsa.

      He won gold in his travels.

      Musing on the old runic verse, I wondered if the people have composed such an obituary to my memory as well.… If so, perhaps it is not so very different from the lines Horsa’s comrades cut to commemorate his fall. Save that I won no gold in my travels. Only an empire that I neither deserved nor wanted nor could defend. And memories that burn like iron and cut like fire.

      A clatter behind me in the depths of the old arcade. Shadows were lengthening; evening neared; the sky reddened. The waiters were coming now with their tight, shiny black trousers and swarthy faces blending into the gathering dusk and only their startlingly white jackets visible in the gloom. One by one they moved the flimsy wrought-iron tables and chairs from under the arcade into the warm plaza. It was time for me to finish my drink and go, back to my cramped, dusty little flat up two flights of flimsy stairs in the hostel by the small side canal, where I had lived now for most of a year.

      Soon, with evening, the plaza of the old cathedral would be transformed into an open-air cafe. Strings of bulbs in faded Japanese lanterns of tinted paper. Colored lights. The old fountain playing, its glimmering jets laving the sleek green thighs of the bronze nymph and the beard of the kneeling satyr, who have stood for more than two centuries in uneasy proximity to the pink stucco home of the bird-limed saints, a weird dichotomy, this juxtaposition of faded paganism and stiff Catholicism. A whisper of cool breeze off the bay would set the paper lanterns bobbing. And I would be here again with evening. Watching the crowd and drinking bad Chianti with my cheap meal, watching the young lovers, two by two, leaning across the small tables toward each other, hands plaited together on white cloth, the candles between them guttering behind glass, dividing them each from the other and