The Film-makers of Mars Read online

  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 towards 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 grey 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.

  Copyright © 2008 by Geoff Ryman.

  Books by Geoff Ryman

  The Warrior Who Carried Life (Allen & Unwin, 1985)

  The Unconquered Country (Allen & Unwin, 1986)

  The Child Garden (Unwin Hyman, 1989)

  Was… (HarperCollins, 1992)

  253 (HarperCollins, 1998)

  Lust: or No Harm Done (HarperCollins, 2001)

  Air: Or, Have Not Have (St. Martin’s, 2004)

  The King’s Last Song (HarperCollins, 2006)

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  Unconquered Countries: Four Novellas (St. Martin’s, 1994)

  Paradise Tales: And Other Stories (forthcoming) (Small Beer)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  Tesseracts Nine (editor, with Nalo Hopkinson) (EDGE, 2005)

  When It Changed: 'Real Science' Science Fiction (editor) (Carcanet, 2010)