Jandar of Callisto - Lin Carter, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 1
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Jandar of Callisto - Jandar 01
By Lin Carter
1. THE LOST CITY OFMANOR
That the most far-reaching and momentous historical events often spring from minute and seemingly
inconsequential accidents is a fact which I can attest from my own experience.
For the past four months now-insofar as I have been able to measure the passage of time-I have dwelt
on an alien world, surrounded by a thousand foes, struggling and battling my way through innumerable
perils to win a place beside the most beautiful woman in two worlds.
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And all of these adventures, these wonders and terrors, sprang from a single cause, and that cause was a
crumb of dirt half the size of my thumbnail.
As I sit, painfully and slowly setting down these words with a quill pen and homemade ink on a sheet of
rough parchment, I cannot help but wonder at the obscure vanity which prompts me to record the tale of
my incredible adventures-a tale which began in a lost city deep in the impenetrable jungles of southeast
Asia and which ventures from there across the incredible distance of three hundred and ninety million
miles of infinite space to the surface of a weird and alien planet. A tale, furthermore, which I deem it most
unlikely any other human eye will ever read.
Yet I write on, driven by some inexplicable urge to set down an account of the marvels and mysteries
which I alone of all men ever born on earth have experienced. And when at last this narrative is
completed, I will set it within the Gate in the hopes that, being composed entirely of organic matter, paper
and ink as well, it may somehow be transported across the immeasurable gulf of interplanetary space to
the distant world of my birth, to which I shall never return.
In the night sky, at certain seasons when the Inner Moons are on the other side of our primary and the
starry skies are clear, I can (I fancy) see the earth. A remote and insignificant spark of blue fire it seems
from this distance; a tiny point of light lost amid the blackness of the infinite void. Can it truly be that I
was born and lived my first twenty-four years on that blue spark-or was that life but a dream, and have I
spent all of my days upon this weird world of Thanator? It is a question for the philosophers to settle, and
I am but a simple warrior.
Yet I can well remember my father. He was a tall man, stern-faced and powerfully built, with scowling
brows and thick black locks. His name was Matthew Dark; a Scotsman from Aberdeenshire, an
engineer by profession, and a wanderer by inclination, he tramped the world to its far corners searching
for the joy of life, its richness, its color, which always eluded him and always seemed to beckon from
over the next horizon.
From him I seem to have inherited my inches, for like him I am something over six feet; from him, as
well, must come my strength, for among men I am reckoned a strong man of great endurance and
stamina. But it was from my mother came the gift of my yellow hair and blue eyes, which have none of
the dour, darkling Scot in them. She was a Danish girl from a town whose name I cannot pronounce and
she died when I was a small child. All that I can remember of her is a soft warm voice, a sweet smiling
face bending over me, the touch of a gentle hand. And I seem to see laughing blue eyes, as calm and
deep and sparkling as the lakes of her homeland, and the gleam of pale gold hair woven in thick
braids-alas, it is only a shard of memory, a brief glimpse into a past which I can never recapture, never
completely recall.
The color of my hair and my eyes, these were the only gifts she ever gave me, besides my life itself. But
in an odd way I owe her a double debt: for it was for reason of my yellow hair and blue eyes that my life
was spared when I fell into the cruel hands of the savage and inhuman warriors of the Yathoon-but I am
getting ahead of my own story.
If I owe my mother the double debt of life given and life saved, I at least owe my father for my name,
Jonathan Andrew Dark. He was building a great hydroelectric project inDenmark when he met and
loved and wed my laughing, blue-eyed mother. She went with him toSouth America for his next job, for
an engineer must go where his work leads him, and wanderers have no home. And thus it chanced that
while my mother was a Dane and my father a Scot, and I am now a naturalized American, I was born
inRio .
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Of my early life there is little enough to tell. Or, rather, I run the risk of telling too much-for it has little
bearing on the saga of my adventures on the fantastic world that has now become my home. A tropical
fever carried off my lovely mother when I was only three; my father I seldom saw, for he was off building
a highway inPeru , a dam inBolivia , a bridge inYucatan . But when death took her from us I became his
constant companion. Prim and proper folk might be scandalized to think of a tender child amid the
savage surroundings of a jungle camp, but I thrived on the rough, exciting life, and to this I am sure I owe
my love of peril and adventure. For I saw the green, stinking interior of the Matto Grosso before I ever
saw the interior of a schoolroom, and was familiar with the dangerous rope bridges that span the airy
heights of the high Andes before I ever saw a paved city street.
I became a sort of pet or protege to the engineers of my father’s camp. It was that laughing bandit Pedro
who taught me to throw a knife before I ever learned my letters, and the big Swede, Swenson, who
taught me every trick of rough-and-tumble fighting his brawny, battered body had ever learned. I could
bring down a hunting jaguar with one cool steady shot straight between its burning eyes even as it sprang
for my throat-long before I had mastered the occult mysteries of long division.
Yes, long division-for my formal schooling had been somewhat neglected while I had learned to brew
coffee with water taken from a snake-infested jungle stream and heated over kerosene flames in a
battered tin pot, to hunt and fight like a man, to climb like a monkey, and to survive where a city-bred
boy would have succumbed to fever ticks, snakebite, or cholera. It happened when I was about thirteen.
My father had had enough of the banana republics by now; he yearned for the dry, parched air and
gorgeous nights of the desert after years spent in the sweltering sinkhole of marshy jungles; he was
thinking of an oil-drilling project inIraq .
But in the back alleys of a vile little jungle town named Puerto Maldonado he ran into an American
geologist named Farley, an old friend of many years standing. Puerto Maldonado is in the back country
ofPeru , on the shores of a river calledMadre de Dios , “Mother of God.” God, however, had nothing to
do with Farley being in Puerto Maldonado: he was hunting for the place where the Incas had gotten their
gold.
He had found nothing but ticks, mosquitoes, and a particularly nasty breed of snake the natives called
jararaca. It was a nip in the ankle from the venomous fangs of this particular denizen of the jungles that
had laid up Farley in the backroom of the only gin mill in Puerto Maldonado for three weeks. My father
and his friend celebrated their chance meeting with copious toasts of bad gin in fly-specked glasses, and
somewhere between the second and the third bottle my father conceived the notion that I required
schooling. Here was Farley, a distinguished geologist with a string of college degrees after his name, like
paper tags in the tail of a kite. And here was I, a tall, rawboned, broad-shouldered and sunburnt boy,
able enough to hack through the tangled and snake-infested swamps of the Matto Grosso like a veteran,
but a green-eared novice when it came to the mystic doctrines of long division.
In less time than it takes me to describe the event, a decision had been reached. Farley was on his way
to the coast when the next mail packet came chugging down the coiling silver length of theMadre de Dios
; thence overland to the burgeoning young city ofSanto Domingo and a bush pilot named O’Mara who
would fly him to civilization. He was on his way back to what he described as “God’s Country,” but what
the geography books call the United States of America, and with all possible haste, for there was a
professorship open at Harvard for a seasoned field geologist, and he was hungry for the world of cinema,
cocktail lounge, and campus. And, besides, he had been lucky this time to have spent only three weeks
sweating jararaca venom out of his guts. He preferred not to give the wriggling little monsters the chance
for a second bite.
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So I was off toAmerica with the would-be Herr Professor, and, to tell the truth, I didn’t at all mind the
idea. I had become aware in recent months that we men shared the world with a delectable species
called girls, and I would find few specimens here in the muddy jungles ofPeru , while I was given to
understand they were as common inAmerica as was carrapato do chao, the humble ground tick, in this
part of the world.
I never saw my father again. An exploding oil pocket in the uplands ofIraq nine months after this sent him
to thatEl Dorado orValhalla where all old adventurers spend their eternities. God bless him, for the
world’s a poorer place without him in it.
Not to occupy these pages with an account of the wonders of small-town America, which must be
already familiar to my reader-if ever this most unusual journal is fortunate enough to find its way across
three hundred and ninety million miles of space to the nearest reader capable of understanding English-I
shall pass over the next several years without much more than a summary.
My lack of anything in the way of schooling proved a bit of an impediment. But Mr. Farley-now
Assistant Professor Farley-serving in loco parentis, lined up enough tutors for a rash program. I proved,
rather surprisingly to all, and especially to myself, an alert, bright student, and before long I was almost up
to my age group. I had seen the interior of a schoolroom at last, and found it no less of a jungle in its way
than the Matto Grosso had been. And the abstruse mysteries of long division were at last conquered.
Farley was teaching at Harvard, but somehow or other I ended up at Yale. I shall pass over these years
briefly: they were happy years. I broke no fewer bones on the football field than do most undergraduates,
and no fewer hearts in Lover’s Lane, under the stimulus of a ripely goldenConnecticut moon. Nor did my
own heart escape without a fracture or two; but it’s all part of the mystery of what philosophers call
“growing up”-as if there was any other direction in which to growl
Oddly enough-for all the heady pleasures of the football field-I found more intoxication in the feel of a
rapier in my hands. Quite by chance I discovered a natural affinity for the sword, and for two years
running I was captain of Yale’s famed fencing team. This, too, like the color of my hair and eyes, was to
prove an unexpected blessing when I came to wandering and warring through the black and crimson
jungles of barbaric Thanator-but again I am ahead of my story.
Although I was an American citizen by now, the wanderlust had bitten too deep, had struck me too
young, for the quiet academic life to hold many attractions for me. I yearned, always, to see what lay
beyond the dim horizon . . . over the next range of hills . . . beyond the bright waters of the shining sea.
Before the ink was dry on my sheepskin, I was off. A hasty farewell to the Professor, and I began to
wander. The next couple of years took me far and wide. The restlessness, the wanderlust I had inherited
from my father took me about the globe. A brief stint of journalism inNew York , then I shipped as an
ordinary seaman on a merchant tub toStockholm . I learned to fly in India, of all places, and this led to a
bit of refugee-running out of Cuba, arms smuggling in the Near East, and a few flights of medicine and
food supplies into blockaded Biafra.
I ended up in Vietnam, and when some technicality over my naturalization papers looked to keep me out
of the fight, I joined the Red Cross as a pilot, running supplies and medics into the trouble spots. My
thirst for adventure had frequently carried me into trouble from which my fighting instincts had, till now,
rescued me without permanent damage. But in Vietnam, something happened .. . .
The Viet Cong terrorists had made a strike at a small village and medical help was needed urgently. So
urgently that they hauled me out of my billet on thirty minutes notice. I was to ride herd on a squad of
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choppers flying in medics and food and flying out the seriously injured.
I had just spent a couple of weeks in Saigon on leave so I was fresh and rested, so to speak. My group
was stationed at a temporary field hacked out of the brush on the outskirts of Hon Quan, which is about
sixty-five miles north of Saigon and only some ten miles or so from the borders of Cambodia.
We were a half hour out of Hon Quan when my chopper began to develop a bad case of the chokes.
Something was wrong with one of the fuel lines, probably a morsel of dirt that had clogged the line. The
sort of thing a full mechanic’s checkout would have spotted and corrected, but we had been scrambled
on notice too short for a full-scale check.
And that meant I was in trouble. We didn’t have the big two- and three-man combat choppers the
American army used; on rescue missions like these all I had was a little one-man copter. The cargo craft
were up ahead, needed to fly out the injured. So I was all by myself.
I radioed the rest of the squadron and told them my second-in-command would take over as I was
having engine trouble and would probably fall behind. They went on ahead while I dropped back, trying
to figure out what to do. We were flying over some of the densest jungles on earth and there was
nowhere to sit her down safely. If I could find a flat space to sit her down I could probably fix the trouble
in no time, even if I had to unscrew one of the lines and blow the obstruction out.
I circled for a while, hunting. There was a chance, a slim one, that the line would clear itself, but I
couldn’t count on it. If the motor conked out I would crash in the treetops. A chopper comes down
slowly, even without power, because the air catches and turns the blades, braking the rate of fall. That’s
the nice thing about these flying eggbeaters.
The bad thing is you are flying too low to bail out with a parachute.
I began to sweat.
For a half-hour I played with that chopper like a virtuoso with a Bach concerto, getting every ounce of
go-power I could squeeze from my laboring engine. I couldn’t return to base because I knew there was
no landing area between there and here, having just flown over the same piece of countryside. But-who
could say? Off to the west a bit there might be a clearing. I nursed her carefully in that direction.
A while later I spotted a flash of light, the yellow-brown glisten of a jungle river. My chopper was fitted
out with pontoon gear, of course. Half the land in this desolate corner of the globe is swamp and marsh.
If I could make it to that river I could at least make a landing.
I began wondering just where I was. No river of that size should be in my neighborhood. I must have
flown farther afield in my search for landing space than I had suspected.
Could it be the Mekong? If so, I was in trouble. The Mekong isn’t in Vietnam at all, but over the border
in Cambodia. It traverses eastern Cambodia from north to south and empties into the South China Sea.
And Cambodia is a place we were not supposed to be. A so-called “neutral” country, its ruler, Prince
Sihanouk, might be a jolly host to visiting American VIP’s like Jackie Kennedy, but he was mighty
inhospitable when it came to lost or strayed or crashed American pilots who violated what he laughingly
called the neutrality of his borders-which the Cong are suspected to cross regularly.
But beggars cannot be choosers. Just as my chopper came over the broad, gliding floods of the jungle
river, my exhausted engine gave one last strangled croak and died. The chopper fell like a stone. Then
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