Fantastic Mars -13- Caverns of Mars (Patreon)

I knew I wasn’t dead anymore because my butt felt cold like I had been sitting on a cement park bench in the winter. My mind felt half-frozen, too. 

Not a park bench, I sat on the floor of a cave that had been smoothed out and altered as a living space. I could barely see in the dimness but light filtered in from somewhere above. There were large mounds on the floor all around me, and by large, I mean much larger than me.

The darkness stretched away in all directions getting thicker and thicker. There were no visible walls, hidden in the gloom, I supposed. The light from above seemed to have no source that I could focus on and I really could not see a ceiling, either.

I had trouble bringing my mind into focus, too. Thinking took a lot of effort and didn’t seem worth it at first. My memory didn’t want to co-operate either. For one thing, just who the heck was I?

The voice from the—headband?—i had worn had ordered me to play dead, going so far as to tell me to stop my heart. Was that a real memory?

With my heart stopped, I was dead and my spirit went wherever dead people go in this reality. Some empty place full of loneliness. But I had discovered a door or some way out, into another world.

I had spent years in that world where I was a little girl named Joanie and then a slave named Betty. It had seemed so real, much more real than being a tailed, naked and slightly kinky Red Martian woman named Yonee. That had to have been some sort of fantasy.

Because I didn’t have a tail now.

I searched for it, looking behind me in the dark and even feeling of my butt with both hands, just to be sure. No tail. I was naked though, just as I remembered. I had breasts, seemingly not as large as Yonee’s had been, but larger than Betty’s little adolescent bumps at the moment when I left her life. It confused the heck out of me.

What had happened? Was I Yonee if I didn’t have a tail? Maybe I was still Betty? I pulled my hair in front of my face to check the color but there was not enough light for that. It looked black like Yonee’s but in the darkness I couldn’t tell for sure.

Was I actually someone named Mojo who lived in a world of smartphones and Google Earth and drones and something called Uber? That seemed even more unlikely because Mojo was supposed to have had a dick and I didn’t. I checked. Nope, soft and smooth and a little furry (which Yonee had not been) and with a warm, damp slit instead of Tom, Dick and Harry.

Nope, I wasn’t a boy and I had a really hard time imagining that I had ever been one. It was ridiculous. Seejay, I remembered him, had said that my little slit where I sat down and I had the same name, Yonee—that that was what Yonee meant.

But where was I and how was I going to get back sexy Seejay and serious and dear, goofy, gigantic Hote? I remembered them vividly now. But I forgot for the moment about the voice that had told me to stop my heart and I bent all my effort to discovering where I might be.

Stumbling around in the dark, I bumped into the nearest mound and felt the yielding firmness of cold flesh. I peered closer, not really able to see in the darkness, (Yonee could, but not Betty). I groped around, feeling of the thing. I screamed when I realized that I had found a corpse. A huge corpse with too many arms and with tusks in its face. A Green Martian.

Was it Trike my friend who had become a Green Martian in this world? I didn’t think so but I couldn’t be sure, so I screamed and cried and wept until I was sick.

Having been dead myself recently—twice!—I recovered eventually wishing I had some liquid to rinse out my mouth. Yonee with her magic could have conjured some up but I didn’t have those resources as Betty.

I explored some more, avoiding the body I had already discovered. I found I was surrounded by the corpses of Green Martians, too many of them for me to count. I fell on the floor again in panic and horror. I writhed around making whimpering sounds, fighting off invisible ghosts. I found myself calling out for Mam.

But Mam wasn’t real. She came from the death dream I had. Her and Hiram and Uncle Toby and all the rest had existed only in my mind. While I was dead. Hadn’t they?

I didn’t know.

Still, I remembered it as if it were real. It seemed more real than the long ago life of someone whose friends called him Mojo. I had been Joanie/Betty for years, much longer than I had been Yonee. And if it had all happened just in my mind, isn’t all of life experienced only in the mind?

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to force the darkness out. Slowly I stopped being so frightened. I tried to do some breathing while I counted, a trick Mojo had learned in another world. A yoga show on early morning television. 

Breathe in, one, two, three, four. Hold the breath, one, two, three, four. Breathe out, one, two, three, four….

Television, what a concept, as someone must have said. Unreal pictures projected from one mind to another through a common household appliance.

Prime time. Late night. Saturday morning cartoons. Afternoon game shows. Sunday morning preachers and political pundits. 

Do toasters have religion? Political parties? Bachelorette parties?

Sitcoms, news shows, reality tv….

I may have dozed a few minutes, lying there on the cold stone surrounded by corpses. I woke up and the terror had receded but horror still lay in piles around me. Some bigger, some smaller, some I knew must have been Green Martian children, mothers, families. I was convinced now that none of them was my friend Trike.

I wondered, what had killed them?

Had I killed them?

That thought got me up and moving again. I searched around for some clue, anything that might tell me something about where I was and what had happened.

Had the greenies captured me? How had they got to Virginia? No, wait…

That hillside in Virginia had not been the end of Betty’s story because, here I was on Mars and I was still Betty! How had Betty, a white slave from a world where the Confederacy had won the war ended up on Mars? Had she used the same method from in ERB’s books? Literary license?

But there were other memories there, buried, unexperienced by my waking self. I shied away from them pulling myself back into the underground mausoleum of slaughtered greenies.

I shouldn’t call them greenies, I reflected. They are people. Were people. Chromatically challenged indigenous Martians? How very California of me. I suppressed a snicker of hysteria, still trying to look around and find some sort of evidence of what might have happened.

I did find a sort of canteen full of what I hoped was water. After tasting it, I still wasn’t sure but I could at least rinse the taste of vomit out of my mouth. I swallwed 

There seemed to be a lot of loose stuff on the floor. I picked something up and recognized it, an earring. Hadn’t I had a lot of jewelry on? Yonee had…

I couldn’t remember for sure. Where would a slave girl in Virginia get jewelry to wear? Had I stolen it? No, Betty had no jewelry. It was Yonee who had worn gold and gems. Yonee who had placed a tiara on her head. A Princess of Mars?

I checked the top of my head, my ears, wrists, neck, breasts, tongue! Nothing, no jewelry at all. 

I searched the floor, lots of loose jewelry and most of it I sort of recognized. Bracelets, anklets, belts, rings.

Then I found the egg. Smooth, hard, cold, it seemed to be made of stone and about the size of a hen’s egg or a little smaller. Didn’t the Red Martians in Burroughs’s books lay eggs? Had I ended up in the wrong story? But it wasn’t a real egg, it was made of stone even if it was the right size and shape, it was way too heavy. And the Red Martian eggs in those books had been much larger, like ostrich eggs.

As Betty, I was familiar with the size and shape of henfruit, I had spent years collecting the eggs from the farm’s chicken coops and I had the scars on the back of my hands from being pecked to prove it. 

I checked. I did have several tiny round scars on the back of my hands, I could feel them in the dark because I knew where they were. They had shown up as pink when my skin was dyed brown. Betty’s skin.

Something else occurred to me to check for. And yes, the scar just above my left shoulder blade was there too.

I was Betty, or maybe Joanie. And I was on Mars. I didn’t know whether to feel relief or not. Did I know who I really was now? Being Betty might not be the best thing….

As a Red Martian, Yonee could survive on Mars much better than a human could and with her magic, even better. She didn’t even need to eat or drink, somehow. 

Wait. Betty had never had magic. Did I?

The egg I still held in my hand tingled. Magic, I thought at it. It almost hummed, a vibration I sensed rather than heard or felt. I remembered that feeling, Yonee had felt it at the very center of her being when she had sex or worked magic or got excited.

I had felt it.

This thing was Yonee’s magic, I could feel it even now. It thrummed and hummed and buzzed in my hand. Except it did none of those things physically. I felt its power with my nerves and my mind and the center of my being.

I was Betty, I was Yonee and there was not a lot of Mojo left, at least, not while I was holding the stone ovoid.

I tried to work magic through the egg. The toybox of Yonee’s spells was right there but it was like it was in another room. My mind could not touch the magic, could not work it.

But I had worked magic. Somehow, I had killed all of these greenies. I knew I had done it and I felt sick. But I had been under the command of that voice. I glanced toward the heap of jewels at my feet, somewhere in there was the headband that had given him control of me.

Wait.

The headband had given him control of Yonee. I felt of my shoulder again. I was still Betty. If I put the headband on again, would he be able to control me? Or could I just use it to communicate with him? 

Did I want to?

I got up and wandered around in the darkness, leaving everything behind, trying to find a way out. There didn’t seem to be one. The cavern was quite large, larger than one of the fields back in Virginia, though I may have been fooled by the poor light. Several caves opened off of it and I ventured into a few of them but they were all deeply shadowed from what little light existed in the main chamber.

I had already found and avoided pits and holes in the floor, some of them so deep that a rock dropped into them made only a tiny, far away noise after several heartbeats. Perhaps one of the side openings was the route out of here but I didn’t dare explore them without a light source. A pit in one of the side caverns would be deadly to an explorer who could not even see the floor.

I couldn’t risk that.

I found the pile of jewelry amid the corpses again, guided back to it by the sense I had of the green egg. The smoothness and seductiveness of the little ovoid called to me and gave me the sense that we belonged together. It held my magic, Yonee’s magic, Yonee’s very identity, if I could unlock its secret.

Yonee could get out of this place. For one thing, she could see in the dimness much better than I. For another, she had magic and could make light and water and food. I wasn’t hungry yet but I knew I would be, sooner or later. I was only human, Yonee was something more.

And less.

Wait. The stone egg I had found, that I still had in my hand…. It was too dark in the cave to see colors, even with Yonee’s eyes I could not have done it. 

Then how did I know the egg was green?

Image by Terry Naumer, background made transparent. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/