The Start of Time Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Preface to Book One

  Chapter 1 I need to find water

  Chapter 2 How it Began

  Chapter 3 The Desert and The Cave

  Chapter 4 The Day of Departure

  Chapter 5 Arrival on the Red Planet

  Chapter 6 Refreshment and Learning the Language

  Chapter 7 History Lesson and Sheltering

  Chapter 8 Mating Night

  Chapter 9 Making weapons

  Chapter 10 Morning on a New World

  Chapter 11 My Weapon Works

  Chapter 12 A Second Night at the Ruins

  Chapter 13 The Story of Babies and Brides

  Chapter 14 Before the Gates of Tranna

  Chapter 15 In the House of the Shrine Maidens

  Chapter 16 The Council Meeting

  Chapter 17 A challenge in the council hall

  Chapter 18 Morning In the House of Mark

  Chapter 19 Call the Carpenters

  Chapter 20 Short Engagements

  Chapter 21 A short Visit with Tronuck

  Chapter 22 Alexia Asks for a Lesson

  Chapter 23 Teaching The Price of a Princess

  Chapter 24 Abolishing the Bride Price

  Chapter 25 Alexia and Sashar come Home

  Chapter 26 On the Roof with Sashar

  Chapter 27 Alexia's Story

  Chapter 28 Preparing for the Wilderness

  Chapter 29 Shall we Hunt Demons?

  Chapter 30 First Day of Training

  Chapter 31 Afternoon Musings

  Chapter 32 At the Place of Demons

  Chapter 33 Sashar's Story

  Chapter 34 Checking on Progress

  Chapter 35 Reviewing Our Practice

  Chapter 36 Training at Night with Alexia

  Chapter 37 Today We Traveled Toward Nobrus

  Afterword

  About The Author

  Other Series by The Author

  The Start of Time

  Shrine Maidens of Barsoom

  Book 1

  Marilyn Foxworthy

  1st Edition

  Copyright © 2018 Marilyn Foxworthy

  All rights reserved.

  My name is Marilyn. I have written before about some of the remarkable men of the Jensen Family. This time, it’s a man named Mark. This is the first book of his story.

  I call it “Book 1: The Start of Time”. But that’s not how it starts. It starts with Mark looking for memorabilia related to his favorite old pulp fiction adventure books. What he finds leads him on his own grand adventure.

  Well, ready? Our story starts on a sunny morning on a foreign planet…

  But first, before you turn the page, beware of several things that you’ll find on the other side of this door. I warn you now. Here’s what you should know before you decide to read the story of our hero and his wonderful life:

  The story is, at times, highly sexual. At times graphically so. If that isn’t what you want to read, you better stop right now. Take the book back to the store and get your money back. There’s a lot of sex.

  The story is long. It isn’t a quick read for a single afternoon. In fact, the tale is several volumes long. This is just one book of an epic saga. The entire series is long. If you want a short little diversion, stop now. If you get hooked on the story and spend more time than you wanted to reading, and possibly rereading, the entire adventure, maybe that’s my fault, but I make no apologies for it.

  Spoiler alert: And this refers back to point 1, our hero is remarkable in many ways, but one of those is how several women may fall in love with him at the same time. And because he’s so remarkable, they generally have no jealousy between them. I’ll leave it to you to read how that plays out, but if the implications disturb you, I recommend a more traditional ‘Bodice-Ripper’ romance. OK, let’s just spell it out: there’s probably going to be some harem elements to the story. Heroes know how to satisfy. But, pay attention to the next point…about the allegory aspects of that.

  Allegory alert: If you read the story correctly, many of the people, especially the women related to the primary hero in the story, will actually represent different aspects of the same person. As people, we are complex beings. You will find explanations of the ‘oneness’ of the characters, so keep in mind that what may sound polygamous, may actually be an allegory of one monogamous relationship. Or don’t. You can read it however you want to, but it was written in many respects as an allegory. That doesn’t make it any less fun. It does make it more like eroticism for philosophers though.

  The story was written by me, but in the same style as my other books, as if our hero had kept journals of his adventures, and I just edited and published them. That may have been more the case in some books than others, but it’s the style I enjoy right now. I was a fan of the great pulp writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I think it influenced the language and style to some extent.

  I’ve tried to write the story in a way that’s easy for text-to-speech reader software to make sense of. I love listening to the stories myself, and I use a text-to-speech program on my phone or computer, and while I’m exercising or driving. I find that the rereading isn’t perfect, but it’s adequate. Some of the words will be mispronounced consistently, but you can probably tell what’s being said. For example, “I wound up being wounded” won’t pronounce the two different renderings of “wound” correctly, but you’ll be able to follow the story well enough. Also, to make it clear who’s speaking, a lot of the dialog starts with “He said, …” and “She asked, …” to try to make it more listener friendly. Otherwise, it might have been written differently.

  You may notice frequent references to quoted movie lines, song lyrics, and passages from other books. They may seem obscure. If you find something that one of the characters says to be a bit weird, it’s probably a movie line. You can look it up on the Internet or something if you want to. If you get it, that’s fun. If not, I hope you don’t feel like you’re missing the joke

  Refer to point 1, above. Really. I’m not kidding. It gets graphic. And pay attention to points 3 and 4 as well. You have been warned. And, just so you know what to expect, there’s no sexual humiliation, violence, bondage, or anything like that presented in any erotic way. If that’s what you’re looking for, something darker, this isn’t for you. There’s a lot of sex, but it is portrayed as respectful, consensual, and loving.

  Happy trolls.

  Chapter 1 I need to find water

  It was my second day on the ‘Red Planet’. Today I’d better find water. Food would be good too.

  It wasn’t exactly like I had expected, but how could it be? I had followed an unbelievable path to an unbelievable destination. I had started out with a few expectations, but most of them were very flexible.

  On the one hand, I had expected to find a dead-end and nothing to show but a few boring vacation photos. Maybe I would get an article out of it that I could blog about.

  On the other hand, I had hoped to take a one-way ticket journey to a foreign planet that teenage boys of the past century had read about; and knew to be just fiction.

  Reality turned out to be on that ‘other hand’. And I needed to find water.

  Chapter 2 How it Began

  My name is Mark Jensen. As I write this, I’m 47 years old.

  My dad had been a big fan of classic American Pulp fiction. Not the movie, the books. Especially the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He called it ‘The Golden Age of American Literature’. No high-school English teacher would have ever agreed with him, but you might find an eclectic college professor somewhere who might.

  My dad thought Hemingway was absolute crap. He thought Hawthorne and the rest of what was taught as great Am
erican lit, Fitzgerald and all those that his generation had been forced to read as if they were the kings of fiction, were detestable examples of the poorest writing imaginable. The greatest literature in his opinion were the stories of Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, even Doc Savage. My dad loved the classics: the pulp fiction dime novels of adventure from the first half of the 20th century.

  That was what he raised me on. I was home educated; and it was a good education. Yes, I went to a public school as well, but my real education happened mostly at home. I got good grades, went to a good state college, got a good job, had a good career, and did pretty well for myself. We skipped the ‘crap’ and focused on what he called ‘the classics’. His favorite pulp series was the John Carter of Mars stories, and so was mine.

  I loved them. I read every one several times. Dad and I would drive around or sit in the backyard and talk about the stories, but mostly he would talk about why he found them such great examples of fiction. When I had a son, I shared the love of these books with him as well.

  The thing that brought me to the point that I was at on this day took place about six months previous, when my wife of 25 years died. Grief does funny things to you. All of the old patterns are disrupted. All of the conditioned emotional responses are broken. None of the things, the sounds and smells and sights, that you’ve grown so used to come to you anymore. Life is broken.

  Did you ever have a dog for years and years, and then it died? And you come home after work and open the door and you can’t figure out what’s wrong? That when you opened the door, Scruffy should have been there in the way so that you had to tell him not to run outside? That you should have had to step over him as he got in your way as you made your way to the kitchen? That’s grief. It’s all broken. The patterns don’t work anymore, but your emotions keep expecting that they will. Scruffy’s gone, but you still expect him to be there on an unconscious level. You can’t help it.

  A spouse is a whole lot more than a dog. The patterns are everywhere. The way the clothes smell coming out of the drier isn’t even right anymore. It had been six months.

  I didn’t go into a depression. I’m a fairly stable and accepting person. My several years studying old fashioned mindfulness kept me grounded. For some comfort though, I turned to reading ‘the classics’ again. And, once again, the John Carter stories were a favorite.

  I’d always been somewhat of a collector, and during this time, I began collecting memorabilia; first editions, old comic book adaptations, a few mementos from the author’s life sold off by his estate. It was in some of those mementos that I found some things that made me…question things.

  You see, in the original story of John Carter, the tale starts with a fictional encounter between John and his nephew. John is recently returned from his first trip to Barsoom, or ‘Mars’ and he delivers to his nephew a manuscript detailing his first adventure, and then he departs to return to his new home world.

  John’s story starts with him being chased by American Indians, entering a cave, and waking up on what he believes to be Mars. I won’t go into a retelling of the story here. Read it for yourself. The important fact for me is that among the mementos and artifacts that I acquired was what appeared to be an even earlier manuscript of the story. It appeared to be a draft that predated the publication of the first book by at least 10 years, and told a somewhat different version, much more detailed in some respects.

  The details weren’t so much in the story itself, though there were several accounts that did not make it into publication, as I’ll explain in a moment; the strangeness was in the prologue. This seemingly original version went into detail about where and when the story of the chase, the cave, and the manner of transportation to the red planet occurred. Incredibly there were descriptions of the location of the cave and even hand drawn maps showing the route taken. From reading it, these seemed to be John Carter’s map to get himself to the cave and back to civilization on Earth. Both the forward and reverse path were described as having several way points and markers, both natural and constructed by Carter himself.

  In addition, several appendices detailed Barsoom customs, politics, food and dietary information, and even marital and sexual practices of the various races of the planet. The copy was riddled with strict warnings against any sort of publication, especially concerning the location of the cave.

  Of course, both the appendices and the narrative were far too explicit for publication at the time. That was 100 years ago and the depictions would been considered unquestionably obscene. Today they would just be another book in the romance section of the local bookstore. The published story mentioned only that both men and women of Barsoom wore no clothing, but did not recount the more erotic details mentioned in the text that I had in front of me.

  As far as I could guess at the time, if the story were to be believed, which it surely couldn’t be, the story, the customs and history, and the locations of the cave were delivered by John Carter to his nephew, who editing it heavily, produced the sanitized adventure and delivered it to Burroughs for final editing and publication. Burroughs was a natural story teller and, according to the account given in the documents that I had acquired, he had developed his literary style from the early telling of the stories by Carter.

  It was an astounding find. And I was convinced that it was authentic. Not that it was true, but that it was actually from the author of the tales I loved so much as a boy. Over the next months, I researched the find as much as I could. I read and reread the manuscript. I carefully made electronic copies of each page and ran the results through handwriting recognition software. I took the results and corrected any errors in the computer-generated output. And I spent long hours translating the directions and maps into a modern overlay of how to reach “Carter’s Cave”.

  At each step, I expected to verify that the places described could only be fictional; and as each step was taken, I found that it wasn’t necessarily so. Step by step, I found that it was possible that the place actually existed. It was in a remote part of Arizona, about 20 miles off the I-10 freeway. The closest ‘civilization’ being the infamous ‘Thing’ curio shop. It was located on private land out in the desert.

  This was a hoot. I had a manuscript that purported to give the location of the very cave that John Carter traveled through to Barsoom. According to satellite images on the Internet, the spot was in a hilly location, and only 10 miles from a dirt road. Further digging revealed that land in the area was selling for about $500 an acre to anyone foolish enough to be suckered into buying it.

  Well, I decided it was time for an adventure. I was well-off financially, and I could make the trip for a bit more than a good luxury two-week vacation in Hawaii, including the purchase of the equipment and supplies that I figured that I’d need; and I went a step farther. I went ahead and bought a 20-acre parcel surrounding the calculated location!

  Time off from work was no problem and this was an adventure I could get into. At worst, I would find the location described and turn around and come back. At best, I’d find a cave, camp in the spot for a bit, and maybe even arrange to dig a well and set up a small retreat for myself.

  I was going to do it. I had nothing else that I had to do, so why not?

  I bought the land over the Internet and mapped out my route. I estimated that it would take three or four days to drive to the area where I would leave the freeway. My 4x4 pickup had never seen real off-road driving before, but this was just dirt roads and it would do great for that. I’d pull a small trailer with a new off-road ATV and all of my other supplies. I didn’t need to take too much; if I decided to stay for a while, I could always drive back to a nearby city within eight hours or so.

  I figured that after I left the freeway, it would be about an hour drive in my truck and then one to two hours off-road in the ATV. Again, why not! It felt right. It sounded like fun. So I started making plans and gathering my supplies.

  I placed the original manuscript, a copy, and the electronic file
s in a safe deposit box and set up my affairs to run without me for a while in case I decided that I liked desert life.

  I spent time with my son and told him that I was going on a vision quest into the desert and left instructions with him…just in case. I made sure to warn him not to be hasty in declaring me dead if I was out of touch for a while. What if I did find more than I really thought possible?

  The night before I began my quest, I took my son to dinner at a casual restaurant and told him most of what I have described above. We laughed at the idea and he lightheartedly accused me of becoming a ‘Vernian Hollow Earther’, referring to people who believed that the earth was actually hollow and that the Jules Verne account of the ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ and the Burroughs stories of Pelucidar were in fact realities, just like I was half-heartedly considering with the Barsoom story.

  I couldn’t really argue with him about it. So, we laughed.

  He said, “Dad, I kid you about it, but you know that if I didn’t have a new job and a fiance to take care of, I’d go with you in a heartbeat! This is incredible, even if, as you say, it is impossible to believe. You did find this stuff. What are you going to do with it? Can you publish it somehow?”

  I replied, “I could, but I don’t know that there would be an audience for it now. For now I won’t do anything with it. I have copies and you have a key to the safe deposit box, and I’m going on an adventure into the desert. That’s it for now.”

  He said, “Well, good luck, Pop. I won’t declare you dead until you are at least 70. If you get to Mars and decide to stay, send a postcard and papers so that I can have my inheritance. Deal?”

  I laughed and said, “Deal. I love you, Son. I’ll see you in a few weeks. I’ll let you know if I find something.”

  We laughed and joked and he insisted that I tell him some of the juicier bits of Barsoomian customs and we finally said goodnight.

  I walked to the parking lot to my truck, which I had already packed and fueled, and as I started the engine I decided to go ahead and leave that very moment. I could drive a few hours and find a motel around midnight. I pulled onto the freeway and headed down the road, not really knowing my destination.