Swords of Waar Read Free Page B

endless tape loop— Norman Prescott Kline had been to Waar .
    I saw why the book had been a flop. It was a terrible story. Boring and predictable and corny at the same time. After the civil war, Captain Jack Wainwright, southern gentleman and officer of the Confederacy, heads out west to escape a bunch of evil carpetbagging creditors, and finds a strange object while prospecting for silver in Nevada. The thing transports him to “Wharr,” which for some reason he thinks is Mars, and he falls in love with a local girl—a princess named Alla-An, who immediately gets kidnapped by an evil prince, and for the rest of the book, Captain Jack chases the bad guy from place to place, fighting his minions and trying to rescue Alla-An. Then in the end he saves her and they get married, even though they’ve said, like, three words to each other in the whole book.
    Anyway, the fact that it was a stupid story didn’t really matter, because behind all the noble speeches and the other hero bullshit, every detail about Waar was just how I remembered it. It was all there, the Aarurrh, the airships, the names of things. The princes were called Dhanans, the birds everybody rode were called krae, the big-ass gila-monster pit-bull bastards were called vurlaks. Some things sounded a little different. For instance, Kline spelled Ora’s capital city Armlau, where I’d heard it as Ormolu, but shit, close enough, right?
    All that book did was make me sure that this guy had been to Ora, and if he had, he might know the way back. I had to find him. I’d beat it out of him if I had to.
    Around 6:30, I heard the back door of the house open, and boots crunching across the gravel of the yard. I got up and looked out a port hole. Eli was tip-toeing toward his truck, beer cooler and jacket in hand. I pulled on my jeans and t-shirt and stepped out barefoot, holding the book.
    “Hey, Eli.”
    “Shit. I was tryin’ to let you sleep.”
    “Forget it. I was awake. I, uh, finished the book.”
    He threw his jacket and cooler in the truck. “Uh-huh. Like it?”
    “Ha. It was shit, but… but it was right.” I held up the book. “Where can I find this guy? I need to talk to him.”
    Eli snorted. “Better find yourself a seance, then. Kline died broke sometime in the fifties, raving ’til the end that Burroughs and all the rest had ripped him off. Never even got to see that book published.”
    I sagged. Of course the guy was dead. He wrote the fucking thing in 1909. It had just seemed so immediate that I’d forgot, like nothing had changed on Waar for a hundred years.
    “Well, does he have any family, then? Anybody I could talk to?”
    Eli laughed and swung up into the truck. “I haven’t exactly made the man my life’s work, girl. I only know what I read in the fan mags, back in the day.” He pointed toward the house. “You wanna look him up, there’s a computer in Delia’s office. Go nuts.”
    The look on his face as he drove away said he thought I already had.
    ***
    I helped Delia feed her three horses and all the various dogs before she went off to work—she was an inventory manager for a company that rented camera cranes and lighting rigs to movie people—then made myself a cup of coffee and a bowl of Cheerios and sat down at her computer.
    I am not what you’d call computer savvy. I’ve never owned one. Always felt riding a Harley with a laptop in my saddle bag was a little… wrong. But I have used one before. Whenever I’ve had to do any job hunting I’d go to the public library and use theirs and check the want ads, and I borrowed a friend’s computer after Don died to sell his parts bike on eBay. Anyway, it wasn’t hard to get the hang of it, and pretty soon I had a list of Google results for Norman Prescott Kline.
    It got harder from there, slogging through sites owned by people with similar names, store sites offering his books for sale, forums for science fiction fans with post after post by people who really needed to get