Northwest Smith's world

OK, another old-style SF one: the world of CL Moore’s “Northwest Smith.”


One of the mottoes of the Space Patrol is “Three Planets, One Law”, but under private questioning they will shamefacedly admit to a variety of local exceptions and variances that would give headaches to a student of the Holy Roman Empire’s political arrangements.

They call it “The Three Planets” as is it was a unified political entity, but it’s hardly that: even the individual planets are fragmented, the Venusian “Emperor” ruling less than a third of the hot planet, the rest being divided into a multitude of kingdoms and empires and republics and barbarian tribal groupings on the Fever Coast of the Hot Continent, and Earth into five Great Powers and a scattering of great-power toadies and Nervous Neutrals. Mars is theoretically under the rule of one dynasty, as it has been since long before the first stone was laid at Jericho, but the Emperor’s authority is largely nominal in the Drylands and the Polar wastes.

Although there is much “frontier” land among the wastes of old Mars, as well as many mysteries on Venus and even some deuced queer spots on crowded Earth, a more accurate understanding of “The Three Planets” would be “not the frontier.” Venus, Earth and Mars represent civilization of an understandable type, regular trade and commerce, comprehensible science and clean restrooms. In the twenty-second century, the real frontier is seen as fiery Mercury, the innumerable and often poorly explored Asteroids, and the distant moons of Jupiter, the current edge of exploration.

And finally, the three planets represent humanity: all three worlds were settled aeons ago by a common stock, cross-fertilized ages later but still long ago by lost Martian and perhaps Terrestrial civilizations. There are other, stranger strains mixed into the folk of the three planets, odd evolutionary branchings and occasional dead ends, and people who seem to have the touch of worlds and universes utterly unknown. But the majority of all three planets are a common if long-separated stock, able to interbreed in most cases, and for all their cultural peculiarities, family and companions in a universe vast and filled with strangeness.

History has expanded vastly since the young, quarrelsome and energetic civilization of 20th century Earth launched a new era of interplanetary travel. Mars has seen countless civilizations rise and fall over many millions of years, some reaching great heights, but always mysteriously going rotten and descending back into dust. Some of the mysterious, crumbled relics found occasionally in Lunar caves where the sun never shines seem of antiquity comparable. Older still are the curious artifacts occasionally found in the Asteroid belt, which is the remnant of an ancient planet once inhabited by a mysterious civilization: long ages ago it was destroyed by a cosmic bullet, a small world of extraordinary density which came out of the void at such frightful speeds that escape would have been impossible even if the inhabitants of the fifth planet had possessed spaceships (the notion that all human races originally came from the fifth planet is hotly debated.) The old iron core of the fifth planet was knocked into a distant orbit past Pluto, and much of its mass knocked out of the solar system altogether.

Earth, in fact, had a history previously unknown: ancient and only partially translatable Martian records seem to speak of visitors from the third planet, leading Terrestrials to look again into dubious and “discredited” archeology. Strange and almost unimaginably old ruins have been found beneath the Indian Ocean, strange things have come up from the deep Pacific, and fragments of mysterious alloys recovered from the depths of Greenland glaciers, while a supposed “early Sumerian crystal goblet” of uncertain provenance held in a British museum since the 19th century has turned out to be Martian in origins and older than the Ice Ages. Only on Venus does the historical record taper off after a few millennia, and this may have more to do with the local corrosive climate and the quarrelsome history of the planet than anything else: occasionally odd blocks of curiously geometric displaced stone show up in the jungle, eroded travelers on a world which has never known glacial flows.

Earth is crowded, civilized, and not particularly democratic. It is heavily urbanized, and the 30 million inhabitant of Greater New York inhabit a vertical wonderland of bridges and suspended roads criss-crossing a forest of titan steel and crystal pillars over a thousand feet high. The war between Aryan Europa and China has recently ground to a stalemate of exhaustion, each side having lost more than a third of its population and revolution breaking out at home. The other three great powers of Pan-Africa, North America and Ind are not displeased with these results, since there was little love lost between any of them and the combatants, and all three had joined into a “league of armed neutrality” to prevent any expansion of the war into space or elsewhere on Earth. North America in particular hopes through reconstruction aid and investment to bring China under its influence, while spheres of influence in South America and the Middle East are busily being rearranged.

Immigrants from the other planets, drawn by the wealth and energy of Earth, are numerous, especially in North America. When sampling off-planet cooking, it is generally safer to try out Martian rather than Venusian restaurants if you can’t read the menus: one of Venus’s more popular exports to its offplanet sons and daughters is canned frog broth. Governments tend towards the authoritarian and the technocratic: North America is still fairly democratic, but it still has its prison asteroids where a regular ration of the whip is the norm, and powerful men and women who behind closed doors coolly discuss the benefits of genocidal behavior.

The Terrestrial song “The Green Hills of Earth” remains popular across the Three Planets, but was not written by a blind spaceman musical genius, and does not include the lines "We rot in the molds of Venus, / We retch at her tainted breath. / Foul are her flooded jungles, / Crawling with unclean death," which would be considered highly insulting by any Venusian. (Sure, Venus does have flooded jungles crawling with unclean death, but that’s only part of the planet).

The airless Moon is thinly populated, given the far greater attractiveness of Mars and Venus, and is a sort of annex of Earth, only roughly divided into spheres of influence by the Great Powers, and scattered with mining colonies, industries suited for vacuum, low gravity, and no environmental review whatsoever, and a multitude of archeologists and paleontologists investigating the mysterious scattered ruins and buried fossils from an era in which the Moon briefly and paradoxically held an atmosphere.

Venusians are a pale people, white of skin and with large and slightly slanted (no, not epicanthic folds, actually slanted) eyes in various shades of darkness. They are slender and almost elfin, and their hair is most often night-black but sometimes of a variety of colors not matched on earth. They possess a variety of adaptations to their warm, damp climate, including water-resistant skin that allows a Venusian to stand in swampy water for days or weeks without developing a case of trench-foot. There is something of the cat about them, playful yet cruel, utterly innocent-looking as they plan how to screw you over, patient and cool as so many cucumbers and always with the grace of someone who knows themselves to be royalty. One is very lucky to have a Venusian as a friend: one is in deep shit if they only think they have a Venusian as a friend. Venusian women are said to be the most seductive in all the solar system, and Venusian women’s fashions are considered the peak in elegant sexy. There are several Venusian sub-races, from the Hairy Men of the north Polar continent to the hairless, fishbelly-white inhabitants of the Fever Coast, but they are not generally what people think of when they say “Venusian.” Rumors of “fish-men” inhabiting the hot seas are ancient and anciently unproven.

Venus was briefly united under one Emperor, and the current Emperor still claims a planetary suzerainty, but unlike Mars, planetary union has hardly been the norm in Venusian history: although some large empires have come and gone, the herding-cats aspects of Venusian politics have tended to prevail in the long run. This is a reassuring thing to humans, since the various Venusian states have succeeded in catching up with Earth technologically at an alarming rate. (The Terrestrial Great Powers have tried to gain influence over the major Venusian states through divide and conquer tactics, with limited success: the Venusians wrote the book – several of them, indeed – on Machiavellian politics).

Venus is warm, wet, and almost perpetually cloudy. Green lichen-like growths soon appear on any exposed rocky surface. The nights are black with no stars or moon, but some of the local vegetation is phosphorescent. The low-lying continents and innumerable islands are mostly swamp (the dominant Venusian breeds are often disparagingly referred to as “swamp-men”), salt marsh, and jungle, although the North Polar areas have a relatively temperate climate and the interior of the Equatorial continent is mostly filled by the Devil’s Baking Sheet, the hottest, deadliest and most impenetrable desert on any of the Three Planets.

Martians are a varied bunch, as benefits the age of their race, but the major division is between Canal Dwellers, the current imperial race, pink and orange-pink and red-pink, short and a bit pudgy, and the Drylanders, backwards descendants of a race which ruled Mars many ages ago, thin and bony and with skin like wrinkled dark grey-red leather. The Canal dwellers are highly civilized but rather passive, with a certain amused condescension towards “hurried” races like Earthlings or Venusians, fond of their luxuries but also cynically philosophical about the inevitable misfortunes of life. Drylanders are ruthlessly invested in the business of survival, and make up the majority of Martians who take up adventurous careers, legal or illegal, in the grittier parts of Mars and the solar system. In spite of this, they have a strong artistic tradition, and their skills as woodcarvers and weavers are legendary. Less artistically inclined are the almost skeletal nomads of the Great Southwestern Desert, considered scary harsh people even by other Drylanders.

Mars is relatively thinly populated, although there are some fairly large cities at the intersections of the major canal systems. Most of the planet is desert or semi-desert, with extensive salt wastes and icy polar mountains whose highest peaks tend to accumulate carbon dioxide frost, among the foothills of which hardy hunters pursue the most expensive furs in the solar system. Even in the early ages of Martian civilization it was dry, although back then it had a few small and salty seas and much of what is now desert was then grasslands where the ancient Drylanders built their first kingdoms. There is extensive commerce with Earth, Mars exporting a variety of goods – art, luxuries, manufactures (Mars still holds tight some age-old technological secrets which so far terrestrial corporations cannot duplicate), drugs, liquors, etc., along with the trade in Martian artifacts (Mars has so much history that Martians are very little concerned about earthmen digging bits of it up and selling them: one blunts ones shovel on million-year-old paving stones when enlarging the cellar) and the tourist trade. The capital of Lakkdarol is one of the commercial hubs of the solar system, and the millennia-old Lakkmanda Markets are a legend across the solar system, with a veritable literature of songs, poems and stories surrounding them. If anyone in the solar system ever stumbles across the lamp of the Jinn for sale, it most likely will be in Lakkmanda Market.

A number of terrestrial settlements have sprung up in areas the Martian government isn’t bothering with (say around half of the planet), powered by atomic energy and either running a lengthy pipeline to the nearest canal or melting deep permafrost in the extensive portion of the planet with seriously chilly winters. It is generally more popular a place to set up shop than Venus, where terrestrial settlers are watched over by local governments rather more interested in their sovereignty than the sleepy and almost indifferent Martian ruling class, and where your chances of dying of some nasty infection are a lot higher. (On the other hand, those Venusian girls…)

Mars is also the favored spot for people who want to disappear off the radar or stay out of the reach of the Space Patrol and other law enforcement authorities. In the endless miles of desolation, combined with the Martian Drylander habits of hospitality towards strangers and Minding Your Own Business, entire illegal communities spring up, flourish, and die back to emerge somewhere else when they become too “popular”. Some of the most dangerous bandits and pirates in the solar system have their hideouts on Mars (some take up residence in the more corrupt Venusian states, but although the amenities are superior, the bribes are more expensive and the dangers of betrayal higher). The icy polar city of Righa, founded by a member of the vast Russian Diaspora, misspelled by his successors, is the most successful illegal city on Mars, which is to say it has lasted several decades without someone burning it to the ground, and is showing (from the local point of view) discouraging signs of going “legit.”

There are other peoples, some not very human. The wormy yellow inhabitants of Europa have a considerable if peculiar civilization of their own, while the green, blue, puce, etc. inhabitants of Ganymede are backwards races currently being energetically exploited by the inhabitants of the inner solar system. On one of the Black Asteroids (the hard to detect fragments of the cosmic “bullet”) a brown-skinned near-human race contends with a race of weird reptiles (due to their unusual density, even fairly small Black Asteroids may have enough gravity to hold onto some atmosphere). Closer to home, there are the curious, half-blind troglodytes of the Martian subterranean seas, and the peculiar big-headed little men of the isolated city of Xi, not discovered by the Brazilian government until 1953, and an odd, white-haired, thin-boned people who apparently hang out in Tibet along with their enormous sense of self-importance. (Tibet remains independent in this world. These facts are not unrelated). On small towns on the edge of civilization occasionally someone – or something – will show up that can’t be fit into any known category. What is that pig-faced guy at the back of that crowd picture, someone will ask. And the Martian or Venusian will shrug.

There are a few organizations that span all three planets. The Triplanetary Trade Commission (The gold standard is back: due to the lack of trust in each other’s financial systems, the Three Planet’s common currency is the Interplanetary Gold Dollar). The Universal Court, a fairly feeble UN-type institution based on the Moon. And the Space Patrol, which is funded by all major governments and whose officers are supposedly trained in a tradition of service and justice that transcends regional prejudice, but in fact is full of spies and agents from every major government, not to mention interplanetary criminal organizations. Crews are mixed to prevent favoritism, but connections matter. It was founded by, and is currently numerically dominated by, humans, but the Martian and Venusian components have been growing.

The Space Patrol has to deal with a huge area, from the mining colonies in the twilight zone of Mercury to the new settlements near Jupiter. They have to deal with smugglers, space pirates, supposedly legitimate shippers doing shady business on the side, and the occasional Weird Space Menace. And they receive little respect from the hard-bitten civilian men and women who make their living in the very tough business of space travel without the support of a government. And the agents of the Space patrol, often underfunded, often aboard patrol boats bought cheap and unable to keep up with the professional space-criminal’s souped-up craft, hoping that they won’t develop an allergy to the memory drugs needed to memorize (this week) the LLothic dialect of Middle Venusian, with untrustworthy superiors and sometimes subordinates to worry about, reciprocate in full the dislike.

The Space Patrol still pursues Northwest Smith, whose crimes against the varied laws of the Three Planets are rather more numerous than his heroic deeds, although you will never get his fans to admit that.

Said fans include a major portion of the Spacer community. Spacers are a tough and individualistic breed, and create their own little communities wherever they go, slightly contemptuous of groundlings and those who only go into space as cargo. Spaceman’s leathers are the traditional costume: if one can afford it, the favored type is the skin of the Venusian Crested Swamp Behemoth, which is tough, durable, largely stain-proof, Venusian mold and fungus-proof, non-flammable, a good insulator, and has an almost impossible to eliminate odor similar to machine oil, which discourages rich Terrestrial posers from buying and driving the price up. The Spacer’s favorite drink is Venusian segir “whiskey”, served in black bottles, dark red as wine, with an indescribable but not offensive taste and a kick like Vodka.

Aside from smuggling of valuable commodities and space piracy, there are a variety of nasty new drugs, the Three Planets each cross-fertilizing their local criminal societies through access to new and interesting product. And then there is slavery: it remains legal in some places on Venus, theoretically banned by the Emperor but continued in practice in parts of Mars, and on all three planets nastily persisting in the places where great wealth and great poverty coexist. In one of their admitted occasional successes, the Space Patrol over the last couple decades has managed to largely suppress the interplanetary slave trade, which had boomed for a while under the Willard Gang, perhaps the most notorious pirate organization in the solar system at their height.

Mercury, the asteroids, and Jupiter are currently the frontier. Mercury is only habitable in the narrow twilight zone of the tidally locked planet, a harsh environment between the seas of red-hot dust and curiously persistent ball lightning of the hot side, and the starlit ice-fields and ghostly mysteries of the dark side: still, the rich mineral resources attract investors and fortune-seekers. A number of Dark Asteroids have been found with air and some local life, while prospectors seek veins of uranium or platinum, or the rare intact artifact of the lost fifth-planet civilization in the many fragments of a world between Mars and Jupiter. The Belt is a motley place, with many small private colonial efforts, shirt-pocket utopias often brought to an end by insufficient skill with life support system, space pirate strongholds, Space Patrol bases looking for pirates, and asteroid prisons. It also has bigger and more “official” settlements on the larger planetoids, where travelers from the inner solar system stop and refuel and stock up on beef jerky and Red Bull (or, rather, the 22nd century equivalents) before heading on to Jupiter.

Jupiter, in this world of pulp physics, glows with lurid color, providing rather more heat and light for its satellites than the distant sun. Seven of them have some sort of life, although only Europa supports a real civilization, and three are marginal enough that exploration so far is limited. Things are still pretty crude where Earthlings and others have settled, and months of travel away from the inner system, local officials generally make their own law.

Nobody has yet made it to Saturn and returned. There is considerable argument as to whether this is due to it simply being too far for spaceship systems stretched to the limit, or whether there is something nasty about Saturn, natural or otherwise.

Technology is based on cheap and clean nuclear power, and the dominant weapons systems are directed energy weapons, which put one hell of a lot of power into individual hands (the ray or “heat-gun”, ownership of which on Earth is either forbidden or requires elaborate registration procedures, depending on jurisdiction, is only slightly less lethal than “First Generation” Star Trek phasers). Computer tech is generally primitive: there are no AI’s, and spaceship piloting still requires a fair degree of human skill. “Ancestral memory” is apparently a real thing: it is studies scientifically in various terrestrial institutions of learning, although as yet not much useful information has been acquired from the (mostly) dead past.

People with psychic abilities exist, although they are rare. The stronger ones live with danger: like psykers in WarHammer 40K, the ability to peer into other dimensions comes with the danger of something peering back, and taking control of the psychic for their own purposes. Although the general Earth public is skeptical of psychic stuff, various government secret agencies employ psychics, unreliable as their abilities often are, to try to get a leg up on the competition. The Indians have perhaps the most advanced training program. The Chinese effort to force-grow useful mental abilities ended rather badly: a special fortress prison on Yuebing Er (formerly one of the New Siberian Islands) contains some of the fallout.

The North American Government’s Bureau of Non-Planetary Antiquities does not concern itself solely with odd things found in space. It's reputation of being a boring bureaucracy filled with dusty archaeologists is a cover; in fact it deals with odd items in general, artifacts and technologies that might be considered either simply incomprehensible or just “magical”. Currently its best investigators are puzzling over the contents of a package abandoned in a New York restaurant. Apparently a small stone tablet carved in relief with curious symbols similar to ones found in caves on the Moon, closer examination has shown it to be made of an unknown, almost indestructible substance, and that it reacts in an unpredictable way to extended human contact. So far one incautious team had their faces melted off, and a more cautious team still managed to have half of their membership reduced to small piles of dust. Investigations continue, and condemned criminals are being surreptitiously moved from prison to BNPA authority.

The solar system is full of dark mysteries. There are tales of strange peoples and monsters, of magic and old Gods. Martians and Venusians know full well there are things science at best barely hints at: most Earthlings, still in the flush of an era of triumphant science, tend to pooh-pooh such things, but experienced spacers and other far travelers see and hear enough that they are much less willing to dismiss the ancient legends of the other planets – or, increasingly, their own. People and entire spaceships disappear under strange circumstances, or occasionally reappear, mad or dead and strangely changed. There are some moons and asteroids where the Space Patrol will not land under almost any circumstances, for reasons that are named “confidential” and not further elucidated upon. Even the bravest of space pirates and space adventurers tend to follow their example in such cases. Operating largely outside of the public eye, there are people on Mars and Venus that are said by sober officials to be actual wizards and witches, and tales circulate of their strange abilities.

The priest-rulers of the silvery-haired, misty-eyed inhabitants of innermost Tibet are in a bit of a rage. Their memories of the future are less clear than their memories of the past, but they had been sure that the Stone of Eternity would fall into the hands of one of the priesthood – who had then been gunned down in some bar brawl in New York, a fact which had escaped him because none can remember their _own_ death, due to paradox. Now they trawl the future and the memories of millions not yet born to try and recapture it, but the future of the next few centuries remains cloudy, and some whisper that this can only be accounted by through a terrible era of death and destruction lying between the _now_ and the distant, dimly remembered future time when the Moon will be Redeemed…

Strange creatures are occasionally glimpsed. Many ancient myths, it appears, have some counterpart in the realities of the solar system – Vampiric things suck blood or life force itself, strange insect-like beings appear and make mischief and then disappear like fairies or elves. Vast monsters like the dragons of myth crawl through the Venusian jungles, and stories are whispered of a “Circe” dwelling on a jungle moon of Jupiter, who lures space travelling men to their doom and turns them into ghostly beasts. An infinite number of alternate universes exist, says science; some of them peer curiously into this one. Fortunately, cooperation on our side is needed to really get through…

The slimy shape-shifting tentacle monsters are mostly female, or at least appear to be.

There are stranger vampires than those which suck life-force. There are creatures that live off fear, there are things that live off adoration. And then there are the secret rulers of the Minga Fortress on Venus. Carved out of the bare bones of the mountain the capital city of Venus runs up against, the fortress is older than recorded Venusian history, and for all that time it has been breeding women for beauty (mysteriously, apparently without the use of men) and selling the rulers of the Venus – and in the last couple centuries, to the great and powerful of Earth and Mars as well – the Minga maids, the most beautiful and gracious and charming women in the solar system. So beautiful are they that even the worm-like rulers of Europa have begun purchasing them, although reportedly as objects de art, preserved for viewing in crystalline suspended animation, rather than objects of kinky worm sex. (The holders of the city around the Minga fortress, kings or Emperors as may be, historically have been bribed with a share of the loot and free samples).

The fortress is staffed by hired eunuchs and women, very remunerative jobs, as long as one does not fall prey to Vanishing Servant Syndrome before retiring . Who else lives there is unclear: the head of the fortress, the black-robed Alendar, occasionally meets with kings and emperors, and is often accompanied by one or two other black-robed figures that never speak. How new Alendars are chosen, and from what population is unknown, as it is unknown how the inner caste reproduce themselves (presumably with the aid of the female servants, although their apparently lack of need for males for the Minga has led to some creepy speculation).

Who – or what – provides security is also a matter of whispered myth and legend. On a couple occasions, greedy kings and emperors have tried to kill the golden goose. Soldiers forcing their way in never came out again, and when the siege equipment was called in said monarchs died of peculiar ailments before much progress could be made against the fortress’s massive walls. These facts have carefully been suppressed in the histories, but are well known in the Imperial family. Modern weapons probably would be quick, but after three centuries of unbroken Détente the Venusian emperors see no reason to make waves.

Some vampires feed on beauty. And when you are breeding animals for your food, there are always culls and rejects. The Alendar – there has always been just one – and its kin, the black, writhing slime-things which roil the black waters many miles beneath the fortress – feed off beauty, and have always been amused at how much humans have been willing to pay for what they toss away as not tasty enough.

Recently there were some disturbing happenings at the Minga fortress, which went incommunicado with the outside world for a few months. A new Alendar finally appeared and hired a whole new staff. (The bribes to content the local authorities were _massive_. As in, give every member of the NYPD a summer cottage in the Hamptons). He is short, never shows his face, and communicates entirely through written notes.

He’ll get the hang of being human in another century or two.

If he ever returns to the Venusian Empire's capital, Northwest Smith is definitely on the Minga’s shit list.

Beyond immortal slime vampires and sirens, there are gods and things akin to gods. The Gods were more powerful, more real, once; some have become mere abstractions, most have faded, some have perished or disappeared entirely. Others still await. Some sleep in deep places beneath the Earth or Mars, others lurk in pocket dimensions and occasionally intrude on our world. There are gates, some known to the initiate, others secret and stumbled into by the unlucky or unwary.

Some Gods are supposedly helpful. Shar, the chief god in the complex polytheism of Venus, is widely seen as a beneficial deity, and has come to be worshipped by some Terrestrials and Martians as well. But most Martians know Gods are not to be trusted, and that if there is divine power in the universe, it is most likely dark. They speak from experience.

Perhaps the most sinister God of old myth is the elder God of Mars, whose name, Pharol, is nowadays a mere obscenity, representing nothingness and utter oblivion, but once stood above the kings who ruled Old Mars before the seas dried. It is said that He came from the exploding ruin of the fifth planet, where He had ruled for countless ages before. (Some say that the destruction of the fifth planet came because He ruled there so long). His Temple survived being hurled across space to Mars, preserved by His fell might. When Martians came and entered the temple mountain which had fallen from the skies they saw Him and his two children/brother/sister/lovers/emergency food supplies, Saig and Lsa, sitting on their crystal thrones, and they fell to their knees and worshiped.

Black Pharol, as he would be known in later ages, displaced and debased the older Gods of Mars, now almost entirely forgotten. His true name was not spoken by humans, save for the occasional high priest imbued with a fragment of His power: it could not be spoken by human tongues, because it was not composed of sound as we know it but of an immobilizing force, cancelling and devouring all normal sound and vibration, darkening the very air.

His dark eidolon did not move from His throne, since by this era his power had begun to fade, but His spirit travelled across Mars as a cold grey mist, sucking the life from those unfortunate to cross His path: one of His elder names was the Cold Grey God, although the unspeakable Form on the throne of crystal was blacker than midnight. Some say that Martian civilization was permanently blighted, that when Martians grew powerful and numerous Pharol would cull their numbers and bring another era of decline and decay, or perhaps simply grow too greedy and feed too energetically on the spirits and energies of His subjects. But in time the city in which He was worshipped (it’s very name long forgotten)was destroyed by a massive earthquake, burying His temple. As He withdrew further from the world, His power to compel and command grew less, resistance grew, and eventually an Emperor arose who overthrew the power of the Priests of Pharol and banned his worship…

…leading to centuries of civil war and chaos.

Today “Pharol” is a curse, his priesthood a hidden ancient cult divided into many mutually hostile sub-sects, broadly believed to take part in the most ghastly of perversions, of which corpse-eating is one of the more mild. The Gods withdrew, the seers and mystics and those with wild talents say, because the stars became not right and they pulled back from this universe. Some vanished altogether from human ken, all grew weak and were often forgotten. But after all, after summer is winter, and after winter summer. The stars have changed, and some may now seek to return. There are those who still believe that, whatever the wishes and hopes of men, the Cold Grey God will inevitably return one day at the peak of His might, and all three worlds will be enveloped in hungry mists. Some of His followers exist to this day, and amid the decorative Old Martian script that decorates many a Martian dwelling or kick-knack, the meaning of which has long been forgotten, foul symbols of His power hide in plain sight.

(Admittedly, some of his worshipers don’t really want to have their God that close: King Log vs. King Stork, after all).

For various reasons, Northwest Smith is on His shit list too.

Foolish modern wizards and seekers after ancient mysteries seek to regain the ancient knowledge with which the wizard-kings of Old Mars made servants or at least sworn allies of horrors unspeakable: some even dream to one day master ancient Gods themselves. Most of these people are harmless enough, but not the Thule society. For long they have eaten bitterness: although their secret black magical aid saved Europe for the Aryan people, later Fuhrers grew distrustful of their power and in the end brutally suppressed them, calling their practices un-Aryan degeneracy. But they survived, and grew strong in the shadows. Now that the previous rulers have been discredited, the opportunity beacons to take control of Aryan Europa and reshape it in their image…