Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Mike Resnick, Robert T. Garcia

showing no signs of running out of arrows. One of them yelled, and the remainder retreated to their canoes, cutting them loose and pushing off. In very little time, they were but specks in the distance.
    Mirina dropped to the deck of the boat, heedless of the blood, spent.
    She collapsed there, wings sprawling, body heaving with pants and shuddering with the pounding of her heart. Dek ran to her, seizing a waterskin on the way, and cradled her in his arms, putting it to her lips.
    She had not even the strength left to drink, so he used a little of the water to gently bathe her face.
    For a moment I feared that she had overtasked her strength, defending us, and that her frail heart would fail.
    But then she took a deep and shuddering breath, and looked up at Dek. And that was when I saw it happen, when he looked at her for the first time, and saw, not the strange birdlike creature, nor the seeming-child. He looked at her and saw the woman in the slender body, and looked on her, not as a man looks on a child, but as a man looks on a woman.
    She saw it, too, and her eyes widened. Her hands started to move in that language of signs, but he forestalled anything she might have “said” by kissing her.
    Well, that is all that there is to the tale. The rest was commonplace; we heaved the bodies of our unknown enemies overboard, cleaned the decks of blood, and tied the captured canoes behind us, for they were exceptionally well-made, and more than made up for the loss of the sea-beast. The wind finally rose in our favor. Between the compass and Mirina’s inner sense, we returned to our own shores, and Dek presented Mirina to his father as his mate. Nor did Kolk appear displeased with this.
    And as for me . . . well, this tale has given me new hope. For if a man of Thuria can have his mate fall from the sky to him, a mate half-bird and half-girl, then surely there can be a mate out there for me.
    After all, what in Pellucidar is less likely—a female Sagoth as intelligent as I—or a girl with wings?

Amtor—ERB’s Venus—is a watery jungle world, and its hero is blond Carson Napier, who set out for Mars but forgot to take the gravitational field of the Moon into account and wound up on Venus. The villains in the first book were (well-disguised) communists, and the villains in the third of the four books were parodies (but deadly parodies, paradoxical as that may seem) of the Nazis. Here Richard Lupoff, long-time Burroughs scholar and author of two nonfiction books about ERB’s worlds, comes up with a new menace to our hero.
    —Mike

    Scorpion Men of Venus

    Richard A. Lupoff
    (dedicated to Dave Van Arnam)

    Jagged-edged and venomous thorns tore at our clothes and deadly vines swung from the dripping limbs of towering deciduous pitcher-trees—seeking as if intelligently motivated—to capture Duare and myself. Armed only with machetes, their blades honed from Venusian ironwood trees, the courageous sable-tressed Venusian maiden and I beat back our vegetable attackers.
    “I am weary, Carson,” the lovely Duare gasped. “I do not know how much longer I can continue.” For a moment she collapsed into my arms. Seeming to draw strength from our momentary embrace, she drew a deep breath and, uttering an oath in her native tongue, swung her weapon at a sinewy green creeper that had made its way across the jungle floor and was attempting to wrap itself around her ankle.
    “Do not lose hope, O Princess,” I encouraged her. “While yet we draw breath, there remains a chance that we will win free of our pursuers.”
    “Princess.” Duare spoke with bitter irony. “What matters it be I princess or slave, should I be sawed to bits by blade-thorn bushes or, worse yet, captured by a pitcher-tree and digested alive!” She wiped perspiration from her brow, swung her blade once more at a clutching vine, and strode ahead.
    Behind us we could hear the eager cries of the brutal Andaks of Kattara. Half-human, half-beast, each of these