‘It was the first strike of the Squeem,’ the Rememberer said. ‘Harry never forgot that moment. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? It shaped his whole life. Even before the next wave came, falling on the cities.’
Rhoda and her soldiers listened, trying to understand, trying to decide whether to believe him. Trying to decide what to do about it.
While the old man rested – or had done eighty minutes ago, the time it took the signals from Earth to reach Saturn – Rhoda let her staff resume other duties, but summoned Reg Kaser, her first officer.
Waiting for Reg in her cabin, Rhoda powered up her percolator, her one indulgence from her Iowa home. While it chugged and slurped and filled the cabin with sharp coffee scents, she faced her big picture window.
The Jones was a UN Navy corvette. It was locked in a languid orbit around Rhea, second largest moon of Saturn. In fact the Jones wasn’t far from home; its home base was on Enceladus, another of Saturn’s moons. Rhea itself was unprepossessing, just another ball of dirty ice. But beyond it lay Saturn, where huge storms raged across an autumnal cloudscape, and the rings arched like gaudy artefacts, unreasonably sharp. The Saturn system was like a ponderous ballet, illuminated by distance-dimmed sunlight, and Rhoda could have watched it for ever.
But it was Rhea she had come here for. Within its icy carcass were pockets of salty water, kept liquid by the tidal kneading of Saturn and the other moons. That wasn’t so special; there were similar buried lakes on many of the Solar System’s icy moons, even Enceladus. But within Rhea’s deep lakes had been discovered colonies of Squeem, the aquatic group-mind organisms that had, for a few decades, ruled over a conquered mankind, and even occupied Earth itself.
The Jones was named for the hero who had crucially gained an advantage over the Squeem, through a bit of bravery and ingenuity, which had ultimately led to the Squeem’s expulsion from the Solar System – or so everybody had thought, until this relic colony had been discovered. The xenologists were already talking to these stranded Squeem, using antique occupation-era translation devices. It was Rhoda’s task to decide what to do with them. She could have them preserved, even brought back to Earth.
Or she could make sure that every last Squeem in Rhea died. She had the authority to destroy the whole moon, if she chose, to make sure.
It was a hard decision to make.
And now she had the complication of this old man, the self-styled ‘Rememberer’, and his antique saga of the occupation which he insisted had to be heard before any decision was made about the Squeem on Rhea.
First Officer Reg Kaser arrived, and waited silently as she gathered her thoughts.
They were contrasting types. Rhoda Voynet, forty years old, came from an academic background; she had trained as a historian of the occupation before joining the service. Kaser, fifty, scarred, one leg prosthetic, and with a thick Mercury-mine accent, was a career soldier. He had taken part in the counter-invasion a decade ago, when human ships, powered by hyperdrives purloined from the Squeem themselves, had at last assaulted the Squeem’s own homeworld. They worked well together, their backgrounds and skills complementary. Kaser had learned to be patient while Rhoda thought things through. And she had learned to appreciate his decisiveness, hardened in battle.
‘Tell me what we know of this old man,’ she said.
Kaser checked over a slate. ‘His name is Karl Hume. Born and raised on Earth. Seventy-four years old. He’s spent his life working for the UN Restoration Agency. Literature section.’
Rhoda understood the work well enough. Much of the material she had drawn on in her own research had come from the Restoration’s reassembling. The Squeem were traders, not ideological conquerors, but in their exploitation they had carelessly inflicted huge damage on mankind’s cultural heritage. A hundred and fifty years after their expulsion the Restoration was still patiently piecing together lost libraries, recovering works of art, even rebuilding swathes of shattered cities brick by brick, like New York, where young Harry Gage had watched the sky fall.
‘Hume was a drone,’ Kaser said, uncompromising. ‘His work was patient, thorough, reliable, but he had no specific talent, and he didn’t climb the ladder. He held down a job all his life, but nobody missed him when he retired. He had a family. Wife now dead, kids off-Earth. He never troubled the authorities, not so much as a dodgy tax payment.’
‘Until he tried to abduct a kid.’
‘Quite.’
The boy, called Lonnie Tekinene, was another New Yorker, ten years old – the same age as Harry Gage, Rhoda noted absently, when he had witnessed the Squeem invasion. Hume had made contact with the kid through a Virtual play-world, and had met him physically in Central Park, and had tried to take him off to Hume’s apartment. Alert parents had put a stop to that.
And as Hume had been processed through the legal system, he had become aware of the discovery of the pocket of Squeem on Rhea, moon of Saturn, and the deliberation going on within the UN and its military arm as to what to do about it.
Kaser said, ‘Hume didn’t harm a hair of the kid’s head. At first he just denied everything. But when he heard about Rhea he opened up. He said it was just that his “time” had come. He was the “Rememberer” of his generation. But he was growing old. He needed to recruit another to take his place – just as he was recruited in his turn by some other old fossil when he was ten.’
‘He never explained why he chose this kid, this Lonnie? What criteria he used?’
Kaser shrugged. ‘Looking at the police files, I don’t think anybody asked. Hume was just a nut, to them. Probably a sexual deviant.’
Rhoda said, ‘But he insisted we need to hear what he has to say. Some truth about the Squeem occupation, preserved only in his head, that will shape our decision.’
‘We know all about the occupation,’ Kaser said. ‘It was a System-wide event. It affected all of mankind. What “truth” can this old fool have, locked up in his head, and available nowhere else?’
‘What truth so hideous,’ Rhoda wondered, ‘that it could only be lodged in one man’s head? What do you think we should do?’
Kaser shrugged. ‘Assess the Squeem colony on its own merits. Maybe they’re just stranded, left behind in the evacuation. Or this could be a monitoring station of some kind, spying on a system they lost. Maybe it even predates the occupation, a forward base to gather intelligence to run the invasion. Whatever the reason, it needs to be shut down.’
‘But the Squeem themselves don’t necessarily need to be eliminated.’
‘True.’
‘You think I should just ignore this old man, don’t you?’
He grinned, tolerant. ‘Yes. But you won’t. You’re an obsessive fact-gatherer. Well, we have time. The Squeem aren’t going anywhere.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll see if the old guy has finished his nap.’
Karl Hume, bathed once more in strong Earth sunlight, talked to his inquisitor of memories passed down through a chain of Rememberers: the memories of ten-year-old Harry Gage.
Before the invasion, humans had diffused out through the Solar System and beyond in their bulky, ponderous, slower-than-light GUTships. It was a time of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future. Then the first extra-solar intelligence was encountered, somewhere among the stars.
Only a few years after first contact Squeem ships burst into the Solar System, in a shower of exotic particles and lurid publicity. The Squeem were aquatic group-mind multiple creatures. They crossed the stars using a hyperdrive system beyond human understanding. They maintained an interstellar network of trading colonies. Their human label, a not very respectful rendering of the Squeem’s own sonic rendering of their title for themselves – ‘Ss-chh-eemnh’ – meant something like the Wise Folk, rather like ‘Homo sapiens’.
Communication with the group-mind Squeem was utterly unlike anything envisaged before their arrival. With no separation between individual
s, the Squeem hadn’t evolved to count in whole numbers, for instance. But eventually common ground was found. And despite fears that mankind might be overwhelmed by a more technically advanced civilisation, trade and cultural contacts were initiated.
The Squeem were welcomed into the Solar System.
Then – it was a morning in New York – in orbit around every inhabited world and moon in the Solar System, cannon platforms appeared. Humanity’s slower-than-light GUTdrive warships had no hope of blocking the Squeem’s hyperdrive convoys.
And on Earth, rocks began to fall.
‘They came in too fast for the planet’s impactor defences to cope with,’ the Rememberer whispered. ‘Rocks from the Solar System’s own belts of asteroids and comets, sent in at faster than interplanetary speeds. And they were targeted. Obviously it was the Squeem’s doing.
‘Harry and his family, stranded on Earth, got an hour’s warning of the Manhattan bolide. Harry’s father knew New York. He got Harry off the island through the ancient Queens-Midtown tunnel.
‘The bolide came down right on top of Grand Central Station. The impact was equivalent to a several-kiloton explosion. It dug out a crater twenty metres across. Every building south of Harlem was reduced to rubble, and several hundred thousand people were killed, through that one impact alone, on the first day of the invasion. Harry saw it all.
‘And Harry’s mother didn’t make it. Crushed in the stampede for the tunnels. Harry never forgave the Squeem for that. Well, you wouldn’t, would you?’
Harry and his father reached Queens, where a refugee camp was quickly organised.
And the world churned. All Earth’s continents were pocked by the impact scars. Millions had died, cities shaken to rubble. People were horribly reminded of the Starfall, a human war fought with similar techniques only decades before. But now the aggressors were aliens, lacking any human kinship or conscience.
The damage could have been far worse. The Squeem could have sent in a dinosaur-killer, or a relativistic missile like the Fists of the Alpha System rebels of the Starfall war. They could have put Earth through an extinction event, just as easily.
‘It took a day for their true strategy to be revealed,’ the Rememberer said. ‘When people started dying, in great numbers, in waves that spread out like ripples from the impact craters. Dead of diseases that didn’t even have names.’
It had been an ingenious strategy, and evidently rehearsed on other subject worlds before. The impactors had been carefully prepared. They had all been seeded with bits of Earth, knocked into space by massive natural impacts in the deep past, and so well preserved that they even carried a cargo of antique life. Spores, still viable.
‘Diseases, antique and terrible,’ the Rememberer whispered, ‘diseases older than grass, against which mankind, indeed the modern biosphere, had no defence. They used our own history against us, to cut us back while preserving the Earth itself. Having lost his mother during the bombardment, now Harry lost his father to the plagues. He didn’t forgive the Squeem for that, either.’
Rhoda Voynet listened to this account. She was familiar with the history Hume had outlined so far, at least in summary. It was eerie, though, to hear this tale of immense disaster by an eye-witness at only a few removes.
The Squeem attack must have been overwhelming, horrifying, for those who lived through it. Incomprehensible in its crudity and brutality. But since those days mankind had learned more of the facts of Galactic life.
This was the way interstellar war was waged. It wasn’t like human war. It wasn’t politics, or economics. Though both mankind and Squeem were sentient tool-using species, the conflict between them was much more fundamental than that. It wasn’t even ecological, the displacement of one species by another. This was a clash of biospheres.
In such a war there was no negotiation. You just hit hard, and fast.
On Earth, residual resistance imploded quickly.
The more marginal colonies on the other planets and moons were subdued even more easily. Harry’s home arcology in Cydonia was cracked open like an egg. Stranded on Earth, he never found out about that.
And human space travel was suspended. Wherever the great GUTship interplanetary freighters landed they were broken up, and the Poole wormhole fast-transit routes, reopened since the Starfall, were collapsed. Some spaceborne humanity escaped, or hid. Pilots couldn’t bear to be grounded. Harry’s great-aunt Anna, an AntiSenescence-preserved slow-freighter pilot on the Port Sol run, managed to escape the Solar System altogether. Harry never knew about that either. In fact he never saw any of his family again.
Harry Gage, orphaned in the first few days of the invasion, was a Martian boy stranded on Earth.
Under the Squeem regime, he was put to work. In the first weeks he had to help lug the bodies of plague victims to vast pyres. He always wondered if one of them was his own father. Later he worked in labour camps, set up in the ruins of the shattered cities of mankind.
He grew older and stronger, working hard for the Squeem and their human collaborators, as the aliens began to exploit the worlds they had conquered. The Squeem had no interest in human technology, which was too primitive to be useful, still less in the products of human culture. But Earth was a lode of complex hydrocarbons, highly prized by interstellar traders. The last of the planet’s oil and coal was dug up by human muscle, and exported off the planet. Harry worked in the mines, squirming through seams too narrow for an adult.
Humans themselves could be worth exporting, though they were expensive and fragile. Slave transports lifted off the planet, sundering families, taking their captives to unknown destinations. Even after the eventual expulsion of the Squeem nobody ever found out what became of most of them. Jones, however, the ultimate liberator of mankind, had been among their number, a captive off-world worker.
And on Earth people kept dying, from overwork or hunger or neglect.
The Squeem even shut down AntiSenescence technology. They had no interest in lengthening human lives; fast-breeding generations of servants and slaves were sufficient for them. Beneath the attention of the Squeem, stone-age wars were fought over the last AS supplies. Some of the undying went into hiding, detaching themselves from human history. Other lives centuries long were curtailed in brief agonies of withdrawal.
Amid all this, Harry grew up as best he could. There was no education, nothing but what you could pick up from other workers and bits of Squeem-collaborator propaganda, about how this wasn’t a conquest at all but a necessary integration of mankind into a Galactic culture. Harry heard little and understood less.
‘But,’ Karl Hume whispered, ‘Harry never forgave the Squeem, for their murder of his mother and father. And he began to develop contacts with others who were just as unforgiving. It was a dangerous business. There were plenty of collaborators, and the dissident groups were easily infiltrated.
‘But a resistance network gradually coalesced. Small acts of sabotage were committed. Every act was punished a hundredfold. But still they fought back, despite the odds, despite the cost. It was a heroic time.’
Lots of untold stories, historian Rhoda thought wistfully.
‘Then,’ said the Rememberer, ‘Harry was transferred to the Great Lakes.’
Lake Superior had the largest surface area of any freshwater lake in the world. It was a grandiose gesture of the Squeem to colonise this great body of water, to symbolise their subjugation of mankind. Harry worked on vast projects to adjust the mineral content of Superior’s water to the Squeem’s liking, incidentally eliminating much of the native fauna. When the lake was ready, the Squeem descended from the sky in whale-like shuttles.
It was the Lake Superior colony that gave the resistance a real chance to hurt the Squeem.
Rhoda Voynet grew more interested. At last the Rememberer was talking of incidents she’d never heard of before.
It was easy to kill a Squ
eem, if you could get near one, as easy as murdering a goldfish. But all Squeem were linked into a mass mind. So the death of a single Squeem affected the totality, but only in a minor way, as the loss of a single neurone from a human brain wouldn’t even be noticed. To hurt the Squeem significantly you had to kill an awful lot of them.
And that was what Harry’s resistance cell managed to do. It happened close to Harry’s twenty-fifth birthday.
‘It was a suicide mission,’ the Rememberer said. ‘A volunteer allowed her body to be pumped full of Squeem-specific toxins and pathogens. Harry wasn’t the assassin, and nor was he educated enough to have manufactured the toxins. Underground cells of fifty-somethings, the last generation of pre-invasion scientists, laboured over that. But Harry was a link in the chain that got the toxins to the assassin, and he helped provide a diversion that enabled the woman to finish the job.’
The woman just jumped into Lake Superior, one bright morning, her body weighted with bags of rocks. She slit her own wrists and let her crimson blood spill into the waters.
‘Every Lethe-spawned Squeem in that lake died,’ Karl Hume said. ‘They felt that loss all the way back to their homeworld. And I mean it, those group-minded bastards all felt it.’
As Hume told this story, Rhoda saw Reg Kaser clench his fist, the others of her crew shift and murmur. Subtle signs of triumph. It was a story that none of them had heard before; Rhoda, herself a historian, had no idea the invasion-age inhabitants of Earth had been able to mount such an effective assault on the conquerors.
‘But of course it made no difference to the occupation,’ Hume said. ‘The Squeem still had the Solar System. They still had Earth. They rounded up everybody even remotely connected with the killing.’
‘They got Harry,’ the inquisitor prompted.
‘Oh, yes. And they put them all in a prison camp, where Harry waited for Earth’s punishment.
‘To understand what followed,’ Hume said darkly, ‘you have to try to see the world-view of the Squeem. For one thing, they aren’t instinctive killers as we are. Their background is a cooperative ecology, not a competitive one like ours. That’s how they ended up as a group mind. When they did kill, as in the strikes on the cities, the killing was minimal, if you can call it that. Just enough to achieve their objectives, in that case to shatter resistance and subjugate the population.
Xeelee: Endurance Page 17
