The Massacre of Mankind

by Stephen Baxter

  He could hardly be a roving reporter. But he soon discovered he could journey in time, with the help of books his family bought or borrowed for him. He wrote topical pieces on aspects of the city’s history, and later graduated to better-paid work for guide books for the foreigners who swarmed through Constantinople: thanks to the oil, visitors in recent years so eager to prove themselves friends to the Ottomans and not foes. The Schlieffen War had seemed likely to destabilise the Ottoman empire almost as much as it had the Russian, but it seemed to Emre that in recent years the situation had grown calmer. The Sultan had been restored, to no great enthusiasm. The British insisted on their ‘protectorates’, to ensure access to the Suez canal, and to the oil of Mesopotamia, but otherwise kept themselves to themselves. The Germans, meanwhile, had proven themselves useful allies at least in the short term – fighting to fend off Russia’s ambitions to own Constantinople itself. Allies in the short term: perhaps you could hope for no more than that.

  But now, in the middle of this complex swirl of history and ambition, the Martians had landed.

  Constantinople was almost unique in the Second War in that the first landing of the Martians’ invasion party fell within the bounds of the city itself, landing in that more modern part of the city north of the Golden Horn known dismissively by the locals as Frengistan – ‘Foreigner Town’. Hotels, business centres and embassies had been flattened indiscriminately, and few of the surviving Turks mourned.

  Soon, though, the Martians had been ready to move. They advanced through the districts of Pera and Galata, and then the fighting-machines simply waded through the waters of the Golden Horn north of the new German-built Galata Bridge, and into the old city. Centuries before, the ancient Roman city walls had been no defence against the Turks with their gunpowder weapons; now they proved no obstacle to the Heat-Ray. It is to be wondered if the Martians sensed anything of the antiquity of the quarters into which they probed, the glittering legs of the fighting-machines towering over the dusty houses and bazaars, and the ancient, glittering mosques. But then, I suppose, to a race as antique as the Martians, even Constantinople is as evanescent as a traveller’s pitched tent.

  It was unfortunate that Emre was left behind during the flight.

  The Martians’ advance into Stamboul was a shock to the inhabitants; communications in much of the empire, even the older parts of the capital, were still primitive in 1922. An alarm had been sounded, the local police running from house to house and ringing bells. One of Emre’s brothers, dragging his children behind him, had come to the door to collect their mother.

  And Emre, in his room at the back of the house – a wounded soldier too stubborn and proud to call out – stayed where he was. So it was that when the Martians came to his neighbourhood, Emre was entirely alone.

  The first he saw of them was a kind of slim pillar passing his window. He realised later that he had seen the leg of a fightingmachine, picking its way through the dilapidated neighbourhood as an adult might step cautiously across a carpet strewn with toys.

  Emre had a vehicle of his own, a kind of low cart made for him by one of his brothers - practical, but hated by Emre, for it was like a beggar’s chariot. Still, now he used his strong arms to lift himself down from his bed and onto the cart, and rolled through the deserted house to the front door.

  Something was coming down the street.

  Emre saw a thing like a swollen metallic spider, so huge it all but filled the narrow street, side to side, but its five limbs carried it over the cobbles with uncanny grace. As it passed, tentacular limbs probed into the houses to either side, the open doors and windows. And what Emre thought was a sack of leather was riding on its back. This was the controlling Martian. It was thus in some parts of the world, where the Martians sent in their handling-machines to explore densely inhabited neighbourhoods, in advance of destroying them – or perhaps in search of feedstock, a fate that, fifteen years before, had so nearly had befallen Walter Jenkins and the curate in the ruined house in Sheen.

  The Martian seemed to spot Emre. It stopped, freezing to an eerie stillness. Emre too waited, sitting on his cart, as the Martian sat on its own machine. They were strange mirror images, Emre thought, each dependent for movement on a mechanical aid.

  Afterwards, Emre would always wonder how the encounter would have worked out, if not for the child.

  It was a boy, barefoot, aged no more than five or six – Emre wasn’t sure if he knew him – somehow left behind in the evacuation. Now he stumbled from a doorway. He looked around, and then started running towards Emre, presumably the only adult he had seen all morning.

  Emre reacted quickly. He waved his arms. ‘Get back!’

  But the Martian was almost as fast. Emre saw from the corner of his eye as a metallic limb held out a cylinder – it was a Heat-Ray projector – and swept it through the air like a wand. Walls exploded, windows shattered, wooden frames burst into sudden flame.

  And the near-invisible beam brushed the child.

  Emre was not the only Turk to encounter Martians that day. After the invasion of England in 1907 the great Islamic empire had studied the Martians as a potential enemy, for, among much other damage, they had destroyed the Shah Jahan mosque in Woking. Even now a brave young officer called Mustafa Ataturk was leading a force in defence of the ancient and glorious Ayasofya – and later this heroism would be a platform for Ataturk, rehabilitated under the Sultanate and encouraged by the Federation of Federations, to achieve great things on a world stage. The old city itself was resilient; it had survived invasions, the fall of empires, earthquakes, fires, and in recent decades coups and counter-coups. It would survive even an invasion from another world.

  But at that moment Emre knew none of this. He was alone against the Martians - but not powerless. Emre had been crippled for ten years, but he was only thirty years old, and still strong in his upper arms. Enraged by the wanton destruction of the child, paddling at the road’s cobbles, he used all his strength to hurl himself at the Martian. Perhaps he could smash a hole in that great fleshy lump in the top of the machine before he was killed.

  But the Martian coolly regarded him, from lidless eyes. Then it turned and receded from his view, effortlessly outrunning him, before Emre had to give up, exhausted.

  It was some time before Emre had the courage to seek out the remains of the child. And he found a strange shadow play.

  So rapidly had the Heat-Ray passed – and perhaps it was on some reduced setting for the safe use by its controlling Martian in such an enclosed space - that it had incinerated the child entirely, but had merely scorched the surface of a wall behind. And so a kind of inverted shadow of the child remained, caught running in its final moment, as if painted on the darkened wall.

  17

  ABOVE DURBAN

  ‘Ulla! Ulla! . . .’ The Martian cry was heard around the world, in the Americas, in Australia, in Asia – and in Africa.

  It was in the early morning of that Saturday, high above Durban on a foothill of the Drakensberg Mountains - and with the Martian walking machines still ravaging the city below - that Gopal Tilak came upon the Zulu woman. She sat alone, a small pile of belongings at her side, the morning light on her rather expressionless face.

  I met Gopal Tilak much later, when I visited the ruins of Bombay, only to happen, by chance, upon this eyewitness to the destruction of Durban. By the time I met him Gopal had become a prominent lawyer advising a newly independent Indian government on the proper application of the human rights legislation imposed by the Federation of Federations in Basra. In the calm environs of a very English tea shop on the outskirts of Bombay, Gopal would tell me of that dreadful morning, and his accidental meeting in the foothills.

  He had judged the woman to be perhaps thirty years old, more than ten years younger than himself. She did not seem to have noticed him coming. The world was quiet, up there; the detonation of the buildings and the screams of the people of the city were whispers on the wind. He could still make o
ut, however, rising from a dozen places, the ugly, discordant cry of the Martians: ‘Ulla . . .’

  He coughed, so as not to alarm her; the sound seemed magnified.

  She turned her head, glanced at him, turned away with no apparent interest.

  He said to her, in English, ‘May I join you?’

  She looked at him again and shrugged. ‘I do not own hill.’

  ‘Quite so.’ In fact, he knew, the native folk were allowed to own land in only seven per cent of the territory of the Union of South Africa. And here he was thinking like a lawyer, even now; on such a morning as this, surely it was only common humanity that mattered.

  Moving stiffly, he sat beside her. He wore a suit, dusty now and the tie long loosened, and his patent leather shoes, meant for carpeted city offices rather than rough hikes, were badly scuffed. He was not unfit, he played tennis and a little cricket, but he was new to the way of life of the refugee. This woman, he instinctively felt, presumably after a life of toil, was more sturdy than he.

  ‘I have water,’ he said.

  ‘I too.’ She looked at him again. ‘We can share if one is short. Water is scarce just here.’

  ‘Thank you. And food? I have some biscuits . . .’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Though I should be, I suppose, it is a long time since I ate.’ He carried a satchel; long emptied of books and other weighty objects, now it held little but the identity papers which had to be carried throughout the British Empire, a few biscuits, a flask of water. He took the flask, sipped from it, and offered it to the woman. ‘I was on a train coming into Durban. I have been advising on employment rights for the Indian population here. I have been trying to leave this country since the news of the Martian attacks in America. I wished to travel home, to Bombay. But the Martians fell there some hours ago. And now the Martians are in Durban too!’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I am a lucky man. Before we reached the city my train stopped, the crew wished to turn back. But I need to get to the coast, to the ships . . .’

  ‘You walked.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He hesitated. ‘My name is Gopal Tilak.’

  She nodded. She said her name was Nada, and a surname that he would later not recollect.

  ‘“Nada.” Is that an unusual name?’

  She shrugged. ‘My mother, worker on a farm. The farmer’s wife, she give me name. Nada. Name from a book. Means “nothing” in some tongues. Thought that was funny. Later I read book.’

  ‘You speak English -’

  ‘Afrikaans better.’

  ‘You read and write.’

  ‘And count. Family workers on farm, in the country. I work in a company in the city. Exports diamonds.’

  Diamonds, and the gold of the Transvaal, Gopal reflected: the huge mineral wealth of this country that flowed out into the world, mostly benefiting the British who owned the mining rights.

  She said now, ‘When Martians came -’

  ‘You decided to walk home? Just like me. It’s just that we’re walking in opposite directions.’

  She looked at him. ‘Know Durban?’

  ‘Not well. My work mostly took me inland, to the towns, the villages. That’s where most of the problems are in this strange stitched-together country, of Afrikaners, Indians – and Zulus like yourself.’

  ‘Zulus here first. Now, everything taken away.’

  ‘I know,’ he said with some passion. ‘Ten years ago, more, I worked with Mohandas Gandhi. Do you know of him? Englishtrained lawyer who led campaigns for the rights of the Indians here. Passive resistance – that was his tool; we call it satyagraha in our language. You just down tools and refuse. But even as we won our small victory, a much greater injustice was being legislated into existence – I mean, the institutionalised discrimination against the native majority.’

  He regretted his rather complex language, but she seemed to understand. ‘Gandhi? Where now?’

  ‘Went back to the Raj, to advance the rights of our countrymen on our own soil.’

  ‘In Bombay?’

  ‘I hope not.’ He closed his eyes then, and tried to imagine Bombay as it must be now. Gopal came from a well-to-do family from Delhi, but as a young man he had moved to Bombay for the commercial possibilities of a city that had grown huge under the British, and he had grown to love it: the sprawling old quarters, the giant cotton mills of the industrial zones, even the great administrative buildings of the British. And then there was the scent of it, of the spices of cooking, of the sandalwood burned at the festivals. Well, more than sandalwood would be burning in Bombay this terrible morning.

  ‘Can’t fight Martians,’ Nada said now. ‘Just wait until go away. What was word?’

  ‘What word? Oh – satyagraha.’

  She repeated it with relish, syllable by syllable. ‘Satyagraha. Wait until go away. Then take land back.’

  She was right, Gopal thought. But even if the Martians could be beaten, they would leave human affairs everywhere stirred up, as if with a giant spoon. Nothing would be the same, anywhere in the world, he supposed.

  Nada stood. ‘Now I go home.’

  He stood with her. They scrupulously shared out the water they carried between them, then shook hands rather gravely, and she walked away, deeper into the hills.

  Gopal waited until the Martians’ main attack seemed to be over. Then he worked his way towards the outskirts of Durban.

  As it happened the Martians themselves withdrew before Gopal reached the city. And he was intrigued to learn later, so he would one day tell me, that they had been seen heading north, a great ambulatory army of them, making steadily, it seemed, for the forested heart of Africa.

  18

  OUTSIDE ST PETERSBURG

  ‘Ulla! Ulla! . . .’

  Heard in every continent, that day, from east to west, and south to north – from southernmost Africa to the far north of Russia . . .

  ‘Ulla! Ulla! . . .’

  At midnight the Martians had landed at Tosno, some thirty miles south-east of St Petersburg. In retrospect Andrei Smirnov would reflect that the day Martians came to Mother Russia ought to have been strange enough. But, for him, it got stranger.

  In his barracks in the city, Rifleman Andrei Smirnov had happened to be awake, and had seen for himself the cylinders pass across the sky, streaks of light like so many green shootingstars. Most of the men in the barracks, sleeping as best they could, had missed it. Even when the word got around, and those who woke were told the strange news, most of them didn’t care. Martians were England’s problem; Germans were Russia’s.

  The city, Russia’s capital, sat on a fat isthmus between Lake Ladoga to the east, and the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic to the west. In this eighth year of a long war the German divisions had pushed through Finland and come on the city from the north, evidently intent on taking the capital at last, in a bold and demoralising coup. The Imperial Army had responded well. The Germans had been held north-west of the city, a line that had since solidified in miles of trenchworks and wire and artillery emplacements, backed up by rougher ditches and wooden barricades assembled by civilian squads. But they were German invaders stuck like a knife deep in the belly of Russia, and they had been there for years.

  This particular night the men in Smirnov’s unit, on a rest rotation, had been holed up in what had been a school hall a few streets behind the Pushkin Theatre. They were far behind the lines, deep inside the city itself, on the southern bank of the Neva, the river that bisected St Petersburg. And when morning came the men, summoned by the bugle, formed up in a yard where no children had played for many months. Outside the barracks, a sense of urgency was apparent. Smirnov became aware of church bells ringing, rousing the population. They soon learned that Smirnov’s unit was being mustered, not to go north to meet the Germans, but south to face Martians. Smirnov could feel the fear sweep along the lines, like the passing of a ghost.

  Andrei Smirnov was a conscript soldier, one of many millions – some said as many
as five million – mobilised since the Germans’ declaration of war. He had seen little action, even since being posted here, to St Petersburg itself. Was he to be spared a German bullet, only to face an interplanetary death?

  As it turned out, not that particular day.

  A lieutenant, in a crisp staff officer’s uniform, walked along the lines, briefly inspecting the men. He stopped by Smirnov, tapped him on the shoulder and beckoned him away. ‘You’ll do. This way.’

  In a moment Smirnov’s life had changed, and he was set on path that would lead me, one day, to write to him about his memories of this day. For now he was just confused, and wary, for no soldier likes novelty; novelty gets you in trouble, or dead. Smirnov looked over to his corporal, but the man shrugged. Smirnov had no choice but to follow the lieutenant.

  The lieutenant looked him up and down. ‘Your name?’ Smirnov told him.

  ‘Can you ride a motorcycle?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I -’

  ‘I am an aide to General Brusilov.’

  Automatically Smirnov stiffened to a kind of attention.

  The lieutenant handed Smirnov a packet of papers, and a small white flag. ‘Here are your orders. You are to take a message to the Germans. Am I keeping you awake, soldier?’