The Massacre of Mankind

by Stephen Baxter

  Walter, so he told me later, would have predicted some such pause. Jupiter is some five times further from the sun than the earth; the distance between the planets is never much less than some four hundred million miles at the closest, never further than six hundred million miles at the furthest. It would take a ray of light, then, never less than thirty-four minutes to cross from the earth to Jupiter, and thirty-four minutes back again. Einstein has proved that nothing in this universe can travel faster than a ray of light – and therefore any Jovian response to our signal, our violent scrawling of Jovian signals in the English dirt, could not have been expected to come in much less than an hour after we had created the signal. Whether God could surpass the speed of light I will never know, but even the Jovians have limitations!

  But, delay or not, it had worked; the withdrawal of the Martians seemed to prove it. We had intervened in a conflict on an interplanetary scale. We had called in the Jovians, as a bullied boy might call in a schoolmaster to save himself from a beating. It had worked.

  When he came back to England a few weeks later, Walter cackled with pride at the thought of it, and the next minute all but wept at our temerity – my temerity. I think actually he was a little afraid of me. For - what had we done?

  What had I done?

  I had brought humanity, irrevocably, into the grave awareness of Jupiter. The Jovians are older than us, and, we must deduce, immeasurably more intelligent, immeasurably more wise. We may hope they will be like a kindly celestial uncle. But, Walter says, even if so, there is no reason to believe that what they see as benevolence will translate into what we may experience as kindness, even mercy. Thus a child weeping over a sick mother could never imagine the moral choices to be made by a battlefield doctor making triage choices.

  Yet on reflection, Walter still felt we had had no choice. The Jovians might spare us; the Martians certainly would not have.

  And still, on that fateful Sunday and afterwards, puzzles remained.

  The hostilities everywhere withdrew. behind, along with any surviving human victims, but they seem to have taken their own native humanoids with them. Just as it had been in England in ’07, the slow, sad work of recovery began. And slowly too parties of military and scientists and various officials approached the great Martian earthworks. They were empty – the Martians gone – and stripped this time of technology, of the cylinders and all they had brought, all that had been manufactured.

  Yet the question remained – we knew, as I will relate in due course, that only a fraction had left this earth – where had the Martians gone?

  And then, what of our still greater neighbours? They had saved us, if indirectly – but how? It was evident that the Jovians, alerted by our crude sigils, had sent some kind of signal, some commandment, to the Martians. But how? What had been sent, what received?

  In the end, the answer became obvious to anyone who looked out of her window at the right time. At that time, late in May 1922, the moon was a crescent, dwindling towards a new moon on the 26th, the Friday after the weekend of the global landings. And the moon had changed, as even the naked eye could see. In the darkened sector of the disc, a fine line could be made out: an arc, within the perimeter of the moon’s face. As the days passed, and the new moon came, the truth became apparent for all mankind to see – as our unwelcome Martian guests had evidently made out more quickly. The moon’s face bore a tremendous circle, silver, perfect, a thousand miles across. The Jovians had written their sigil on the face of the earth’s own satellite.

  And it is evident for whom the symbol was intended. That great design was observed, as the moon waxed and waned, through the coming months – through a year, and then most of another. It vanished as suddenly as it had been created on April 7, 1924.

  It was Walter who first computed the significance of the date. ‘It is just as the Martians timed their attacks to our day-night cycle, and they landed at our midnight,’ he said. ‘The lunar sigil persisted for two years less forty-three days. Allowing for the leap year, that comes to six hundred and eighty-seven days that the sigil was in existence . . .’

  Which is precisely one Martian year.

  BOOK IV

  MARS ON EARTH

  1

  A TELEPHONE CALL

  It was in the autumn of 1936, fourteen years after the Second War, that Carolyne Emmerson called me.

  It was quite out of the blue. I had been living in Paris, more or less contentedly, with my sister-in-law Alice close by. I was continuing to work, rather slowly, on drafts of the narrative history you are reading now. Under strict military instructions – even in the age of the Federation of Federations secrecy is a habit when it comes to the Martians! - I had kept silent about my own role in the withdrawal of the invaders (by the time this memoir is published, by my sanctions-defying American publisher, I will no longer care). I was forty-eight years old, and with the poisonous plague removed from my body by a fullblood transfusion, I believed I had put my own Martian entanglement behind me.

  And, I am ashamed to say, at first I did not recognise the name: Carolyne, having divorced Walter Jenkins before the Second War, had never remarried, but had eventually reverted to her maiden name. Nevertheless it was Walter she wanted to discuss with me.

  ‘I’m concerned for him,’ she said, her telephonic voice a whisper. ‘He’s never stopped being engaged with it all, you know. Straight after the Second War he plunged straight into the Basra conferences, and made a public ass of himself on a number of points. Now he’s wangled access to the Martian pits at Amersham, and spends his waking life there. And he’s as careless of his health as ever he is.’

  ‘I see the papers are using his articles again.’

  ‘Only for the shock value, I think. You know how the mood is changing as the opposition approaches . . .’

  She meant the next perihelic opposition, due in 1939; another set of close approaches of Mars to the earth, more opportunities for their invasion fleets to cross – an alarming prospect if you believed the scare warmongers like Churchill. And if stories put about by the Martians followed precedent they would make their first crossing in the opposition before, in 1937, only months away. Indeed we had already passed one possible opportunity; the 1920 invasion had come two oppositions before the optimum in that particular cluster. It was disturbing that there seemed as little astronomical news available to the general public under our glorious new world order as there had been under the old. And this time the speculation was spiced by much fearful guesswork about where those Martians who had come to the earth in the twenties might be hiding. They had not been observed since the end of the Second War, but, as far as anybody knew, they were still here. It all made for a horrible lack of resolution.

  ‘The mood is souring,’ Carolyne whispered. ‘All this talk of the Germans and the Russians and the Americans rearming, despite the Federation treaties. And so, of course, there’s Walter all over the place, the newspapers’ pet apostle of peace! Some are even calling him a traitor to humankind.’

  ‘You fear for his mental stability.’

  She laughed, sadly. ‘I have always feared for his mental stability. It’s not just that, Julie. I fear for his life. Since the assassination of Horen Mikaelian . . .’

  It had happened two days before; I had been deeply shocked by the murder of that patient architect of peace and unity – a murder inflicted by those who feared a new war with the Martians, or, perhaps, longed for it.

  ‘Walter has already been on the BBC condemning the act. Of course I agree with him; of course he must say what he feels. But -’

  I sighed. ‘But as we’ve seen ever since ’07, he will go charging into danger without a thought for his personal safety.’

  ‘Please go to him, Julie. See that he is safe.’

  ‘But, Carolyne . . .’ The Jenkins’ marriage was an old, longtangled mess, which poor Carolyne had survived with dignity and kindness. Yet I knew that Walter had never lost his tenderness for his estranged wife. As she h
ad once remarked herself, you could read about it in his books. ‘It’s you he needs, not me.’

  ‘I cannot,’ she whispered. ‘I cannot.’

  That was family for you. Of course I could not refuse to help – and I agreed, in fact, that Walter probably really was in danger given the shocking precedent of Mikaelian. Of course I would go to him. Even if it meant, I realised, the publisher of my own narrative of the Second War would have to wait even longer for a finished draft. I tried to make contact.

  In the event I did not have long to wait before I received an invitation from Walter himself, over the signature of our old friend Eric Eden, to visit that Unreliable Narrator at the Martian pits at Amersham.

  2

  AFTERMATH

  When Carolyne phoned, I admit, I was rather out of touch. After the Second War I had retained my anonymity, and since then I had distanced myself from the consequences, as much as one can from a world war. I had my own life, which I had resumed with some relief; I had gone back to America for a time, and then retreated to the battered sanity of a recovering Paris, and had spent the intervening decade trying to rebuild a disrupted career as a journalist, in addition to researching and compiling the early sections of this present memoir. I had been content to watch the recovery of a wounded world as if from without – a very Jenkins-like perspective.

  Everything had been so different after the Second War! The Martian assault was over in a few days – and the immediate aftermath was as painful as ever, the clearing of the dead, the search for survivors all traumatised to one degree or another, the beginnings of reconstruction the unseemly scramble for scraps of Martian technology – and after that the longer-term problems had started. The Martians might be gone, but the banks were still not issuing loans, the stock exchanges were not trading, and in America as in London and Berlin even the bullion reserve was not secured. As global trade ground to a halt, after a couple of weeks the food shortages began, and the power cuts, and the water supply failures - even in cities that had never glimpsed a Martian - and soon after that the plagues. Then came the riots, and then the revolutions in Delhi, in the Ottoman provinces, even in France against the occupying Germans.

  These early days of emergency, in fact, had been the inducement Mikaelian had used to call her parliament of the desperate to Basra.

  Horen Mikaelian was an Armenian nun who at the time of the Second War had been in Paris, a refugee from persecution under the Ottomans. Her emergence as a key figure after the war was remarkable – as was her capacity for persuasion, which had fuelled the first tentative efforts to construct a new postMartian world order. Indeed, one of Mikaelian’s first achievements had been to broker a hasty armistice between the German and Russian empires. The fact that the two armies had cooperated in resisting the Martians at St Petersburg and elsewhere helped with that.

  Then, with that achievement behind her, Mikaelian had called presidents and emperors and monarchs and ambassadors, and scientists and historians and philosophers, to gather in Basra, an ancient city at the heart of the world’s first civilisation (and from which the British occupying presence had been hastily withdrawn). At that first conference, emergency aid packages were immediately agreed, an international bank quickly set up to aid relief efforts, and longer-term infrastructure projects begun institutions that had later become the pillars of the Federation of Federations.

  And, above all that, what had emerged from those first frantic days in Basra had been the vision of a federal model of government, a supremely flexible and resilient system which Mikaelian says struck her as the single most striking piece of genius about the post-Revolutionary American settlement – a system that Mikaelian had, in her own endearing words, ‘sold’ to the assembled leaders. At first Mikaelian’s ‘Federation of Federations’ was little more than a patchwork of agreements over trade and spheres of mutual interest, but at least all this ‘Turkish parley-voo’, as Churchill had wryly called it, might enable mankind to govern itself with a little more sanity than it had managed before.

  Well, it seemed to be working. The institutions for which Mikaelian had argued, and which had seemed so utopian before – global transport networks, resources such as mineral rights held for the common good, international interventionist financial institutions (Keynes argued for that) - had quickly proved their worth. Even the somewhat sceptical and isolationist Americans had been glad of the new order when global aid poured in to alleviate the effects of devastating floods on the Mississippi in 1926-7, and again when the collapse of an overheated Wall Street almost caused a global recession. The invasion of China by Japan in 1931 had been another test for the Federation’s councils. The restored Chinese Emperor Puyi had argued eloquently for help; concerted international pressure caused the Japanese to abandon their adventure.

  The old empires, meanwhile, were evolving towards a looser, more democratic form of federalism: relics of an age of conquest and despoliation, now mutating into agents of the peaceful coexistence of peoples. This was true even of the tottering Ottomans. And on a wider scale the idea of a kind of global unity was emerging.

  Walter Jenkins had been invited to the first Basra summits. Age had not mellowed him. He wrote of the impressive celebrities he met – Gandhi for one, a representative of a newly independent India, and Ataturk, the Ottoman ambassador – but Walter’s principal memory seems to have been one of irritation that he had been largely outshone by one of his long-standing rivals: ‘You know the fellow, the Year Million man, with the alarming novels and scattershot predictions, forever falling out with some socialist or other, and the whiff of extra-marital scandal ever clinging about him, and his damn squeaky voice . . .’ We may have been all but prostrate at the feet of the Martians, but we humans continued our own petty wars regardless. Oddly that gives me a certain hope for the species. And I should note here that the efforts of ‘the Year Million man’ to lobby for a declaration of human rights to be the centrepiece of the new Federation’s constitution will long be remembered, with gratitude.

  Meanwhile the Cythereans, our unwilling guests from Venus – those who had not been spirited away by the Martians when they withdrew – were the subject of international and interdisciplinary study, in reserves and zoos and biological institutions across the planet, a study the public followed avidly in the newspapers and newsreels. I suspect, in fact, that their very presence on the earth, their very strangeness, inspired a subliminal sense of unity in mankind. Some, indeed, said that we should be housing these visitors, not in reserves, but in their own embassy to the Federation of Federations. Such troubling questions, which strike at the heart of our understanding of what it means for us to be human, are for the future, perhaps.

  As for myself, I had ventured to Basra, anonymously, for the great ceremonies on April 24 1925 when the Federation’s constitution had been signed. And I admit I came to London to celebrate the independence of Ireland and India in 1927, and the granting of the vote to women – at last! – in 1930 . . .

  But I always scuttled back to Paris. Something in me, I think, had been changed during the War. When I saw people around me, especially in anonymous masses, I could find it hard to see the spirit beyond the flesh and bone – as if they were no more than plastic receptacles of blood, to be moulded at will. A touch of the Jenkins Syndrome, you might say. In London I had found greater consolation, in fact, at the Tomb of the Vanished Warrior, before an empty coffin, than in the company of the living.

  So we had enjoyed an age of hope and unity that, I knew, had raised the spirits of that utopian, Walter Jenkins, even while he grumbled endlessly about the details. An all too brief age, it seemed; already disunity and tension was on the rise, thanks to the wretched astronomical clockwork of the solar system that was bringing Mars swimming towards the earth. After two doses of invasions from Mars everybody knew this; none of us needed scare stories in the Daily Mail to remind us of it. Even if we kept back from war, in protests, riots, even minor insurrections, violence was returning to a barel
y healed world – and it had already taken, at the hand of some deranged protester, the life of that apostle of peace, Horen Mikaelian herself.

  And here I was, about to plunge back into the maelstrom.

  3

  BY MONORAIL TO ENGLAND

  Despite a rivalry between France and England that dates back a thousand years, the straight-line distance between their capitals has only ever been two hundred miles. And in the late autumn of 1936 it would take only two hours for me to travel from one city to another.

  But, though I was not yet fifty, I felt like a relic in this new age. The new monorail was a miracle of now globally shared Martian technology, an application of their mastery of electromagnetic fields. When I was a little girl, I reminded myself as if I was some crone in a rocking chair, we didn’t yet have motor-cars - and now this. I tried not to think of the fact that my carriage, propelled by the invisible energies of electricity, was balanced on its rail on a row of single wheels beneath it, its mechanical intelligence keeping it upright like a circus unicyclist. So forgive me if I clung to the cushions of my seat as the train rocketed along, smart and silent.

  I did comfort myself with the fine views. Paris itself, as I am certain most Parisians would have wanted, had been changed little by the tumultuous events of the early decades of the twentieth century – in fact the city had suffered more at the hands of the Germans than the Martians. The grand old city was a fine sight to see in the low September sunshine, as my train rode the rail on its elegant stilts, green and blue, high above the rooftops. But from the train I could not see the most significant location of all in the modern city, the embassy of the Federation of Federations itself, all glass and Martian aluminium in the Place de Fontenoy. This modest building had lobbied for acceptance into the venerable Parisian skyline, but would always be dwarfed by the Eiffel Tower, expensively restored for the 1924 Olympics.