Xeelee: Endurance (19 page)

‘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 Squeem, 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.

‘We, on the other hand, had “murdered” Lake Superior, in their view. We had rendered a whole body of water uninhabitable. They are aquatic, remember. To them it was as great a crime as if we had destroyed an entire world.

‘And so they planned a punishment appropriate to the crime they perceived.’

In the silent skies above Harry’s prison, ships slid into position. Beams of pinkish light connected them, and pulsed down into the ground. It took a full year to assemble the network.

‘And when it was ready . . .’

‘Yes?’ the inquisitor asked.

‘Water is funny stuff,’ the Rememberer said. ‘Have you ever heard of hot ice?’

In the next break, Rhoda had her engineering officers extrapolate what had happened, from the hints in Hume’s account.

Ice formed naturally when heat was extracted from a body of water, the hydrogen-oxygen molecules settling into a space-filling solid lattice. But the Squeem had discovered that you could create a particular kind of ice, called polar cubic ice, even at high temperatures, with electricity.

‘We know about this too,’ Reg Kaser said. ‘You pass an electric field through the water – a strong one, a million volts a metre. The two hydrogen atoms in a water molecule have a slight positive charge, and the oxygen atom a negative one, so the electric field makes the molecules line up like fence posts. And there you have it, ice, at as high a temperature as you like. This happens in nature, though on a microscopic scale, wherever there are strong enough electric fields, such as across the membranes of nerve cells, or in the cavities of proteins. Mini icebergs riding around inside your cells. Amazing. The Squeem were masters of this sort of technology. Masters of
water
.’

‘And so,’ Rhoda prompted, ‘on occupied Earth—’

‘They froze the water.’

‘What water?’

‘All of it.’

Earth’s oceans plated over with ice, right down to the equator, and then froze to their beds. And then the hard whiteness crept up the river valleys.

Harry and his co-dissidents were made to watch, on vast softscreens. Indeed, the Squeem made everybody watch, everybody capable of understanding.

‘Even the aquifers froze, deep underground. Even the moisture in the soil,’ Hume whispered. ‘Everybody walked around on permafrost, down to the equator.

‘The Squeem controlled it, somehow. After all, humans are just big bags of water.
We
didn’t freeze, nor did the grasses, the animals, the birds, the moisture in the air. Of course rainfall was screwed, because nothing was evaporating from the oceans.

‘They kept it up for a full year. By then people were dying of the drought and the cold. And Earth blazed white, a symbol of the Squeem’s dominance, visible even to all the off-planet refugees and hideouts, visible light years away.

‘Then they released the field.

‘There was a lot of damage as all that ice melted, most of it suddenly – it wasn’t a normal thaw. Coastlines shattered, river valleys gouged out, meltwater floods, climatic horrors. Lots of people died, as usual.

‘And the oceans were left sterile. Oh, the Squeem allowed gradual restocking, from samples in old climate-crash gene-store facilities, that kind of thing. The oceans didn’t stay dead. But still, for an age they would be depleted, and the recovered biosphere would always be artificial. Humanity’s link with the deepest past of life on Earth cut, for ever.

‘It was the worst act the Squeem, an aquatic species, could think of,’ Hume said. ‘To murder oceans. They thought it would crush human resistance once and for all. And it worked. But not for the reasons they imagined.’

‘When it was done, they just let Harry and his colleagues go. Harry came out of that prison camp near Thunder Bay, and found himself in an aftermath society. It had been by far the worst act of terror ever inflicted on the Earth, by mankind or anybody else.

‘And it had cut through some deep umbilical connection. Everybody just wandered around stunned.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Rhoda. She assessed the reactions of her crew to this forgotten crime. Anger, shock, a lust for revenge.

‘And,’ Hume said now, ‘the Squeem became concerned. They hadn’t anticipated a reaction like this. I guess they knew us even less well than we knew ourselves. A large proportion of mankind was plagued by flashbacks, crippling fear. Productivity was dropping. Birth rates falling. They didn’t want to kill off their cheap labour. Maybe they saw they’d gone too far.

‘World leaders were called to a kind of summit. I say “leaders”. After two decades of the Squeem there were no elected presidents, no monarchs, no moderators of global councils. The “leaders” were labour organisers, essential academics like doctors, a few religious types.

‘And the Squeem offered, not a restoration – for what they had done could not be put right – but a kind of cure.’

Most of humanity was suffering a deep kind of post-traumatic stress.

The memories of the freezing were etched deeply into every human brain. Like all traumas, the event had produced a rush of adrenalin and noradrenalin, which then forced brain centres called the amygdalae to imprint the memories into the hippocampus, the memory centre, very deeply. It was essentially a survival mechanism, so that any reminder of the event triggered deep memories and a fast response. Sometimes memories like this were gradually extinguished, the memory pathways overridden if not erased. But in this case, for the majority of mankind, the extinguishing mechanism didn’t work well. The event had been too huge, too deep, too wide. And global post-trauma stress was the result.

But this could be rectified.

‘There are ways to control memory formation,’ Reg Kaser murmured to Rhoda, taking another briefing from his data slate. ‘Drugs like beta blockers that inhibit the action of adrenalin and noradrenalin, and so reduce their memory-forming capabilities. A stress-related hormone called cortisol can inhibit memory retrieval. There are drugs that release a brain chemical called glutamate that enhances learning, so accelerating the normal memory extinguishing process. And so on.’

‘You’re talking about altering memories with drugs,’ Rhoda murmured.

‘Since the twentieth century, when neuroscience was established as a discipline, human societies have always been cautious about memory-changing technology,’ Kaser said. ‘Memory-editing has been used as therapy, and to treat criminals. In the age of Michael Poole, for instance. But there are obvious ethical issues. A memory is part of your identity, after all. Does anybody else have the right to take away part of
you
? And suppose a criminal deliberately erases all her own memory of her crime. If she doesn’t remember it, is she still responsible? That was used as a defence in a criminal trial during—’