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 individuals, 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.