‘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—’
‘Never mind,’ Rhoda said.
‘The point is, such technologies have existed in the past. And after a couple of decades of occupation, the Squeem, presumably with human collaborators, were able to come up with a suitable treatment . . .’
‘This is what they offered us,’ Hume was saying. ‘An engineered virus that would spread through mankind, across the Earth. Eventually carriers would infect the off-planet populations too. It wouldn’t be comfortable. You would have a nightmare, reliving the trauma one last time. But that would make the memory labile again for a short time. And so it could be treated.’
‘They would delete the memory of the freezing, of this vast crime,’ the inquisitor said. ‘From everybody’s heads.’
‘That was the idea. There would have to be a subsidiary activity of removing traces of the event from various records, but there weren’t too many marine biologists at the height of the occupation. It wouldn’t be difficult. Everybody would come out of it believing the oceans had always been depleted of life, maybe since the global eco-crashes of the second and third millennia. They’d think the damaged coastlines and scoured river valleys they observed had always been that way, or maybe they were damaged in the war.
‘This solution served the Squeem’s goals, you see. People would stay pliable. They just wouldn’t know why.’
The inquisitor said sharply, ‘And, since none of us have heard of this freezing before, I take it that these “leaders” made this supine choice on behalf of the rest of mankind.’
‘You shouldn’t judge them,’ Hume said. ‘We had been enslaved, for decades. They could see no way out. The only choice was between a future of terrified subjugation, or a calmer one – vague, baffled, adjusted.
‘Even Harry Gage and his resistance colleagues knew they were beaten. They submitted. But,’ he said, and a smile spread over his leathery face, ‘there was one last act of defiance.’
Everybody alive would forget the terror. Everybody but one.
‘It wasn’t sophisticated. They would just hide one person away, for a year, perhaps more. Earth is a big planet. There were plenty of places to hide. And not all of the biochemists had gone over to the Squeem. Some of them helped out with screens against the virus. And when he or she came out of her hole in the ground . . .’
The offscreen inquisitor guessed, ‘Harry Gage was the first Rememberer.’
Hume smiled. ‘They chose him by lot. It could have been anyone. It’s the only reason we remember Harry now, the only extraordinary thing that happened in his life.
‘He went into the hole without a word of protest. And when he came back out he found himself the only one who remembered the freezing. A kind of living memorial to a deleted past.
‘Harry just went back to work. But the course of the rest of his life was set out. It must have been hard for him, hard not to talk about what he knew. It’s been hard for me, and I didn’t live through it.
‘Harry Gage died in his late forties. It wasn’t a time when people grew old. But he fulfilled his last mission, which was to transmit his memories to another.