Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

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 had 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.

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.