Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

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 barely 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.

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.

I saw that the weather was changing, with heavy thunderclouds streaming in from the east, soon to blot out the autumn sunshine. I cursed my luck, though that was scarcely fair to the fates. Across the northern hemisphere, the climate had been worsening for a decade, with an excess of extreme events, notably storms of rain or snow or hail, and bloodyminded winds that had done nothing to help humanity’s tentative efforts to recover from the Martians’ assault. The elderly, into which category I now tentatively included myself, dreamed of what in retrospect seemed like idyllic late-Victorian times: days before the Martians, the summer days of childhood. But then, perhaps everyone feels that way about the past.

Beyond Paris my train soared across the countryside of north-west France, passing without stopping through Amiens and Boulogne – and then, in utter silence, apparently on invisible magnetic wings, we sailed over the Straits of Dover, with the sun bright above us once more and the Channel waters glittering below, and the monorail towers slim and elegant, a chain of mighty new Eiffels. During the Channel crossing coffee was served by calm bilingual stewards. That, I thought, was just showing off.

At Dover our service swept through a Crystal Palace of a new station, and then it was on, striding on more stilts over the pretty towns of Kent, with the North Downs a great wave of greenery. And very soon we came to London.

Such was our speed as we raced towards Waterloo that I only glimpsed the damage that had been done to the city by the Martians in their years of occupation, and the rebuilding since, but in places I saw what looked like Martian handling-machines and excavating-machines busily scraping and digging, with the eerie puffs of green smoke that always characterised Martian technology. Meanwhile, in the more expensive districts, in Chelsea and Kensington and along the Embankment, grand new buildings were rising up, skyscraper blocks and terraces that gleamed with Martian-manufacture aluminium. They seemed grand to me, anyhow; I had not been back to America for a time, and had not seen a restored Manhattan that Harry Kane told me ‘would make you eat your hat’. But even so London was transformed. After all, after the invasion of ’20 London had been systematically pummelled by the Martians, and had got it worse than any other city on earth, with every landmark you can think of targeted. It had been like the Great Fire, I suppose, a chance for a rebuilding. And so some modern Wren had erected a new St Paul’s on the site of the old, not a dome but a shining needle of Martian aluminium, topped by a crucifix.