Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Hopson seemed awed.

With a rattle of cables, the elevator was slowing, and I saw that there was a doorway, neat and circular, cut in the wall of the shaft. ‘We have almost reached our stop,’ Walter said.

I looked at him. ‘A stop at what?’

‘The city of the Martians,’ he said. ‘Be careful when you climb off the platform.’

It was a city indeed, or a warren at least, far beneath the ground of England, now lit by electric lamps, a network of cylindrical tunnels and spheres, and with a geometry that eluded me though I was assured it had all been thoroughly mapped.

Aside from the silvery metallic fabric of the tunnel walls, I saw no Martian equipment there. But there were traces of humanity everywhere: telegraph wires taped to the walls, a chemical toilet, caches of battery torches and candles in case, I supposed, the electrical power failed – even oxygen bottles and masks.

‘But these are a mere precaution: the air stays fresh,’ Walter said. ‘There are several shafts to the surface, and a breeze flows, apparently naturally, but I have my suspicion there is technology involved somewhere in the process – something subtle, not a pump as we would use, a kind of osmosis perhaps, or a capillary action…’

We came to a big spherical chamber – one of several, I was informed. The floor was terraced with concentric horizontal platforms, like broad steps leading down from the sphere’s equator where we had entered. All this was seamlessly moulded from the same metallic substance as the walls of the tunnels. A couple of soldiers stood on guard, watching us warily, one with a field telephone at his side.

Walter Jenkins sat easily on a step, and we followed his lead. ‘Of course all the Martian gear has been removed – mostly by the Martians themselves, a few relics by the first humans to penetrate the place. One can only imagine how it was when the Martians themselves were here! It was rather dark to human eyes, but as you know Mars’s sunlight is dimmer than ours. And the Martians, scattered through this chamber like great leather sacks, hooting and puffing the way they did, those strange finger-tentacles working… But still one can deduce a great deal about the Martians and their society even from the basic layout of the place.’

‘Oh, really?’ I asked, in a mood to be sceptical. ‘Such as?’

‘Just compare this to any human structure you ever saw – consider what’s missing . You have the passageways, and the communal areas, and that’s it. There is nowhere for privacy, for the Martians evidently don’t desire it. And there’s no evidence of status, or hierarchy. Nobody has a grander room than anybody else. So we can deduce their social structure is flat. They must make their decisions by discussion and consensus. They share everything – why, we see no evidence of anything like private property. They are supremely loyal to each other, too. And remember, I have strong reason to believe the Martians are telepathic. They could not lie to each other. Have you considered that? Imagine how human society would be transformed by that one simple adjustment!

‘Why, even these common areas have a kind of democratic symmetry. One must sit and talk in the round. We found one exception, a chamber with a peculiarly dimpled floor. The best speculation is that this is where the young are kept, after they bud from the parents, when they are small and dependent.’

Hopson seemed to like the idea. ‘Just like being sent away to prep! Didn’t do me any harm. A Martian at Eton? Might fit right in. Well, he’d be good at table tennis.’

‘Such as, that their great cannons are clearly a secondary technology – I mean, a derived use of an existing device, rather than a fresh design. The cannon, you see, were produced by tunnel-boring equipment that was probably perfected long ago – equipment primarily designed underground habitats, like this. for the construction of I suspect that all the technologies they brought to the earth, at least in 1907, were not dedicated weapons, not machines meant for making war, but adaptations of technologies meant for other purposes. Even the Heat-Ray.’

Hopson mused, ‘Just as a man may use a flame-thrower, meant for clearing scrub, as a weapon: deadly enough if you’re in the way of it, whatever its intended purpose.’

‘That’s the idea. After all, what do we see when we look at Mars? You have the snow and the ice, the oceans, the vegetation, the canals. Nowhere do we see a Martian city. Not a single building. Not even at the most complex of nodes in the canalnetwork, like Solis Lacus.’

I saw what he meant. ‘They must have retreated underground – into warrens like this.’

‘That’s it. It’s logical, isn’t it?’

Hopson wasn’t keeping up. ‘But why would one choose to live in a warren?’

‘For protection. For breathable air, as one’s atmosphere thins and collapses. For warmth – for even when the sun dies, you know, the interiors of the planets will retain their heat, and in fact the earth more so than Mars because of its greater mass. This may be our destiny some day, when the sun becomes cold: to huddle underground, kept alive by the planet’s residual heat.’

‘But there’s nothing here,’ I mused, looking around at the blank walls. ‘Not just an absence of sunlight – what would one eat?’

‘Life in the subterranean cities would be one of technological advancement and biological simplicity,’ Walter said, rather pompously. ‘The end of the game in which the Martians are already engaged. The Martians rebuilt their world as they rebuilt themselves, in a great simplification, just as they discarded the wasteful lumber of gullet and stomach to become little more than a brain and a blood circulation system. We know they have hugely simplified their ecology – there is the red weed, and the humanoids that feed on the weed who provide blood for the Martians themselves. Everything else extirpated! Discarded! From the mightiest tree to the flies to the most insignificant of microbes – which as we know left the Martians vulnerable to infection when they first came, in ’07.’

Hopson frowned. ‘Do you admire all this? But the flies, man – swallows eat flies. Do away with the flies, and you lose the swallows. Would you want that?’

‘Not I,’ I said firmly, struck by the astuteness of the observation.

‘There might be no alternative,’ Walter said, dreamy, anxious. ‘Do you not see it? One day the Martians will surely go further yet, leaving behind altogether all this business of biology. Imagine a machine that could take rock, and raw energy from the sun or the planet’s heart, and turn that into food – for all the elements one needs can be found in the minerals, you know. The ultimate efficiency – the most exquisite simplicity – nothing but sunlight, and rock, and brains. That , I believe, is the ultimate technical goal of the Martians.’

I grunted. ‘You sound as if you envy them. Isn’t that what the psychologists said of you, Walter? That you’re half-Martian yourself? Anyhow now they’re gone – this lot at least. So where are the rest? The ones who landed in New York and Los Angeles, and Peking and Berlin… Even you must be aware of the disquiet that mysterious vanishing has caused, and continues to cause. The situation can never be resolved until we know. Do you have some new notion?’

He smiled. ‘In general terms, it was always obvious.’

I glowered; he could be infuriating. ‘Obvious, was it?’

‘Most of the earth is too hot for them. So they will have migrated to where it’s cold . And as most of them landed in the northern hemisphere—’