Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

‘But look at the river-bed mud that’s exposed. That we can use. Heavy river-bottom mud, when it dries a bit, is perfect growing ground for potatoes. We had to be cautious, because it meant coming close to the skinnies where they worked at the red weed, in the rivers.’

‘The skinnies?’

He looked at me. ‘The humanoids. From the Martian cylinders.’

‘I remember, from ’07…’

‘All we found last time was drained corpses. This time—’

Despite my overwrought state, this news evoked wonder. ‘Alive? Men from Mars?’

‘Not men. And not just from Mars, either, it seems.’

I had to see for myself. Boldly, I walked down the river course, past the soldiers, towards those toiling others.

Others . They plucked and dragged and gathered the red weed, the leaves and sacs and pods and cactus-like growths, leaving the deeper roots intact. Much of this harvest they lay out on the river bank, as if to dry it. Some of it they tucked into their mouths, munching placidly as they worked.

I had not concentrated on the task; some queer dread in me recoiled from looking too hard at those performing it. Now I made myself face them.

There were two sorts, both basically human – or humanoid, to use that odd, distancing word. The two kinds kept to their own groups.

One kind were tall, skinny indeed – taller than me at six feet or more, with odd round heads and big eyes over small faces, and pinched mouths; their faces were oddly babyish. Naked they were, and all but sexless, the males with shrunken organs, the females breasts that were almost flat. Many wore bandages of a crude kind on their legs and arms – even, in one case, a splinted arm. Nude, pale, hairless, they looked fragile, and the work, light as it was, seemed an effort for them. They seemed quite incurious about me and Frank, and the sweating soldiers just yards away.

‘They all seem to be adults,’ I remarked to Frank, in a whisper – oddly I felt shy before these creatures even as I gawped at them.

‘Yes, but there have been children born here,’ he said. ‘Since the landings in ’20, I mean. They’ve been glimpsed. Of course we’ve had a few human babies too… That one,’ he pointed at one female, ‘appears to be carrying. Shows quickly on such an attenuated frame.’

‘Many of them are injured.’

He nodded. ‘Their bones are brittle, as you’d expect – meant for a lighter gravity than ours. They evidently have medicine of a sort, but it’s crude. I’ve seen them at it. As if to set an arm is a habit so old it has become a matter of instinct, like a bird building a nest – not knowledge, or learning. D’ye see? I’d like to know if their skeletons are of the same siliceous sort discovered in the debris of the ’07 landings. Of course none survived that trip, consumed en route between planets; we only found the remains, drained of blood. While this stock—’

‘Are here to breed.’

‘Yes. So we see a Martian ecology being established on the earth, Julie. There is the red weed; the humanoids consume that as our cattle consume the grass; and, just as we in turn consume the cattle—’

I shuddered. ‘Do you think they understand how they are being used?’

‘Perhaps. But so much of what they do seems instinctive, as I said; perhaps they have been slaves so long—’

‘Natural selection has shaped them to the fate.’

‘It may be,’ he said bleakly.

As I watched the Martian humanoids toil I wondered if this was the future for Abbotsdale – for all humanity. Would we too evolve into slavery, until we forgot the slavery itself?

‘But those others,’ Frank said, walking on, ‘do not seem so adapted to their indenture.’

He meant the other sort of humanoids – perhaps a dozen of them, as there were a dozen of the skinny sort. These were shorter – not very short, they wouldn’t have seemed out of place from that point of view in the poorer districts of London – and where the skin of the tall ones had been pale to the point of translucent, these were brownish, under a thick coat of body hair. Where the others’ eyes seemed too large for the day and they turned habitually from the sun, these had small black eyes, and I would see them blunder into each other, as if the bright light of an English May day was not sufficient for them. And while they did not seem as stocky as a human, their bones not as robust, they were certainly heavier than the tall ones.

‘Barely adapted at all,’ Frank said. ‘As if they have been newly acquired.’

‘Newly? What do you mean?’

‘Well, look at them,’ he said gently. ‘The tall ones are from Mars – I think we can agree to that. So they are suited to the lower gravity and the dimness of the more remote sun.’

‘Big eyes and fragile bones.’

‘That’s it. Whereas this new lot, of which specimens were not retrieved from the ’07 wrecks, seem adapted to a brighter daylight than ours, and a gravity that may be only a little lighter than our own, not as weak as the one-third of Mars. And that coat of body hair—’

‘It almost looks aquatic.’

‘My thought exactly,’ he said. ‘Like a water mammal, an otter or a seal.’

‘Not much water on Mars.’

‘No. But I don’t think this lot are from Mars. It’s a miracle they are able to subsist on the red weed, as the skinny ones do – or perhaps that’s just another example of the Martians’ biological manipulation.’

These toiling others, the hair on their legs caked in mud, looked back at us with a kind of furtive boldness. And I thought I heard them mutter to each other in an odd, high-pitched, almost gurgling sing-song. It occurred to me that I had not heard the tall humanoids utter a word to each other, and did not even know if they were capable of it; perhaps language had been bred out of them too by their monstrous masters.

‘Then if not from Mars – where, Frank?’

‘They’re from Venus,’ Frank said flatly. ‘The Martians went to that planet, and brought them here to the earth. I think they’re from Venus, Julie. Here in England!’

On arrival at Abbotsdale the first order of business was to organise transport to rescue our party of stranded sappers. Horses and carts were briskly dispatched; Ted Lane rode back with them.

Abbotsdale, meanwhile, I quickly discovered, was an odd place. Well, how could it not be?

I thought I could read the pre-Martian history of the village, such as it was, in the ruin of an ancient abbey that had no doubt given the place its name, a manor house, two venerable farmhouses which might have been eighteenth-century, and a couple of lanes of cottages built on what had been common land until only a few decades back – the cottages, I learned, had once housed brickmakers who had worked on the common, and whose trade was now being eagerly researched and recovered – and a scattering of more modern houses built here for commuting businessmen, as a kind of backwash from the nearby railway line. Sprinkle the dish with a couple of pubs, a school in ugly London brick, and a brace of nineteenth-century churches faced with flint, the architectural motif of the area, and you had a typical village of middle England of the time and the place.

Save that now Abbotsdale was a Martian colony. You could see it in the red weed that had infiltrated even into the heart of the village, and climbed all over one of the old churches like some gruesome ivy.

And, I thought from the off, you could see it in the faces of the people trapped there.

Frank had been given permission to move into one of the old cottages by the common, the middle one of a terrace – it was actually called ‘The Brickmaker’s Cottage’ – and he quickly sorted out spare rooms for myself and Ted Lane to sleep in.