Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Stapledon has even speculated that, so fecund and moist and warm is Venus, there may be other varieties of Cythereans, on scraps of dry land in that watery sphere perhaps, or even flying in the clouds, which are thick and dense and perhaps rich with aerial game – and if so, those happy flyers may have been beyond the reach of the Martian hunters when they came.

However, as I was to observe myself, some characteristics of the Cythereans’ behaviour and their physical adaptations are reminiscent not of hunters but of prey animals. Their pregnancies are brief compared to ours; the babies emerge active and alert and fast-growing – ready to swim, and flee the predators attracted by the scent of birthing fluid, perhaps. And then there is the fear they will sometimes display before manifestations of the large : they will cower from Zeppelins, flee even from the shadows of gasometers. Perhaps great beasts like tyrannosaurs or Owen’s pliosaurs patrol the swampy lands and oceans of that world. And perhaps it has been fear and flight that has driven their evolution to intelligence, rather than aggression: a need for cooperation with each other, perhaps, as was so evident in my brief witnessing of them.

Certainly the Cythereans became prey when the Martians invaded.

As Verity pointed out, ‘Of course every adult Cytherean on the earth must have been brought by the Martians in their cylinders. Can you see how many of them are wounded? The fur hides it unless it’s a grievous injury, but there are lumps and contusions and badly healed scars, and some have their ears bitten, or even fingers missing: injuries they brought with them from the cylinders – so we think, anyhow.’

‘Injuries inflicted by the Martians?’

‘Perhaps not directly.’ She faced me. ‘Imagine how it was! The Martian humanoids seem shaped by their slavery – they seem to have evolved to its conditions, so long have they been suppressed. Not so the Cythereans, squat, strong, stocky, and used to freedom – and with a will to live. If you were in that pen on the cylinder, suspended in interplanetary space – when the Martians came to bring out the next one for the crew’s supper treat – would you not fight to survive? The battles in the dark of space, to stay at the back of the pack , must have been brutal and desperate.’

‘Even so, some evidently lived to reach the earth.’

‘And perhaps that was the plan all along,’ Verity said. ‘The Cythereans probably have a better chance of surviving on our earth than the spindlier Martian humanoids. So they have been released, to breed and for the hunting in the future.’

I smiled. ‘Like rabbits in Australia.’

‘That’s the idea.’ She looked out at the Cythereans at play. ‘But it’s to be hoped that they don’t prove as much of a pest as the rabbits, or the prospects for them on this earth – well, they won’t get much of a welcome.’

As the light of day slowly faded, the cubs napped, snuggling against their mothers. And the adults started pairing off. It was an unplanned process, a languid swimming to and fro, a matter of jostling, nudging with the nose, a caress with a webbed hand. Then, not yards from their neighbours – and within full sight of us – the coupling began. The most basic method was face to face in the water, with the male and female clinging to each others’ upper torsos to give anchorage, while the male thrust and the female pushed back. Sometimes they would go front to back, the male on top, the female’s face lifted above the water so she could breathe noisily, and with an absent expression on her small face. And sometimes, before or after, even instead of a full coupling, they would play, exploring with their hands and mouths.

I dared not look at Verity.

She laughed at me. ‘You get used to the sight. They are quite without shame.’

‘Are we to regard them as animals, then, for all their cleverness? Animals have no shame because they can’t conceive of it.’

‘Not animals. They have a kind of language, you know – you hear it in the night sometimes when the world is quiet, a kind of continuous babbling, like a brook. Perhaps it’s just that they haven’t had thousands of years of priests telling them that their bodies and their natural functions are sinful.’

‘And what of Charlie’s crucifix?’

‘As I said, you can thank the Vicar at Abbotsdale for that,’ she murmured. ‘He has become rather obsessed by such speculations. Are the Cythereans fallen, or not, as we are? And what of the Martians? Was there a Martian Messiah, a Cytherean Christ? Or must the message of our Jesus, Christ the Man, be taken to these other worlds? Not trivial questions, you will agree. So the Vicar tried to engage with the Cythereans on that topic. I saw him wade out into the muck of a mill-pond to give Charlie that crucifix! He liked the sparkly bauble, I suppose.’ She looked out at the water, the shadowy shapes still gently paired, and winked at me. ‘Between us, I think our good Vicar was rather too interested in the Cythereans’ healthy sexuality than is good for him. Come on, I’m exhausted just watching them…’

Exhausted perhaps, but I was also charmed. I admit that I always felt a certain repulsion at the sight of a Martian humanoid – not so much from the physical form as the evidently evolved abjectness of the race. The Cythereans were new to that game, and in them I saw something of the Noble Savage, I thought. But that is only my partial and prejudiced perception. The Cythereans were animals – people – with a cultural and biological heritage of their own, indeed as the Martians had once been, and had no need of my approval. But I offer these reflections honestly, for what they are worth.

We returned to the house. We banked down the stove on which we’d boiled the rainwater for our tea, and made our toilet, and retired to bed.

I think I slept well enough, once again. I don’t recall that we’d made any specific plans for the next day. We had food enough, even tea, and we were both getting over the trauma of our arrival, and myself the strain of the days of travel even before that. I think we had vaguely intended to stay at least a day or two, to gather our strength and plot our next step – which would have involved getting off the island and out of the Misbourne flood, for a start.

Whatever we had intended, it never came to pass. For we were both woken in the small hours by the Cythereans’ unearthly screams.

In our borrowed night gowns, we met in the gloom of the landing.

Verity said, ‘You heard it.’

‘Yes. We dress and leave.’

‘Agreed.’

I hurried back to my room. Last night, lucky for me, I had been compos mentis enough to lay out my travelling clothes, a bag to hand mostly packed – it was a shoulder bag I had found, for I had left my beloved rucksack in Marriott’s inn. I threw on my clothes, crammed the rest of my gear into the bag, pulled on my boots, and even so I was out later than Verity, despite her broken arm.

We hurried downstairs and through the kitchen – even in that moment of peril I snatched the tea caddy from the table and shoved it in my pocket – and we emerged on our veranda, where we had spent the last evening. This faced west, and the sky was clear, still grey before the dawn light came, and the swampy flood water lay before us, its surface eerily still where the red weed lay on it in great lily-like sheets. And not a sight of the Cythereans, and their screams were no longer to be heard. It was as if they had never existed.

‘Gone!’ I said. ‘But I suppose they had even less packing to do than us—’

‘No.’ She pointed with her good arm, into the murk. ‘Look! There’s one.’