Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Now, with grace but sudden speed, one of the machine’s handling tentacles uncurled towards us.

‘’Old still! I warned you – they’re checking you over! ’Old still!’

I was first. I stood there while the arm swept over me, its tip, its cold flank, running over my body. Its motions were smooth, clean, mechanical. I cannot believe it searched me merely by touch; perhaps it relied on some effect analogous to Roentgen rays to perform a deeper inspection. In only a second it was done, and I breathed again. Then it was on to Verity, and she held my hand tight, especially when the Martian probed her broken arm with its splint.

Then, with sudden abruptness, the machine backed away, turned, and walked off with its usual liquid grace, returning to whatever task it had abandoned to come to us.

Bert said, ‘There you are. Told you they’d check you up. I come up ’ere every now and again to let ’em ’ave a look and make sure they don’t forget ’oo I am. And I told you to leave your weapons behind. For if you hadn’t, they’d have been found and it would have been the drips for all of us.’

‘The drips?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see. Now, come on.’

He led us down the inner face of the perimeter rampart. The low, multi-legged Martian machine had passed down this rough slope easily, but we bipedal humans had to pick our way more cautiously.

On the floor of the Redoubt we walked forward, through a scene of industry. All around us excavating-machines, big, mole-like, dug into the earth and shaped it into pits and galleries, tunnels and canals around that deep central shaft. These secondary dimples were huge excavations in themselves, in some of which, amid puffs of green smoke, I saw handlingmachines working on the familiar process of the extraction of aluminium from the clay of the earth, as well as less recognisable tasks. And in other pits I saw machines working on the construction of other machines, handlers and excavators, working in pairs like surgeons, or midwives. In one great cavity I even saw them assembling a fighting-machine, the heavy handlers crawling over the great bronzed cowl, the articulated legs laid out in sections.

Martians and their machines moving everywhere, in the low dawn light, in near silence.

Unexpectedly Cook made us pause. ‘Wait a minute. They won’t interfere with us unless we do something stupid. Just look … Sometimes I stand on spots like this and sort of ’alf-close my eyes, so it gets dim and indistinct. It’s all industry, I suppose, but it ain’t like ’uman industry, is it? Just stand ’ere and take it in. Think of it not as a kind of factory or a quarry, but as a landscape…’

I stood, and tried to set aside my fear – and that instinctive loathing of all things Martian – and tried to see it as he had suggested.

It has long been remarked that all Martian machines have a certain living quality, thanks to their ingenious electric musculature, in sharp contrast to our own crude arrangements of wheels and gears and levers and rods. Now I saw that quality evident all around me. Excavating-machines ploughed in a group through the broken earth, as dolphins will plough through the waves of the oceans; and a herd of handlingmachines, of all sizes, gathered together, crossed an open area, en route from one task to another, the dawn light glistening from their metal hides as if from the backs of migrant beasts. And I saw a brace of fighting-machines on the move, off in the distance beyond the far rampart of the pit, tall, elegant, striding through the dusty air. Over it all hung the faint tinge of green, of the smoke that was emitted by Martian machines on the moves from joints and fixtures, and from the pits they dug in the ground.

‘ I’ve never been to Africa,’ Cook murmured now. ‘Not even to Boer country. But I’ve seen pictures. When I look at it like this, I don’t see industry. I see a kind of savannah. They’re like animals on the move, big and small, individuals or in herds.’

‘Yes,’ Verity said, sounding surprised. ‘You’re right. I see it now. It all has that quality of life. The handlers like hornybacked herbivores, the fighting-machines like great giraffes perhaps – no! They are too aggressive for that.’

‘Like tyrannosaurs,’ I suggested. ‘Striding across some Cretaceous plain.’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘See, I’ve read the books, or some of ’em,’ Cook said. ‘Some say there must ’ave been animals on Mars, once. Because you wouldn’t get ’umanoids, and then Martians, just showing up on a world without a whole zoo , plants and animals and such, evolving together. And others say that’s all gone now, because Mars is too dried out. The Martians ’ave ’ad to turn the whole world into one big city, or a factory, where there’s nothing but the canals and the machines and the pumping ’ouses, I suppose. Like the ’ole of Mars is a giant Birmingham – ha!

‘But what about the animals? Well, in my lifetime I’m seeing animals being replaced by machines. I trained in the ’orse artillery, and now the nags are being swapped out for motor wagons, for better or worse. A lot of us miss ’aving the beasts at our side. And maybe the Martians feel the same, see, and they’ve done something about it. Maybe they’ve got a few old bones in the museums, up there, a few of the last specimens, as we’d ’ave. But they’ve gone further, see. A motor lorry ain’t much like an ’orse – an ’orse doesn’t ’ave wheels for a start. But Martian machines ’ave legs, like animals…’

‘I see what you’re getting at,’ Verity said now. ‘Maybe the Martians modelled their machines more closely on their animals than we ever did.’

‘That’s it,’ said Cook. ‘As if we made mechanical ’orses and elephants and such.’

‘So what we’re seeing is a kind of diorama – it’s how Mars used to be. Impressionistically, at least. And it’s this way because the Martians, for all their apparent brutality, didn’t want to lose their own past. How – romantic.’ She sounded reluctant to say the word.

It was a fetching thought, and I grinned at the old artilleryman. ‘Bert Cook, you do have quite an imagination, don’t you?’

But he retreated into his shell of customary resentment. ‘Got no education to speak of – no respect from the toffs. But, ho yes, I always ’ad imagination. I imagined all this back in ’07, when the rest of you thought we was done with the Martians. I kept thinking. Now then – you two come with me and I’ll show you things that will beggar your imagination.’

We walked on.

He led us to the cage of the Cythereans first.

It was not much of a cage, in fact. To hold their captives from Venus, the Martians had dug out a kind of tank, a shallow cylinder lined with some rubbery, impermeable material, and filled with water that was stained faintly crimson, the colour of the Martian weed. A handling-machine stood by, motionless, like a guard, but without a controlling Martian riding it. A containing net of a silvery mesh was stretched over the pit, and firmly fixed by a solid band anchored to the ground. This mesh was hexagonal, the holes the size of pennies, perhaps – enough to let in the sun and the rain, not enough to allow out a Cytherean, nothing larger than a digit on those webbed hands. But we could see the Cythereans, and they could see us, with their small black eyes set in those smooth faces.

My life had been saved by a Cytherean, and I had spent some time with them, but I could scarcely claim to be an expert in their psychology. But their mood was not hard to read. Most of the wretched creatures just lay in the water, floating, on their backs; some, heartbreakingly, had infants basking on their bellies. One big male swam back and forth, back and forth, a couple of firm strokes with hands and feet taking him from one side of his enclosure to the other, but no further. It was as you might see a tiger pace in a too-small cage in a zoo. And another adult, a female, was working at the net, picking at it with her fingers, gnawing at it.