Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

Verity said, ‘ This , though—’

‘Gen’rally they don’t last long,’ said Bert Cook, almost casually. ‘The bud seems to drain the mother’s body of too much blood, too fast. I say bud. I say mother. Not sure whether those terms are the right ones, I ain’t no Huxley.

‘Some say the Martians were like us – once. Ain’t that so? ’Umans, or ’uman-shaped – like the wretches they bring with ’em to eat during the voyage. But they evolved away, or rather sculpted themselves away from that form. Eugenics, the betterment of a stock by surgery or fiddling with the germ plasm – I don’t know, all I know is what I read, and I don’t even understand ’alf of that.’

‘And now they’re trying it on us,’ Verity said, joining us, her face closed with disgust and rage. ‘Seeing if we can be made Martian, like them.’

I whispered, ‘Whatever it is, I wish—’

‘You could end it? Myself also. Put an end to this House of Pain!’

Cook said coldly, ‘You still ain’t seeing it clearly. The Martians, you know, would say they are doing us a favour. Lifting us up, as if we made a chimp smart as a college perfessor. And who’s to say, by their lights, they are wrong? And – pain? What of it? You clever-clogs keep telling me the Martians are above us mere mortals. Perhaps, with their ’eads detached from their bodies, they are above pain as above pleasure. And what need they care of the pain they inflict on us? Any more’n we care about the pain of the animal in the slaughterhouse – or the tree we cut down.’ He grinned at me, mocking. ‘And, seeing this, do you still think you’ll be able to communicate with ’em? Still think they’ll be impressed by you being able to prove Pythagoras’s theorem, or whatnot?’

I saw that even an imagination as dark as Bert Cook’s had not guessed at the truth of my mission, at what I carried in my veins – even now, as I completed these last few steps of my long journey, seven hundred miles from the bright civilisation of Berlin to this, the centre of evil – no, not of evil – of the unbearable inevitability of science, and intelligence, and Darwin’s chill logic.

But perhaps Bert was right. By the Martians’ lights and perhaps in the view of our own descendants of the far future , they who would have to deal with the cooling of the sun, and the freezing of the earth, as the Martians have done their world the Martians’ ghastly treatment of the young mother in the pit, our own first step to a greater evolution, was the noblest gift they could have given us.

In any event, what Bert Cook said to me now was: ‘I think it’s time you saw the end of it.’

So we were brought to the very centre of that mile-wide pit. From here the bordering rampart could be seen all around, and the sun, I saw, was soon to rise over the wall to the east – it was still very early. Before us the great fallen cylinders protruded from the earth like megaliths; it was a Martian Avebury. We were close to that tremendous central shaft in the ground, too. From where we were I could see the excavating-machines toiling under the lip of the pit, widening and smoothing the walls. And I could hear a great pulse sounding from deep underground – boom, boom, boom – like a tremendous engine, or a beating heart. It was the backdrop to everything that followed.

And there, in a shallow arena, the Martians sat together. They were out of their machines, and resting on a carpet of their red weed. They were flattened balls, as if deflated, their skin creased. I imagined that was an effect of our earth’s heavy gravity. I saw those strange faces clear and close to – the immense dark eyes, the lack of a brow ridge, the V-shaped lip, the lack of a chin – unless you’ve seen it in life you cannot imagine the animation of that face. And the brow huge and sweating, not unlike the brow of Walter Jenkins, I thought! Occasionally one would pluck at a vesicle of the weed or a fatter cactus-like growth, lift it with those long, bony fingers and push it into its mouth. They regarded each other with those immense dark eyes. And they hooted and honked, sounding like brokendown steam engines. Huge, flaccid, ugly, they would have been almost comical, I think, if not for the equipment arrayed around them.

That equipment:

Imagine a series of hanging brackets, like scaffolds, with a handling-machine settled at the base of each. A human being hung from each of these scaffolds, by the feet, inverted, the arms loosely strapped to the sides. These captives did not struggle, but they were conscious throughout. Later anatomical examinations proved it: the Martians used electricity to render their selected specimens flaccid, incapable of physical resistance, but it seems clear they were awake through most of it – and, probably, capable of sensing pain. All of them happened to be adults, and for that I am forever grateful; the images burned in my memory might have been so much worse yet, if children had been among the victims. Dangling people, then. Eyes closed, their faces flushed with blood – their hair loose and fallen, the skirts of the women draped in an undignified way. Some were well dressed, in fact; it made no difference now.

And a tube, crimson, protruded from the side of the neck of each of these victims– the left side, I remember vividly attached to a valve set in the jugular vein or carotid artery. Each tube snaked down to a rack among the group of Martians. These tubes, and the racks they were lodged in, had peculiar markings which Keynes, expert on blood transfusion, has since speculated might be related to human blood types; a Martian may prefer, or be compelled to take, human blood of a particular type, and the tubes were coded as necessary.

For this was the feeding, of course. The last stage in the process was simple, technically. Using the long fingers of those strange hands, a Martian would take one of the tubes, insert it into a kind of cannula attached to its own flesh, and turn a tap, so that the blood ran directly from a human being into its own body. There were even young in the Martian circle; the juniors, like the adults in every particular except their size, had their own miniature cannulas fixed to the flesh, and I saw one adult, almost gently, use her long fingers to adjust the feed tube to the inlet on the flesh of a confused infant. It seemed almost touching.

‘Sometimes they’ll feed in a kind of frenzy,’ Cook murmured in my ear. ‘Then they can’t get the victims in quick enough, handling-machines or no handling-machines. Your Martian needs a lot of blood through ’im, from time to time. Why? I’m no sawbones, but I’d say it’s the need to flush out the waste from the bloodstream. How else are they to do it? Never seen a Martian on a lavatory – I bet you never thought about that, did you? Or sometimes they just bleed the victims out into big refrigerated stores, like blood banks.

‘And other times, like this, it’s more leisurely, sort of inbetween. Like a tea party, don’t you think?’ He laughed. ‘Almost polite. Sometimes they’ll empty you in one feed. Or sometimes they’ll turn you right way up and hang you in a kind of store, and keep you for later. Eventually you’re used up, of course.’

I said bleakly, ‘And then?’

‘And then you’re no more use.’ He grinned coldly. ‘The crows are allies of the Martians, at least. You two ladies ’ave done well – thought you’d pass out or run away long before this. So, now what? Going to give ’em your geometry lesson?’

‘Let us talk,’ I said, and walked away from him with Verity.

Her face was pinched with anger and disgust. ‘If I had a Zeppelin and an immense bomb, I would drop it and erase all trace of this blemish. It doesn’t belong on our earth.’