Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

‘I’ll go back to the Park.’ He tapped his shoulder. ‘Broken wing or not, I’ve still got more fighting experience than half the bozos in there combined, and somebody needs to keep George Patton’s feet on the ground.’

Now a soldier came running from the direction of the river, looking for officers to report to, yelling about some new development. Woodward stayed with them long enough to figure out what was happening now.

So much for cutting the bridges.

The Martian fighting-machines were simply wading across the East River, in a broad crescent formation, between the Queensboro and Williamsburg bridges. The river was only some forty feet deep – no obstacle to the hundred-feet-tall Martian machines, which, as, Marigold furiously pointed out again, should have been apparent from the British briefings. And meanwhile smaller, squat handling-machines, at the feet of their tripedal big brothers, were scuttling under the water and clambering out on dry land, their aluminium chassis glistening, dripping filthy river scum, Heat-Ray projectors ready to wield.

Now, looking down 60 thStreet, Harry saw them come fighting-machines, towering at last over Manhattan. Already artillery coughed from the emplacements in Central Park.

Harry and Marigold exchanged quick handshakes with Woodward, and ran west and south.

And around the world, still the cylinders fell.

On the morning the Second War came to Australia, so Luke Smith believes, he was fourteen years old. At the time of my writing this account Smith is an educated young man in his late twenties, trained as a lawyer, and with a passion to defend the rights of his own people. He has a clear memory of the events of those astonishing days, and when he finally overcame his own illiteracy he wrote down what he saw.

But ‘Luke Smith’ is not his name, and was not when the Martians landed. He had been separated from his family, in upstate Victoria, at a young age. Given the name of a Gospel writer, he was raised in a Christian mission until the age of ten, and was then ‘loaned’ – he remembers the specific word being used – to a sheep farmer near Bendigo. There he was abused. He is vague on specifics. The culprit may have been one of his own people. At twelve he ran away, into the bush.

And he headed south to Melbourne, a city he had heard of but had never seen. By the age of fourteen he had joined an underclass of young Aborigines in that city, despised and even more invisible in that urban setting than were his people in the countryside.

He was a clever if entirely untutored child, with a poor, rough-accented vocabulary. Still, from conversations with others, and from comments made by white folk in his hearing – I imagine they believed he would not understand – he gained an impression of the plight of his people. He seems to have formed a determination to survive, at a very young age. He learned how to live in Melbourne, which like all cities is a vast machine producing enormous amounts of waste, accessible to those clever enough.

Luke always felt he was effectively alone.

Then the Martians came.

The cylinders landed at Fairfield, north-east of Melbourne, at local midnight of Saturday 20 thMay – it was Friday afternoon in England.

Luke had been sleeping in Luna Park, which is an amusement resort at St Kilda, on the shore of Port Phillip Bay, to the south-east of Melbourne itself. When he woke, some time after dawn on that fateful Saturday, the place seemed deserted. He had heard movement during the night of motor vehicles rolling – he even heard the growl of animals – but it had not disturbed him; there were such noises every night, in the Park. It was a sprawling, casually policed place, much of it on the edge of criminality anyhow, and there was a plethora of hiding places for a boy like Luke to tuck himself away and sleep in safety.

When he emerged from his hiding place, though, there was nobody around.

He walked through the Park, past the stalls and stands and attractions, some of them locked up, others simply abandoned. Even then it occurred to Luke that he could simply break into one of the abandoned food concessions. But cautious habits drew him to the garbage pails as usual. He did notice that the rats seemed bolder.

He would learn later that after the Martians had landed, following the pattern established in America, they had quickly overcome any initial resistance by the local authorities and military, and then had advanced towards the city, their main goal, at dawn. With everyone having already heard the reports from America, there had been a mass, spontaneous evacuation, mostly to the south and west. Thus, that morning, Luna Park was deserted. But Luke Smith had heard nothing of the Martian advance – indeed he knew nothing of Martians at all, when he woke that morning. Filling his belly was a more pressing concern.

After eating, following an instinct he would not later be able to understand, he left Luna Park to walk the few miles into downtown Melbourne.

He passed through the Albert Park area, making for South Melbourne and the river. His sense of direction had always been good; after a couple of years he knew the city’s geography pretty well, even if he had trouble reading the street signs. These suburbs were not entirely deserted, but almost. He saw a few people in shut-up houses, peering fearfully through northfacing windows – looking out for a menace Luke still knew nothing of. Here and there late-goers fled, mostly on foot. Electric trams stood silent on their rails, useless. A few shops had been broken into.

And Luke saw, a couple of times, a sight he had never witnessed before: the dead bodies of white folk.

He crossed the Yarra by the Queens Bridge. Now he was in a grid of streets, the expensive part of the city. In those days Melbourne was still was a young town, and later he would learn something of its history: the Gold Rush money on which it had been founded, the banking crash of ’93 that was still talked of in hushed tones three decades later. With an instinct driven by a never-assuaged hunger he made for the Queen Victoria Market, a sprawling development with craft and clothing stalls crammed in among the food vendors. Luke knew this place; on market days it was crowded with a miscellany of folk, from gowned academics from the colleges to black-robed Italian grandmothers pushing carts. Rough types came for the petty thieving; Luke had often come here for the waste, and a bit of begging if he had to. Today, as elsewhere, the place was mysteriously deserted. But the bins behind the stalls offered rich pickings, of cold meat, stale bread, half-eaten sugary cakes. Luke considered finding a bag and filling it; he might never have a chance like this again. But the ability to run away was his key survival skill, and you couldn’t do that if you were burdened. He decided he would come back to the market later, and fill his belly when he needed to – if his luck held.

In the meantime, he was free, even of hunger.

On a whim, he made his way a short distance across town, to Swanston Street, and the State Library of Victoria. He knew that this was a building full of books, and he even had a dim idea of what books were for , even if his own reading was barely enough to pick out his own name. What interested him about the Library was the tremendous dome that topped it – supposedly, he had heard people say, the largest concrete dome in the world. Later he would learn that that hadn’t been quite true, a local’s boast. But still, this boy who ate from garbage cans and slept in the corners of an amusement park liked the idea that he could stand here and just look at something that couldn’t be bettered anywhere in the world. It is an image I like: the ragged Aborigine boy, in the deserted street of that white folks’ city, illiterate, unwashed, abused and ignored, standing on that sloping lawn before the pillars of the front portico – alone, and yet inspired by a monument to knowledge.