Terra Nullius
Page 13
– Doctor Robert Black, Leader of the Native Delegation to the Settler Parliament
The sound of hammering on sheet metal was drilling its slow, relentless way into Bagra’s head, erasing her sense of peace as she walked the corridors of her mission. It was everywhere, although she knew it was only coming from one direction. She knew exactly where it was coming from, yet it echoed and crashed, working its way into every corner of the building. If she was going to have to listen to it, no matter where she went in the mission, she may as well go inspect the work.
Outside, closer to the hammering, you would have expected it to be louder yet the nearby alien forest appeared to absorb it, unlike the familiar walls inside. If they had been built to amplify the sound it would be hard to imagine them doing a better job. So, for one of the first times since arriving on this planet, Bagra was glad, even delighted, to be outside. It was a cool day, the air damp and the infernal sun hidden behind a comforting solid grey sky. She could even hope, she would always hope, it might rain.
The work outside was progressing well. Where there had been two metal boxes, good places to lock up the little monsters when they were disobedient, when they resisted their lessons, when they acted like the animals they were, there were now four, and a fifth being built. She was delighted the work was nearly completed, the noise would soon end, but she was also worried that five boxes would not be enough, but it was at least more than two.
Since that fugitive, Jacky, had broken into the office, the Natives had been restless, almost impossible to control. Most of them seemed to believe what the Department for the Protection of Natives believed, that the small pile of excrement was looking for a way home.
Surely that was impossible: the Natives were not particularly intelligent, when they were taken from their parents for education they soon forgot their early life. His home was there, in the mission or in the settlement that had taken him in, surely he would dream of no other.
Maybe he was trying to return home, to whatever slum, whatever filthy camp he had been collected from. It seemed more likely he was taking revenge for some poorly understood slight, for something that had occurred in the mission. Wherever he was the Troopers would get him.
Turning without warning she looked at the windows of the schoolroom. There they were again, the ugly, contemptible faces of the children staring out at the work, staring out at the scrub, staring at her. When they noticed she was looking they all went back to their work. She could imagine their whispering, like the hissing of snakes.
They would have to be disciplined, that entire lot, the entire class would have no lunch today. She could not identify the individual children involved, they all looked the same to her.
Their teacher would hear about it too; there had been a lapse in discipline for the nuns as well, they were getting lazy, more proof they were losing faith in the work. Bagra alone seemed to be maintaining the rules, maintaining discipline, keeping the faith, doing it for all of them. The younger nuns, after Jacky’s break-in, were starting to doubt that the children could be trained to become reliable servants. Some had even begun to question whether the children should be trained to service at all.
It was all that Jacky’s fault. Somehow rumours of his continued freedom kept reaching the Natives. Somehow the children knew that after absconding, after breaking into and trashing her office, he was still free. ‘Looking for home,’ they said, the word ‘home’ said more times in the mission in the past weeks than it had been for years combined. There had been more attempted escapes lately, children believing they could go home. Surely they could not even remember what ‘home’ was, where their homes could be. ‘Home’ became a battle cry, a touchstone.
‘There are always escapes, have always been escapes, it is one of the Native’s basest drives, to escape,’ Bagra told the other nuns that night over dinner.
‘Why, if we are trying to help them, are they so desperate to escape?’ asked Mel’s stupid friend, the other young nun.
‘Before Jacky broke in,’ Bagra said with false calm, with affected boredom, ‘the attempts had always been for pathetic, shallow, selfish reasons, a desire,’ she was hissing, losing her temper, ‘a constant urge to escape their work, plain laziness, a desire for whatever animalistic pleasure they were searching for when the tracker caught them.’
‘They are escaping more, or trying more,’ said one of the nuns, old and decrepit.
‘The others cover for them,’ Mel interjected, ‘hide the fact they have run, wanting to give another the chance to “go home”.’
Bagra agreed even though the silly girl’s attempt at getting into her good books was transparent. Escapes were taking longer to be discovered, the children getting further before the tracker started. Tracks were getting lost.
The brats had a stronger desire to run now, trying so much harder to stay free, to avoid the trackers, to avoid recapture. There had even recently been a little monster who had escaped, and been recaptured but who would not submit. She was dragged back kicking and screaming, injuring the tracker, kicking the walls of her prison box all night, keeping everyone awake.
Nothing could stop the rebellion, end the noise – even beatings, even withholding food and water. Suddenly after days of screaming it had stopped: the child was unconscious, near to death from lack of water. One of the older sisters had collected the child and taken her to the infirmary to recover. Bagra wished they had just buried it, not saved its life. The very next night, having shown no sign of waking all day, it escaped from the infirmary and disappeared.
They had laughed at her, dared to actually laugh at her; she heard their giggling, their horrible twittering, always behind her when she walked. She never caught them at it – by the time she turned they were always silent, always looking the other way. She never knew which one it was. The laughter followed her everywhere, even seemingly empty corridors could erupt into childish, monstrous giggles.
She lacked the resources, even the will to punish every child in the mission, not when the other nuns might resist. Punishment would need to be handed out arbitrarily. Could she get away with doing it randomly?
It was all that Jacky’s fault.
Turning from the noise of hammering she would have run into the schoolhouse if her sense of propriety had allowed it. Restoring discipline to that classroom would certainly help to restore her equilibrium. If not, it would certainly cheer her up, especially the disciplining of whoever was supposed to be teaching.
‘I have contacted that man they call “Devil”, the Chief Protector of Natives, personally,’ Sister Bagra said as the older nuns nodded sagely. ‘I did not ask much, merely that he hurry up and capture the fugitive so peace can be restored.’
There was murmuring around the table. Bagra spoke again to quiet them. ‘There was no answer, that terrible man with no respect, so I wrote him again, told him that there would be no peace from the Natives until Jacky was caught.’
Bagra believed that soon it would be too late; as more and more escaped others would get the courage to try. One day all of her charges would believe they could ‘go home’. She had heard of trouble in the surrounding settlements, servants taking Jacky’s example, disappearing in the middle of the night. Soon they would lose control completely.
What was it about this particular fugitive that everyone was so interested in, that the Natives would not ignore? There had been escapes before, many of them; whether or not the Native was captured was irrelevant to keeping order. Yet this man, barely more than a child kept everyone excited. He was not even particularly interesting, barely memorable.
‘Until Jacky is captured we will soldier on as usual,’ she stated in a tone that left no room for argument.
At least until the inspector came, which seemed to be delayed again and again with no explanation, nobody even deigning to inform the mission. There was a ready excuse, the communication satellites were useless,
they had travelled across the stars to this godforsaken planet, yet they had no modern communications most of the time. Half the time they sent messages not knowing if they would arrive, the other half they did not even trust the system that much and relied on a courier.
This could not do, this waiting for a guillotine blade that never fell. He had arrived on the planet, that much seemed likely; the trip to this planet was no longer difficult.
Travelling across land, that was more dangerous – there was the heat, the dry and the depredations of the Natives. Anyone who did not rate a flier was in real danger travelling anywhere, maybe something had happened to him on the way. Bagra was not certain whether or not to hope he had met some disaster. If he died on the way it would not end their problems, instead it would simply delay them as another inspector was dispatched.
A new inspector was no more likely to be forgiving, and the administration back home less so once they had lost an inspector from the Church. The next inspector could instead be a ‘hatchet man’, sent to clean up rather than investigate the mess. If they had been kind with their choice of inspector there was still a hope she could convince him there was nothing to worry about.
Chapter 12
Person to person we are stronger than them, faster than them and we have the advantage of local knowledge. We are no less intelligent than them, might even be smarter on an individual level. Where they beat us consistently is in technology and the unrelenting, merciless, largely impersonal, application of force. Our species is also as ancient as theirs; when we were climbing down from the trees they were taking their first upright steps from the swamp, so there is no age advantage. It seems all their advantages developed because they come from a part of space where populated planets are more numerous.
Stated simply, their interstellar enemies and friends are right next door.
While we have developed in isolation, until they came, they developed in a society of constant interstellar contact, trade and war. They have traded technology with their near neighbours, they have stolen technology from their neighbours, they have had the need to develop that technology for defence and assault against those same neighbours.
We have had no reason to develop the technology of conflict to the level they have, because until this point we have known of nobody offplanet to fight. We did not develop the technology of interstellar space flight because we had nowhere to go, and no competition for getting there first.
We always thought we were an aggressive people, warlike and violent. On contact with other species from the other side of the galaxy we discovered that we are not. They are to us as a lion is to a lamb.
An analogy that would help us understand is western Europe on our planet. A tightly packed mass of small kingdoms with relatively high population densities they have, since prehistory, always traded technology when they were not fighting over land and resources. The competition, the drive to develop the technology of travel and war was intense leading to the technological advantage that Europe developed.
Distant countries, perhaps less warlike than those in Europe and, importantly, with lower population densities, developed complex social systems that enabled them to survive in their environment. They did not travel and invade, they did not go to war like the Europeans did. Importantly they had everything they needed and did not invade other people to steal their resources. People of those countries did not even need to defend themselves against populous warlike neighbours until the Europeans came, by which time it was, for them, too late.
Now Earth is the isolated country that has a relatively low population, lower technology and a culture relatively un-warlike. In the history of the world, when Europeans landed in Australia, the most isolated continent on the planet, the people there had no context in which to understand the new more powerful, warlike enemy. The mental and emotional technology of the Australian Aboriginals taught them to live in peace and harmony, to survive in the toughest natural environment in the world. It did not equip them to defend against an attacker from outside. In interstellar terms we, the people of Earth, are the Australian Aboriginals.
We have fought wars, we have killed, we were killing each other right until the invasion but do not believe in killing indiscriminately; we fight but deep down we believe that peace is better for society. We sometimes fail to act brutally enough, a collection of ethics we call ‘humanity’ tempers our reactions. They have no such compulsion, we are not their equals; to them, we are merely a part of the inhospitable environment they are trying to tame.
I had always thought humans were brutal in war, merciless in combat, but that was before the Settlers arrived. In the early days of our resistance, starting immediately after their arrival on our planet, we had some success in destroying them, in fighting back. This success came at a cost we were unwilling or unable to keep paying. If one of them were killed, ambushed or slaughtered (there were no actual battles) their retaliation was swift and decisive.
When Europeans ‘colonised’ the lands of the so-called primitive peoples we were brutal. The ‘murder’ of an Englishman in Australia, for example, could lead to the death of an entire tribe. This had the effect of terrorising the people whose lands we had colonised. They could not, for the most part, understand that sort of brutality.
Similarly we could not have imagined the violence with which the invaders of Earth, the colonisers of our planet, would react. When a Settler was mobbed and killed in London, after beating a human child in the street, the city was ‘sanitised’ and not a single human was left alive. The entire south of England was enslaved and the island we called Britain was turned slowly into a fortified camp, their greatest stronghold.
– Rear Admiral (Retired) Martin Freeman (Reprinted with permission courtesy of the Institute for Human Studies)
Johnny Star was utterly helpless, if Johnny Star had the strength left to move he would be writhing in pain. Johnny Star knew he was about to die. His soft moist skin, so like that of an amphibian, poorly adapted to the heat and dry, was so parched it was starting to crack. If he didn’t find water soon he was doomed, cooked.
His friends, the Natives, had taken off, either certain he was going to die and abandoning him to his fate, or, as he hoped, on a desperate search for water. He had been delirious with the heat when they left, he had no idea if they had told him why they were leaving.
If they were looking for water they would in their humanity show, by contrast, exactly how compassionate his own people were. Which was, in his opinion, not at all. His own people would have left him there to die. He just wished his friends had left someone with him; he hated being alone.
He had heard before what it was like to die from the dehydration – the ‘dry death’ they called it. More than once, when he was a trooper, he had joined the search for Settlers missing from their settlements. When they were found at all they were often dead under whatever pathetic shade they could find. If the searchers were lucky they found a corpse, skin cracked and dry eyes sunken into the sockets. Otherwise what they found was a terrifying, mummified ‘thing’, skin like paper stretched over brittle bones, the remains contorted by the dry heat. The eyes, the windows of the soul, would be dehydrated to almost non-existence, leaving nothing but a leather-wrapped skull.
Many troopers, once they had seen mummified victims of the heat, vowed this would never be their fate, they would take their own lives first. Sometimes lost troopers were found dead, shot with their own guns well before the dry death could occur. Maybe some of them could have been saved if they had just waited.
Johnny had fought for his life for far too long to take that quick, relatively painless option. As long as there was hope that somebody would come, as long as there was hope that it might rain, he held on. It had gone well past the point where there was genuine hope; Johnny was holding on through pure, bloody-minded stubbornness. Dying of the heat and the dry was one experience he could live without.
Out in this desert though, even the leaves were desiccated; there was not even enough rain, enough moisture to rot them. The litter would stay there until the inevitable fire, the fire that always comes, turns it to ash. When cleansing fire came it would burn his corpse too, a cremation, his ashes fertilising the trees, far better than following stupid orders to a fool’s death, buried in a bone yard, murdering humans who did not deserve to die.
There were species of frogs and toads on this planet that were capable of hibernating when there was not enough water for them to survive. Before the water ran out completely they formed a cocoon of slime filled with water. Within that they would sleep through the dry, sleep until the rain came. What magic, what beautiful, unbelievable magic, surely this cannot be possible. Johnny wished so hard his people had that ability, or at least that he had that power. Screw the rest of his people, let them die. It would have been more useful to him right now than the intelligence and industry that had enabled them to build spaceships, to colonise other planets. He could sleep through the heat, where none of his people would find him, return when the rain came to a new world, maybe a world where he would be forgiven, where he could forgive his people for the massacres of the Natives.
This time he was out of luck; he was going to die here under a tree, in the heat, die of the heat and the parched oven-hot air. He would die and in this grey-green pile of leaves and bark, so close in colour to his skin, he would be perfectly camouflaged, invisible. In death he would disappear. He realised, too late, when he had no strength left to move, his friends, if they returned, might not be able to find him, already buried as he was.