Terra Nullius

by Claire G. Coleman

  Grandfather was fond of telling them about families in the days, in the many years, before the Invasion. Families fought, he said, many times, sometimes unfriendly almost to the edge of hatred. Sometimes they went even further than that, past hatred to find a new supply of it when everyone thought it had run out. Yet when assaulted, or even just insulted, by outsiders, families had always turned their aggression outwards, defending each other, fighting the common foe. An external foe of one member of the family almost always became an enemy of everybody.

  In an old book they had found there was a photo, faded and spotted with black mould, of a mob of large horned animals. They were being harangued by a mob of smaller animals like long-haired dogs; Grandfather called them wolves. The large herbivores were in a tight group, the larger ones turned towards their foes together, building a wall of flesh and horns to protect the young from the surrounding teeth.

  He always said when their people fought among themselves that he hoped his family, his mob, would be like that.

  Alone, momentarily at peace, bathing in the song of the magpie, Esperance checked the load in her handgun. Things had become far more dangerous of late and almost everybody was armed, although few were lucky enough to have a small light gun. Most of the rest of the mob were armed with knives, axes, improvised weapons – a bow here and there, spears made of aluminium pipe. Only a select, fortunate few had hunting rifles or shotguns.

  The gun in her hand was the pinnacle of human firearm ­technology, yet compared to Settler weapons it was as effective as bad language. When her meagre ammo inevitably ran out bad language was all she would have. Bad language and a knife.

  Esperance had only one magazine of ammo, and that was in her gun. No spare, there wasn’t any spare ammo to get. She checked, as she did every morning now the Settlers were on the warpath, that all was well, the gun was well maintained and loaded. Count your shots, she reminded herself, count your shots. This was essential. If they were overrun by the Settlers, by the Toads, the last shot was for her.

  She hoped the decades hadn’t deteriorated the ammo to the point it would not work.

  There was a woman among them, her soul, her heart broken, so lost from herself she had barely any sense, any humanity left. Hiding among them, always ready to run, she lived in constant morbid fear that the Toads would get her, take her back. So scared was she, so damaged by her ordeal before escaping to the desert, to the camp, her screams were almost unbearable to those living around her. On those days they moved camp she did so gagged, so that her screams would not alert the searching Settlers. She lacked the impetus to move; when they moved they had to carry her.

  Yet, no matter how much her screams endangered everybody else, not one soul in the camp ever considered abandoning her.

  One of the hunters had found her, scratched and bleeding, unconscious and half-dead with hypothermia from the freezing desert night. She was so still he had almost tripped over her as he tracked a goat through the thorny scrub. She was so cold he had thought her dead.

  Her name was Livia. They had pieced together her tale from the words between the screams, between the bouts of unconsciousness. It was a laborious task, to understand her story.

  ‘They took me to a place of theirs, a prison, a hospital, a factory, I don’t know what to call it,’ she had said in a terrified flurry of words. ‘I didn’t even know what they called it; they never spoke to me, never spoke to any of us. There were hundreds of us in the same room, all women, all strapped to beds, all tied with our legs in stirrups, pulled apart like a woman having a baby in the olden days.

  ‘They put babies in us, made us have babies, they didn’t put them in us the normal way, like a man does it; they did it with machines. There was a needle in my arm, for injections; a machine would hiss and pour more something into my arm.

  ‘I was there for I don’t know how long, as soon as we had babies they would take them and put more babies in us. I don’t even know how many babies I had, why do they need so many babies anyway?’

  After that they knew why the Toads always took the women, especially the young women, the girls. There was one thing Esperance was sure of: she would not be taken to a baby factory. She had her suspicions, thought she knew why they needed babies. Her and her mob were intractable, uncontrollable, aggressive. Humans everywhere when left to grow free were hard to control – they thought and therefore they fought.

  She had heard that even humans born in a settlement, born to slavery had a deplorable tendency towards small acts of pointless rebellion. Deplorable to the Settlers that is, amusing to the Natives. The Settlers wanted slaves: if they couldn’t capture them and control them they would have to breed them.

  They had started with the children. When they destroyed a camp, destroyed a town, they would always take the children, the younger the better. There were schools and camps somewhere, everywhere, where the children were trained into biddable slaves and servants. It could work if they could get children early enough, but where would they get enough small children?

  Every year a child lived and grew free, lived not enslaved, would teach that child too much independence. As the human numbers had fallen, the free humans had begun to die off, it must have gotten harder to find children to train. Breeding humans must have been a solution or at least part of a solution to the problem of a lack of slaves.

  Esperance had seen the children who came out of the baby factories. She had lain on a hillside staring at a Settler’s homestead, watching her own people work for the aliens. Some of the children were as unreliable, as human, as you would expect. They were teenagers, or at least looked like teenagers, a bunch of them with all sorts of skin and hair colours – at least the Invasion had eliminated the racism between human groups that had existed before. She could not see what they were doing exactly but the furtive glances towards the house, the particular way they moved and stood, told her they were up to no good. She wanted to cheer them on.

  Near them was a scattering of other children, clearly human there was nevertheless something different, even wrong, disturbing about them. There was a robotic, mechanical cast to their movements. Nothing they did was unnecessary to the task they were doing. If they were carrying something they carried it, they did not wander, they did not stop and stare, did not speak, did not drag their feet.

  They were silent; not silent like the older, more normal-looking kids who giggled lightly while trying to be silent. Rather they were completely silent like they had nothing to say, no thoughts inspiring their mouths to move. What was more disturbing than that was their appearance: all the same age they seemed to have grown almost exactly the same amount; there were probably boys and girls although it was hard to tell as they looked about six years old.

  Esperance had shuddered when she realised they were all almost identical. In the camps where humans were enslaved there was normally a mixture, a spectrum of skin colours from a pale pinkish cream right through to almost black. These were all-white kids: they were whiter than a natural white, their skin not even the transparent pink of white human skin; it had the colour of porcelain. Their hair too was white, like the bleached hair she had seen from time to time in ancient magazines; white and perfectly straight.

  Profoundly disturbed, unsettled, even frightened, she had returned to camp.

  When he heard Livia’s story, Grandfather took Esperance to his hut and carefully unwrapped the oilcloth that had protected the pistol from damp and time. He taught her to use it, firing only dry, learning with an unloaded gun, as there was no ammunition to spare for training. He had told her to wait as long as possible to fire as she hadn’t trained her aim, he told her to conceal the gun until she had to shoot so the enemy wouldn’t know she had it. He told her to shoot point-blank, into the face of the enemy so she could not miss, or to hold it against the heart before pulling the trigger, if Toads had hearts. He had told her to save the last shot for herself, to run if she
could, to always run if she could but if she couldn’t, then it was best to die cleanly.

  There were sick children in the camp, and after her brief time alone Esperance returned to nurse them as best she could. It was the water, most likely, because it was always the water or some disease the Settlers brought with them from whatever distant rock they arose from. Children had died the past few days, from a scouring diarrhoea that more often than not left its victim too weak to survive.

  They had been as careful as they could be with the water but there was little they could do, all they had was another muddy hole in another parched bone-dry riverbed. If you were careful when you collected the water you could get it without too much mud but maybe whatever was killing the children was not even in the mud. It was in the water.

  Tracks revealed the problem, or so she thought. In the sand around the camp strange tracks had appeared; she had no doubt they had been left by the soft, clawed feet of the Settlers’ livestock. Nobody had seen the animal yet but there was obviously a stray, or more than one, sharing their water. Whatever it was had clearly fouled where it drank.

  When the Settlers had first come they had brought many things, not least of which was diseases the Natives had never contacted. People, Esperance’s people, most of the humans, had died in droves before the Settlers even got to them. It had not hurt the Invasion when millions died before you even had to kill them, when soldiers on the other side were too sick to fight.

  A stray animal was extremely dangerous. Not only was it adding disease to their water that none of the children seemed capable of fighting, but Settlers valued their livestock and would no doubt be looking for the stray before long. The obvious solution presented itself: kill the damned thing and eat it, which would feed them for a while and remove the danger, unless the Settlers were looking for it, tracking it. If they had any tracking ability at all they could find it.

  No choices were good. Taking the animal back to the settlement would work if they knew where the settlement was, and if they could return the animal without being caught, without being seen. Before they returned it they would have to catch it, which would not be easy. Killing it and eating it would still be better, but then they would have to move camp, the Settlers might track it to near their camp and then the whole camp would be at risk. The only advantage would be that they would be well fed when they moved on. They were going to have to move no matter what.

  It was clear that the Settlers valued, even overvalued, their animals, more than they valued the lives of Natives. Many Natives had died, hunted down and executed for the crime of stealing livestock. If they didn’t steal livestock what else was there to eat?

  Esperance had been told, more than once so she believed it, that before the Settlers came the fertile land was all dedicated to growing food for humans, her own people. Then the Settlers came and brought their own crops, their own animals, slaughtering the Native animals and leaving them to rot, to make room for their own. Human, Native, earthling livestock had been killed to leave room for the Settler animals, and that left nothing to eat other than Settler animals.

  Settlers called it stealing.

  It was dry country, but there was always water to be found if Jacky could just work out where it was. Scratching and scraping through the scrub, moving with care but with as much speed as he could manage he headed downhill. Always before when he had found water it had been downhill: there might be a creek down there, or a waterhole, a billabong, there might be mud, a damp gully where he could dig.

  If nothing else, there might be a puddle.

  The scrub got thicker the further down the valley he scrambled, thorn trees and brambles catching on his clothes, adding their own lines to the history of catches, pulled threads and ragged tears. His skin was not spared – his clothes were not enough to protect him from the thorns and sharp sticks – and he was soon covered with a network of tiny cuts and scratches.

  Further down he reached a thicket of alien vines. Brought to Earth by the Settlers, they had escaped the settlements and were crawling their relentless way up the rivers and creeks from the coasts. Deep-rooted and water-hungry, they sucked the land drier, filling their thick leathery leaves with precious water, leaving nothing for the other plants. Where they grew nothing else could, such was their insatiable desire for water and space.

  There was fruit sometimes, on this vine, although it was normally in the middle of the thicket and protected with poisoned thorns. Jacky loved the vine fruit; of all the supplements to their meagre rations, all the foraged foods, they were his favourite.

  There was also a good chance, Jacky knew, that there was water in the middle of that tangled poisonous mess. The vine could suck the land dry but it normally needed water to get established. He could see no easy way in, no simple way to tackle this problem; it was rare that he had ever found a way into the thickets uninjured.

  He remembered well the last time he had been scratched by those thorns. He had lay thrashing in bed for two whole days, delirious with the pain of it. It would have taken his mind if it had gone on any longer, he could not bear it. When it ended, when he was barely strong enough to stand, the pain still there in the background of everything he did, weak from hunger and thirst, for there was nobody to nurse him, he was beaten for missing two days work.

  There was nobody to treat his scratches if he got injured, nobody to drag him out of the thicket, he could die in there. He would have to be laboriously careful. Lying on his belly in the dust, the sand, the fallen leaves and the parched remains of native plants he looked through watering eyes for a way in.

  As always there were fewer thorns low down in the old wood. If he could crawl flat enough on his belly, if he was slow, meticulous and careful, if he dug down into the mud and muck when he needed to, if he was lucky, he might make it into the gully the vine was strangling.

  Or he might get poked, poisoned and trapped.

  Hiding his sack in the leaves at the base of a tree he slipped his water bottle into the back of his shirt and took his kitchen knife in hand. It was not much of a weapon but it was sharp; he had scraped the edge against a handy stone only hours ago. He needed something to cut his way in and out if the vines got too thick. He needed some small protection against the inevitable snakes.

  It was a dark and horrific crawl, on his stomach in the dark, dry, hot thicket. Sometimes there was not even room to crawl on his belly. Those times he pulled himself through gripping tightly to the vine trunks, using them like the rungs of a ladder. Other times there was not even room to do that much and he had to reverse, a task even harder than moving forward.

  Little light filtered through the vines and it got darker and darker in there, until even acclimatised to the dark he could barely see. When finally there was no way further he sawed through the leathery, ropey plants by feel.

  He felt the water rather than saw it, his hand squelching into mud where before there had been nothing but sand. He could smell the damp, a comforting smell in parched nostrils. There were vines in the puddle, all that remained of a creek. His hand could feel a tangled mat of roots and stalks leaving barely enough room to slip his water bottle into the filth.

  Lying on his belly he drank, face in the water, not caring if the water was poisoned or diseased, knowing one bottle would not be enough, yet that was all he had. He drank until his belly was sloshing. It was purely by luck, in the complete darkness, that he placed his hand on the leathery skin of a vine fruit, fallen from the vine into the damp sand. He needed both hands and there was little chance of it surviving the crawl so he ate it there, relishing the sweet, tart, nutritious flesh.

  The crawl out was just as difficult, just as slow, just as painful, and this time he had no water as a reward at the end of it. His mind nearly broke in the darkness; trapped beneath the deadly vines, he fought his way out on stubbornness.

  He escaped and ran up the hillside yet night fell before he ma
de it back to where he had left the Toad, who he had inexplicably saved. There was not enough light to see so he crawled into a hollow at the base of a tree and collapsed into a pained sleep.

  As soon as sunlight glowed through his closed eyelids he moved again, not quite at a run. Worried for the man he had left there – although he did not know why – tired and hurrying, he was for a moment insufficiently paranoid. He stepped into the clearing to find himself staring down the barrel of an antique human-made rifle.

  There were humans everywhere, five of them, all armed with rifles, shotguns, one even with a long rifle of plasticky ceramic. Worried for himself and for the Settler who could be dying, he froze, making no move for his pathetic weapon, knowing it would not be enough, knowing it would accelerate his death if he put his hand on it.

  ‘There was a Toad here,’ he spluttered, ‘I need him, I need his help, is he still here?’

  The humans stood silently, as if frozen, not lowering their weapons. For some reason they did not shoot. Where there were readable expressions they seemed mostly to be of puzzlement. Jacky could not fathom the situation, nothing about it made sense.

  A gentlemanly drawl came from behind him, dropping into the silence like a stone into a muddy lake. ‘Why would you care about a Toad, little man?’ The voice was confident, almost arrogant. If it was a walk it would be a swagger.

  ‘I need his help, I need to find my home and he might be able to help me.’

  ‘He was helpless,’ the voice snapped, ‘you could have killed him and there would be one less pestilent Settler in the world. Actually, you could have just left him there to die, that would also mean one less Settler for little effort on your part. I just can’t understand why you would not want one less Settler.’ The mysterious voice was circling around past Jacky’s left though he was too scared, too cautious to turn and look.