The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “Harry’s parents brought him to Earth, a once-in-a-lifetime trip to meet great-grandma and grandpa. He never did get to see them.”

  It had been the year 4874, nearly two centuries past. Harry Gage was ten years old.

  And Earth was about to be conquered.

  The flitter bearing Harry Gage and his parents had tumbled out of the shimmering throat of the wormhole transit route from Mars to Earthport.

  Harry peered out of the cramped cabin, looking for Earth. Mum sat beside him, a bookslate on her lap, and Dad sat opposite, grinning at Harry’s reaction. Harry would always remember these moments well.

  Earthport was at one of the five gravitationally stable Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system, leading the Moon in its orbit around Earth by sixty degrees. The flitter surged unhesitatingly through swarming traffic. From here, Earth was a swollen blue disk. Wormhole gates of all sizes drifted across the face of the planet, electric-blue sculptures of exotic negative-energy matter.

  The final hop to Earth itself took only a few hours. Soon the old planet, pregnant and green, was approaching, as if surfacing. Huge fusion stations, constructed from ice moons, sparkled in orbit above green-blue oceans. The planet itself was laced with lights, on land and sea. In the thin rim of atmosphere near the north pole, Harry could just make out the dull purple glow of an immense radiator beam, a diffuse refrigerating laser dumping a fraction of Earth’s waste heat into the endless sink of space.

  Earth was visibly stable, healthy, recovered from the climate-collapse horrors of the past, and managed by a confident mankind.

  “Harry’s flitter landed in New York,” the Rememberer said. “A spaceship coming down in the middle of Manhattan. Imagine that!”

  Harry and his parents emerged onto grass, a park, in the sunshine of a New York spring. Harry could see the shoulders of tall, very ancient skyscrapers at the rim of the park, interlaced by darting flitters.

  Dad raised his face to the sun and breathed deeply. “Mmm. Cherry blossom and freshly cut grass. I love that smell.”

  Mum snorted. “We have cherry trees on Mars.”

  “Every human is allowed to be sentimental about a spring day in New York. It’s our birthright. Look at those clouds, Harry. Aren’t they beautiful?”

  Harry looked up. The sky was laced by high, fluffy, dark clouds, fat with water, unlike any on Mars. And beyond the clouds he saw crawling points of light: the habitats and factories of near-Earth space. Harry was thrilled to the core.

  But Mum closed her eyes. She was used to the pyramids and caverns of Mars, and could not believe that a thin layer of blue air could protect her from the rigors of space.

  And as Harry peered up, he saw a line of light cut across the sky, scratched by a spark bright enough to cast faint shadows, even in the sunlight.

  New Yorkers looked up, faintly concerned. This wasn’t normal, then.

  “It was the first strike of the Squeem,” the Rememberer said. “Harry never forgot that moment. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? It shaped his whole life.”

  Rhoda and her soldiers listened, trying to understand, trying to decide whether to believe him. Trying to decide what to do about it.

  While the old man rested, Rhoda let her staff resume other duties, but summoned Reg Kaser, her first officer.

  In her cabin, she powered up her percolator, her one indulgence from her Iowa home. While it chugged and slurped and filled the cabin with sharp coffee scents, she faced her big picture window.

  The Jones was a UN Navy corvette. It was locked in a languid orbit around Rhea, second largest moon of Saturn. In fact, the Jones wasn’t far from home; its home base was on Enceladus, another of Saturn’s moons.

  Rhea itself was unprepossessing, just another ball of dirty ice. But beyond it lay Saturn, where huge storms raged across an autumnal cloudscape, and the rings arched like gaudy artifacts, unreasonably sharp. The Saturn system was like a ponderous ballet, beautiful, peaceful, illuminated by distance-dimmed sunlight, and Rhoda could have watched it forever.

  But it was Rhea she had come for. Within its icy carcass were pockets of salty water, kept liquid by the tidal kneading of Saturn and the other moons. That wasn’t so special; there were similar buried lakes on many of Sol system’s icy moons, even Enceladus.

  But within Rhea’s deep lakes had been discovered colonies of Squeem, the aquatic group-mind organisms that had, for a few decades, ruled over a conquered mankind, and even occupied Earth itself. The Jones was named for the hero who had crucially gained an advantage over the Squeem, a bit of bravery and ingenuity which had ultimately led to the Squeem’s expulsion from Sol system—or so everybody had thought, until this relic colony had been discovered. The xenologists were already talking to these stranded Squeem, using antique occupation-era translation devices.

  It was Rhoda’s task to decide what to do with them. She could have them preserved, even brought back to Earth.

  Or she could make sure that every last Squeem in Rhea died. She even had the authority to destroy the whole moon, if she chose, to make sure. She was promised the firepower. Weapons were Reg Kaser’s department, and there were a lot of black projects around.

  It was a hard decision to make.

  And now she had the complication of this old man, the self-styled “Rememberer,” and his antique saga of the occupation, which he insisted had to be heard before any decision was made about the Squeem on Rhea.

  First Officer Reg Kaser waited silently as she gathered her thoughts.

  They were contrasting types. Rhoda Voynet, forty years old, came from an academic background; she had trained as a historian of the occupation before joining the service. Kaser, fifty, scarred, one leg prosthetic, and with a thick Mercury-mine accent, was a career soldier. He had taken part in the counterinvasion a decade ago, when human ships, powered by hyperdrive purloined from the Squeem themselves, had at last assaulted the Squeem’s own homeworld.

  They worked well together, their backgrounds and skills complementary. Kaser had learned to be patient while Rhoda thought things through. And she had learned to appreciate his decisiveness, hardened in battle.

  “Tell me what we know of this old man,” she said.

  Kaser checked over a slate. “His name is Karl Hume. Born and raised on Earth. Seventy-four years old. He’s spent his life working for the UN Restoration Agency. Literature section.”

  Rhoda understood the work well enough. Much of the material she had drawn on in her own research had come from the Restoration’s reassembling. The Squeem were traders, not ideological conquerors, but in their exploitation they had carelessly done huge damage to mankind’s cultural heritage. A hundred and fifty years after their expulsion, the Restoration was still patiently piecing together lost libraries, recovering works of art, even rebuilding shattered cities brick by brick, like New York, where young Harry Gage had watched the sky fall.

  “Hume was a drone,” Kaser said, uncompromising. “His work was patient, thorough, reliable, but he had no specific talent, and he didn’t climb the ladder. He held down a job, all his life. But nobody missed him when he retired. He had a family of his own. Wife now dead, kids off-Earth. He never troubled the authorities, not so much as a dodgy tax payment.”

  “Until he tried to abduct a kid.”

  “Quite.”

  The boy, called Lonnie Tekinene, was another New Yorker, ten years old—the same age as Harry Gage, Rhoda noted absently, when he had witnessed the Squeem invasion. Hume had made contact with the kid through a Virtual playworld, and had met him physically in Central Park, and had tried to take him off to Hume’s apartment. Alert parents had put a stop to that.

  As Hume had been processed through the legal system, he had become aware of the discovery of the pocket of Squeem on Rhea, moon of Saturn, and the deliberation going on within the UN and its military arm as to what to do about it.

  Kaser said, “Hume didn’t harm a hair of the kid’s head. At first, he just denied everything. But when he heard ab
out Rhea, he opened up. He said it was just that his ‘time’ had come. He was the ‘Rememberer’ of his generation. But he was growing old. He needed to recruit another to take his place—just as he was recruited in his turn by some other old fossil when he was ten.”

  “He never explained why he chose this kid, this Lonnie. What criteria he used.”

  Kaser shrugged. “On the other hand, looking at the police files, I don’t think anybody asked. Hume was just a nut, to them. A sexual deviant, maybe.”

  Rhoda said, “And he insisted we have to hear what he has to say. Some truth about the Squeem occupation, preserved only in his head, that will shape our decision.”

  “But we know all about the occupation,” Kaser said. “It was a systemwide event. It affected all of mankind. What ‘truth’ can this old fool have, locked up in his head, and available nowhere else?”

  “What truth so hideous,” Rhoda wondered, “that it could only be lodged in one man’s head? What do you think we should do?”

  Kaser shrugged. “Assess the Squeem colony on its own merits. Maybe they’re just stranded, left behind in the evacuation. Or this may be a monitoring station of some kind, spying on a system they lost. Maybe it even predates the occupation, a forward base to gather intelligence to run the invasion. Either way, it needs to be shut down.”

  “But the Squeem themselves don’t necessarily need to be eliminated.”

  “True.”

  “You think I should just ignore the old man, don’t you?”

  He grinned, tolerant. “Yes. But you won’t. You’re an obsessive fact-gatherer. Well, we have time. The Squeem aren’t going anywhere.” He stood up. “I’ll see if the old guy has finished his nap.”

  Karl Hume, bathed in strong Earth sunlight, spoke of memories passed down through a chain of Rememberers: the memories of ten-year-old Harry Gage.

  Before the invasion, humans had diffused out through Sol system and beyond in their bulky, ponderous, slower-than-light GUTships. It was a time of optimism, of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future.

  Then the first extrasolar intelligence was encountered, somewhere among the stars.

  Only a few years after first contact, Squeem ships burst into Sol system, in a shower of exotic particles and lurid publicity. The Squeem were aquatic group-mind multiple creatures. They crossed the stars using a hyperdrive system beyond human understanding. They maintained an interstellar network of trading colonies. Their human label, a not very respectful rendering of the Squeem’s own sonic rendering of their title for themselves—“Ss-chh-eemnh”—meant something like the Wise Folk, rather like “Homo sapiens.”

  Communication with the Squeem was utterly unlike anything envisaged before their arrival. The Squeem didn’t count in whole numbers, for instance. But eventually, common ground was found. And despite fears that mankind might be overwhelmed by a more technically advanced civilization, trade and cultural contacts were initiated.

  Then, in orbit around every inhabited world and moon in Sol system, hyperdrive cannon platforms appeared.

  And on Earth, rocks began to fall.

  “They came in too fast for the planet’s impactor defenses to cope with,” the Rememberer whispered. “Rocks from Sol system’s own belts of asteroids and comets, sent in at faster than interplanetary speeds. Obviously it was the Squeem’s doing.

  “And they were targeted.

  “Harry and his family, stranded on Earth, got an hour’s warning of the Manhattan bolide. Harry’s father knew New York. He got Harry off the island through the ancient Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

  “The bolide came down right on top of Grand Central Station.

  “The impact was equivalent to a several-kiloton explosion. It dug out a crater twenty meters across. Every building south of Harlem was reduced to rubble, and several hundred thousand people were killed, through that one impact alone, on the first day of the invasion. Harry saw it all.

  “And Harry’s mother didn’t make it. Crushed in the stampede for the tunnels. Harry never forgave the Squeem for that. Well, you wouldn’t, would you?”

  Harry and his father made it to Queens, where a refugee camp was quickly organized.

  And the world churned. All Earth’s continents were pocked by the impact scars. Millions had died, cities shaken to rubble.

  But the damage could have been far worse. The Squeem could have sent in a dinosaur killer. They could have put Earth through an extinction event, just as easily.

  “It took a day for their true strategy to be revealed,” the Rememberer said. “When people started dying, in great numbers, in waves that spread out like ripples from the impact craters. Of diseases that didn’t even have names.”

  The impactors had been carefully selected. They were all bits of Earth, knocked into space by massive natural impacts in the deep past, and so well preserved that they even carried a cargo of antique life. Spores, still viable.

  “Diseases older than grass,” the Rememberer whispered, “against which mankind, indeed the modern biosphere, had no defense. They used our own history against us, to cut us back while preserving the Earth itself. Harry lost his father to the plagues. He didn’t forgive the Squeem for that either.”

  Rhoda Voynet listened to this account. She was familiar with the history Hume had outlined so far, at least in summary. It was eerie, though, to hear this tale of immense disaster, eyewitnessed at only a few removes.

  The Squeem attack must have been overwhelming, horrifying, for those who lived through it. Incomprehensible in its crudity and brutality.

  But since those days, mankind had learned more of the facts of galactic life.

  This was the way interstellar war was waged. It wasn’t like human war. It wasn’t politics, or economics. Though both mankind and Squeem were sentient tool-using species, the conflict between them was much more fundamental than that. It wasn’t even ecological, the displacement of one species by another. This was a clash of biospheres.

  In such a war, there was no negotiation. You just hit hard, and fast.

  Surrender was inevitable.

  The Squeem moved quickly.

  On Earth, residual resistance imploded quickly.

  The more marginal colonies on other planets were subdued even more easily. Harry’s home arcology in Cydonia was cracked open like an egg. He never knew about that.

  And human space travel was suspended. Wherever the great GUTship interplanetary freighters landed, they were broken up, and the Poole wormhole fast-transit routes were collapsed. Some spaceborne humanity escaped, or hid. Pilots couldn’t bear to be grounded. Harry’s great-aunt Anna, an AntiSenescence-preserved freighter pilot on the Port Sol run, managed to escape Sol system altogether. Harry never knew about that either. In fact, he never saw any of his family again.

  Harry Gage, ten years old when the rocks fell, orphaned in the first few days of the invasion, was a Martian boy stranded on Earth.

  He was put to work. In the first weeks, he had to help lug the bodies of plague victims to vast pyres. He always wondered if one of them was his own father. Later, he worked on the construction of labor camps, in the ruins of the shattered cities of mankind.

  He grew older and stronger, working hard for the Squeem and their human collaborators, as the aliens began to exploit the worlds they had conquered.

  The Squeem had no interest in human technology, too primitive to be useful, still less in the products of human culture. But Earth still had lodes of complex hydrocarbons. The last of the planet’s oil and coal was dug up by human muscle, and exported off the planet. Harry worked in the mines, squirming through seams too narrow for an adult.

  And some products of Earth’s biosphere proved useful for the Squeem, not the bugs or plants or animals themselves, but aspects of their exotic biochemistry. So Harry worked on tramp ships harvesting plankton, and in vast fields of swaying grasses.

  Humans themselves could be worth exporting, though they were expensive and fragile. Slave transports lifted off the planet,
sundering families, taking their captives to unknown destinations. Even after the eventual expulsion of the Squeem, nobody ever found out what became of them.

  And people kept dying, from overwork or hunger or neglect.

  The Squeem even shut down AntiSenescence technology. They had no interest in lengthening human lives; fast-breeding generations of servants and slaves were sufficient for them.

  Stone-age wars were fought over the last AS supplies. Some of the undying went into hiding, detaching themselves from human history. And other lives centuries old were curtailed in brief agonies of withdrawal.

  Amid all this, Harry grew up as best he could. There was no education, nothing but what you could pick up from other workers, and bits of Squeem-collaborator propaganda, about how this wasn’t a conquest at all but a necessary integration of mankind into a galactic culture. Harry heard little and understood less.

  “But,” Karl Hume whispered, “Harry never forgave the Squeem, for their murder of his mother and father. And he began to develop contacts with others who were just as unforgiving. It was a dangerous business. There were plenty of collaborators, and the dissident groups were easily infiltrated.

  “But a resistance network gradually coalesced. Small acts of sabotage were committed. Every act was punished a hundredfold. But still they fought back, despite the odds, despite the cost. It was a heroic time.”

  Lots of untold stories, historian Rhoda thought wistfully.

  “Then,” said the Rememberer, “Harry was transferred to the Great Lakes.”

  Lake Superior had the largest surface area of any freshwater lake in the world. It was a grandiose gesture of the Squeem to colonize this great body of water, to symbolize their subjugation of mankind. Harry worked on vast projects to adjust the mineral content of Superior’s water to the Squeem’s liking, incidentally eliminating much of the native fauna. Then the Squeem descended from the sky in whalelike shuttles.

  It was the Superior colony which gave the resistance a real chance to hurt the Squeem.