‘We, on the other hand, had “murdered” Lake Superior, in their view. We had rendered a whole body of water uninhabitable. They are aquatic, remember. To them it was as great a crime as if we had destroyed an entire world.
‘And so they planned a punishment appropriate to the crime they perceived.’
In the silent skies above Harry’s prison, ships slid into position. Beams of pinkish light connected them, and pulsed down into the ground. It took a full year to assemble the network.
‘And when it was ready . . .’
‘Yes?’ the inquisitor asked.
‘Water is funny stuff,’ the Rememberer said. ‘Have you ever heard of hot ice?’
In the next break, Rhoda had her engineering officers extrapolate what had happened, from the hints in Hume’s account.
Ice formed naturally when heat was extracted from a body of water, the hydrogen-oxygen molecules settling into a space-filling solid lattice. But the Squeem had discovered that you could create a particular kind of ice, called polar cubic ice, even at high temperatures, with electricity.
‘We know about this too,’ Reg Kaser said. ‘You pass an electric field through the water – a strong one, a million volts a metre. The two hydrogen atoms in a water molecule have a slight positive charge, and the oxygen atom a negative one, so the electric field makes the molecules line up like fence posts. And there you have it, ice, at as high a temperature as you like. This happens in nature, though on a microscopic scale, wherever there are strong enough electric fields, such as across the membranes of nerve cells, or in the cavities of proteins. Mini icebergs riding around inside your cells. Amazing. The Squeem were masters of this sort of technology. Masters of water.’
‘And so,’ Rhoda prompted, ‘on occupied Earth—’
‘They froze the water.’
‘What water?’
‘All of it.’
Earth’s oceans plated over with ice, right down to the equator, and then froze to their beds. And then the hard whiteness crept up the river valleys.
Harry and his co-dissidents were made to watch, on vast softscreens. Indeed, the Squeem made everybody watch, everybody capable of understanding.
‘Even the aquifers froze, deep underground. Even the moisture in the soil,’ Hume whispered. ‘Everybody walked around on permafrost, down to the equator.
‘The Squeem controlled it, somehow. After all, humans are just big bags of water. We didn’t freeze, nor did the grasses, the animals, the birds, the moisture in the air. Of course rainfall was screwed, because nothing was evaporating from the oceans.
‘They kept it up for a full year. By then people were dying of the drought and the cold. And Earth blazed white, a symbol of the Squeem’s dominance, visible even to all the off-planet refugees and hideouts, visible light years away.
‘Then they released the field.
‘There was a lot of damage as all that ice melted, most of it suddenly – it wasn’t a normal thaw. Coastlines shattered, river valleys gouged out, meltwater floods, climatic horrors. Lots of people died, as usual.
‘And the oceans were left sterile. Oh, the Squeem allowed gradual restocking, from samples in old climate-crash gene-store facilities, that kind of thing. The oceans didn’t stay dead. But still, for an age they would be depleted, and the recovered biosphere would always be artificial. Humanity’s link with the deepest past of life on Earth cut, for ever.
‘It was the worst act the Squeem, an aquatic species, could think of,’ Hume said. ‘To murder oceans. They thought it would crush human resistance once and for all. And it worked. But not for the reasons they imagined.’
‘When it was done, they just let Harry and his colleagues go. Harry came out of that prison camp near Thunder Bay, and found himself in an aftermath society. It had been by far the worst act of terror ever inflicted on the Earth, by mankind or anybody else.
‘And it had cut through some deep umbilical connection. Everybody just wandered around stunned.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Rhoda. She assessed the reactions of her crew to this forgotten crime. Anger, shock, a lust for revenge.
‘And,’ Hume said now, ‘the Squeem became concerned. They hadn’t anticipated a reaction like this. I guess they knew us even less well than we knew ourselves. A large proportion of mankind was plagued by flashbacks, crippling fear. Productivity was dropping. Birth rates falling. They didn’t want to kill off their cheap labour. Maybe they saw they’d gone too far.
‘World leaders were called to a kind of summit. I say “leaders”. After two decades of the Squeem there were no elected presidents, no monarchs, no moderators of global councils. The “leaders” were labour organisers, essential academics like doctors, a few religious types.
‘And the Squeem offered, not a restoration – for what they had done could not be put right – but a kind of cure.’
Most of humanity was suffering a deep kind of post-traumatic stress.
The memories of the freezing were etched deeply into every human brain. Like all traumas, the event had produced a rush of adrenalin and noradrenalin, which then forced brain centres called the amygdalae to imprint the memories into the hippocampus, the memory centre, very deeply. It was essentially a survival mechanism, so that any reminder of the event triggered deep memories and a fast response. Sometimes memories like this were gradually extinguished, the memory pathways overridden if not erased. But in this case, for the majority of mankind, the extinguishing mechanism didn’t work well. The event had been too huge, too deep, too wide. And global post-trauma stress was the result.
But this could be rectified.
‘There are ways to control memory formation,’ Reg Kaser murmured to Rhoda, taking another briefing from his data slate. ‘Drugs like beta blockers that inhibit the action of adrenalin and noradrenalin, and so reduce their memory-forming capabilities. A stress-related hormone called cortisol can inhibit memory retrieval. There are drugs that release a brain chemical called glutamate that enhances learning, so accelerating the normal memory extinguishing process. And so on.’
‘You’re talking about altering memories with drugs,’ Rhoda murmured.
‘Since the twentieth century, when neuroscience was established as a discipline, human societies have always been cautious about memory-changing technology,’ Kaser said. ‘Memory-editing has been used as therapy, and to treat criminals. In the age of Michael Poole, for instance. But there are obvious ethical issues. A memory is part of your identity, after all. Does anybody else have the right to take away part of you? And suppose a criminal deliberately erases all her own memory of her crime. If she doesn’t remember it, is she still responsible? That was used as a defence in a criminal trial during—’
‘Never mind,’ Rhoda said.
‘The point is, such technologies have existed in the past. And after a couple of decades of occupation, the Squeem, presumably with human collaborators, were able to come up with a suitable treatment . . .’
‘This is what they offered us,’ Hume was saying. ‘An engineered virus that would spread through mankind, across the Earth. Eventually carriers would infect the off-planet populations too. It wouldn’t be comfortable. You would have a nightmare, reliving the trauma one last time. But that would make the memory labile again for a short time. And so it could be treated.’
‘They would delete the memory of the freezing, of this vast crime,’ the inquisitor said. ‘From everybody’s heads.’
‘That was the idea. There would have to be a subsidiary activity of removing traces of the event from various records, but there weren’t too many marine biologists at the height of the occupation. It wouldn’t be difficult. Everybody would come out of it believing the oceans had always been depleted of life, maybe since the global eco-crashes of the second and third millennia. They’d think the damaged coastlines and scoured river valleys they observed had always been th
at way, or maybe they were damaged in the war.
‘This solution served the Squeem’s goals, you see. People would stay pliable. They just wouldn’t know why.’
The inquisitor said sharply, ‘And, since none of us have heard of this freezing before, I take it that these “leaders” made this supine choice on behalf of the rest of mankind.’
‘You shouldn’t judge them,’ Hume said. ‘We had been enslaved, for decades. They could see no way out. The only choice was between a future of terrified subjugation, or a calmer one – vague, baffled, adjusted.
‘Even Harry Gage and his resistance colleagues knew they were beaten. They submitted. But,’ he said, and a smile spread over his leathery face, ‘there was one last act of defiance.’
Everybody alive would forget the terror. Everybody but one.
‘It wasn’t sophisticated. They would just hide one person away, for a year, perhaps more. Earth is a big planet. There were plenty of places to hide. And not all of the biochemists had gone over to the Squeem. Some of them helped out with screens against the virus. And when he or she came out of her hole in the ground . . .’
The offscreen inquisitor guessed, ‘Harry Gage was the first Rememberer.’
Hume smiled. ‘They chose him by lot. It could have been anyone. It’s the only reason we remember Harry now, the only extraordinary thing that happened in his life.
‘He went into the hole without a word of protest. And when he came back out he found himself the only one who remembered the freezing. A kind of living memorial to a deleted past.
‘Harry just went back to work. But the course of the rest of his life was set out. It must have been hard for him, hard not to talk about what he knew. It’s been hard for me, and I didn’t live through it.
‘Harry Gage died in his late forties. It wasn’t a time when people grew old. But he fulfilled his last mission, which was to transmit his memories to another.
‘The Second Rememberer was in her thirties when the Squeem regime began to crumble – sooner than anybody had expected. She, too, died young. But she was able to pass on her knowledge to another in turn.
‘And so it went. Two centuries after the Squeem conquered Earth, I am the Sixth Rememberer.’
‘And you tried to recruit Lonnie Tekinene.’
Hume sighed. ‘That was the idea. I left it a bit late in life to be befriending ten-year-olds.’
‘But,’ the inquisitor said, ‘even though the Squeem fell so long ago, none of you thought to reveal the truth of all this oral history until now.’
Hume shrugged. ‘When would have been right? Each of the Rememberers has had to make that judgement. It was only when I learned of your pocket of Squeem, surviving in the Solar System after the passage of two centuries, that I judged the time was right. You need to know the whole truth about the Squeem in order to deal with them.’ His face twisted. ‘But I wasn’t sure. I’m still not.’
The off-screen inquisitor asked, comparatively gently, ‘So how do you feel now?’
‘Relieved. It’s a burden, to be the only one who knows.’
It took Rhoda Voynet and her crew another week of data-gathering before she felt ready to make her judgement.
She called Reg Kaser to her cabin, and fired up her percolator once more. Beyond her picture window, Saturn turned, its cloudy face impassive before the turmoil of living things.
‘They’ve started to find proof,’ she said to Kaser.
‘Of what?’
‘The freezing. The geologists, putting together pieces of the puzzle – as if they were the first of their discipline millennia ago, deducing the existence of past Ice Ages from erratic boulders and gouged valleys. The biologists, trawling the seabeds for crushed whale bones. My historian colleagues, finding traces of deleted records. Global evidence of a decade-long glaciation event. It was always there, but unnoticed; it just needed a framing hypothesis to fit it all together.’
‘So Hume was telling the truth.’
‘It seems so.’
‘Meanwhile,’ Kaser said, ‘I’ve been talking to the xenologists, who have been in contact with those Squeem down there under the ice. The Squeem have been making their own case.’
‘About what?’
‘About why we should be lenient. The Squeem say they suffered some deep trauma of their own. After all they are aquatic, they’re functionally fish-like, and it must have taken a huge disjunction to lift them out of their ocean and into space.’ Kaser scrolled through notes on his slate. ‘Something about an invasion, by yet another world-conquering species. The Squeem managed to enslave the slavers, took over their star-spanning technology, and started an empire of their own. Something on those lines. It’s complicated.’
Rhoda said harshly, ‘And that justifies them occupying Earth?’
‘I suppose that’s the argument. But you’re the commanding officer.’
‘I am, aren’t I?’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘I want to know my options. Tell me about the weapon. The one that will destroy Rhea.’
Knowledge in the UN Navy was rigidly partitioned. It was part of Kaser’s job to bear secrets of destruction, until they were needed. Rhoda only knew of their potential. He looked away. ‘If you’re sure. This is need-to-know only.’
‘I need to know.’
‘It’s not a human development,’ Kaser said. ‘Not even Squeem.’
Rhoda glanced beyond Saturn’s limb, at the stars. ‘Something hideous we’ve found. Out there.’
‘Yes.’
Even under the oppressive Squeem occupation, humans had learned much.
They learned, for example, that much of the Squeem’s high technology – such as their hyperdrive – was not indigenous. It was copied, sometimes at second- or third-hand, from the designs of an older, more powerful species.
‘It was during the occupation,’ Kaser said, ‘that the name “Xeelee” entered human discourse. The primal source of all this good stuff.’
Rhoda shuddered. ‘And is this new weapon you’re offering me a Xeelee artefact?’
‘It may be. Stuff gets swapped around. Purloined. Modified. We don’t know enough about the Xeelee to say . . .’
Ridding Rhea of the Squeem was a challenge. The ocean in which they swam lay under kilometres of ice, and was wrapped around a core of ice and rock. The ocean itself could be easily cleansed, but it would not be hard for Squeem groups to hide out in cracks and crevices in the irregular core, the thick, uneven crust. Rhoda needed something that would cleanse the little moon, thoroughly.
‘Tell me what this thing does.’
‘Maybe you know that the planet Jupiter is being destroyed. Eaten up from within by a swarm of black holes.’
‘Yes.’ In fact Rhoda knew a little more about it than that.
‘If we could make a black hole,’ Kaser said, ‘we could throw it at Rhea and demolish it the same way.’
She nodded, vaguely horrified, but trying to think clearly. ‘That would do the job, But we can’t make a black hole.’
‘No. But we have a technology almost as good.’ He pulled up graphics on his slate and showed her. ‘It’s a way to create a dark energy black hole.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s all to do with quantum physics,’ he said.
‘Oh, it would be . . .’
It was a kind of freezing, like water to ice, a phase transition. But this would happen at the quantum level. In a ‘quantum critical phase transition’, ordinary matter congealed into a kind of superconductor, and then into sluggish stuff in which even subatomic fluctuations died, and mass-energy was shed.
‘It’s as if time itself is freezing out,’ Kaser said. He mimed with his hands. ‘So you have a spherical shell. Just a volume in space. You arrange for matter falling on its surface to go through this quantum phase transition. And as your input matter passes i
nto the interior its mass is dumped, converted to vacuum energy. Dark energy.’
‘Why doesn’t this shell implode?’
‘Because dark energy has a repulsive effect. Antigravity. Dark energy is already the dominant component of the universe’s mass-energy, and the antigravity force it produces will drive the expansion of the universe in the future. So I’m told by the physicists. Anyhow, the repulsion can balance the infall of matter.’
‘It can balance.’
Kaser grinned. ‘That’s the engineering challenge, I guess. If you get it right you get a stable object which externally looks just like a black hole. Inside there’s no singularity, just a mush of dark energy, but any structure is destroyed just the same. These things are found in nature, apparently.’
‘And they are easier to make than genuine black holes.’
‘So it seems. You do need a big box of exotic matter – that is negative-energy matter – to make it work.’ He kept grinning.
‘A big box of exotic matter like a Poole wormhole mouth.’
‘Just the job. The Squeem wrecked the old Poole wormhole transport system, but they left the wormhole mouths in place. There are several still orbiting Saturn. Any one of them will do.’
‘And if we throw one of these things into Rhea—’
‘It will eat up the moon.’
‘That would get rid of them,’ Rhoda said.
‘That it would. And later the residual black-hole-like object would just evaporate away . . . Of course there are other options. The Squeem may be useful. We could use them, as they once used us. A Galaxy-spanning telepathic network—’
‘We don’t need them in the Solar System for that. We have their homeworld.’
Xeelee: Endurance Page 18