by Chris Edwards
Taboos are strange things. Sometimes it’s okay to do a thing, but not to say a thing. Or at least not to call it by its real name.
You can say it’s unfortunate. You can say it’s necessary. You can use words like “new equilibrium” or “niche readjustment”. What you can’t say is that we’re wiping them out because they’re inconvenient and we just can’t bear to get back onto the colony ships and go home. Even with cryostet it was still at least a subjective year for most of us — longer for the adults who had to take a rotation on crew.
And this place is great, it’s everything we hoped it would be. Blue seas full of life, skies full of clean air, abundant resources just waiting to be harvested. The trouble is, somebody already was.
They sort of look like a big snail with radial tentacles for locomotion, but they’re not slow like a snail. They can’t pull their whole body inside their shell either, just their brain and internal organs. They make these tools; sharpened throwing stones and nets, little huts out of the sugar-grass, paints and jewellery. They’re people. They’re us, a hundred-thousand years ago. We called them “squeakies”.
To begin with we thought they were cute. We traded them junk in return for their hard-won wisdom about edible roots and flowers and fish. I remember the local tribe, the Rebbis (our name, their names are pretty much all suction noises and squeals), made us a feast about a month after we landed. Must have cost them a lot of their stored food, we’re bigger than them and there’s a lot of us, but they didn’t seem to mind.
But something was off after that. They took to following us around, kept asking us questions the translators couldn’t parse. Eventually it dawned on us that the feast was their polite way of saying “lovely to see you, now take a hike.” They genuinely expected us to pack back into our shuttles and migrate somewhere else. Apparently, that’s just good manners for squeakies.
Needless to say, that worried a few folks. Eventually we decided to fence off our colony area, just for security. Well, the squeakies didn’t take to that at all. A few nights later part of our fence got chopped down, some cattle got loose and a pregnant milch cow took a tumble and miscarried.
There were arguments after that, but eventually cooler heads prevailed, we built a taller, stronger fence out of metal. The squeakies wouldn’t get through that with stone hatchets. In hindsight, it should have been obvious that wouldn’t be enough. They were primitive, but they weren’t stupid – they were social, problem-solving, tool-using sentient creatures, and we’d just marked a big chunk of their territory off limits to them. They got quite inventive with ladders and ropes, at least until we electrified the fence. Lots of laughter as we heard squeakies getting zapped. Of course, we didn’t realise it at the time, but come morning it became a little less funny. Since they curl their tentacles around almost anything they touch, they found it near-impossible to let go once they were on the fence. We found two dead and a third dying, and everybody said it was a great shame. But the fence stayed powered.
It was a day or two later that Tilda-May, one of our botanists, didn’t come back from one of her rambles. Nobody wanted to go out in the dark with the squeakies all riled up, so it was dawn before a search party set out in a couple of rollers. By lunchtime they’d found her, face-down in a pond with a sharpened stone through one eye. We’d been lucky so far; this had been our first death since planetfall. The squeakies had already done a pretty good job of clearing out the predators, and none of the local pathogens had proven capable of overcoming our wide-spectrum phage shots. The first human death on this wonderful new world was a murder.
Needless to say, folks weren’t going to sit still for that. The town-hall meeting got pretty heated that night. After Tilda-May the focus shifted — instead of just putting a wall around the town, we were going to put a wall around the squeakies. They were just simple creatures, as long as we made sure they had food, they’d be happy enough. That was the plan, anyway.
We told them, we sent a drone out with a translated recording on it, warning them what would happen if they interfered with our workers. I think a lot of us were hoping they’d just go away, find somewhere else for their little village. Spare us the effort of corralling them until they saw sense. It didn’t go that way, of course.
Even before we got the first earth-mover in position, sharp stones were flying at us in a hail. The squeakies were fast and surprisingly stealthy in the long grass. The militia members moved in, their armoured clothing and helmets keeping them relatively safe as they advanced. I don’t think there was a plan, just a response, just gunfire.
Dozens of squeakies dead for two more of ours, many more injured on both sides. Our infirmary was overwhelmed. The squeakies had no real idea about medicine, they could re-grow a lost limb, but a broken shell was a death sentence. A single bullet from one of our guns could pass through the material of their entire village or blast a squeakie to pieces.
I wish I could say that was the end of it. The Rebbis didn’t give us any more problems, just huddled in their huts as we built a reservation around their flimsy little village. They got the extra feed-crops we kept for our animals — the gene-tinkered strains with a bit of bamboo in them that sprouted like weeds and were ready to harvest in a couple of weeks. Theoretically they’re human edible too, but not exactly nutritious if you’ve only got one stomach to break it down.
A few months pass, we’re into the second rainy season by this point, and a problem comes up. Our main food crop fails as a local fungal-analogue suddenly develops a taste for terran tubers. We’ve got many weeks until a new resistant crop can get spliced and not enough food stored to get us and the livestock through it.
The humane thing to do would have been to slaughter the animals. Cull the herds down and live off the meat for a while. But you have to understand the risk in that — if these animals went extinct here, there’d be no more coming from home. Not for decades, at least. People who’ve sacrificed everything, every kind of comfort, you’re asking a lot for them to live without fresh milk or the occasional bit of bacon. No, that was never going to fly. We had to start eating the feed-crops, horrible as they were.
We’d been pretty much ignoring the squeakies all this time, but now it turned out we didn’t have enough food to share with them anymore, we had to crack open the fence and convince them to go somewhere else. When we did, we found that they hadn’t exactly been prospering in captivity (oops, sorry, “safety confinement”.) Most of them were sick or malnourished, their shells thinning and cracked. No children that I could see. Clearly the feed-crops were lacking some kind of nutrient the Squeakies needed. The survivors barely resisted as we loaded them up onto transport rollers and drove them a hundred klicks down South and left them in the middle of nowhere with a few bags of feed-crop and some fibre tents. Free to die out of sight.
That was a couple of years ago now, and a lot of that stuff is water under the bridge. The Terran-splice plants are pretty much ruling the roost around the colony these days, which is just as well because there’s a lot more human mouths to feed. Colony’s been expanding as new farms set up all around.
More Squeakies show up from time to time, some little tribe migrating through. Events almost always followed the same pattern; indignation escalating to property damage and then a call for the militia. A few of those farmers are more than happy to get proactive when a Squeakie tribe moves close; there’s more than one fireplace with a collection of polished shells sitting on the mantle above it.
Anyway, I guess we’re real civilised now, because we had ourselves a proper election for mayor and everything. The winner’s main plank was “solving the Squeakie problem.” A lot of folks read what they wanted into that, but it proved a popular position.
So now our militia patrols get to go out and fly drones, looking for the thermal signature of Squeakie campfires. Once we find them, we gas the camp, lock them in cages and transport them a few hundred klicks away to somewhere we don’t care about. We don’t transport their stores or their tools, we just leave them with that same, sad deal as the Rebbis got – feed crops, fibre tents and a few blankets. The gas leaves them sick, kills some of them. We leave them food we know won’t feed them, structures not big enough to house them and no tools to hunt or farm. It would be kinder to simply put a bullet through their shells if you ask me.
I wonder if this is how the neanderthals went, or any one of the half-dozen other species of human that perished to allow modern homo sapiens to rise to the top of the pile.
But no, officially, the plan is to simply “discourage” the Squeakies from coming near our settlement. So as long as we don’t see any Squeakies, it means they’ve taken the hint and gone somewhere else. At the rate the colony is growing, I imagine we’ll have discouraged them out of existence on this continent in a century or two. If history records them at all, it will be as the killers of colonists; brutal violent creatures.
I still have some of their jewellery in a box. Crude, of course, but made with alien eyes and alien thoughts — ones we were never interested in finding out about. I will remember them when they are gone.
~
Bio:
Chris is co-author of the audio drama podcast “Tales From the Aletheian Society” (www.hunterhoose.co.uk) and lives in Glasgow, Scotland, with his two children and co-parent. He’s written gaming material for Cubicle 7, We Evolve and Profound Decisions, and has had a handful of prose stories published in various venues. He really, really wishes he could get more sleep.
Philosophy Note:
The story is an exploration of colonisation. What happens to previously high moral values when a small, isolated community feels threatened? And how do the victors twist the historical narrative to ensure they aren’t seen as the villains?
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