Mars Evacuees Page 17

  I blundered into some kind of ramp, hurt my leg, and climbed up inside.

  It was cold, but not that much colder than outside. Some sort of machinery was croaking to itself in an unhappy way, which made me think the steam we’d seen was coming from the ruins of whatever was supposed to keep the ship at a Morror-friendly temperature.

  The chamber lit up to greet me. After seeing the Morror, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at how colourful everything was. The walls were rounded and banded with stripes of colour that whorled and curved like the lines in a fingerprint, mostly icy blues and sea-greens on the left, giving way via some purples near the door to flamey reds and orange on the right. Some of the colours lit up, some didn’t.

  Josephine followed me first. She was still filming everything in this ultra-detached way that was becoming slightly scary. She lingered over some coils of white sigils in a swirl of dark red and said, ‘It’s writing.’

  There were these oval alcove things set into the walls, each about two-foot high and padded.

  ‘Do you think this is for passengers?’ I said. ‘I guess the front bit must be for piloting.’

  We leaned into the wreck of what must have been the helm. The view screen was all smashed and half the control deck was caved in. What remained of the controls were all spaced and angled in such a way that they’d be horrible for a human to work, but you could see that they were controls: there were more wheely-slidy things, and banks of spongy leaf-like things, where we’d have had banks of screens and buttons, but still. And whereas all the business parts of a human ship tend to come in sensible black or grey with maybe a bit of blue or orange backlighting if you’re lucky, these were as colourful as everything else in the ship. It almost looked like someone had dumped their jewellery collection on a counter and then decided to fly a spaceship with it.

  ‘Never thought Morrors would be so festive,’ I said.

  ‘If those are chairs, there should be a crew of three,’ said Josephine, looking at some hexagonal plinth-like things. She said this close to her tablet for the benefit of the film. For the benefit of me, she added, ‘Just because it can take that many, doesn’t necessarily mean it did.’

  Somehow I did get the feeling our Morror was on its own; the way it’d been hanging around by itself and the way no one seemed to be trying to rescue it. Still, the possibility of lots of Morrors running around, when a minute ago you hadn’t been expecting any, isn’t something you just get over.

  Carl pulled himself up into the ship. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what can we nick?’

  The idea of pinching stuff from the Morrors was bizarrely cheering. It felt like getting a little of our own back, even though you’d think having a real, live Morror prisoner was a much better way of doing that, but that wasn’t fun at all as it involved a lot more responsibility.

  So we poked around very thoroughly and Carl got himself sprayed with some sort of bright-blue liquid, which terrified us for a while but did not seem to do anything when wiped off except leave him a little cleaner. Eventually it turned out the Morror approach to storage was to have lots of hexagonal compartments built into the floor and walls.

  We found some green-and-brown lumpy things, and some blue shredded stuff, all of which we decided was almost certainly food. One of the compartments was full of frozen lumps of meat – at least in the sense that we were somehow pretty sure it was bits of animal, despite being bluey-grey – though whether the animals were more like fish or more like mammals we weren’t sure. This raised the ‘what if it’s poisonous to humans’ issue again, and also made me feel weird because suddenly I was imagining Morrors getting squirted with blue stuff and sitting around eating, which wasn’t something I’d ever been able to do before.

  We also found weapons. Some of them were easy to recognise as such: semicircular blades with a hole presumably for Morrors to slot their tentacles into; and a couple of curvy staffs, which Carl poked and prodded and ended up shockraying a hole into the roof with.

  We left the food for the time being but thought we’d hang on to the weapons, what with all the alarming things we’d encountered lately.

  ‘The most important thing is the oxygen,’ said Josephine, because the ship was full of the stuff and we were breathing perfectly happily without our masks on. ‘Look, why don’t we make camp here? We can’t go much further anyway and that way we won’t use up any of our own supply overnight.’

  ‘It’s too cold,’ I said. ‘And too weird. But mainly too cold.’

  ‘I didn’t mean we’d actually sleep in the ship. But we could trap the Morror in here and put the tent up outside and channel the oxygen in from here.’

  So that’s what we did. Putting up a tent is no mean feat when it was never designed to stand up without being attached to a spaceship and has been partially eaten by Space Locusts, and getting an alien spaceship to blow oxygen into it is also pretty difficult. But we were becoming increasingly good at taking things apart and putting them together again in ingenious ways. We pitched the tent over two of Monica’s legs, and the Morror ship’s ventilation system turned out to be another thing that wasn’t that different from anything we were used to.

  The Morror didn’t make a sound when we marched it into the ship, and it didn’t seem to have anything you’d call a facial expression. Its changing colours were a little hypnotic, though; I kept finding myself staring at it, and then I got scared that perhaps it was some kind of psychological weapon meant to make you dopey so it could attack. I tried not to look at it so directly after that.

  ‘Hey! Keep your . . . tentacles where I can see them,’ said Carl, brandishing his shockray staff as the Morror lifted a length of one finger-arm beneath the bindings round its torso. The Morror paused, stared blankly at Carl and then squirted some blue stuff from the wall on to itself, which it then started flicking and smoothing over its tendrils as best it could, and even though it was pretty awkward being tied up, the effect was like a bird preening itself or a cat washing.

  Then it suddenly managed to fold itself into one of the padded alcoves and sat there, roosting like an owl. It gazed at us disconcertingly for a while, then it murmured some more whispery syllables to itself and closed its eyes.

  Noel tried to feed the Morror some of the stuff we’d found, but it didn’t want any. Carl was dead keen to try some of the Morror food, but we persuaded him we should only resort to that on the brink of actual starvation as we weren’t equipped to deal with a medical emergency. So, trying to pretend the Morror wasn’t there, we ate some of our own stuff and eventually we got into our tattered sleeping bags and bundled up together for warmth. It was our third night out on the surface of Mars.

  Of course we knew the Goldfish would have zapped it silly and screamed the place down if the alien made a wrong move. Just as I’d expected, though, none of us slept very well.

  It wasn’t just that it was there. It was that we still had no real plan for what to do with it.

  18

  ‘OK, everyone try not to freak out,’ I said, the next morning, ‘but I think there are more of them.’

  Everyone commenced freaking out.

  We’d been in the process of discussing what to do with the one Morror we already had. We were leaning towards just taking careful note of the coordinates and leaving it tied up where it was. It wouldn’t die before we got to Zond, and then we could tell someone to go back and get it.

  Noel, of course, thought this was cruel.

  Anyway, now I’d got everyone scared of extra Morrors. ‘Where? How many? What are they doing?’ they all said, and Josephine and Carl brandished their new-found weapons. Carl still had the shockray staff, and Josephine had taken the curved blades and looked more piratical than ever.

  ‘Over there, and nothing – there are three or four of them, I can’t be sure, just lying down. I think they might be dead.’

  We hesitated, everyone trying to look at the things I’d pointed out and no one actually succeeding.

  ‘It m
ight be a trap,’ Noel said.

  Josephine shook her head. ‘If they were alive they’d have done something while we were asleep.’

  Carl lowered the shockray staff a little. ‘Well, let’s have a look.’

  Then the Morror – our Morror, obviously – lurched out of the invisible spaceship making a wailing noise and waggling its tentacles as best it was able.

  Josephine and Carl had their weapons raised in a second and the Goldfish was plainly gearing up for a good hard zap. The Morror stopped in its tracks and spread the ends of its tentacles.

  ‘Leeeeee-eeee,’ sigh-wailed the Morror. ‘Leeeeeee m’alooooooo.’ Then it seemed to make an effort, pull itself together, and it said much more clearly; ‘Leave them alone.’

  There was a pause. Carl said flatly, ‘What.’

  ‘Leeeeeve them alooone,’ repeated the Morror. ‘They aaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaahhhrrrr already deaaaaad. Leeeeeeeeeeee in peeeeeeeeeece . . .’

  ‘You talk English!’ crowed Noel.

  No one else was as pleased about it as that, but Josephine’s eyebrows jumped with intrigue.

  ‘Yeeeeee-eeeessss,’ the Morror sighed, then shook itself slightly. ‘Yes. We are trained in your languages.’

  ‘What an interesting development,’ Josephine said softly.

  ‘So you can spy on us,’ I said. ‘Lovely.’

  ‘It’s good that you understand,’ said Carl, ‘because now I can tell you what bumkettling invisible gits I think the lot of you are.’

  The Morror’s colours rippled purple-black-blue. It said, ‘That is a natural response. You could not comprehend our reasons.’

  This did not endear it to us very much; even Noel snorted angrily.

  ‘Why don’t you find out for yourself whether we can comprehend?’ asked Josephine. ‘Go on. Explain.’

  The Morror rippled orange and pink and reverted to the way of talking it evidently found more comfortable: ‘Leee-heeeeeeeeve meeee. I aaaam ooo ooonly one Mo-raaa uha-raaa, I aaaaaam nooooot a threeeeeeaaaattt . . .’

  Then it scuttled back inside the spaceship, and thereby disappeared.

  ‘Guard it, Goldfish,’ Josephine ordered, while gesturing fiercely at the rest of us to come out of Morror earshot.

  ‘Fill the oxygen tanks and carry on towards Zond,’ she hissed at us when we’d put thirty feet or so between us and the Morror ship. ‘I’m staying here with it.’

  ‘What?!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘We have to be realistic,’ Josephine said. ‘We’ve got limited oxygen, there’s a bunch of Space Locusts trying to eat us; we can’t be certain there’s anyone at Zond. We could all be dead in a few days, the Morror too. But we’ve got the first Morror anyone’s ever seen. If I die I want to find out as much as possible first. I want to leave a record. It could be crucial to the war and to science.’ She looked at us to see if we were getting the point and judged that we weren’t. ‘I want to interrogate it,’ she finished.

  ‘Do you have to be so grim, Jo?’ complained Carl.

  ‘Yes,’ said Josephine, inevitably.

  ‘Well, we’re not going to waltz off and leave you stranded alone with it. You can forget that right now.’

  ‘It’s tied up and I’m armed! I’ll cope perfectly well.’

  ‘Yeah, this is not a thing that’s getting negotiated,’ said Carl, ‘is it, Alice.’

  ‘No, it is not,’ I agreed. And because Josephine looked as if she could probably keep arguing for a while: ‘And no one’s dying. We’ll bring it with us. You can interrogate it as we go, if you have to. And if, that is when, we find people . . . if we find Dr Muldoon, she’ll know what to do with it.’

  ‘What wonderful company it’s going to be,’ said Carl, sighing.

  Noel on the other hand was thrilled, and scampered back towards the spaceship, calling, ‘Morror! We going to take you with us, Morror, and we’ll feed you and look after you and make sure you’re OK!’

  The Morror was even less keen on this than Carl, and made the long waily ‘Leeeeeeee’ sounds that came out when it couldn’t get its mouth around ‘Leave me alone’. However, once the Goldfish had prodded it out of the ship and it saw Monica, it seemed to become resigned to its fate. Possibly it reflected that while it might not like being a prisoner of war, being the stranded survivor of a spaceship crash wasn’t necessarily a better bet.

  We did go and have a look at the dead Morrors before we left, just in case there was any funny business going on. But they really were dead, lying under one large sheet of the invisible fabric, in a neat row. One looked more or less like the living Morror in the spaceship; same newt-face and tendrils, though it was bigger and the face was squarer and the mane was longer and straighter. The other two were different; one had a much frillier mane and the last was about twice the size of the others and didn’t have a mane at all, just larger patches and spots over a rounder head.

  The dead Morrors didn’t have any colours. Their skins were dark grey, their glassy tendrils empty. But there were coloured pebbles strewn all over the ground around them.

  After we’d looked at them, Carl, without saying anything, quietly put the invisible sheet back.

  So we packed everything else up and refilled our oxygen canisters from the ship, climbed on to Monica and lurched west with our prisoner.

  Josephine and Noel were doing a good cop, bad cop routine with the Morror. No prizes for guessing who was who.

  ‘Why are you invading Earth? How many of you are there? And why are you here? There’s nothing on Mars but kids and scientists. Are you trying to take over the whole solar system, or is there something else to it? You needn’t expect any food or water until you start cooperating.’

  ‘I’m Noel and this is Josephine and Alice and Carl. So you know our names, can’t you tell us yours?’

  ‘Unnnntiiiiiie meeeee,’ the Morror moaned. ‘Untie me.’ Its vowels were getting shorter and easier to understand; that was about the only progress we were making. It sat aboard Monica in that weird huddled-up roosting position, clutching something against its torso wrapped in its tentacles – it must have managed to pick it up inside its ship. It was a pale, irregularly shaped shiny thing about the size of a football, and as the Morror stared at it, colours and patterns started to stream across the surface. They were, at first, completely different colours (rose, amber, turquoise) from the ones rippling across the Morror itself (black, yellow and purple), but gradually they started to sync up (lavender, slate-grey and scarlet, sage green), though they never became exactly the same. The Morror always had odd little patches of some completely different colour on its body somewhere, and the patterns on the object always seemed more orderly and deliberate.

  ‘What is that?’ Noel asked the Morror. ‘What do you think it is?’ he asked everyone else when the Morror continued to pretend he wasn’t there.

  ‘Good question,’ said Josephine, and grabbed for it. The Morror struggled valiantly but Josephine was determined and it couldn’t move its tentacles properly.

  ‘Tell us about this,’ she demanded, holding it out of the Morror’s reach.

  ‘It is nothing that could interest you,’ said the Morror.

  ‘Oh, but I am interested,’ said Josephine. ‘I like weird things. I have a whole collection of them I carry around with me everywhere. Ask anyone.’

  ‘You caaaaan’t haaaaave it,’ said the Morror, getting all long-vowelled again in its distress.

  ‘Is it a weapon? A communications device? Or . . . something religious, maybe?’

  ‘No,’ insisted the Morror, tentacles straining to get the object back. I couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable and sorry for it, though you’ve got to admit that having shiny things taken away from you is pretty mild as interrogation techniques go.

  ‘Why don’t you just say what your name is, where’s the harm in that?’ urged Noel.

  The Morror sighed. Well, it always sounded as if it was sighing, but that one sounded particularly meant. ‘I am . . . Thsaaa.’

&nbs
p; ‘That’s a nice name,’ said Noel encouragingly.

  ‘All right, Thsaaa,’ Josephine said. ‘Start with what you’re doing on Mars. Are you colonising it?’

  ‘No.’

  Carl butted into the interrogation: ‘Well, why the hell not? It was right here. No one was living on it. Surely you could have terraformed it as well as we can. If you needed a planet, why couldn’t you damn well take this one and left us alone?’

  ‘This planet is unbearable,’ said the Morror softly. ‘I cannot even feel where I am or what direction we are going.’

  Josephine’s expression briefly changed from War Face to Science Face. ‘Go on,’ she said.

  The Morror made sad whistling noises and swayed its tentacles. ‘There is no . . . Ruhaa-thal.’ It seemed to think for a bit, and muttered, ‘No . . . cumbakīya kşētra.’

  Something about that sounded really weird – the Morror’s accent had schanged completely and I remembered things I’d learned in lessons back at Beagle: ‘That didn’t sound Morror-ish,’ I said. ‘That sounded more . . . Hindi.’

  ‘GOOD JOB, ALICE!’ bellowed the Goldfish, thrilled at the least hint of things getting educational again. ‘That was Hindi!’

  ‘I cannot think of the word in English,’ snapped the Morror.

  ‘Cumbakīya kşētra means “magnetism”,’ said the Goldfish happily. ‘And that’s true, kids! Unlike Earth, Mars has no magnetic field.’

  Noel and Josephine looked at each other. ‘Birds have magnetic senses,’ said Noel, excited. ‘And whales and things. You’ve got something like that too?’

  ‘So Mars isn’t suitable for you? Because it hasn’t got a magnetic field?’

  The Morror rippled its tentacles and lowered its head in what might have been agreement.

  ‘So that’s why you chose Earth,’ said Josephine.

  ‘I chose nothing,’ said Thsaaa.

  ‘Oh, fine, you’re just following orders – you, plural, then,’ snarled Josephine, and there was an edge of rage in her voice I’d never heard before. ‘Why did you come to the solar system at all? And if Mars is so awful for you, what are you doing here?’