Mars Evacuees Read online

  ‘We neeeeeeed the Earth,’ whispered the Morror, breathing faster and sucking in oxygen from the mask I’d given them.

  ‘And we don’t?’

  ‘No, you do not feel it as we do, you are so blaaaaank,’ said the Morror, flashing all kinds of colours.

  ‘Blank,’ repeated Josephine. And for a moment she was blank; expression just dropped off her face.

  Then she leaped at Thsaaa, and grabbed the oxygen mask away. ‘Is this blank?’ she shouted, pushing them against the rock wall. And then she was struggling with them while they gasped and she yelled: ‘Why, just explain all of it, tell me why any of this had to happen.’

  ‘Go Josephine!’ cheered the Goldfish.

  ‘No! Don’t go Josephine!’ protested Noel in distress.

  Thsaaa might have been too surprised to fight back at first, but they weren’t tied up any more, so they wriggled and lashed out with their tentacles. Carl and Noel and me were trying to separate the two of them anyway, so Thsaaa shortly got free and then they hopped off the rocky shelf into the shallow river coursing through the cave and splashed away into the dark making a wailing noise.

  ‘Oh, well now we’ve lost it,’ said Carl in disgust.

  Josephine just stood there gasping and staring, and then she took off as well. I thought for a moment she was going after Thsaaa, possibly in order to drown them, but then she splashed off in the opposite direction.

  ‘Stay here,’ I cried at Carl, dragging my boots back on.

  ‘Oh, this one’s all yours,’ he said, sitting down and putting his head in his hands in sheer exasperation.

  I put on my uniform jacket and climbed gingerly down from the ledge. ‘Come on, Goldfish. I need a light,’ I said. ‘But when we find her, don’t talk, OK?’

  I waded into the dark, feeling very cold and damp as soon as I was away from the Paralashath.

  ‘Josephine?’

  The dark water glittered, reflecting the Goldfish’s glow. Josephine’s silhouette separated from a twisted column of rock. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, I usually just do come after you when you charge off somewhere. And it generally works out OK.’

  ‘That’s why you’ve ended up out here,’ growled Josephine. ‘And nothing about this has worked out OK.’

  ‘Well, we’re alive. You found us Monica. We’re semi-close to Zond. We’ve got a Morror, even if they are really annoying and rude. Look, I would say I’ll leave you alone if you want me to, but what with this whole situation . . .’

  Josephine made a sad, impatient little noise. I decided to try a different tack: ‘What’s going on with you? You’re the one who never even wanted to fight them.’

  Josephine kicked up a spray of water. ‘I don’t want to be a soldier. I’m a useless pilot and I hate being told what to do. If I don’t get blown up on my first day, I’ll end up going crazy and shooting myself.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ I said, but Josephine ignored me.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean I’m not angry. I want to be an archaeologist and a composer and I should be allowed to be, and if it wasn’t for them – and they were shockraying London on the day I left, remember? And that thing – all I want from it is an answer. I’m not punishing it, I haven’t said, “Let’s kill it with rocks.” And after everything they’ve taken away, a lot of people, grown-up people, would think I was more than justified.’

  ‘Who did they take away?’ I said, very quietly, because I was sure we were talking about a person.

  ‘Guess,’ said Josephine bitterly.

  I had, already, I was almost certain who it was, given the people she’d mentioned from home and the person she rather significantly hadn’t.

  (I hate thinking about dead mums.)

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

  Josephine swerved round. ‘Oh, don’t be,’ she snarled in a weird, strangled, horrible voice. ‘She was a musician on the Queen Guinevere when they sank it. I was one year old. I don’t remember her. So it doesn’t matter.’

  After quite a long time of standing there, praying I wasn’t going to say the wrong thing, I said, ‘Of course it does.’

  Josephine made a noise that was a bit like a laugh, although not very much, and did actually look at me. ‘Yes, it really does,’ she agreed. ‘Of course, Lena and Dad do remember her. I know it must be worse for them in lots of ways. But I hate that I can’t. I can tell when they’re thinking about her and sometimes they don’t talk about her because I’m there and I –’ She smacked her hand hard against the stalactite pillar. ‘I want to know why she’s dead. Is that so unreasonable?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course it isn’t. But not like this, OK? This isn’t like you.’

  There was a soft splashing nearby and a murmur of long, mournful Morror syllables. The Goldfish spun round, but Thsaaa was still hidden in the shadows and might as well have been invisible again.

  ‘You are speaking of your . . . mother?’ Thsaaa said quietly from the darkness to Josephine. ‘I wish she could return to you. I wish my people had not harmed you. I . . . do not believe it should be forbidden to say that.’

  Josephine didn’t answer straight away. ‘Why do you think we’re blank?’ she asked, at last, pacing towards the voice and the splashing until the Goldfish revealed Thsaaa, flickering orange and green, and somehow I got an impression of confusion. Josephine tilted her head. ‘It’s because we don’t change colour, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ said the Morror, and went yellow.

  ‘Yellow!’ I said, suddenly getting it. ‘Yellow is embarrassment.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ insisted Thsaaa, but not at all persuasively and more yellowly than ever.

  Josephine’s lips parted with fascination and she breathed, ‘Oh, Dr Muldoon would love this.’

  ‘Noel would, too,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back and show him. Come on, it’s not as if anyone has got anywhere better to go, and I’m freezing.’

  So we splashed back to the ledge where Carl and Noel were, and everyone had some more oxygen, and Noel was duly thrilled by Thsaaa the Alien Mood Ring. Thsaaa might not have particularly enjoyed the attention, but Noel tried to give them a quick rundown on what all the various human expressions meant so at least it was reciprocal.

  ‘Look, THIS – GRRR! – is ANGRY! Like when you go . . .?’

  ‘. . . black, purple,’ supplied Thsaaa.

  ‘Oh, are you angry now?’ asked Noel in concern, because Thsaaa was mostly lilac and grey now. ‘I didn’t mean to annoy you.’

  ‘No. Not angry. Not this purple. This is . . . this is something else. I cannot . . . I do not know all the words,’ and whatever those exact colours meant, Thsaaa sounded so weary that we left them alone for a bit.

  ‘Can you lie?’ asked Josephine guardedly, from across the Paralashath.

  You’d think it might have been in Thsaaa’s interests to say that they couldn’t, but they said, ‘Yes. One may force colours to some extent. It is not easy to maintain, unless you are very skilled or very talented. An actor, for instance.’

  ‘Is that why you wear invisible suits? So you can lie if you want to?’

  ‘No,’ said Thsaaa, and clammed up again.

  Josephine looked at the Paralashath. It wasn’t producing any colours at the moment, just heat, but Thsaaa had said that wasn’t what it was for and we’d seen the patterns it could make.

  ‘Is this . . . art?’ she asked.

  Thsaaa went soft rose and amber and blue, reached out and swirled the tips of their tentacles across the Paralashath’s surface again, and it changed, whorls of turquoise and peach quivering over it. ‘Yes,’ Thsaaa said. ‘My Ruul-ama composed it. They were a musician too.’

  Josephine frowned, and either Noel’s Human Expressions lesson had done Thsaaa some good, or the Morror had realised on their own that this didn’t quite make sense. ‘Ah. I suppose . . . this is silent, so not music? But art, yes.’

  The Paralashath gave off little ripples of heat and cold in
time with the rhythm of its colours, so you could feel the patterns of temperature play across your skin like feathers. Thsaaa’s colours gradually flowed into sync with it.

  Thsaaa said into the depths of the Paralashath: ‘My Ruul-ama died over Karaaaa, and my Suth-laaa-hum, working on the Northern light-shield.’ There was a pause, and then it explained: ‘My parents.’

  Kara, I thought. The battle that made my mum famous. Maybe she’d even been the one who killed them.

  ‘Yeah, but how old are you?’ asked Carl, briskly.

  ‘Thirteen,’ said Thsaaa.

  ‘. . . Thirteen of our Earth years?’ asked Carl, after a grinding silence.

  ‘Of course thirteen of your Earth years,’ said Thsaaa witheringly. ‘Why would I give you an answer you couldn’t understand?’

  We all wondered if maybe Morrors were like dogs and cats who didn’t live that long but were middle-aged at five or whatever.

  ‘And . . . er . . .’ said Carl. ‘Does that roughly correspond to . . . I mean, as a proportion of . . . I mean, are Morrors grown up when they’re thirteen?’

  ‘No,’ said Thsaaa.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m eight,’ volunteered Noel, but no one else felt like saying anything much for a while.

  ‘We didn’t know you were a kid,’ Josephine said softly.

  And us stranded war-kids sat there quietly in the Martian cavern, waiting for the rain to stop.

  ‘. . . Math, anybody?’ suggested the Goldfish.

  20

  Oh Christ, that maths lesson, you don’t even want to know. To cut a long story short, it became obvious that Thsaaa’s new position was that while humans might have a bit of emotional depth after all, we were still probably drooling idiots compared to the lofty grandeur of a Morror brain. That got Josephine’s back up – well, everyone’s, but Josephine was the one who challenged the alien to a Maths Duel for the honour of our respective species.

  ‘Is this really necessary?’ I groaned.

  ‘Yes!’ cried Thsaaa and Josephine as one.

  Noel lent Thsaaa his tablet to work on, which Thsaaa got the hang of pretty fast – we’d already seen that their tentacle-tips were at least as dexterous as human fingers. So the Goldfish sent a maths quiz over to both of them and Thsaaa and Josephine were soon furiously hacking away at the questions.

  ‘Look on the bright side – as long as they’re doing that, we get out of algebra,’ Carl whispered to me as we settled down to watch.

  Now, you do assume that invisible aliens who’ve besieged your planet your entire life can’t be completely thick. So, much as I respected Josephine’s brain, I was pretty surprised when she proceeded to wipe the floor with the Morror, who just got yellower and yellower as Josephine finished her quiz in about a third of the time they needed and, according to the Goldfish, got ninety-six per cent right while Thsaaa got nothing.

  ‘That is a lie!’ Thsaaa exploded. ‘You are cheating! You have no thol-vashla-sleeth!’

  ‘Aww, no one likes a sore loser, Thsaaa,’ chirped the Goldfish with undisguised satisfaction.

  But the triumph had gone out of Josephine’s face. ‘It’s because it’s in base ten,’ she mumbled, almost inaudibly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Base ten!’ Josephine yelled. ‘Ordinary maths! Human maths! We work everything by tens because people started off counting on their fingers! But look at it . . . them!’

  ‘Yes!’ Thsaaa proudly waved the three tentacles that grew at each shoulder. ‘I knew there must be an explanation! You are using the wrong kind of mathematics!’

  ‘There is nothing wrong with our mathematics,’ snarled Josephine.

  So Thsaaa wanted to do the whole quiz again in base six. And Josephine might have been an intellectual prodigy, but this wasn’t something she’d had a lot of practice with.

  ‘Have you got any logic tests, Goldfish?’ she asked.

  ‘You are trying to avoid a fair challenge!’

  ‘I am trying to find something with a universal frame of reference!’ Josephine retorted.

  ‘Maybe there isn’t one,’ said Carl.

  ‘All right, so we’re not going to find out who’s cleverest today, and everyone’ll just have to learn to live with that,’ I said in exasperation, while the contestants glared at each other and then at me.

  ‘You souuuuuuund like my Suth-laaa-hun-Ruul,’ grumbled Thsaaa.

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure you just got called an alien granny, Alice,’ said Carl.

  ‘If you were that intelligent, you’d have realised the problem straight away,’ muttered Josephine to the Morror. ‘I was the one who did that.’

  Noel decided to smooth things over at this point by shuffling over to Thsaaa to show them the various things his tablet could do that were more fun than maths tests. ‘See, it’s a bit like a Paralashath,’ he said.

  ‘No, this is a much simpler construction than a Paralashath,’ said Thsaaa immediately.

  Noel shrugged and just played some songs and videos, and then various funny things he’d got off the internet at home.

  Thsaaa tolerated this loftily for some time. Then Noel hit play on a particular video and there was a much more noticeable effect: tendrils swayed and flashed red and pink and Thsaaa wheezed, ‘The . . . creature . . . pushed the human . . . into the pond.’

  ‘Are you . . . laughing?’ I asked uneasily. ‘Or are you ill?’

  ‘Please, show it agaaaaaain,’ begged our Morror.

  I suppose some things are universal after all. It was a particularly funny video of a goat butting a man into a pond.

  Noel leaned over to show something else on the tablet and, as he did so, brushed Thsaaa’s tentacle with his hand.

  ‘You’re a lot warmer than I’d have expected,’ he said thoughtfully. Tentatively he held his hand out so Thsaaa could touch it or not as they wanted to. ‘I thought Morrors liked everything really cold.’

  Hesitantly, Thsaaa coiled a tentacle-tip around Noel’s finger. ‘And I knew you would be cold. And yet . . . I thought it would be like touching something dead . . .’

  ‘Oh.’ Noel frowned, and then decided to shrug it off. ‘No, I expect it’s a bit like what touching a reptile feels like, to a human.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Thsaaa. ‘You generate less heat, and lose it more quickly. We would overheat in warmer climates. Our world was cooler – we were made to keep warm easily.’ Thsaaa sighed and flickered sage-green and grey. ‘Humans . . . humans do not need such particular conditions.’

  After that, the Goldfish said the storm outside had stopped, and we figured we were as dry and ready for travel as we were going to get.

  Which frankly wasn’t that ready, after everything. A big part of me really didn’t want to move. It was difficult to do it without starting to promise myself things like baths and warm beds and hot pasta and Mum and Dad, and I’d been pretty good at not focusing too much on that sort of thing up until now and I was scared of getting let down and not being able to take it.

  We waded out of the cave and piled onto Monica.

  Everything outside was still extremely wet, to the point of there being exciting new torrents of floodwater thundering across the landscape, but it was now more possible to skirt around them, and Monica was sure-footed enough not to slip in the mud.

  The umber clouds parted and the little sun came out as we skittered round the flank of Mount Peacock. A misty rainbow hovered over the peach-coloured ridges of the land beyond.

  Thsaaa was entranced. Their tentacles spread wistfully towards it and their colours flickered into sympathetic bands of red, orange, yellow, green. ‘A vamala-raaa! It has been so looooooong,’ they said.

  ‘Yeah, it has been,’ I agreed. I hadn’t seen one in years, even on Earth, and it made me feel a little better.

  ‘There are so few colours on this planet,’ sighed Thsaaa.

  ‘That’s not really true,’ Josephine said. ‘Have you seen the little flowers that are growing
now? The purple sea and the grasslands? And even without the terraforming, the sky at night . . .’

  Thsaaa considered. ‘Yes,’ they conceded. ‘Yes. But you cannot imagine what it is like, without Ruhaa-thal. It is so strange, that you come from a planet that has mag . . . mag . . .’

  ‘A magnetic field, Thsaaa,’ supplied the Goldfish, and I thought, Wow, Thsaaa is now in the category of Kids the Goldfish needs to Teach Stuff. That really is progress.

  ‘A magnetic field,’ Thsaaa repeated. ‘It is so strange that you have it and you did not evolve to use it. This place, it . . . it hurts. But yes, I can see it must be beautiful for humans.’

  ‘So, tell us about your planet, Thsaaa,’ said Noel.

  Thsaaa went quiet.

  ‘Or planets, plural?’ suggested Josephine.

  ‘I am not allowed. You already know, I am not allowed.’

  ‘Yeah, but c’mon, that horse bolted hours ago,’ Carl said.

  ‘That . . . horse?’ echoed Thsaaa, confused.

  ‘There must be something you know is OK,’ said Carl. ‘Something that’s just about the stuff you do at home. Like, here’s an example. We come from a city called Sydney, our parents run a cinema, and I’ve seen Hawkflight so many times I can recite the entire screenplay. It’s about a Flarehawk pilot who chases a Morror ship through a wormhole to the Morror home world and he defeats all the . . . uh, never mind. I mean, in Sydney, there are many beaches, people like swimming.’

  There was a slight pause. ‘We are aware of Hawkflight,’ said Thsaaa. ‘It is inaccurate on almost every possible level.’

  ‘There’s a fountain in Darling Harbour where the water goes in a spiral and you can play in it,’ offered Noel encouragingly, before Carl could say anything else tactless.

  ‘Darling Harbour stinks of fish,’ said Carl.

  ‘It does not. And there’s an aquarium. There’s a pool where you’re allowed to feed the rays. And sometimes we used to walk back from the aquarium through Chinatown and eat Emperor’s Puffs . . . they’re little batter cakes with custard inside . . .’ Noel began to look slightly mournful.

  ‘I have spent most of my life on ships and civilian stations,’ said Thsaaa.