Mars Evacuees Page 25

  It was Carl, obviously.

  ‘Leave the robot alone,’ said Mum. ‘You’ll break it.’

  Carl saluted my mum, which was a weird thing to witness, but Carl seemed to get a strange kick out of saluting people. ‘A man from the EDF came into my room and told me I was a hero,’ he said. ‘In which case, a ride on a hospital robot is not that much to ask, is it?’

  I couldn’t help but think that whoever had said that to Carl had been very, very unwise, but my mother only said, ‘You’ve got a point,’ and let him latch on to the robot for one more swoop along the corridor.

  ‘So hey,’ he said to me breathlessly, coming back. ‘You took forever to wake up.’

  I suppose, compared to the kid I’d seen jumping into the ocean months ago, he looked terrible; too thin and too pale and covered in bruises where he wasn’t covered in bandages. Compared to me, though, he looked in unreasonably good shape. ‘How come you’re so lively?’ I said.

  ‘Because I am a hero,’ said Carl, grinning. ‘Eh, I was as limp as a rag a few hours ago, but you get over it. I’ve just been really bored. And my parents aren’t here yet. And the Goldfish’s been nosing about, and I don’t trust it not to give me a physics quiz. No respect for heroes, that fish.’

  ‘Where’s Noel?’

  ‘I’ll show you. He was knackered, though.’ Carl led us through a set of double doors to a room halfway down another stretch of corridor. ‘Oh, no, the Goldfish’s got him.’

  I peered round the door. Noel was still curled up in bed. The Goldfish was hovering over him, but it wasn’t teaching him anything. It was singing gently, the Chinese song it had sung to me back on Beagle Base.

  We tiptoed past so that we wouldn’t disturb Noel and the Goldfish wouldn’t notice we were there.

  A soft play of coloured lights was marbling the white paint of a wall outside another room.

  A crisp voice from inside said, ‘Interesting. But what is it for?’

  ‘It’s art, Lena, I already told you. Ow.’

  ‘It would be worth examining the internal workings.’

  ‘You will not take it to bits, it’s mine. Ow.’

  Josephine’s fingers were clasped protectively over the Paralashath lying on her chest. She looked smaller in the bed, and even more battered and fragile than I’d remembered. It might have been partly that her hair was combed and styled and so took up less space. A sombre young woman was just finishing the last plait, Josephine wincing all the time.

  ‘This is Lena,’ she greeted us. ‘She has no soul and she tortures young girls.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said Lena gravely, rising from her chair. She seemed to keep on rising for some time; she must have been six foot two at least. She wore little glasses and a dark suit, and her hair in a chignon, even though I knew she was only eighteen. She did look a bit like Josephine around the eyes and forehead, but I couldn’t imagine Josephine ever growing up to be that big, or that tidy, or so composed and still and unfidgety. Lena shook everyone’s hands.

  ‘Lena, this is Carl,’ said Josephine. ‘He can fly a spaceship through a cloud of Vshomu and come out the other side.’

  ‘And I am the first person to do a wee on the Acidalia Planitia,’ said Carl happily.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. He is also disgusting, but we have to put up with that. Noel is a lot less gross, but sadly he isn’t here right now to balance Carl out; he was the first one to spot a Vshomu.’

  ‘And he stopped the Goldfish hurting Thsaaa,’ I said.

  Josephine smiled up at me. ‘This is Alice,’ she said more quietly. ‘She’s handy with duct tape when you’ve been partially eaten or exploded. But mainly she stops people going crazy or giving up.’

  For a moment I had the weirdest feeling I was going to cry, and I didn’t know why.

  ‘Duct tape is always good,’ said Lena.

  ‘This is Josephine, Mum,’ I said. ‘She worked out why the Morrors were on Mars and she finds giant robot spiders and builds flamethrowers, and she’s my best friend.’

  Lena frowned. ‘Josephine, you didn’t mention anything about a flamethrower.’

  ‘If you didn’t want me to build flamethrowers, you shouldn’t have taught me the basic principles when I was six,’ said Josephine. ‘It worked well.’

  ‘Everything seems to have worked out well,’ I said.

  ‘Of course it did,’ said Josephine serenely. ‘I was never in any doubt it would.’

  And we laughed, because that was hysterically funny, and Josephine added, ‘Alice. Let’s go outside.’

  So we did that. There was some talk of wheelchairs for both Josephine and me, which neither of us wanted. But I managed to shuffle along on my own feet leaning on Mum, and Lena simply hoisted Josephine over one shoulder and walked off with her. Josephine protested heartily. Lena ignored her until she gave up.

  The hospital grounds weren’t particularly beautiful. There were a lot of military vehicles and tarmac. But there were some flower beds and roses growing in them. And the sky was bright blue.

  ‘Isn’t it sunnier than it used to be?’ I said as Lena plonked Josephine down on a low wall.

  ‘The Morrors,’ said Mum, tilting her face up to the sunlight. ‘They said they’d let more light through. They’re doing it. And it’s summer.’

  EPILOGUE

  Later there was this whole business where we got medals for Conspicuous Gallantry, and of course that was nice but it’s not really the point of the story so I’m going to skip it. It only happened because this one newspaper ran a campaign of headlines saying things like ‘Reward the Plucky Kids of Mars!’ and people got a bit hysterical. And Dad always particularly hated that newspaper, and since then some human and a Suth-laaa Morror fell in love and now it’s doing a campaign about OUTLAW MORROR–HUMAN MARRIAGE SHAM.

  So the medal thing was nice, and Gallantry is a really enjoyable word to say, but it’s all also slightly embarrassing.

  They’ve just finished building the Vuhalimath-laa. They can adjust it to let sunlight through, somehow, even though from the outside Earth is invisible now. If you’re flying in from Mars or Saturn, you just see the moon orbiting an empty space. So Earth is colder than it was before the Morrors came, but not as cold as it was when we left for Mars.

  Of course, that doesn’t mean everything’s sorted out and everyone’s happy. Mum wasn’t kidding about it being complicated. A lot of countries left the Emergency Earth Coalition because they wouldn’t accept Morrors living on Earth permanently, even though the Morrors are plainly staying here whether anyone likes it or not. A lot of them live in Antarctica, which they’re calling Uhalarath-Moraa, and it hasn’t officially been recognised as a state yet, but Dad says it probably will be soon. And not all the Morrors are happy either – some of them don’t think there’s enough room on Earth, and still want a planet to themselves, and recently they did find a chilly little uninhabited moon out there that might be OK for them with a bit of terraforming. Dr Muldoon, who recovered fine from her injuries, is helping with that when she isn’t doing ungodly experiments on people, or flying out to Mars, or mentoring Josephine.

  She had a lot of work to do to get the EEC to put much effort into defending Mars as well as Earth from the Vshomu, but at last they understood that leaving Mars as a place for Vshomu to feed on and breed is a really terrible idea. It’s not going to get its own Vuhalimath-laa any time soon, but the EDF do go out there regularly and clean up any Vshomu infestations that they find.

  It got scary about six months ago when a big cloud of them turned up and started chewing on the Moon. But at least we’ve got a lot of warning about them, whereas the Morrors hadn’t had a clue until their actual planet started being eaten, and by the time they began to get organised it was too late.

  Mum still spends a lot of her time out there, doing what she’s best at: defending Earth in her spaceship. Now she protects the light-shield instead of trying to destroy it. She doesn’t come home every night, but she does come home. And
we live together with Dad and Gran in Warwickshire and that’s all I wanted.

  Not all Earth’s Morrors live in Uhalarath-Moraa. Some of them live anywhere on Earth that’s cold and will have them.

  Thsaaa’s two surviving parents run a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. A year after we returned to Earth, we all got together to go and see them.

  Josephine and I rode up on the ski lift with our families. Carl and Noel had got there already. It was summer again, but the mountains were still gleaming with snow. On a crag above the ordinary chalets, between banks of fir trees, there was a large domed building painted in whorls of colour, and outside it Thsaaa stood with their parents, waving their tentacles.

  ‘Hi, Thsaaa,’ I said. ‘Erm, Vel-haraa, Thsaaa, alvaray sath lon te faaa? How was that? I’ve been practising.’

  Thsaaa went pitying colours. ‘It’s nice that you tried,’ they said. ‘I think we should stick to English.’

  ‘Thsaaa!’ Thsaaa’s Thuul-lan gave them a light cuff with a tentacle.

  ‘Don’t mind them,’ said Thsaaa’s Quth-laaa-mi said to us placidly. ‘They’re aaaaaaaalways like that.’

  ‘Hi, team!’ crowed the Goldfish, bustling up to us over Noel and Carl’s heads. Someone had fixed its eye and given it a new coat of paint, but it was never going to look quite as good as new again. Not that it seemed to care. ‘Hi Alice, hi Josephine! Long time no see! Have you learned anything exciting about the history of Switzerland today?’

  ‘Can you believe Noel and me got stuck with this as a reward,’ Carl groaned.

  ‘I asked,’ protested Noel. ‘It’s my friend.’

  ‘That fish is a good fish,’ said Carl’s dad. ‘It’s got your grades up across the board. I won’t hear a word against it.’

  Thsaaa’s parents showed us their house, though it was too cold to stay in there for long. But we saw that there were Paralashaths of different sizes and shapes on pedestals. And there were two empty sleeping niches, lined with multi-coloured pebbles, for the two parents that wouldn’t come back.

  Thsaaa’s Thuul-lan and Quth-laaa-mi had put a big table outside in the snow. It was warm enough if you kept your coat on. We ate baked fal-thra and tomato ketchup, and Thsaaa was right, they do go really well together. And we watched the last few skiers shooting down the slopes as the sun went down.

  ‘Do Morrors ski?’ asked Carl, dubiously.

  ‘No,’ said Thsaaa. ‘We toboggan.’

  ‘Are you going to help your parents run the ski resort when you grow up, Thsaaa?’ asked Noel.

  Thsaaa turned soft, thoughtful shades of blue and aquamarine. ‘I want to study the history of our people,’ they said. ‘Our art. The Paralashath. So much has been lost.’

  We were all quiet for a bit after that.

  ‘I asked what you were going to do when you grew up the first time I met you,’ said Josephine to me. ‘And you wouldn’t even think about being anything except a soldier.’

  ‘There was no point, then,’ I said.

  ‘What about now?’

  I hesitated. I had been thinking about it, of course, but I hadn’t talked about it yet. ‘I think I want to be a doctor,’ I said.

  I was a little worried Mum might be sad I didn’t want to be a fighter-pilot like her, but she said, ‘You’d be a wonderful doctor.’

  ‘And are you still going to be an archaeologist and a composer and . . . all the other things?’ I asked Josephine.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said confidently. ‘And I’m doing a lot of biochemistry with Dr Muldoon. But I’ve been thinking lately . . .’ Josephine looked up at the sky. The stars were beginning to come out. ‘Do they have space archaeologists? Because I think they should.’

  I laughed. ‘So: a multi-disciplinary scholar, artist, and explorer, in space.’

  ‘Yes. Shut up.’

  ‘What about you, Carl?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Fly spaceships,’ he said, shrugging.

  ‘I have this awful, haunting fear you will end up a politician,’ said Josephine.

  ‘Nah. Just spaceships. Maybe I can be your pilot, Jo; you’ll need someone to get you there.’

  ‘And we might need a doctor,’ said Josephine.

  ‘And Noel can be a space zoologist and categorise any animals we find,’ I said.

  ‘Are there other people like us out there, Thsaaa?’ Josephine asked. ‘I know Morrors searched a long time before they found a place you could live, but did you find anyone else along the way? Places where there are people?’

  The stars above the Alps were huge and wild and clear. Thsaaa’s long tentacles rested loosely around our shoulders.

  ‘There are millions of worlds,’ Thsaaa said.

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you so much to my wonderful editors at Egmont and Harper Collins, Sarah Hughes and Alyson Day and Toni Markiet, and to Lynne Missen at Penguin Canada for the warm welcome (and all the books!). Thank you to Jo Hardacre too for bringing such imagination and energy to Mars Evacuees. Thank you Andrea Kearney and Andy Potts for the beautiful cover – seriously, have you seen it? So orange. So shiny. It fills me with joy.

  Thank you Marisa Pintado for your lucid copyediting and for actually being moved to go to see the Visions of the Universe exhibit at the National Maritime Museum!

  Thank you, Catherine Clarke at Felicity Bryan, for your laser-guided agenting, for a life-saving suggestion about the sequel, and for exploding ‘They just don’t get it!’ in the back of a taxi when a different publisher rejected Mars Evacuees on the grounds of featuring too many girls in space.

  Thank you Zoe Pagnamenta for flying the Martian flag high on distant shores.

  Thank you, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Ivy Alvarez, both of whom generously talked to me about Filipino and Filipino-Australian childhoods. I hope I didn’t mess up too badly. And Rochita, additional thanks for being so enthusiastic about the idea and such a warm reader of my work. Readers, you should check out both these writers: rcloenenruiz.com and ivyalvarez.com

  Thank you, John Rickards and others for calculating how far a twelve-year-old could jump on Mars.

  Thank you, Samira Ahmed, for letting me chat about Mars on your radio programme, for pushing me towards public stages and people towards the things I write.

  Thanks to my family for their unwavering support.

  Thank you Mrs Cooke, for reading us Goodnight Mr Tom and for believing I could be a writer in a school where encouragement was in short supply.

  And thanks again, Freya, for telling me – at a crucial moment – that you wanted to read this book. Even though you thought Alice was an old-fashioned name and that I’d started too many sentences with ‘And’. I needed to hear it. All of it.