Mars Evacuees

19

For a few horrible seconds, all we could do was try to hang on and hope Monica didn’t overturn completely. The Goldfish reeled through the air above us in a white haze of water as the rain bounced off its flanks, its eyes flashing as it tried to keep Monica under control. Monica’s legs flailed and thrashed, but giant robot spiders do not make good swimmers.

We collided with a spur of rock, and stuck there for a bit, though we could feel the current trying to drag us loose.

‘Untie me, please,’ said Thsaaa urgently. It had the ends of its tentacles coiled around what had been a pipe in the Flying Fox, but with its upper tentacles bound to its torso it couldn’t get a good grip.

I was clinging to the same thing too and worrying that I could feel it coming loose.

Carl reacted while I was still thinking; he grabbed one of Josephine’s Morror blades and hacked through Thsaaa’s duct-tape bindings. Of course, this left him only one hand to hang on with himself, and his immediate reward was a surge of floodwater that coursed over Monica’s back and swept him off before he could even yell.

One set of Thsaaa’s tentacles wrapped tight around the pipe, the other around Carl’s arm, both at once.

Carl and everyone else made up for lost time on yelling. The Morror didn’t say anything, but didn’t let him go.

And that was all well and good but then we came loose from the outcrop of rock and went swerving downhill again. This time, the Goldfish had Monica tuck her legs in so we were riding something more like a sledge if still not like a boat, and then we were hurtling towards another mound of rock and I thought, Oh, God, this is it, but then Monica got her legs around it and gripped and we were more or less stable, though with the flood still surging around us and the rain beating down.

Everyone except the Morror had started trembling. ‘We’ve got to get out of this,’ I shouted into the roar of the rain. ‘Goldfish. Can’t breathe properly. And the cold. Hypothermia. Pneumonia.’

‘Can you go and look for any kind of shelter?’ Josephine gasped.

‘I’ll do my best,’ it replied, and vanished into the rain. I missed it immediately; with the air and the ground brown and churning around us, it was all too easy to imagine it wouldn’t make it back.

I started checking to see what we might have lost to the floodwater, but once I’d got oxygen masks on to everyone I was too cold and wet to go on. With some hesitation I handed over an oxygen mask to Thsaaa, who then proved that we still had Josephine’s bag of strange things, because it whipped its tentacles like a lasso across the platform and snatched its shiny object out of it.

Josephine looked indignant but didn’t demand it back, because you can’t expect prisoners to actually hand you the means to interrogate them.

‘I saved your life,’ it reminded Carl.

‘Yeah, I guess you did,’ Carl said. ‘Uh. Thanks.’

‘I hope you will bear that in mind if you should succeed in taking me to your superiors. I suppose you do not have the concept of ushaal-thol-faa, but you do at least have crude approximations like dhan’yavāda and gratitude in your languages, which I believe should have some influence on your behaviour.’

‘Yeah, all right. At least you’re honest about why you did it,’ said Carl, shivering, clearly beginning to feel rather less grateful.

But Noel wasn’t. ‘THANK YOU SO MUCH, THSAAA,’ he exclaimed, even though his teeth were chattering. ‘He’s my brother. I know he’s kind of an idiot, but still I’m really, really glad you didn’t let him drown.’

The Morror peered down at Noel and looked a little startled, or at least I thought it did.

‘I was only in trouble because I went and untied you,’ grumbled Carl. ‘Where’s your usha-whatever?’

Thsaaa ignored him. It ran the very tips of its tentacles over the surface of its object in an intricate, swirling pattern, and then placed it in the centre of the platform. Josephine could’ve grabbed it again but she didn’t, just looked at it warily.

‘So come on, what is that?’ I asked.

‘It is a Paralashath,’ said Thsaaa, which of course told us nothing at all. But then the Paralashath came to life again and started glowing, and this time it was giving off not only coloured light but heat.

‘Oh! Is that what it’s for?’ I cried, eagerly shifting closer to it.

‘No,’ said Thsaaa rather snottily, like it would have rolled its eyes if it had been human. It might not be a fan of our words for gratitude but ‘no’ was one human word it seemed quite happy with.

‘Isn’t that too hot for you?’ asked Carl. ‘I thought you guys were all about the cold.’

‘This is pleasant for short periods. In these conditions, I am not at risk of overheating.’

‘Is this about engendering more ushaal-thol-faa?’ asked Josephine sourly. Of course she had memorised the word on one hearing.

‘In part,’ said the Morror. ‘If you die of cold I doubt your robot companion would help me reach safety. Or refrain from… hurting me.’

I noticed for the first time a couple of blackened streaks on its chest and head, where the Goldfish had zapped it.

After that we just focused on breathing oxygen and trying to keep our hands warm. Monica’s back was still a horrible place to be in that storm, but it felt a bit less likely to be fatally bad.

Gradually the rain started to subside, and then I saw something glowing through the curtains of water around us. The Goldfish was back.

‘OK, kids, the good news is I think I found someplace,’ it said. ‘Bad news is I don’t think it’s safe to move Monica yet.’

It seemed particularly unfair that we couldn’t get to shelter until the thing we needed shelter from calmed down, but there it was. Everyone who wasn’t Thsaaa huddled closer together around the Paralashath and Thsaaa sat there on its own and watched. Once Noel asked curiously, ‘Can Morrors drown?’

‘Yes!’ it replied crossly, and that was about the extent of conversation.

At last the torrent gushing round our outcrop dwindled to something that Monica could possibly wade through, and the Goldfish led us slowly down the slope of Tharsis and into a hole between two columns of rock. We had to climb off Monica’s back and let her scuttle in separately, which meant we had to wade through the small cascade splashing into the cave.

The cavern didn’t look, at first, like a good place to get dry, seeing as how water was streaming down the walls from unseen channels and dripping from the ceiling, and the bottom was practically a river. But there was a rocky shelf towards the back under a dry overhang, and with Monica crouching beside that we had a reasonable amount of space to recuperate in.

Our new floor space wasn’t the only thing illuminated by the combined light of the Goldfish and the Paralashath; stalactites hung from the ceiling, some long and pointed like icicles, some heavy and swagged like velvet theatre-curtains. Stalagmites rose from the floor all crinkly and twisted like melting candles. As the Goldfish moved between the pillars, the rock glowed rosy-amber and translucent in places, and strange lacy shadows played across everything.

‘Guess we’ll be here for a while,’ said the Goldfish, deceptively casually. ‘You’ll need something to do… How about a math lesson?!’

‘Let us eat something first, for God’s sake,’ said Carl.

We started sorting through our remaining supplies to see what was still usable. We’d lost both the Morror blades when Carl nearly got swept away. We still had the shockray staff, but right now we weren’t as interested in mysterious alien weapons as we were in things we could eat. Some of our food had been washed away too, of course, and almost everything that wasn’t in sealed packs or tubs was ruined. Still, the damage could’ve been worse, though of course we were that much closer to running out and if we didn’t get to Zond soon… or if we didn’t find help when we got there…

‘Give the alien some lunch,’ said Carl.

‘I cannot eat your… Smeat,’ Thsaaa said haughtily.

‘We don’t only eat Smeat,’ I said. ‘OK, this isn’t exactly dinner at the Ivy, but it’s not that bad, in the circumstances. We’ve still got cheese.’

‘Let it have its blue meat-stuff,’ said Carl. ‘It’s defrosted, anyway.’

‘We can’t keep calling it “It”,’ said Noel, who I thought was coming on a bit strong with this Rights of the Morror business, even though I guess I started it. ‘It’s a person.’

‘We call the Goldfish “It”,’ Carl pointed out. ‘It IS an it.’

The Goldfish surely was a person, I thought; it was programmed to want to do certain things and behave in a certain way, but it still had feelings and it could come up with its own ways of doing things. It had proven that when it zapped us into doing schoolwork. I felt guilty this wasn’t something I’d thought about before.

‘Do you mind us calling you “It”, Goldfish?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’m definitely an “It”, kids!’ said the Goldfish sunnily.

‘Er… and you, Thsaaa?’

‘I am not in the same category as a robot,’ replied the alien.

‘OK, fine. Are you a boy or a girl?’ Carl asked.

‘No,’ said Thsaaa.

‘Oh.’ There was a small silence. Carl considered. ‘Are you more… both, or more neither?’

‘No,’ said Thsaaa.

‘Would you care to elaborate, would you like Carl to keep guessing indefinitely or do you want us to understand you’re not going to tell us?’ Josephine asked frostily.

‘I’m Quth-laaa,’ said Thsaaa wearily. ‘There is Suth-laaa, Quth-laaa, Ruul, Thuul and Ma-lashnath.’

We all thought this through.

‘Five sexes? How can you have five sexes?’ I asked. ‘I mean, what would they all do?’

There was a slight pause as we all realised what I had asked, and my face got hot and later Carl called me a pervert. But at the time, no one said anything because everyone totally wanted to know.

Thsaaa didn’t seem to have an emotional reaction that I could make out, except possibly mild boredom: ‘As you like…’ it began.

So that’s how we ended up being the first humans ever to hear about Morror sex, and at first we were pretty interested. It turned out that though there were five sexes, it was actually really rare to have five parents – it was good if you did because you’d probably be extra healthy and live a long time, but it was only really possible when there was peace and plenty for all Morrorkind, which hadn’t happened in a while. But no one had fewer than three, and though Thsaaa didn’t actually say, ‘And that’s another reason why we think you humans are so primitive,’ it was pretty clear.

So, yes, that was interesting. But then it just went on and on and on, and Thsaaa kept stopping and explaining that though usually, most Morrors did it this way, there were like twenty per cent or something of them who did it that way. And after a while, without meaning to, I sort of stopped listening for a few seconds, and when I started again I’d completely lost track of who was supposed to Harvest the Genetic Material from whom, and who else would then Absorb it Through their Sensory Tendrils and what climatic conditions were required for a Thuul to give birth alone, and when they wouldn’t be able to without a Ma-lashnath. And we started nodding and saying Oh yes I see in a polite sort of way, and hoping it would stop talking soon. And at the end we still didn’t know what pronouns to use because Morrors don’t have pronouns. Well, no, they do in some Morror languages, but not in the one Thsaaa spoke.

So I’m going to say ‘they’ when I’m talking about Thsaaa, even if it gets a bit confusing. I can’t guarantee I mightn’t slip up and say ‘it’ or ‘he’ or ‘she’, but that’s the plan. Thsaaa was as happy with this as they seemed to get about anything.

So anyway, eventually Carl created a distraction by eating some of the Morror food; I guess it was inevitable we couldn’t keep him from trying it indefinitely.

‘It’s actually OK,’ he said, chewing thoughtfully. ‘Kind of like crab… but more meaty… and sort of raspberry.’

‘Crab and raspberry?’

‘Yeah, but it works. Come on, Thsaaa. Have an apricot.’

Thsaaa rippled green and black. ‘I will soon have no choice. Your army will not have Morror food for me,’ they said. They warily extended a tentacle to accept a dried apricot, put it in their mouth, and instantly shuddered. ‘The texture…’

‘Never mind, try something else. Jo! Have you got any of those ginger biscuits left?’

Carl and Noel were now equally enthused about interspecies food-sharing and were busily sorting through our scant resources in hope of finding something the Morror liked. Thsaaa listlessly accepted energy bar after cold noodle and though I suppose you couldn’t expect actual enthusiasm, I found its limp disgust a bit irritating. Carl and Noel, however, only seemed to see it as a challenge.

Thsaaa cautiously tried a lump of cheese and twitched and shuddered, but I thought maybe they weren’t totally unpleasant twitches and shudders. Thsaaa ate a little more and said, ‘That’s so strong.’

‘That’s made of milk,’ explained Noel.

‘Which is a fluid cows secrete to feed their young,’ muttered Josephine darkly. ‘Laced with bacteria and then fermented.’

That put Thsaaa off the cheese for the time being. But then they picked up something that quite randomly had survived everything, a bottle of tomato ketchup. They cautiously squirted a dab on to another tentacle, and touched it to their mouth.

Thsaaa went blue, orange and fuchsia, made a high-pitched ‘Eeeeeeee!’ noise and reached for more.

‘You like it!’ cried Noel, delighted.

‘This would go very well with baked fal-thra,’ said Thsaaa, busily sucking ketchup off their tentacles. ‘I wish my Ruul-ama could have tried this.’

‘What’s a Ruul-ama?’ I asked, but Thsaaa was either too engrossed with the ketchup to answer, or pretended to be because it was a convenient way of not answering questions.

‘Are you going to feed it all our food?’ asked Josephine sharply.

‘We don’t really need the ketchup,’ argued Noel, who was just delighted to see the Morror more or less happy.

‘Try and keep in mind why we’re on this messed-up planet instead of at home living our lives,’ said Josephine. ‘Also the small matter of the hundreds of thousands of people who aren’t living their lives at all.’ She drew up her knees and glowered into the black depths of the cave.

After eating, we focused on properly warming up and drying things over the Paralashath. You’ve got to remember that we weren’t quite as badly off as we could have been in this situation, because our uniforms were made of up-to-date, temperature-controlled, highly waterproof nano-weave. On the other hand, what with all the crashing into things and being attacked by Space Locusts, our uniforms also had holes in them and the flash flood hadn’t been particularly kind to the duct-tape patches.

So in the end we mostly stripped down to our underwear and set up a sort of clothes line between stalactites, and then just crouched as close to the Paralashath as we could and breathed some more oxygen. I was way past the point of worrying about the other kids seeing me in my pants and crop top, and frankly didn’t care if our friendly neighbourhood alien saw me either, but Josephine evidently felt rather differently, as she didn’t take anything off but ordered Thsaaa: ‘Stop looking at us.’

Thsaaa obeyed at once. ‘I apologise. I only… I never thought to see humans so close.’

‘That’s the first thing you think to apologise for?’ said Josephine.

‘We’ve all been looking at it… them… Thsaaa,’ Noel countered.

‘Of course we have! But they know what we look like. They’ve been watching us for years; they’ve had time to learn our languages, they know a lot about how to kill us. We know what? That they like tomato ketchup!’

‘You know well enough how to kiiill uuus,’ murmured Thsaaa, their speech again getting soft and long and slow.

‘But you were the ones with the head start,’ said Josephine.

‘You could not understand.’

‘You keep saying so. I keep suggesting you explain. Why did you come to Earth? Why are you on Mars? What’s the plan?’

Thsaaa sighed again. ‘We are forbidden to speak to humans.’

‘Well, then you’ve already broken the rules. Are you worrying about being in trouble with your people? Shouldn’t you be worrying about the trouble you’re in with us?’

‘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.