Mars Evacuees

15

The Goldfish raced along, as if it was swimming downstream with a strong current behind it, and we chased after it.

We slogged along the twisting valleys and climbed black-red slopes of gravel and razor-edged walls of stone, up on to the broken islands of rock called ‘horsts’ and then, dishearteningly, we’d have to scramble down the other side and do it all again. Finally we found ourselves standing on a flat roof of rock with such a deep crevasse between us and the (apparently) unbroken ground we wanted to get to that Josephine, all keyed up and jittery on hope and adrenaline, said, ‘Oh, to hell with it,’ and backed up before launching into a run and soaring off the edge of the precipice into a horrifying leap that carried her thirty feet to land in a little puff of dust on the other side. JUST.

While I dealt with my minor heart attack, Carl was only irritated that he hadn’t done it first and went right after her. He teetered for a moment on the edge but a second later he’d recovered his cool completely, and then he and Josephine were just hanging out over there, as if being worried about jumping across chasms was so last year.

Noel and I looked at each other. ‘Er,’ I said.

‘Well,’ Noel said, and shrugged, and then almost went for it before I grabbed his collar. ‘Yeah, no,’ I said firmly.

Josephine and Carl gazed back at us with what looked awfully like smugness. ‘You can climb down with him, right? We can wait,’ Carl called airily across the gap.

‘Typical,’ I grumbled. ‘No, I flipping won’t!’ I yelled back. ‘Here, Goldfish… you carried him before?’

The Goldfish was hanging in the middle of the gap, three hundred feet above the canyon bottom. It was funny: despite the fact that it almost never touched the ground, so long as it was hovering around head-height I’d never really thought of what it did as flying. But it flew obligingly back, though it did say, ‘I’m not really built for riding, kids,’ as it let Noel crawl on to its back.

Noel’s previous flight, into a spaceship besieged by Space Locusts, hadn’t exactly been an experience to savour. This time, after a nervous squeak as the Goldfish took off, he grinned and waved and yelled, ‘WOOO!’ and I felt a bit envious. I was already pretty sure I was too heavy for the Goldfish to carry.

Carl hadn’t seen Noel riding the Goldfish before and winced, but Noel landed safely at his side and I realised I had committed myself to getting across by the long-jump method.

‘You can do it, Alice! Yay, Alice!’ Carl yelled.

‘Oh, shut up,’ I said irritably, backed off for as much of a run-up as possible, and resisted a ridiculous temptation to close my eyes.

I was in the air for unnaturally long; more than long enough to think how stupid this was and just barely long enough for it to be exciting. I only just got one foot on the very edge of the damn cliff but Josephine and Carl grabbed my arms and I managed not to collapse in a little heap. And there we all were, out of the Labyrinth of Night and on, as the Goldfish immediately informed us, The Plain of Syria, which is a stupid name because Syria is a country on Earth with nothing to do with Mars. But there you go, they weren’t consulting me when they named it.

The Goldfish skimmed forwards over the plain and we ran after it again. The ground was pocked with craters and scars, but in the distance it bulged into wide, low hills like bubbles in heating porridge. The valley we’d crashed into had seemed as bare and lifeless as if Mars had never been terraformed at all. Now we began to see little signs of life again: patches of purple lichen and emerald moss on rocks, and tufts of arctic grass.

‘Look!’ cried Carl, pouncing on something.

A small robot, about the size of a chicken, was crawling doggedly across the ground on four angular legs. Carl picked it up and its legs waggled pitifully in the air.

‘What?!’ Josephine was already breathless from running, but now her breathing hitched with panic. ‘I said big robots, Goldfish…’

‘I don’t mean that little guy, Josephine,’ the Goldfish said indulgently. ‘Come on, gang!’

‘Don’t call us that,’ muttered Josephine, but we followed it over a rise and it jabbed forwards with its nose in the air, pointing.

There, roaming placidly across the tundra like grazing bison, were the Goldfish’s robot pals.

Or, as you and I would call them, ‘the giant metal spiders’.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Perfect,’ breathed Josephine.

‘Really?!’ asked Carl.

The robot spiders were easily as big as elephants. Technically, I suppose, they had six legs rather than eight, projecting from black metal bodies about the size of a car. But I don’t believe anyone could look at the way they moved, one poky black leg at a time, and not think ‘giant spiders’. Sometimes they would stop moving and lower that boxy abdomen towards the ground – raising huge, multi-jointed knees towards the sky – and plop seeds into the soil as if they were laying eggs. Some of them sprayed out finer clouds of seeds or puffs of liquid from dispensers on their flanks. Sometimes they’d scoop up little samples of soil on long spoony things that then retracted back into the body.

‘What’s their top speed, Goldfish?’ asked Josephine in a tense whisper, as if afraid of disturbing wild animals.

‘Well… I don’t actually have that information in my system,’ said the Goldfish. ‘But looking at them, I guess twenty-five miles per hour?’

‘Then we’d only have to travel fifteen hours a day and we could make it to Zond within three days!’ cried Josephine. She pointed to the nearest spider as it ambled southwards, sowing seeds and minding its own business. ‘That one’s ours,’ she decided fiercely, and went running after it, as intent on her prey as a caveperson hunting down a woolly mammoth.

We followed, although I don’t think any of us were very clear about what we were going to do with a giant spider even if we caught up with one.

The spider did not recognise the Goldfish as a Robot Pal, or us as something that shouldn’t be run over. Josephine dodged a huge foot as it crashed down almost on top of her.

‘Goldfish!’ she ordered. ‘Fly up there and interface with it – make it do what you say!’

‘I’ll try,’ said the Goldfish, and maybe it was my imagination but its perky voice had begun to sound a little harassed. Still, it did as she said – flew up to hover above the spider’s thorax, and its eyes flashed rapidly as it beamed an invisible flow of information into the other robot’s computer.

The spider was just as keen on doing its job as the Goldfish was on teaching us maths. So I guess it wasn’t surprising that it seemed confused and suspicious about the stream of new data telling it to stop what it knew it was supposed to be doing. It slowed down for a moment, but then twitched crossly and stamped its way onwards. The Goldfish bobbed wearily in the air in a way that somehow suggested a visible sigh, then flew after it and tried again.

This time the spider stopped moving, reached up irritably with a foreleg and flicked the Goldfish away. The Goldfish hit the ground at high speed with a resounding smack. The spider scuttled away, covering us in a fine dust of scratchy, sneezy seeds like ink from an escaping squid.

‘Goldfish!’ cried Noel, running to the fallen robot.

‘I’m OK, kids!’ said the Goldfish indefatigably, as it bounced up from the ground. But there was a nasty scuff along its side and a dent in its cheerful face.

‘Oh, Goldfish,’ Noel said sadly, stroking the battered place.

‘What’s going wrong?’ demanded Josephine.

‘Well guys, that is not a very sophisticated robot!’ said the Goldfish, and might have said it through its teeth if it’d had any. ‘I can’t get through its firewall. It just thinks I’m a threat.’

‘What if we could open up the casing – get into the CPU? Could you do a direct link?’ Josephine asked.

‘Well, sure, I might be able to force a reboot,’ said the Goldfish. ‘But…’

‘But it won’t exactly hold still for us to do that,’ Carl finished.

Josephine gnawed her lip anxiously as the spider and its central processing unit stomped away at a very brisk twenty-five miles an hour, but whether she would have come up with some new idea we never found out, because Noel announced, ‘I can get up there! Come on, Goldfish!’ And he jumped astride the Goldfish’s back and made a sort of giddy-up clack against its sides with his heels. Now I might have expected the Goldfish not to be totally thrilled with this, but I suppose it really did know how few options we had left because it took off like a rocket. There was just the echo of Noel’s excited whoop left behind.

‘Bloody Noel,’ said Carl.

‘He’s really getting into this Goldfish-riding thing,’ I said, thinking also that the Dalisay brothers had more in common than I’d thought.

We ran and leaped to catch up. Ahead, we saw the Goldfish tip Noel carefully onto the spider’s back. Frankly at the rate it was going it might have carried Noel off into the sunset without us getting anywhere near it, but I guess after a while, when it realised no one seemed to be trying to reprogram it again, it relaxed a bit and slowed down and we managed to catch up.

Noel was rattling and sliding about on top of the spider and saying silly things like, ‘Oh, wow. This is, erm, yeah, wow.’

‘You all right?’ Carl called up anxiously.

‘Oh, hi,’ said Noel. ‘There’s nothing to hold on to?’

‘Grip with your knees!’ Carl suggested.

‘They don’t bend that way!’

‘Get into the central processing unit!’ Josephine bawled.

Noel was now lying spreadeagled on the spider’s thorax, trying to grip the sides. ‘I can’t – I don’t see anything to open! It’s just smooth!’

The Goldfish ducked between the spider’s legs, under its belly and up the other side.

‘The access panel is underneath,’ it informed us.

‘Well, then it’s just badly designed!’ exploded Josephine.

‘It wasn’t designed for these circumstances,’ said the Goldfish.

‘Well, maybe I could reach under there,’ mused Noel, who was clearly very determined to be helpful now.

‘No, don’t be an idiot,’ Carl told him. But Noel didn’t listen – he tried to lean under the spider’s belly, and sure enough, nearly toppled straight off. In this gravity, falling from that height probably wouldn’t have hurt him much, but going under one of the spider’s massive feet certainly would.

‘Noel!’ Carl shouted, helpless.

Noel managed to grab one of the spider’s legs. There was an awful few seconds where there was nothing we could really do but make hissing noises through our teeth and watch him dangle as the spider thundered along, before the Goldfish flew in and somehow nudged him back on to the spider’s back.

‘Oof !’ said Noel, landing and sliding and scrabbling. ‘So,’ he added conversationally, ‘what should I do now?’

‘Hit it with something!’ I yelled, and, ‘Shoot it, Goldfish!’ shouted Josephine.

‘I don’t have anything to hit it with,’ Noel complained.

‘We didn’t really think this through,’ I said breathlessly, throwing myself into another leap after the spider. Even at its slower pace, we’d have lost it by now if it hadn’t stopped from time to time to plant its seeds.

Carl picked up a stone and threw it. Noel looked surprised and completely failed to even try to catch it.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Carl, and tried again. This time Noel caught it, nearly slithered off the spider’s back again, and then started banging hopefully at the smooth plastic.

‘Isn’t it going to notice?’ I asked anxiously.

‘Hope not… doesn’t seem as if it’s got any pressure sensors up there,’ Josephine said, though she was biting her lip again.

The spider spurted forwards and we had another breathless struggle to keep up with it. When we did, we found Noel had managed to bash a hole in the casing. ‘Ow. Ow,’ he said, pulling at sharp bits of broken plastic. ‘OK! I can see… computer stuff !’

The Goldfish promptly spat out a cable. It hung from its mouth (I hadn’t even noticed there was actually a hole there) like a long noodle. Of course, having its mouth full didn’t affect its talking, though the effect was somehow weirder than usual.

‘Good going, Noel!’ it said. ‘Now, you should be able to see a cable port in there somewhere.’

‘Well maybe I should, but I can’t!’

The Goldfish ducked closer and glowed as hard as it could into the hole Noel had made, and muttered more instructions while Noel grabbed the cable and felt around inside the cavity with it.

‘I think I got it!’ he crowed at last.

For a moment nothing seemed to happen. Then Noel was yelling, ‘Aaaah!’ as the spider collapsed in a heap underneath him.

‘We didn’t want you to break it!’ protested Carl as Noel bounced free of the sad-looking pile of black metal legs. We all skidded to a stop. It seemed like we’d been in constant motion for a long time and I started to feel the lack of oxygen. Josephine sucked in an anxious breath and held it.

‘Poor spider,’ said Noel regretfully.

‘I’m rebooting it, guys,’ said the Goldfish patiently, and a humming noise started up somewhere inside the spider. The spider slowly rose from the ground. It was oddly creepy, like watching something rise from the dead. ‘Zombie robot spider,’ I muttered.

‘Can you control it now?’ Josephine asked the Goldfish, her voice taut with anticipation. Her hands were locked into fists.

‘Let’s see,’ the Goldfish said. Its eyes flashed. The spider lumbered forwards. It swung to the right, then to the left. It ran round us in a circle.

‘You’re doing it!’ Josephine cried.

‘Not quite there yet…’ the Goldfish said. It sucked away the cable. The spider stopped moving and stood, trembling weirdly for a second or two. Then it extended one foreleg, then another. It bounced cautiously, as if doing squats, then ran in another circle, before crouching in front of us.

‘Well, what are you waiting for, kids? Climb aboard!’ the Goldfish exclaimed.

We cheered. It was ragged and breathless but it was only an hour or so ago that we thought we’d never cheer about anything again. ‘Back to the ship, Goldfish,’ commanded Josephine, settling cross-legged on the spider’s back. ‘We need to salvage as much as we can carry. Especially the oxygen cells.’ She proved her point by swaying somewhat alarmingly as the spider lurched into a crawl. Carl and I grabbed her at the same time and somehow that turned into a general, messy, celebratory hug.

‘I’m going to call her Monica,’ said Noel, patting the spider’s back.

Monica carried us back towards the Labyrinth of Night, while Noel sang reedily, ‘She swallowed the bird to catch the spider… that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.’

In the far distance, I could see Space Locusts dropping from the purple sky, a scattered dark haze like backwards smoke pouring towards the ground. They looked a long way off, but then I remembered things about calculating distance and how close the horizon was on Mars and I wished the Goldfish wasn’t such a good teacher.

But nobody said anything about them. What was there to say?