Mars Evacuees

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 might 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.’

‘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?’

‘I can tell you nothing more, it is forbidden. And you could not understand.’

Josephine looked down at the shining object in her hands. It was still making colours and patterns, but they no longer matched the waves of colour flowing over the Morror’s skin. She extended an arm, holding the thing high over the ground and Monica’s stamping feet. ‘Maybe I’ll break it,’ she said.

The Morror let out a whistling cry, tentacles flailing, but then suddenly gathered itself. ‘No. You won’t,’ it said disdainfully.

‘Oh no?’ Josephine tensed her arm.

‘You told me yourself. You are interested. You like strange things, and that is strange to you. Could you bring yourself to break it, and gain nothing?’

Josephine stared at it for a long moment and then, scowling, lowered her arm. She kept the object well out of the Morror’s reach, though.

It started raining.

‘Untie me,’ said Thsaaa. ‘I won’t escape. Where could I go? Untie me. Untie me.’

We picked our way slowly around the lower slope of the great bulge of Tharsis, where the ground was a little smoother under Monica’s feet, and the Morror kept chanting untie me, as annoying as a little kid asking Are We There Yet?, and we couldn’t get away from it.

It stopped when the rain got so heavy you could hardly open your mouth without drowning, and Monica was splashing through flows of water that would have been thigh-deep if we’d been on the ground.

But when a surge knocked Monica sideways and swept us all down the mountainside, it started saying it again, even more urgently.