Mars Evacuees

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.

‘Yeah, but still,’ Carl said.

Thsaaa considered. ‘I have always wished to see the city of Swaleeshashalafay Athmaral-haaa-Thay…’ (I’ve given up here but the name actually went on for much longer than that.) ‘I have only ever seen pictures, and there are many Paralashath by Morrors who lived there. The glowing towers and galleries and stairs, built of ice-blocks of every colour – and on the horizon always the steam rising from the sea, from the – the – hot, burning things under the water—’

‘Underwater volcanoes?’ guessed Josephine.

‘Yes! Volcanoes. The steam was like – like pillars holding up the sky. And red spirals of fraaraval hanging between the buildings, and amber gardens of lathmalee…’

‘Is Swarlyshash… thing – is that, like, the capital city?’ Carl asked.

‘The capital city of what?’ asked Thsaaa witheringly. ‘The planet? How could a whole planet have a capital city?’

‘Can you tell us a Morror story, Thsaaa?’ asked Noel. ‘It doesn’t have to be a modern one.’

Irritable bands of orange were winking across Thsaaa and I was sure they were going to refuse, but then, unexpectedly, the orange gave way to soft greens, and they actually patted Noel gently on the head with a tentacle.

‘I will tell you the story of the Bridge of Tham-thol-Tharaa. In the land of Ee-ee-Lathwama, there was a beautiful Suth-laaa who loved a beautiful Ruul. The Suth-laaa had a mane of tendrils as delicate as patterns of frost on a window and their arms flowed as elegantly in the air as weed in the water, and the Ruul’s colours changed as gracefully as theela-va in the sky. But they were alone; for the thirty turns before there had been many warm winters, and so very few Ma-lashnath had been born. The Ruul and the Suth-laaa met Quth-laaa and Thuul sometimes, but without a Ma-lashnath, the Ruul and Suth-laaa could not have children. So they set out for the land of Safwalaa-aa…’

The storytelling didn’t go totally smoothly; Thsaaa soon got annoyed with us because we didn’t always know which bits were Morror society working as normal and which were magic (apparently Sufwalaa-aa was not a real place, even baby Morrors know that, but the thing about warm winters was totally true). But basically the beautiful Suth-laaa and the beautiful Ruul didn’t find any beautiful Ma-lashnath in Safwalaa-aa, but they didn’t realise it was because all the Ma-lashnath had headed for Ee-ee-Lathwama, looking for Ruul and Suth-laaa, and then there was a series of misunderstandings that were probably more hilarious if you were a Morror, but before we could get to the happy ending, or even the Bridge of Tham-thol-Tharaa, Noel interrupted: ‘What’s that?’ And we all tensed up because in our recent experience that question had not been a sign that nice relaxing things were about to happen.

We were picking our way through the Sulci Pavonis – sharp ridges and flat, narrow-bottomed valleys that streaked the land at the base of Mount Peacock – and Noel was pointing at five specks in the sky. Space Locusts! I thought at once – but before I could even say it, I realised they couldn’t be. The specks were holding a rotating circular formation even as they hurtled through the air towards us, and the light glittered silvery off their sides.

‘Those are human work,’ said Thsaaa.

‘Drones – or could they be…?’ began Carl, squinting. ‘We’re nearly at Zond, aren’t we – they could be Goads, right? It could be Colonel Cleaver?’ He stood up on Monica’s back and started waving his arms. ‘HEY! HEY, COLONEL CLEAVER!’

The little robots dived down towards us from on high.

And, of course, they started shooting at us.

We bounded off Monica in all directions. I crammed myself under an overhanging rock; Josephine was crouching between two boulders on the other side of the little canyon. Carl and Noel had headed up rather than down, and were both on a ledge a few feet above Josephine’s head, flattened against the rock wall. That left Thsaaa, trying to hide under Monica, but Monica was still obliviously scuttling forwards and her body was too high off the ground anyway. The drones swept up above us and then swooped back to the attack, surrounding us completely. The air blazed with energy bolts.

‘GOLDFISH!’ Noel howled, from the ledge. Carl had shoved in front of him but they looked horribly exposed up there.

The Goldfish was already doing its best, dancing in the air, shooting and darting, but it was one fish-shaped classroom robot against five military killing machines, and it was really only because the drones seemed so intent on scouring the canyon floor that the Goldfish managed not to be blown to bits itself.

‘What are they doing?’ I yelled. ‘Why are they shooting at us? They’re supposed to be on our side!’

To my horror, Josephine half rose from her crouch, making herself an even easier target. ‘They’re not shooting at us! They couldn’t have missed us all – they’re avoiding us!’

An energy bolt scorched the rock beside my head. ‘They’re not avoiding us very well,’ I complained, shrinking back against the rock and relieved to see Josephine doing the same.

‘Sorry, Alice!’ called the Goldfish from above, who presumably had been the intended target.

‘They’re firing at me,’ shouted Thsaaa, seizing one of Monica’s legs with their tentacles and catapulting away from a volley of blasts. They landed close to the valley wall and dived under an overhang like mine, picked up six stones at once and hurled them with rather impressive precision. They knocked two of the flying drones off course – but only by a foot or two, and they soon recovered and swept back into formation.

‘Your temperature signature,’ Josephine called, as Thsaaa dived out of the line of fire again. ‘It has to be. They can see we’re human and you’re not!’

But there wasn’t much Thsaaa could do about that.

‘Goldfish!’ wailed Noel again. ‘They’re going to kill Thsaaa!’

The Goldfish had actually managed to zap one of the drones so repeatedly it fell to the canyon floor with a thud. But the four remaining drones looked more than equal to one teenage alien with nothing but stones to throw.

‘My amlaa-vel-esh! My invisibility gown!’ Thsaaa wailed. ‘I need it!’

‘It won’t help!’ shouted Josephine. ‘You’ll show up even colder – it’ll just make it more obvious!’

‘The shockray staff !’ I yelled, suddenly remembering it. ‘Grab it!’

But the staff was still strapped to Monica, and Thsaaa wasn’t anywhere near grabbing distance of her now. They were pinned against the rock wall with nothing left to hide behind.

Carl burst into motion; he took a huge leap down from the ledge, lurched for a moment atop Monica’s back, snatched up the staff, and then hurled himself up forwards again. He threw himself on top of Thsaaa, knocking the alien flat, and the four drones stopped in mid-air and hovered there, confused. Carl brandished the shockray staff – which did precisely nothing, until Thsaaa reached from underneath Carl and looped a tentacle around it…

There was a flash of nasty violet light and the drones all dropped with a clatter on to the rocks. The valley was suddenly silent, and there was a faint burnt, metallic taste in the thin air.

Thsaaa scrambled out free of Carl, their tendrils quivering in all directions and their colours flashing so fast and messily they were difficult to look at.

‘What if they had not stopped?!’ they cried in an unusually high-pitched voice, as the rest of us ran over. ‘What if they hadn’t seen you in time? What if your temperature had not masked mine?!’

Carl blinked. ‘Well, that would have been bad,’ he agreed.

‘You could have died, Kuya!’ cried Noel, torn between admiration and horror.

‘You have my ushaal-thol-faa,’ said Thsaaa formally, making an obvious effort to get their colours under control. They extended three tentacles and Carl, who hadn’t hesitated before diving between Thsaaa in front of four killer robots, did hesitate now. But then he took hold of Thsaaa’s arms and let Thsaaa hoist him to his feet.

‘No big,’ he said. But, though I really don’t think he’d thought about what he was doing while he was doing it, he couldn’t help thinking about it now. ‘That really was pretty cool of me, actually,’ he confessed, reaching for his oxygen cylinder and taking a deep breath. ‘Take that, Captain Mendez, I am not just about doing things for the spotlight.’

‘That point would be a lot stronger if you hadn’t actually said it out loud,’ said Josephine, in exasperation, though she was smiling.

But it was hard to stay cheerful. Mars seemed so cold and unwelcoming and full of things that wanted to hurt us just then. We climbed back on to Monica and scuttled onwards as fast as we could.

Carl cleared his throat. ‘I thought –’ he began, and broke off. ‘I really did think it might be Colonel Cleaver. But we’ll find him soon, I guess.’

‘Where did those things come from?’ wondered Noel.

‘Some of the Auroras have them,’ said Carl, his expression tight.

‘So there has to be a ship, somewhere…?’

I could see what was upsetting Carl. ‘Yes. But it has to be… crashed, or malfunctioning,’ I said. ‘Or they’d be here. Those things would have transmitted back that they were dealing with something.’

‘Yeah. I just… I really hope the pilot of the Aurora was all right,’ Carl said.

I thought about Thsaaa’s wrecked ship, and the bodies Thsaaa had had to drag away. The Aurora could have shot down the Morror ship, perhaps; and the Morrors could have shockrayed the Aurora as it fell. The Aurora might have limped as far towards Zond as it could before dropping on to the rocks. Or, on the other hand, it could have been Space Locusts. But I didn’t feel like saying any of it aloud, or asking Thsaaa about it. I was so tired, and none of it would make any difference to the fact we had to keep going.

‘And so those drones were left roaming the sky, hunting for Morrors,’ said Thsaaa softly.

‘Yeah, but look,’ said Carl. ‘Don’t worry. They were just robots. People won’t do that to you. We’ll make sure they know you’re a kid. They won’t hurt you. They’ll work something out with your guys and you’ll be back home in no time.’

Thsaaa rippled black and indigo. ‘They have never had a Morror prisoner before. They cannot waste the chance. They will want to find out… everything they can.’

No one had a very good answer to that.

I hadn’t really been thinking of Thsaaa as our prisoner any more, because we weren’t getting on so badly now and because they could technically have run off whenever they liked. Except that would have almost certainly meant they suffocated or starved, so as choices go that one didn’t really count.

Our last afternoon of travel was as uneventful as an afternoon can be when you are riding a robot spider along with your Alien of Uncertain Status towards a questionable destination with the oxygen running out and, by the end, no more food. We were crossing another great bare plain as a blazing blue sunset spilled into the pink sky. Fine, fine dust rose under Monica’s feet in little spiralling puffs like flares of gas (it also got you very dirty). And there ahead at last was Mount Olympus, the biggest mountain in the solar system, rising above the atmosphere, so huge it was as if part of the sky had been walled off. We rode through the first hours of the night, the two knobbly little moons, and endless snowdrifts of stars. Then we draped the remains of the tent under Monica’s legs and Thsaaa lent us the Paralashath to keep us warm.

‘Can you play something, Josephine?’ I asked, because the silence was getting to me again.

Josephine nodded and played something I’d never heard before, more bluesy than those heartbroken songs she’d played in the Labyrinth of Night, but more delicate and glittery than the actual jazz she’d played back at Beagle, and it kept floating up high and sounded a bit like what being in a tiny, isolated group of people sitting under all those incredible stars is like.

‘What was that?’ I asked when she was finished.

‘I’m going to call it “Martian Sunset”,’ said Josephine.

‘Oh, you made it up? It was lovely.’

‘Yoooooou made it up?!’ Thsaaa flickered turquoise and orange, and seemed astonished.

Josephine raised an eyebrow at them, though I’m sure they wouldn’t have got what that meant. ‘What? You know we have music, right? Did you think we just dug it out of the ground like potatoes?’ She hesitated. ‘What does it sound like to you?’

‘To me it sounds… very… bare. With no colour or movement or shalvulu – temperature changes,’ Thsaaa said.

‘We’ll introduce you to musical theatre when we get home,’ said Josephine, a little crossly.

‘…But I think I understand, I was going to say. You are too quick with everything,’ said Thsaaa, and reached for the Paralashath. ‘Come here,’ they added, and curled a tentacle around Josephine’s wrist and guided her hand to the glowing surface, steering her fingertip in a pattern that might have been like the sigils we’d seen in the Morror ship.

‘Now, play again.’

Josephine’s dislike of doing what she was told briefly warred with her desire to see what would happen. Curiosity won and she put the harmonica back to her lips and started playing ‘Martian Sunset’ again.

The Paralashath answered the music. Colours and patterns streamed out of it, rippling over the sand and faint drifts of shalvulu quivering on our skin. Josephine’s playing hitched and her eyes went wide with amazement, and the colours faltered for a second, turned white and grey. She got back in control again and they steadied and strengthened with arcs of deep blue rising with the high notes and quivers of crimson pulsing with the rhythm over the ground.

Thsaaa said, ‘Ah, yes… I do see,’ and their colours started to sync up with the Paralashath’s colours, as they always did, but this time the hues were from the music.

Josephine actually looked a little teary-eyed by the time she finished playing again. ‘That was…’ she said rather hoarsely. ‘…Thank you.’

‘I wasn’t sure it would work,’ Thsaaa said modestly.

We made an early start the next day, seeing as how there wasn’t any food left.

‘Was your planet destroyed, Thsaaa?’ asked Josephine quietly, as the sun came up. ‘You said it was colder. And all of this… it isn’t just because you ran out of space for everyone at home, is it.’

Thsaaa hesitated for so long I wasn’t sure they were going to answer, but then said, ‘Yes. There is nothing left of it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was before I was born,’ whispered Thsaaa. ‘Whole nations annihilated, so many yeeeeeeears of searching, so many died from the hardship of travel, before they came to somewhere we could live.’

‘And Earth had the magnetic core… and it was too warm, but not by so much you couldn’t work with it,’ said Josephine.

‘Yes.’

Josephine sighed, and looked at her bag in her lap. I think one or two of the strange things she had in there might have been from her mum: maybe the little cushion, or the Christmas tree star?

‘Does it make you feel better, now that you know why?’

I could see Josephine thinking about it, warily testing herself the way you might press on a bruise to see how much it still hurts. ‘No,’ she said in the end, very calmly. ‘But thank you for asking.’

I knew something then, or maybe realised I’d known it for ages, and it made me feel even more tired than I already was. If winning the war meant getting the Morrors off Earth, we were never going to do it. And whether it was fair, or how much of a right we had to be angry about it, wouldn’t make a speck of difference. It was just how it was. Morrors weren’t going to be a weird little blip in Earth’s history after which everything went back to normal, any more than Victorians turned into Tudors or Tudors into Romans. The Morrors were going to stick around forever. It was just a question of how many people got killed before we found some way of handling that.

It was just as well that I’d never really been able to imagine a way of life without Morrors anyway.

‘What happened to your planet?’ asked Carl. ‘Why’s there nothing left of it?’

Again there was a long hesitation, presumably because Thsaaa wasn’t supposed to talk about any of this to humans, or maybe not at all. ‘…The Vshomu.’

We would have asked what the Vshomu was, except that was when we first got a glimpse of Zond Station.

And there was nothing left of that either.