Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

Silence settled in around us.

‘Are we there yet?’ asked Noel, waking up.

I thought we would have to sleep wherever we could cram ourselves on the floor, but it turned out the Flying Fox was better equipped than that. You pressed a button and the hatch to outside popped open, and an egg-shaped pod with smooth, firm walls of glossy fabric ballooned itself out of a cavity in the wall, little legs unfolding to the ground to support it. Or rather, the Goldfish pressed the button with its nose; we’d never have found it otherwise. I thought the Goldfish looked even smugger than usual after that, which should have been impossible as its expression couldn’t really change and it always looked smug. The Goldfish called its discovery a Sleep Capsule and I called it an unusually impressive tent, but either way all we had to do was fasten some toggles and get the sleeping bags out of compartments under the seats – and the Goldfish had to tell us where they were, too.

We had Smeat bars and dried apricots for supper, and then we flopped into the tent. Carl dragged his sleeping bag over to the far wall and, with a dramatic huff, lay down as far from Josephine as possible.

‘What did you do to him earlier?’ I whispered to her when the Goldfish had turned out the lights and settled into standby mode for the night.

‘Nerve clusters,’ she replied darkly, and instantly went to sleep, leaving me wondering rather anxiously just why she knew about those.

But in the end I went to sleep too, without really having much of a clue where we were, besides hundreds of miles from the nearest human being.

When I woke up, I was alone in the tent, though I could hear Josephine’s harmonica nearby so I knew nothing too awful had happened.

Someone had opened a slit in the rear wall of the tent. I poked my head out of it.

Hundreds of perfectly round little lakes and ponds were scattered across the red plain, shining in the sunlight as though someone had dropped handfuls and handfuls of silver coins. And bright green moss was growing on the rocks.

The Goldfish was resting on a hump of moss in the sunshine. Noel was lying on his front, letting a beetle run across his ungloved fingers and talking to it softly. Josephine was perched on the wing of the Flying Fox, swinging her legs and playing the harmonica.

‘We thought we should let you sleep, seeing as you got so bashed up last night,’ Noel told me, as I lowered myself down to the ground.

‘Are you feeling better, Alice?’ the Goldfish asked.

In one way I was feeling worse, because all the places I’d been hit had got more achy in the night, but the sun and the solar mirrors were bright in the lilac sky, and the light was sparkling on the water, and I’d successfully avoided crashing the spaceship into anything the night before, and we could now be completely confident of being left alone by Gavin and Lilly and co., so I felt pretty good about life. ‘Yes, thanks,’ I said. Josephine tossed me a pack of crackers and dried fruit and I started my breakfast.

Carl walked up from behind the Flying Fox. ‘Where are we, Goldfish?’

The Goldfish was very happy to be asked. ‘This is the Acidalian Plain, Carl,’ it began.

‘The Acidalia Planitia ,’ grumbled Josephine, who preferred the old Latin names.

‘And look, you see those ponds and lakes?’ the Goldfish went on. ‘Those are all craters left by meteor strikes, filled with water now because of terraforming! We’re still north of the Martian dichotomy line, which is why the ground was nice and smooth for Alice to land on. If we keep heading south, things are going to get a whole lot more bumpy.’

I started worrying about that, but Carl had other concerns. ‘Has anyone ever been here before us?’

The Goldfish tilted to one side. ‘Well, I don’t have articles about every exploratory trip before terraforming… but no, Carl, probably not.’

I might have had a nice little moment of awe about us being the first people ever to be there, but before I could really get it going, Carl flung his arms wide in triumph. ‘THEN I AM THE FIRST PERSON TO DO A WEE ON THE ACIDALIA PLANITIA ,’ he announced to the universe.

Josephine dropped her harmonica to utter a scoff of disgust, which only made Carl even more pleased with himself.

The Goldfish, however, seemed to take this as a prompt to start being even more teacherly and motivational. ‘Right, gang,’ it said, ‘anyone else need to go? No? All got your teeth clean? Good. Then…’ It did a joyous swirl in the air. ‘ Iiiiiiit’s History Time!’

‘Oh, not this again,’ I said.

‘Goldfish, if you can’t understand why it isn’t History Time, then you’d better go home,’ said Josephine, jumping down from the wing of the Flying Fox. ‘Our priority is survival. We can’t keep having this conversation.’

‘There’s always time for the fall of the Roman Empire,’ said the Goldfish, its cheerful tone somehow stiffening.

‘Look, none of that teacher stuff applies any more,’ said Carl. ‘We’re not doing lessons. You can’t make us.’

The Goldfish hung motionless for a moment, the light inside it quietly throbbing. ‘Can’t I?’

Then its eyes flashed red and we all jumped as something whipped through the air around the Goldfish and stung us like an electric shock.

‘Ow!’ we cried in unison, and then stood there staring at the Goldfish and at each other, and couldn’t believe that had actually happened.

‘Was that corporal punishment ?!’ Josephine asked, incredulous.

‘That’s against the law!’ cried Carl.

‘Would you like to make a complaint?’ enquired the Goldfish sunnily.

‘Yes!’ I said.

‘Your complaint has been logged! Your feedback is important! NOW,’ roared the Goldfish, in a blaring robotic voice, stripped of all perkiness and about two octaves lower than normal, ‘YOU WILL DO YOUR HISTORY COURSEWORK.’

All we could really do was make outraged noises as we sat down on the ground and got out our tablets, or rather Josephine and Noel got out theirs because the kids back at Beagle had stolen Carl’s and mine.

‘ I never said I didn’t want to do lessons,’ said Noel piously. ‘You didn’t need to zap me .’

I wondered if the Goldfish was planning to do a full seven-hour school day right there on the Acidalia Planitia , or if it would just carry on teaching forever, zapping us whenever we tried to escape until we all died of hunger or radiation. But after an hour, when Josephine groaned, ‘We’ve got to get moving , Goldfish,’ the Goldfish agreed brightly, ‘OK, time to go!’ and floated off into the Flying Fox, content.

An hour of schoolwork a day, then , I thought. It wasn’t an unreasonable price to keep it happy.

So we started packing up, and I looked into the food situation. There was still quite a lot left.

‘I guess we should be at Zond by this evening,’ Noel said.

‘We should save some of this stuff anyway,’ said Carl. ‘In case anything goes wrong.’

And it was just as well we did.

‘I wish there could be toast,’ I said.

‘I wish there could be champorado,’ said Carl.

I glanced at him. ‘Hmm?’

‘It’s this kind of chocolate rice porridge; you have it for breakfast with dried fish.’

‘Oh. That sounds nice!’ I said, trying to make a face like I meant it.

‘Yeah, I know, you think it sounds disgusting,’ said Carl tolerantly. ‘All white people do, and you’re all wrong. We really only have it now when Auntie Marikit comes round. Well, we did have it then, I guess.’ He stirred around in the stock of Smeat bars and dried apricots, but there was nothing in there like Auntie Marikit’s champorado, and he sighed.