Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

And very annoying it was too.

‘You’re using up oxygen,’ I said.

Josephine gave a one-shouldered shrug and a sad smile, and might as well have yelled I PREFER TO DIE A LITTLE FASTER DOING SOMETHING I LOVE for how subtle it was.

And somehow that did it. ‘OH FOR GOD’S SAKE,’ I said. ‘OW,’ I added, because I happened to have kicked the spaceship rather hard at the same time.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Noel, who’d been listlessly absorbed in some game on his tablet. By now I was shouldering my oxygen canister and wrapping up the nearest odds and ends and Smeat bars in a sleeping bag.

‘I have had enough ,’ I announced. ‘ You can all sit around being tragic if you want, I am going… THAT WAY, to look for a way out of this. So.’ A little hiccup of mad laughter found its way up my throat. ‘Yes. I’m going outside. I may be some time.’

‘What the hell, Alice,’ Carl said. But I jumped out of the spaceship and started marching off in what I thought was the direction of Zond.

The others tagged along, trying to reason with me or point out that I was an idiot.

‘You can’t walk a thousand miles on one tank of oxygen,’ Josephine snapped.

‘Well, I’m going to give it a try,’ I said. ‘You can do what you like. You can come along and be useful if you want. But –’ I waved my arms, ‘– I’m done with this entire doom thing.’

Josephine sighed. ‘Carl,’ she said apologetically and quietly, as if having gone loony I wouldn’t be able to hear her, ‘I don’t want her to go on her own. All right, Alice,’ she said more loudly, in a patient and noble sort of way. ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No!’ I yelled. ‘You can come with me if you’re going to help. If all you’re going to do is trail along looking like you just dropped your ice cream then you’re not allowed!’

‘What do you want me to do?’ snapped Josephine, and sounded just a bit more alive.

‘Think,’ I said. ‘You’re some sort of bloody genius, aren’t you? What’s the use of that if you just sit there and wait to die? Just try , can’t you?’

‘I can’t!’ Josephine cried. ‘It’s not fair to put that on me. What do you think I can do that you can’t? You haven’t got any ideas either!’

‘Yes, I have!’ I said. ‘ I’ve got the idea of walking that way until I somehow bump into something that’ll help. And if you think that’s stupid then you could at least try and think of something better!’

‘ There isn’t anything better! ’ shouted Josephine. ‘God! Just because I’m not bad at exams – doesn’t mean I can do magic , Alice . We don’t have any oxygen, we don’t have enough food – there was hardly anyone or anything to help on this planet even before they all ditched us and now there’s nothing out here except – ’

And she stopped. There was total silence.

‘…Except?’ I breathed.

‘Except…’ said Josephine again, though I don’t think she even heard herself or knew she was still talking. She turned slowly, eyes wide and unfocused, facing back the way we’d come.

‘ What ?’ Carl asked, ear-splittingly.

‘Robot pals,’ whispered Josephine. ‘Robot pals! Goldfish!’ She started jumping and waving and the Goldfish swooped down from its signalling station above the valley floor. ‘That lesson,’ she went on breathlessly. ‘Do you remember? We were learning about Noctis Labyrinthus and… Goldfish! Carl said there were only a few hundred people on the planet, most of them us, and Goldfish, you said there were plenty of your robot pals .’

‘Sure, Josephine,’ said the Goldfish, startled out of its gloom and as happy she’d remembered a lesson as if we were all still back in the classroom.

Josephine grabbed the Goldfish and stared into its plastic eyes. ‘Are there any of your robot pals near here now, Goldfish? Big robots—?’

Lights flickered in the Goldfish’s eyes as it thought – or rather, I supposed, scanned – for nearby robots. ‘There are some seed-planters and soil-testers and earth-movers about ten miles off…’

‘HA!’ yelled Josephine. She kissed the Goldfish’s plastic face and turned an unexpected cartwheel.

‘We’re going to do what , exactly, with the robot pals?’ asked Carl, in a slightly sarky way that was obviously the result of trying not to be too hopeful.

Josephine came right side up again, eyes shining. She said, ‘We’re going to catch one.’

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.