Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘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… Th saaa .’

‘That’s a nice name,’ said Noel encouragingly.

‘All right, Th saaa ,’ 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.’