Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

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.

‘C umbakīya 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 Th saaa.

‘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 Th saaa . ‘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.

For a few horrible seconds, all we could do was try to hang on and hope Monica didn’t overturn completely. The Goldfish reeled through the air above us in a white haze of water as the rain bounced off its flanks, its eyes flashing as it tried to keep Monica under control. Monica’s legs flailed and thrashed, but giant robot spiders do not make good swimmers.

We collided with a spur of rock, and stuck there for a bit, though we could feel the current trying to drag us loose.

‘ Untie me, please ,’ said Th saaa urgently. It had the ends of its tentacles coiled around what had been a pipe in the Flying Fox, but with its upper tentacles bound to its torso it couldn’t get a good grip.

I was clinging to the same thing too and worrying that I could feel it coming loose.

Carl reacted while I was still thinking; he grabbed one of Josephine’s Morror blades and hacked through Th saaa ’s duct-tape bindings. Of course, this left him only one hand to hang on with himself, and his immediate reward was a surge of floodwater that coursed over Monica’s back and swept him off before he could even yell.

One set of Th saaa ’s tentacles wrapped tight around the pipe, the other around Carl’s arm, both at once.

Carl and everyone else made up for lost time on yelling. The Morror didn’t say anything, but didn’t let him go.

And that was all well and good but then we came loose from the outcrop of rock and went swerving downhill again. This time, the Goldfish had Monica tuck her legs in so we were riding something more like a sledge if still not like a boat, and then we were hurtling towards another mound of rock and I thought, Oh, God, this is it , but then Monica got her legs around it and gripped and we were more or less stable, though with the flood still surging around us and the rain beating down.

Everyone except the Morror had started trembling. ‘We’ve got to get out of this,’ I shouted into the roar of the rain. ‘Goldfish. Can’t breathe properly. And the cold. Hypothermia. Pneumonia.’

‘Can you go and look for any kind of shelter?’ Josephine gasped.

‘I’ll do my best,’ it replied, and vanished into the rain. I missed it immediately; with the air and the ground brown and churning around us, it was all too easy to imagine it wouldn’t make it back.

I started checking to see what we might have lost to the floodwater, but once I’d got oxygen masks on to everyone I was too cold and wet to go on. With some hesitation I handed over an oxygen mask to Th saaa, who then proved that we still had Josephine’s bag of strange things, because it whipped its tentacles like a lasso across the platform and snatched its shiny object out of it.

Josephine looked indignant but didn’t demand it back, because you can’t expect prisoners to actually hand you the means to interrogate them.

‘I saved your life,’ it reminded Carl.

‘Yeah, I guess you did,’ Carl said. ‘Uh. Thanks.’

‘I hope you will bear that in mind if you should succeed in taking me to your superiors. I suppose you do not have the concept of ushaal-thol-faa , but you do at least have crude approximations like dhan’yavāda and gratitude in your languages, which I believe should have some influence on your behaviour.’

‘Yeah, all right . At least you’re honest about why you did it,’ said Carl, shivering, clearly beginning to feel rather less grateful.

But Noel wasn’t. ‘THANK YOU SO MUCH, TH SAAA ,’ he exclaimed, even though his teeth were chattering. ‘He’s my brother. I know he’s kind of an idiot, but still I’m really, really glad you didn’t let him drown.’

The Morror peered down at Noel and looked a little startled, or at least I thought it did.

‘I was only in trouble because I went and untied you,’ grumbled Carl. ‘Where’s your usha -whatever?’

Th saaa ignored him. It ran the very tips of its tentacles over the surface of its object in an intricate, swirling pattern, and then placed it in the centre of the platform. Josephine could’ve grabbed it again but she didn’t, just looked at it warily.

‘So come on, what is that?’ I asked.

‘It is a Paralashath ,’ said Th saaa , which of course told us nothing at all. But then the Paralashath came to life again and started glowing, and this time it was giving off not only coloured light but heat.

‘Oh! Is that what it’s for?’ I cried, eagerly shifting closer to it.

‘No,’ said Th saaa rather snottily, like it would have rolled its eyes if it had been human. It might not be a fan of our words for gratitude but ‘no’ was one human word it seemed quite happy with.