Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘Isn’t that too hot for you?’ asked Carl. ‘I thought you guys were all about the cold.’

‘This is pleasant for short periods. In these conditions, I am not at risk of overheating.’

‘Is this about engendering more ushaal-thol-faa ?’ asked Josephine sourly. Of course she had memorised the word on one hearing.

‘In part,’ said the Morror. ‘If you die of cold I doubt your robot companion would help me reach safety. Or refrain from… hurting me.’

I noticed for the first time a couple of blackened streaks on its chest and head, where the Goldfish had zapped it.

After that we just focused on breathing oxygen and trying to keep our hands warm. Monica’s back was still a horrible place to be in that storm, but it felt a bit less likely to be fatally bad.

Gradually the rain started to subside, and then I saw something glowing through the curtains of water around us. The Goldfish was back.

‘OK, kids, the good news is I think I found someplace,’ it said. ‘Bad news is I don’t think it’s safe to move Monica yet.’

It seemed particularly unfair that we couldn’t get to shelter until the thing we needed shelter from calmed down, but there it was. Everyone who wasn’t Th saaa huddled closer together around the Paralashath and Th saaa sat there on its own and watched. Once Noel asked curiously, ‘ Can Morrors drown?’

‘Yes!’ it replied crossly, and that was about the extent of conversation.

At last the torrent gushing round our outcrop dwindled to something that Monica could possibly wade through, and the Goldfish led us slowly down the slope of Tharsis and into a hole between two columns of rock. We had to climb off Monica’s back and let her scuttle in separately, which meant we had to wade through the small cascade splashing into the cave.

The cavern didn’t look, at first, like a good place to get dry, seeing as how water was streaming down the walls from unseen channels and dripping from the ceiling, and the bottom was practically a river. But there was a rocky shelf towards the back under a dry overhang, and with Monica crouching beside that we had a reasonable amount of space to recuperate in.

Our new floor space wasn’t the only thing illuminated by the combined light of the Goldfish and the Paralashath ; stalactites hung from the ceiling, some long and pointed like icicles, some heavy and swagged like velvet theatre-curtains. Stalagmites rose from the floor all crinkly and twisted like melting candles. As the Goldfish moved between the pillars, the rock glowed rosy-amber and translucent in places, and strange lacy shadows played across everything.

‘Guess we’ll be here for a while,’ said the Goldfish, deceptively casually. ‘You’ll need something to do… How about a math lesson?!’

‘Let us eat something first, for God’s sake,’ said Carl.

We started sorting through our remaining supplies to see what was still usable. We’d lost both the Morror blades when Carl nearly got swept away. We still had the shockray staff, but right now we weren’t as interested in mysterious alien weapons as we were in things we could eat. Some of our food had been washed away too, of course, and almost everything that wasn’t in sealed packs or tubs was ruined. Still, the damage could’ve been worse, though of course we were that much closer to running out and if we didn’t get to Zond soon … or if we didn’t find help when we got there…

‘Give the alien some lunch,’ said Carl.

‘I cannot eat your… Smeat,’ Th saaa said haughtily .

‘We don’t only eat Smeat,’ I said. ‘OK, this isn’t exactly dinner at the Ivy, but it’s not that bad, in the circumstances. We’ve still got cheese.’

‘Let it have its blue meat-stuff,’ said Carl. ‘It’s defrosted, anyway.’

‘We can’t keep calling it “It”,’ said Noel, who I thought was coming on a bit strong with this Rights of the Morror business, even though I guess I started it. ‘It’s a person.’

‘We call the Goldfish “It”,’ Carl pointed out. ‘It IS an it.’

The Goldfish surely was a person, I thought; it was programmed to want to do certain things and behave in a certain way, but it still had feelings and it could come up with its own ways of doing things. It had proven that when it zapped us into doing schoolwork. I felt guilty this wasn’t something I’d thought about before.

‘Do you mind us calling you “It”, Goldfish?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’m definitely an “It”, kids!’ said the Goldfish sunnily.

‘Er… and you, Th saaa ?’

‘I am not in the same category as a robot ,’ replied the alien.

‘OK, fine. Are you a boy or a girl?’ Carl asked.

‘No,’ said Th saaa.

‘Oh.’ There was a small silence. Carl considered. ‘Are you more… both, or more neither?’

‘No,’ said Th saaa.

‘Would you care to elaborate, would you like Carl to keep guessing indefinitely or do you want us to understand you’re not going to tell us?’ Josephine asked frostily.

‘I’m Quth- laaa ,’ said Th saaa wearily. ‘There is Suth- laaa , Quth- laaa , Ruul, Thuul and Ma-lashnath.’

We all thought this through.

‘Five sexes? How can you have five sexes?’ I asked. ‘I mean, what would they all do ?’

There was a slight pause as we all realised what I had asked, and my face got hot and later Carl called me a pervert. But at the time, no one said anything because everyone totally wanted to know.

Thsaaa didn’t seem to have an emotional reaction that I could make out, except possibly mild boredom: ‘As you like…’ it began.

So that’s how we ended up being the first humans ever to hear about Morror sex, and at first we were pretty interested. It turned out that though there were five sexes, it was actually really rare to have five parents – it was good if you did because you’d probably be extra healthy and live a long time, but it was only really possible when there was peace and plenty for all Morrorkind, which hadn’t happened in a while. But no one had fewer than three, and though Th saaa didn’t actually say, ‘And that’s another reason why we think you humans are so primitive,’ it was pretty clear.

So, yes, that was interesting. But then it just went on and on and on, and Th saaa kept stopping and explaining that though usually, most Morrors did it this way, there were like twenty per cent or something of them who did it that way. And after a while, without meaning to, I sort of stopped listening for a few seconds, and when I started again I’d completely lost track of who was supposed to Harvest the Genetic Material from whom, and who else would then Absorb it Through their Sensory Tendrils and what climatic conditions were required for a Thuul to give birth alone, and when they wouldn’t be able to without a Ma-lashnath. And we started nodding and saying Oh yes I see in a polite sort of way, and hoping it would stop talking soon. And at the end we still didn’t know what pronouns to use because Morrors don’t have pronouns. Well, no, they do in some Morror languages, but not in the one Th saaa spoke.

So I’m going to say ‘they’ when I’m talking about Th saaa , even if it gets a bit confusing. I can’t guarantee I mightn’t slip up and say ‘it’ or ‘he’ or ‘she’, but that’s the plan. Th saaa was as happy with this as they seemed to get about anything.

So anyway, eventually Carl created a distraction by eating some of the Morror food; I guess it was inevitable we couldn’t keep him from trying it indefinitely.