Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘It’s actually OK,’ he said, chewing thoughtfully. ‘Kind of like crab… but more meaty… and sort of raspberry.’

‘Crab and raspberry ?’

‘Yeah, but it works. Come on, Th saaa. Have an apricot.’

Th saaa rippled green and black. ‘I will soon have no choice. Your army will not have Morror food for me,’ they said. They warily extended a tentacle to accept a dried apricot, put it in their mouth, and instantly shuddered. ‘The texture …’

‘Never mind, try something else. Jo! Have you got any of those ginger biscuits left?’

Carl and Noel were now equally enthused about interspecies food-sharing and were busily sorting through our scant resources in hope of finding something the Morror liked. Th saaa listlessly accepted energy bar after cold noodle and though I suppose you couldn’t expect actual enthusiasm, I found its limp disgust a bit irritating. Carl and Noel, however, only seemed to see it as a challenge.

Th saaa cautiously tried a lump of cheese and twitched and shuddered, but I thought maybe they weren’t totally unpleasant twitches and shudders. Th saaa ate a little more and said, ‘That’s so strong.’

‘That’s made of milk,’ explained Noel.

‘Which is a fluid cows secrete to feed their young,’ muttered Josephine darkly. ‘Laced with bacteria and then fermented.’

That put Th saaa off the cheese for the time being. But then they picked up something that quite randomly had survived everything, a bottle of tomato ketchup. They cautiously squirted a dab on to another tentacle, and touched it to their mouth.

Th saaa went blue, orange and fuchsia, made a high-pitched ‘ Eeeeeeee !’ noise and reached for more.

‘You like it!’ cried Noel, delighted.

‘This would go very well with baked fal-thra ,’ said Th saaa , busily sucking ketchup off their tentacles. ‘I wish my Ruul-ama could have tried this.’

‘What’s a Ruul-ama ?’ I asked, but Th saaa was either too engrossed with the ketchup to answer, or pretended to be because it was a convenient way of not answering questions.

‘Are you going to feed it all our food?’ asked Josephine sharply.

‘We don’t really need the ketchup,’ argued Noel, who was just delighted to see the Morror more or less happy.

‘Try and keep in mind why we’re on this messed-up planet instead of at home living our lives,’ said Josephine. ‘Also the small matter of the hundreds of thousands of people who aren’t living their lives at all.’ She drew up her knees and glowered into the black depths of the cave.

After eating, we focused on properly warming up and drying things over the Paralashath. You’ve got to remember that we weren’t quite as badly off as we could have been in this situation, because our uniforms were made of up-to-date, temperature-controlled, highly waterproof nano-weave. On the other hand, what with all the crashing into things and being attacked by Space Locusts, our uniforms also had holes in them and the flash flood hadn’t been particularly kind to the duct-tape patches.

So in the end we mostly stripped down to our underwear and set up a sort of clothes line between stalactites, and then just crouched as close to the Paralashath as we could and breathed some more oxygen. I was way past the point of worrying about the other kids seeing me in my pants and crop top, and frankly didn’t care if our friendly neighbourhood alien saw me either, but Josephine evidently felt rather differently, as she didn’t take anything off but ordered Th saaa : ‘Stop looking at us.’

Th saaa obeyed at once. ‘I apologise. I only… I never thought to see humans so close.’

‘ That’s the first thing you think to apologise for?’ said Josephine.

‘We’ve all been looking at it… them… Th saaa ,’ Noel countered.

‘Of course we have! But they know what we look like. They’ve been watching us for years; they’ve had time to learn our languages, they know a lot about how to kill us. We know what? That they like tomato ketchup!’

‘You know well enough how to kiiill uuus ,’ murmured Th saaa, their speech again getting soft and long and slow.

‘But you were the ones with the head start,’ said Josephine.

‘You could not understand.’

‘You keep saying so. I keep suggesting you explain. Why did you come to Earth? Why are you on Mars? What’s the plan?’

Th saaa sighed again. ‘We are forbidden to speak to humans.’

‘Well, then you’ve already broken the rules. Are you worrying about being in trouble with your people? Shouldn’t you be worrying about the trouble you’re in with us ?’

‘We neeeeeeed the Earth,’ whispered the Morror, breathing faster and sucking in oxygen from the mask I’d given them.

‘And we don’t?’

‘No, you do not feel it as we do, you are so blaaaaank ,’ said the Morror, flashing all kinds of colours.

‘Blank,’ repeated Josephine. And for a moment she was blank; expression just dropped off her face.

Then she leaped at Th saaa, and grabbed the oxygen mask away. ‘Is this blank?’ she shouted, pushing them against the rock wall. And then she was struggling with them while they gasped and she yelled: ‘ Why , just explain all of it, tell me why any of this had to happen.’

‘Go Josephine!’ cheered the Goldfish.

‘No! Don’t go Josephine!’ protested Noel in distress.

Th saaa might have been too surprised to fight back at first, but they weren’t tied up any more, so they wriggled and lashed out with their tentacles. Carl and Noel and me were trying to separate the two of them anyway, so Th saaa shortly got free and then they hopped off the rocky shelf into the shallow river coursing through the cave and splashed away into the dark making a wailing noise.

‘Oh, well now we’ve lost it,’ said Carl in disgust.

Josephine just stood there gasping and staring, and then she took off as well. I thought for a moment she was going after Th saaa, possibly in order to drown them, but then she splashed off in the opposite direction.

‘Stay here,’ I cried at Carl, dragging my boots back on.

‘Oh, this one’s all yours,’ he said, sitting down and putting his head in his hands in sheer exasperation.

I put on my uniform jacket and climbed gingerly down from the ledge. ‘Come on, Goldfish. I need a light,’ I said. ‘But when we find her, don’t talk , OK?’

I waded into the dark, feeling very cold and damp as soon as I was away from the Paralashath.

‘Josephine?’

The dark water glittered, reflecting the Goldfish’s glow. Josephine’s silhouette separated from a twisted column of rock. ‘What do you want?’

‘Well, I don’t know, I usually just do come after you when you charge off somewhere. And it generally works out OK.’

‘That’s why you’ve ended up out here,’ growled Josephine. ‘And nothing about this has worked out OK.’

‘Well, we’re alive. You found us Monica. We’re semi-close to Zond. We’ve got a Morror, even if they are really annoying and rude. Look, I would say I’ll leave you alone if you want me to, but what with this whole situation…’

Josephine made a sad, impatient little noise. I decided to try a different tack: ‘What’s going on with you? You’re the one who never even wanted to fight them.’

Josephine kicked up a spray of water. ‘I don’t want to be a soldier. I’m a useless pilot and I hate being told what to do. If I don’t get blown up on my first day, I’ll end up going crazy and shooting myself.’