Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘Look on the bright side – as long as they’re doing that, we get out of algebra,’ Carl whispered to me as we settled down to watch.

Now, you do assume that invisible aliens who’ve besieged your planet your entire life can’t be completely thick. So, much as I respected Josephine’s brain, I was pretty surprised when she proceeded to wipe the floor with the Morror, who just got yellower and yellower as Josephine finished her quiz in about a third of the time they needed and, according to the Goldfish, got ninety-six per cent right while Th saaa got nothing.

‘That is a lie!’ Th saaa exploded. ‘You are cheating! You have no thol-vashla-sleeth!’

‘Aww, no one likes a sore loser, Th saaa, ’ chirped the Goldfish with undisguised satisfaction.

But the triumph had gone out of Josephine’s face. ‘It’s because it’s in base ten,’ she mumbled, almost inaudibly.

‘What?’

‘Base ten!’ Josephine yelled. ‘Ordinary maths! Human maths! We work everything by tens because people started off counting on their fingers! But look at it… them!’

‘Yes!’ Th saaa proudly waved the three tentacles that grew at each shoulder. ‘I knew there must be an explanation! You are using the wrong kind of mathematics!’

‘There is nothing wrong with our mathematics,’ snarled Josephine.

So Th saaa wanted to do the whole quiz again in base six. And Josephine might have been an intellectual prodigy, but this wasn’t something she’d had a lot of practice with.

‘Have you got any logic tests, Goldfish?’ she asked.

‘You are trying to avoid a fair challenge!’

‘I am trying to find something with a universal frame of reference!’ Josephine retorted.

‘Maybe there isn’t one,’ said Carl.

‘All right, so we’re not going to find out who’s cleverest today, and everyone’ll just have to learn to live with that,’ I said in exasperation, while the contestants glared at each other and then at me.

‘You souuuuuuund like my Suth- laaa -hun-Ruul,’ grumbled Th saaa.

‘Your what?’

‘I’m pretty sure you just got called an alien granny, Alice,’ said Carl.

‘If you were that intelligent, you’d have realised the problem straight away,’ muttered Josephine to the Morror. ‘ I was the one who did that.’

Noel decided to smooth things over at this point by shuffling over to Th saaa to show them the various things his tablet could do that were more fun than maths tests. ‘See, it’s a bit like a Paralashath,’ he said.

‘No, this is a much simpler construction than a Paralashath,’ said Th saaa immediately.

Noel shrugged and just played some songs and videos, and then various funny things he’d got off the internet at home.

Th saaa tolerated this loftily for some time. Then Noel hit play on a particular video and there was a much more noticeable effect: tendrils swayed and flashed red and pink and Th saaa wheezed, ‘The… creature… pushed the human… into the pond .’

‘Are you… laughing?’ I asked uneasily. ‘Or are you ill ?’

‘Please, show it agaaaaaain ,’ begged our Morror.

I suppose some things are universal after all. It was a particularly funny video of a goat butting a man into a pond.

Noel leaned over to show something else on the tablet and, as he did so, brushed Th saaa ’s tentacle with his hand.

‘You’re a lot warmer than I’d have expected,’ he said thoughtfully. Tentatively he held his hand out so Th saaa could touch it or not as they wanted to. ‘I thought Morrors liked everything really cold.’

Hesitantly, Th saaa coiled a tentacle-tip around Noel’s finger. ‘And I knew you would be cold. And yet… I thought it would be like touching something dead…’

‘Oh.’ Noel frowned, and then decided to shrug it off. ‘No, I expect it’s a bit like what touching a reptile feels like, to a human.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Th saaa. ‘You generate less heat, and lose it more quickly. We would overheat in warmer climates. Our world was cooler – we were made to keep warm easily.’ Th saaa sighed and flickered sage-green and grey. ‘Humans… humans do not need such particular conditions.’

After that, the Goldfish said the storm outside had stopped, and we figured we were as dry and ready for travel as we were going to get.

Which frankly wasn’t that ready, after everything. A big part of me really didn’t want to move. It was difficult to do it without starting to promise myself things like baths and warm beds and hot pasta and Mum and Dad, and I’d been pretty good at not focusing too much on that sort of thing up until now and I was scared of getting let down and not being able to take it.

We waded out of the cave and piled onto Monica.

Everything outside was still extremely wet, to the point of there being exciting new torrents of floodwater thundering across the landscape, but it was now more possible to skirt around them, and Monica was sure-footed enough not to slip in the mud.

The umber clouds parted and the little sun came out as we skittered round the flank of Mount Peacock. A misty rainbow hovered over the peach-coloured ridges of the land beyond.

Th saaa was entranced. Their tentacles spread wistfully towards it and their colours flickered into sympathetic bands of red, orange, yellow, green. ‘A vamala-raaa ! It has been so looooooong ,’ they said.

‘Yeah, it has been,’ I agreed. I hadn’t seen one in years , even on Earth, and it made me feel a little better.

‘There are so few colours on this planet,’ sighed Th saaa.

‘That’s not really true,’ Josephine said. ‘Have you seen the little flowers that are growing now? The purple sea and the grasslands? And even without the terraforming, the sky at night…’

Th saaa considered. ‘Yes,’ they conceded. ‘Yes. But you cannot imagine what it is like, without Ruhaa-thal . It is so strange, that you come from a planet that has mag… mag…’

‘A magnetic field, Th saaa ,’ supplied the Goldfish, and I thought, Wow, Thsaaa is now in the category of Kids the Goldfish needs to Teach Stuff. That really is progress.

‘A magnetic field,’ Th saaa repeated. ‘It is so strange that you have it and you did not evolve to use it. This place, it… it hurts . But yes, I can see it must be beautiful for humans.’

‘So, tell us about your planet, Th saaa ,’ said Noel.

Th saaa went quiet.

‘Or planets, plural?’ suggested Josephine.

‘I am not allowed. You already know, I am not allowed.’

‘Yeah, but c’mon, that horse bolted hours ago,’ Carl said.

‘That… horse?’ echoed Th saaa, confused.

‘There must be something you know is OK,’ said Carl. ‘Something that’s just about the stuff you do at home. Like, here’s an example. We come from a city called Sydney, our parents run a cinema, and I’ve seen Hawkflight so many times I can recite the entire screenplay. It’s about a Flarehawk pilot who chases a Morror ship through a wormhole to the Morror home world and he defeats all the… uh, never mind. I mean, in Sydney, there are many beaches, people like swimming.’

There was a slight pause. ‘We are aware of Hawkflight ,’ said Th saaa. ‘It is inaccurate on almost every possible level.’

‘There’s a fountain in Darling Harbour where the water goes in a spiral and you can play in it,’ offered Noel encouragingly, before Carl could say anything else tactless.