Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

Carl flopped into one of the seats at the back of the ship and Noel gave him a hug, and I flopped alongside them. I couldn’t help but wish the Goldfish was keeping an eye on the piloting just in case.

But the Goldfish was still just a broken piece of luggage in the back of the ship.

‘Do you think they’re alive?’ asked Josephine, as we sped through a sky stained orange with Martian dust. ‘The people from Zond and Beagle… Dr Muldoon?’

Dr Muldoon’s name couldn’t have meant anything to Th saaa, but they rippled pink and orange at her in what might have been encouragement. ‘I hope we will find everyone.’

The thing about someone pointing to a place on a map of an entire planet and saying, ‘I think it’s somewhere over there,’ is that at best that means flying over an approximately Wales-sized bit of ground without any idea what the thing you’re searching for looks like.

So basically we had to zigzag back and forth and round and round for ages, getting more and more ratty, and Th saaa said more and more things in their language which I’m sure were incredibly rude. And none of us had had anything to eat that day, and it was weeks since anyone had had a cup of tea.

Then after hours of this, Th saaa yelped, ‘There! There!’ and leaped towards the viewport in order to point at… nothing.

‘What? Where?’

‘We’ve gone past it now,’ said Th saaa , in grumpy purples and ambers.

Josephine doubled back and we flew around for what seemed like another million years.

‘That is the exact place you were pointing out,’ said Carl.

‘Clearly that cannot be true, because it is not there,’ said Th saaa.

We flew on.

‘There! There!’ cried Th saaa again.

‘Yeah, that’s a very nice rock face,’ said Carl.

‘The entrance is invisible,’ said Th saaa . ‘What else would you expect?’

‘I’m… really not that enthusiastic about flying straight into a rock face,’ said Josephine.

‘I can see it,’ I whispered. I could make out that sort of vague shimmer in the corner of my eye that I was getting used to where Morrors were concerned. ‘You can fly into it. It’s a big square hole in the rock, like a gate…’

‘I hate how you are not even looking at the screen when you say that,’ Carl moaned.

‘It’s there ,’ I said. ‘That is… at least, I think so.’

‘Well, that’s just lovely,’ Josephine said.

‘ I can see it perfectly well,’ announced Th saaa. But Th saaa wasn’t actually looking straight at the screen either, they were doing the same corner-of-the-eye thing I was.

‘ Obviously I can’t see it if I look at it,’ they said scathingly when this was pointed out. ‘It is invisible. ’

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ moaned Carl.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Down… and no, Jesus, right a bit ! And a bit more down… not that far down ! And there. There. Straight ahead.’

At this point I had to look at the viewport properly and couldn’t help but wince because we were, on the face of it, about to splatter ourselves against a massive rock wall like a bug on a windscreen and it was hard to hold on to the belief that this was a good idea.

Josephine let out a shriek as she closed the last few feet…

And then the wall was gone, and it was dim all around us.

We were in a huge chamber inside the mountain. It was very obviously not a natural space; it was square-cut and terraced into different levels, and though it was much starker and emptier than the inside of the Morror ship, there were coloured lights set into the ceiling and the floor, far below us.

And there didn’t seem to be anybody there.

‘Aaargh,’ said Josephine, panicking after flying through a wall and now having to pilot a Flying Fox in a sudden confined space.

‘Give,’ said Carl, swiftly leaning over her and taking the controls.

‘I’d have been all right,’ said Josephine, aggrieved, as he lowered the ship towards the rock floor.

‘Is there some way to cast one’s voice outside the ship?!’ cried Th saaa sharply , in very urgent colours .

‘Uh, a PA system? Yeah, I think this thing…’

‘ Give it to me. Now .’

Josephine handed them a microphone, and Th saaa started to talk into it, just as my eyes adjusted to the light inside the chamber and I started to pick up that faint shimmer of something …

Not just in one corner of my field of vision, either.

Everywhere.

‘Morthruu Mo- raaa uha -raaa porshwu raaa va, ha’thraa vel Th saaa athla- haaa quurulu nas hur uuu mua…’

There was an instant of silence. Then another voice spoke, loud but in soft, long, rippling syllables. ‘ Shuwathaaahal-vaaa-raha, ath-shal vel lamnawath vramlashaaa ath amna-clath.’

‘We should go outside,’ said Th saaa. ‘But stay behind me.’

Josephine flicked a button to open the hatch, and we stepped out. Th saaa spread their tentacles in front of us like a shield.

All around us, Morrors started uncloaking.

I hope we had decent excuses for being overwhelmed even before we found ourselves surrounded by aliens. Anyway, I came over slightly dizzy. It wasn’t just that there were so many Morrors, and they were all changing colour and tendril-rippling like anything, but they were so different from each other as well as from us. I don’t know if I’d have worked out about the five sexes if I hadn’t known it already, but as I did I could see that there were Morrors with lacy manes, and narrow-built Morrors whose manes covered nearly their whole faces, and very tall Morrors who didn’t have tendrils at all. But it wasn’t just that, it was that they had different-shaped mouths and eyes and no two colour palettes were really the same, and I mean, of course they weren’t all the same, but in our recent circumstances, it had been hard not to think of Th saaa as the standard representative of the Typical Morror.

For one thing, these Morrors were all grown-ups, and thus bigger.

For another, other than invisible suits, I guess Morrors didn’t really do military uniform, or else their clothes had some sort of meaning I couldn’t get. Many of them wore long A-line kilts like Th saaa ’s but in all different colours, and some of them with fin-shaped trains, and others wore layers of transparent fabric, or cream-coloured robes with holes cut away here and there so you could still see the colour racing across their skin.

Anyway, so all of that was very interesting, but you also had to take account of how several of them were holding things that were plainly weapons. Colourful, pretty weapons. But weapons. Pointed at us.

‘Hello,’ I said, giving the Morrors a silly little wave.

The Morrors talked to each other. The sound of their voices rose and fell; sometimes they’d get very vociferous, but sometimes it seemed as if most of what they wanted each other to know was in the colour and play of their tendrils and so they didn’t actually have to say much.

And tides of colour kept sweeping round the group like someone was dragging a paintbrush from one Morror body to the next, though any Morror might be dimmer or brighter. And there would always be streaks and twists that didn’t get passed on with the dominant colour, which would sometimes get into a little eddy in a smaller group or meet a splash of a totally different colour, which would either sweep around in turn the other way or bounce to and fro, which I thought maybe meant the Morrors were disagreeing with each other.