Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

A tall Quth- laaa Morror – at least, that’s what I assumed they must be because they had the same kind of tendrils as Th saaa – came along and sighed, ‘I am Warth- raaa . Come thiiiiiiis waaaaaaaay, ’ at us, being not as good at English as either Th saaa or Swarasee- ee.

‘Do you have to – to run off anywhere else, Dr Muldoon?’ Josephine asked, trying to sound casual about it.

Dr Muldoon smiled. ‘No. Swarasee- ee and I need to be on the first ship to reach Earth; someone has to be the one to brief the EEC. And I need you to make sure I have all the facts.’

‘Hey, kids!’ called an unmistakeably perky voice.

‘Goldfish!’ Noel cried in delight before we could even see it.

The Goldfish came swimming over the heads of the remaining Morrors, with Th saaa hurrying along behind it.

‘You’re OK!’ it said. It showered us with sparkles. ‘I’m so proud of you guys! Doesn’t that just show you what teamwork can do?’

‘…Well, teamwork, flamethrowers and energy torpedoes, yes,’ Josephine said.

‘They fixed you!’ Noel said, reaching up to hug it.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Noel!’ said the Goldfish, with that faint edge to its perkiness that meant it was in fact profoundly cross. ‘These pesky Morrors! You can’t expect them to fix anything. Not properly, anyway!’

‘Why? What’s wrong with you?’

It still looked rather a mess, of course. There was no light behind its right eye, which had been stuck clumsily back into place with glue, and it still had all its scrapes and dents. But it was flying and talking.

‘They took out your zapper, didn’t they,’ said Josephine.

Carl burst into tactless laughter. The Goldfish’s eyes flashed red, but indeed, nothing happened.

‘We could not let it fly around armed,’ said Th saaa. ‘It tried to attack us the moment it was reactivated.’

‘Look, I know it must be very confusing for you, Goldfish, but a lot of things happened while you were… deactivated, and now us and the Morrors are kind of on the same side,’ I said.

‘It’s more of an informal truce,’ said Josephine.

‘And now you can’t make us do history,’ said Carl, who hadn’t stopped laughing.

The Goldfish went into a massive sulk and stopped talking to everybody.

‘I’m sorry it’s being so rude,’ said Noel to Th saaa . ‘Thanks so much for fixing it.’

Th saaa flared their tentacles dismissively. ‘It is really a quite primitive device,’ they said. ‘It was simple to repair.’

Josephine cocked her head sceptically. ‘Did you actually do it yourself ?’

Th saaa shuffled and went slightly yellow. ‘Well… no. I got a grown-up to do it.’

‘Th saaa !’ called Flath, rippling green and peach and gesturing. ‘ Athwara sel lamarath-te! ’ And Warth- raaa beckoned to us again, with the same colours.

‘Just a minute,’ I called.

‘I have to go,’ said Th saaa hurriedly. ‘But first, I want to… Josephine. Please take this.’

Th saaa was holding out the Paralashath.

Josephine went very still and wide-eyed. In fact, we all did.

‘Because it may be a while before we see each other again, but when we do, I hope neither of us will be prisoners of war,’ said Th saaa. ‘And because of the music.’

Josephine stared at the Paralashath, which was pulsing softly with the same colours streaming across Th saaa ’s skin. Then she reached into her bag and fished out her harmonica. ‘Then you take this,’ she said. ‘For the same reasons.’

Th saaa took the harmonica and Josephine hugged the Paralashath to her chest.

‘Thank you,’ said Th saaa , turning solemnest blue as Flath led them away.

‘You gave them your harmonica ?’ I hissed at Josephine incredulously, as Warth- raaa herded us off towards an invisible ship.

Josephine threw me one of her withering looks. ‘Yes. I gave them my harmonica. I didn’t give away my ability to buy a new one.’

The Morror ship swooped out of the cavern and into the lavender sky. Sunlight streamed in through the windows and glittered in the bands of colour around us on the walls. The wild empty ground plunged away as if we’d dropped it. We could see the dust left by the Vshomu, huge clouds of it now, clogging the sky. But they hadn’t ruined Mars yet. We rose higher, until we could see the green and red patterns of the tundra, then the shape of the new continents in the bright new sea. And somehow, despite the fact that we’d been clamouring to get off Mars for hours, it felt shocking to be actually doing it. I suppose it should feel shocking. Jumping on and off planets is a shocking thing to ever be able to do.

Mars shone and shrank until we tore free of the purple sky and it hung in the dark like a pendant made of copper and amethyst and jade and gold.

‘Beautiful,’ whispered Josephine, pressed against the window.

Her breath frosted in the air. The spaceship was just as colourful as the one we’d found on Tharsis, but even colder. The Morrors had seen this problem coming. You might have hoped this meant they would have some advanced, alien-y way of dealing with the problem of transporting easily chilled humans, but in fact they just piled a few wardrobes’-worth of spare clothes on to us and left us to huddle in a corner.

We did a lot of huddling on that voyage. Occasionally we’d try to warm up by jumping on the spot, as the ship was too small and the situation too urgent for a decent round of the Getting Around as Much of the Spaceship as Possible Without Touching the Floor game. And we had quite a lot of time to worry and feel the cold. The ship was faster than the Mélisande had been, but not that much faster: as in, we were going to get back to Earth in about three days rather than a week, but we weren’t going to flit back magically in twenty seconds, which is of course what we wanted to do. And there weren’t proper beds for us; the Morrors roosted in alcoves to rest and so we had to stay huddled in the pile of clothes on the floor to sleep. Camping on an alien spaceship is weird and going to the loo is even weirder, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

I missed Th saaa . The grown-up Morrors were just like grown-up humans in that they talked almost exclusively to other grown-ups (Dr Muldoon, in this case) and didn’t tell us what was going on. Swarasee- ee did at least show us how to make the Paralashath work as a heater (though we couldn’t have it on all the time because the Morrors got too hot) and Josephine tried to ask them about the people who made it and what it meant.

‘I’m sorry, I have never been very interested in Paralashath as an art form,’ said Swarasee- ee , politely.

Unfortunately, once we’d been in space a few hours, the Goldfish stopped sulking.

‘Hmm, looks like we’ve got a lot of time on our hands,’ it said. ‘What shall we do?’

‘Oh, no,’ I said.

‘How about… biology? Alice loves biology, don’t you, Alice?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, too bad,’ said the Goldfish. ‘Let’s talk about BIOMASS.’

We cast despairing looks at Dr Muldoon, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground, wrapped in five layers of Morror kilts, and jabbing important things into Josephine’s tablet.

‘As an EDF officer, I’m ordering you to stop this,’ Dr Muldoon told the Goldfish.

The Goldfish didn’t care. It started projecting the carbon cycle all over the place.

‘Look at them,’ said Dr Muldoon. ‘They’re frozen and traumatised and they should all be in hospital.’