Mars Evacuees

by Sophia McDougall

  I thought it was just as well she hadn’t been at Muckling Abbot, which was very down on that sort of thing. And then I thought that the army was probably very down on that sort of thing too, and became rather worried about her. Or even more worried about her, because I never completely got over that suitcase business.

  She often held her harmonica to her lips and pretended to play it, but didn’t – ‘Even though I’m very good at it,’ she told me candidly – because she thought it might not be the best way to make friends on a cramped spaceship.

  Not that she seemed very interested in making friends. Except with me, and she didn’t even exactly make friends with me – she just seemed to accept it had somehow happened.

  She was getting a reputation for being weird. One day I came back from the exercise chamber and found six kids gathered around our pair of beds where Josephine was sprawling as usual, this time with her legs propped against the wall so that she was half upside down.

  ‘Oh my God, don’t you ever change your clothes?’ asked Christa Trommler, who seemed to be the leader of the outfit.

  ‘No,’ Josephine said regally, without lifting her eyes from her book. ‘I like these ones.’

  ‘Ew,’ chimed in an American girl called Lilly. ‘Gross.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Gavin, another British kid. ‘You’re really starting to stink.’

  Josephine sighed. ‘If you’re going to do this,’ she said, ‘try to take account of modern technology. Obviously I don’t stink. No one stinks any more.’

  I was impressed at how good she was at seeming not to care, but her hands were very tight on the tablet.

  And of course she didn’t smell. For one thing, no one who is taking reasonable care of themselves in other ways starts to smell after only a few days of wearing the same outfit – even if that outfit doesn’t have nanotech in it, and practically all clothes do now. For another, there were not only ordinary showers on the ship, there were these sonic baths that could blast the dirt right off you and you could use one of them in your clothes.

  ‘You might as well say I’ve got bubonic plague,’ concluded Josephine. ‘Or demonic possession.’

  ‘Well I bet you have,’ said Gavin, who clearly wasn’t very quick on the uptake.

  ‘She’s one of those exam kids, Christa,’ said Lilly, pinching one of Josephine’s stones and tossing it gleefully to Gavin. ‘They all think they’re something special.’

  I was already stomping up in a state of some indignation but that last bit did not improve my mood at all. ‘Get out of our cubicle,’ I said.

  ‘Or what?’ said Lilly, rolling her eyes.

  ‘Or I go and tell Sergeant Kawahara how you are harassing us, obviously. It’s not very complicated.’

  ‘Oh, like she would even care about you whining,’ said Christa.

  I shrugged. ‘Well, I’ll give it a try and find out.’

  ‘You’re a snitching little cow,’ said Gavin.

  ‘Yes,’ I said grimly. ‘That’s exactly what I am.’ I sat myself down next to Josephine and glared at them until they wandered off huffing and shrugging and generally making a great show of that totally being what they wanted to do anyway. I do a good glare.

  Josephine didn’t say anything, but one hand came up and patted me on the arm.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘I’m used to it.’

  On the third day, Captain Mendez told us we would be slowing down to pick up a new passenger. This gave me of an amusing mental image of an isolated bus stop hanging in the void of space, but actually there was a research ship on its way back to Earth from the asteroid belt and a scientist was going to shuttle over from it and join the Mélisande on its way to Mars.

  We were all quite pleased to see someone new. We felt a silent clunk as the shuttle attached to the port bow, and a small group of nosy children gathered around the doors. But then nothing happened; the scientist did not come out. Captain Mendez went in and presumably said hello and checked that there really was a scientist in there and not an attack squad of Morrors. But he came out by himself and said, ‘Everyone back to your seats. Dr Muldoon is very busy.’

  Josephine sat up in a clatter of falling pebbles. ‘Dr Valerie Muldoon?’ she repeated in an uncharacteristically high-pitched squeal. ‘Oh my God. She’s on our spaceship! She’s going to be on our planet!’

  I watched her jump up and down a little. ‘And . . . we like her because . . .?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s a biochemist,’ said Josephine, in the tones in which other people would say, ‘She’s a rock star.’ ‘You must have read the profile on her in Nature . . .’ She saw my expression. ‘OK, no. But she’s one of the minds responsible for accelerated terraforming! She’s why Mars is supporting animal life even as much as it is!’

  She bounced again, and then abruptly sat down and hugged her knees, looking agonised.

  ‘. . . Do you want to go and see her,’ I said, trying (or at least mostly trying) not to sound amused.

  ‘I can’t bother her,’ whispered Josephine. She sounded almost crushed.

  ‘Why don’t you write her a fan letter?’ I suggested.

  ‘Huh,’ said Josephine, rolling her eyes and trying to look above such things, which didn’t work very well given everything I’d just witnessed.

  She managed to hold herself together for about fifteen minutes, lying on her bed and pretending to read a book, and then she cracked and started scribbling on a piece of paper. It took about five tries before she produced something that didn’t send her into fits of self-loathing, which I took to Crewman Devlin and asked if he could give it to the scientist when convenient. Crewman Devlin looked sceptical for a moment but then glanced at Josephine, whose eyes were now enormous wells of pleading, and he smiled and did something on his tablet, and a few minutes later the doors of the shuttle slid open to let him inside.

  We waited and Josephine tried to listen to music and not to have a nervous breakdown. Then eventually Crewman Devlin came out and said, ‘OK, she doesn’t mind chatting to you, but keep it quick, all right?’

  I went along with Josephine out of nosiness and for moral support. Dr Muldoon’s shuttle was a dimly lit, confusing place: like a small laboratory that was also a cosy bedroom and a rather alarming museum and, of course, a small spaceship. There was a bed with a patchwork quilt beside a window looking out on to the stars. There was a tank full of swimming things that I assumed were fish until they turned out to be gerbils with fins and furry fishtails, swimming around underwater and nibbling seaweed as if that was perfectly normal. Another tank held several gallons of violet goop, sloshing quietly under its own power and emitting a gentle hum (B-flat, Josephine told me authoritatively later). And in a plastic case was what looked like a pink football hanging in a tangle of red wires, but which seemed unfortunately likely to be a living ball of skin in a tangle of blood vessels. The room was lit by the amber glow of virtual screens hanging above a bank of whirring devices and Dr Valerie Muldoon was rapidly adjusting figures on one and flicking the results over to another. She had a lot of long red wavy hair and a sharp pointy nose. I could see at a glance she was another one like my mum – one of the few who were having a really good war. Dr Muldoon’s eyes were almost too sharp and awake and bright as she turned and looked at us. You only noticed the tired look around the eyes of most grown-up people when you met someone who didn’t have it.

  ‘I’msorryI’msureyougetthisallthetime,’ said Josephine in a rush.

  ‘Actually no,’ said Dr Muldoon, dryly.

  ‘Could you . . . uh . . . autograph . . .’ Josephine stammered. She’d called up a book on her tablet and handed Dr Muldoon her stylus so she could scribble her signature on the screen.

  ‘So are you both into biochemistry, then?’ she asked.

  I said, ‘I haven’t read your book yet, Dr Muldoon, but I am sure it’s very good and I am interested in biology.’ I didn’t add ‘. . . But I like it to be more normal,’ because that wouldn’t have been polite.

>   Josephine said, ‘I’m a little more interested in physics, and, well, archaeology, but . . .’

  ‘Then we can’t be friends!’ cried Dr Muldoon.

  Josephine smiled at the joke, but she’d become still and solemn instead of twitchy and excited. I started to see that although all that fangirling was perfectly genuine, it wasn’t her only reason for wanting to be there. ‘But do you think . . . I could be like you? I mean, doing science for the war effort. Any kind of science. Anything, really . . . rather than being in the army.’

  So she’d still been brooding over that first conversation we’d had.

  Some of the Good War spark went out of Dr Muldoon’s eyes.

  ‘Even I’m an EDF officer, technically,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve yet to fire a shot at a Morror, but it could happen. I had to go through the training, and that was . . . oh, probably around the time you were born. And I can’t do much about the rules . . . but I’m afraid they’re tougher now.’

  Josephine nodded but said nothing, and her face had gone very blank.

  ‘Come round to the lab on Beagle sometime, if you like,’ Dr Muldoon said kindly, turning back to her screens.

  Hugging her tablet to her chest, Josephine turned quietly back to the door. But I couldn’t help asking: ‘What’s living on Mars really like?’

  ‘Make sure you’re careful,’ said Dr Muldoon. ‘It’ll kill you if you give it the chance.’ She looked at us again, and her face softened. ‘It’s beautiful, though. It’s home.’

  Obviously the issue of what Mars was going to be like was on everyone’s minds, and there were some orientation sessions to give us an idea of what to expect. They were not very reassuring.

  ‘You must never leave Beagle Base unless you’re accompanied by an EDF officer or one of the civilian robots,’ said Crewman Devlin. ‘There are still flash floods and dust storms, and you’ll need extra oxygen if you’re out on the surface for any length of time.’

  The Exo-Defence Force School at Beagle Base would be run in English, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish, and if you already spoke one of those as a first language then you had to learn another one to make it a bit fairer for everyone else. This left a lot of people thoroughly fed up, but at least there were enough people who spoke French, say, or Arabic, that they could talk to each other. The worst off were the twenty poor kids like Obsiye from Somalia and Taimi from Finland who were stuck being the only person speaking their particular language and were going to be that way for a long time. There would be messages beamed out to us from Earth sometimes, but we were trying to hide our channels from the Morrors so we couldn’t just bat emails back and forth whenever we wanted. And it can take as much as forty minutes for a signal from Mars to get to Earth, so you couldn’t have any kind of phone conversation anyway.

  We were going to have to get used to each other.

  And one person everyone was already having to get used to was Carl Dalisay. He was hard to miss, partly because he was one of the reigning champions of the Getting Around as Much of the Spaceship as Possible Without Touching the Floor game, (indeed, he was rumoured to have invented it), but mainly as an activist and Leader of the Resistance – that is, because of his ongoing campaign to stop the crew gassing us unconscious every night.

  ‘OK, PHASE ONE,’ he yawped the afternoon after the deputation failed, while some of us were minding our own business and trying to do useful things like learn Hindi. And then kids started marching purposefully down the aisles and the crew exchanged oh-God-not-again looks.

  Carl’s tously little brother came past our cubicle with a tablet and said, ‘Er, hi. We’re doing a petition? About the sleeping stuff ? Could you, um . . .?’

  The text of the petition wasn’t exactly elaborate. It just read:

  GASSING US. YOU SHOULD STOP.

  ‘They do already know we don’t like it,’ I said. But I signed it anyway, partly because I didn’t want to give anyone the impression I did like it, and partly because I felt sorry for the kid. He was only about eight, with gappy teeth and a rather pinched, homesick little face. He did not strike me as cut out for a life of protest politics in space. I said, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Noel. Um, Dalisay, obviously . . .’

  ‘And he is called Carl? Not Kuya?’

  ‘Kuya just means Older Brother,’ said Noel, shrugging.

  Josephine’s arm emerged suddenly from under the table and Noel jumped. She’d been sitting cross-legged under there not talking to anyone, which was the kind of thing she did sometimes.

  ‘Give it here,’ Josephine said, reaching for the petition. She took quite some time over it, and when she passed it back, it turned out she’d written a whole paragraph:

  We deserve a better answer than that there is a war on. War does not justify something just because you want it to. Therefore I wish to protest in the strongest possible terms your indiscriminate and punitive use of a substance whose safety record has never been shared with us. Sincerely, Josephine Jerome.

  As I was reading it, Josephine poked her head out from under the table and peered at Noel with narrowed eyes. She asked, ‘Is that a snail?’

  Noel blushed, clapped a cupped hand protectively over something that was crawling up his sleeve, squeaked, ‘No!’ and scurried away.

  Anyhow, obviously the petition didn’t work, even though I think every kid on the ship signed it. Except that Captain Mendez made an announcement informing us that Somnolum X’s safety record was excellent, thank you very much. But still Carl did not give up.

  Phase two started with about ten Australian voices, an hour before Somnolum X time. ‘Don’t push the button,’ they all chanted in unison. ‘Don’t push the button.’ At once, other voices joined in. By the time the chant was happening in every language on the ship at once, it sounded fairly hellish. But even though it was so clearly a losing battle, I did sort of admire Carl’s persistence. I told Josephine so.

  ‘Oh, this doesn’t count as persistence any more,’ she muttered crossly. ‘This is just showing off.’

  I joined in anyway, and Josephine, who was trying to read, shot me a look of complete betrayal. The only result of the chanting was that Crewman Devlin pressed the button half an hour earlier than normal, and Josephine woke up the next morning with a very dim view of Carl Dalisay indeed. This didn’t get any better that night, when they started chanting again, and even earlier this time – two hours before the usual Somnolum X time. Josephine snapped after five minutes of it and shouted, ‘SHUT UP!’ to the spaceship in general. And then Lilly and Gavin had another go at her for being a suck-up in the exercise room the next day, and I had to enlist Kayleigh to help make them leave her alone.

  But we still didn’t actually know Carl – until he embarked on phase three.

  On the fifth day we were just finishing lunch when I saw Josephine raise her eyes suspiciously towards the ceiling. I didn’t see anything, but I could hear a scuffling, scrambling noise as if there was a rat up there. You never want there to be a rat in the ceiling but particularly not on a spaceship. We both got up and stood staring as the noise came closer, and then suddenly a bit of panelling gave way and Carl tumbled through and knocked us over and this is how we met him properly.

  Not that the conversation got very far. Josephine got up, rubbing her shoulder and said, ‘What,’ and Carl said distractedly, ‘Oh hi, I’m Carl. Listen, I think I’ve kind of . . .’

  And then there was a hiss and a whiff of Somnolum X in the air. And Josephine said, ‘Oh, you are kidding,’ and promptly collapsed, and I yelled, ‘CREWMAN DEVLIN YOU NEED TO GET YOUR OXYGEN MASK ON RIGHT NOW.’

  And then we were all unconscious.

  ‘I was only playing the Getting Around as Much of the Spaceship as Possible Without Touching the Floor game,’ said Carl later, when the three of us were outside the captain’s cabin, waiting to be called inside.

  ‘Oh,’ said Josephine, who had been trying to kill Carl using only her eyes and her brain for the last fifteen minutes. ‘
You were just playing. In the ventilation system. Which carries certain gases that we breathe. Like Somnolum X. And oxygen.’

  Carl spread his hands. ‘OK. I thought either I’d find a way to stop them, or I’d have an unbeatable Getting Around as Much of the Spaceship as Possible Without Touching the Floor score. Either way, a win. I mean knocking us out with Somnolum X is wrong, yeah? I saw what you wrote on my petition! It was great! So this is like I’m resisting, right? It’s like a revolution!’

  ‘I think it’s more like terrorism,’ said Josephine icily.

  Then Captain Mendez called us inside. He was probably about forty or so, but I had a sort of impression he’d looked rather younger when we started out.

  ‘Do you realise you could have poisoned or suffocated everyone on the ship?’ he asked.

  ‘We didn’t do anything,’ said Josephine. ‘It’s not our fault he crashed out of the ceiling and nearly killed us.’

  ‘I don’t care who did what,’ said the Captain wearily.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I would have thought you really ought to.’

  ‘That’s enough out of you, Alistair; you’re in enough trouble as it is.’

  ‘MY NAME IS NOT ALISTAIR,’ I said, but Josephine elbowed me in the ribs and I shut up.