Space Hostages (2 page)

I
still have moments when the fact that I'm friends with an alien strikes me as kind of weird. I'll be chatting away to Th
saaa
and suddenly I'll be thinking, Tentacles. My friend has tentacles. Or, But seriously,
five
sexes? Or, It is just not
normal
for a person's skin to change from stripy blue to spotty green while they talk about what they watched on TV last night.

It is normal, though. It's been a year, so I ought to be over it by now. It's just that we don't have many Morrors living in Warwickshire; it's not snowy enough anymore, and there aren't many job opportunities for them. Th
saaa
lives in the Swiss Alps, so I don't get to see them as much as I'd like.

It was another rainy day. I'd come home, groaned
hello to my dad and Gran, staggered upstairs, and flopped onto my bed, where I was now trying to gather the energy to peel off my work overalls for a shower. Even though the war with the Morrors is over, I'm still an Exo-Defense Force cadet, and I still have duties, though these days we weren't so much defending Earth from aliens as defending Kenilworth from wet rubbish and the Leicester-to-Birmingham train line from long-fallen rotting trees. The ice didn't get as bad around here as it did farther north, during the war when the Morrors were freezing the planet over, but it was still
pretty
bad, and it turns out fifteen years of snow and then floods of meltwater can do quite a lot of damage. There are always supposed to be more robots coming to help, but they never seem to actually arrive. There are some things I like about National Service, like the fact that I get to have some medical training even though I'm only thirteen, but clearing rubble in the rain is not as fun and character building as the government broadcasts try to make it out to be.

But it was only two afternoons a week, and I always got to come home and eat a hot meal with my family, so it definitely beat plodding across Mars in the freezing cold wondering if you were going to starve, suffocate, or be eaten by Space Locusts first,
which was how I'd spent the previous spring.

Though sometimes I found myself . . . missing all that. Messed up, I know.

The ChatPort light flashed yellow on the ceiling. I managed to lurch into a sitting position and clap my hands, and there was Th
saaa
, standing in my bedroom. Not really, of course, though I could see a flickery slice of their sleeping niche behind them and a couple of different
Paralashath
s, which Th
saaa
composed with, softly changing color at the edge of the projection.

“Vel-haraaa,
Th
saaa,”
I said happily. My school doesn't teach
any
Morror languages, which I think is stupid. Ten million aliens live on Earth now, so we're probably going to want to know what they are saying, so I'm trying to learn online when I can. There are twenty-three surviving Morror languages, but I'm mostly sticking to Thly
waaa
-lay, which is what Th
saaa
speaks.

“Your accent, it does not improve, Alice,” said Th
saaa
, pronouncing it more like Al
eece
, which is not a Thly
waaa
-lay thing.

“Well, neither does yours. You sound more and more French,” I said.

Th
saaa
spread their tentacles in what I considered a very French kind of way, if French people had
tentacles, and said, “
Non
, I do not sound French. I sound
Swiss
.”

“How's the Kshetlak-laya going?” Th
saaa
likes studying the dead Morror languages that didn't make it when their planet got eaten by the Space Locusts—or the Vshomu, which is the proper word for them. Th
saaa
had been working on this long poem in the only Morror language I've heard that doesn't sound like sighing or wind in the trees. At least it's closer to a poem than anything else, but it's supposed to be performed along with a specially composed
Paralashath
.

Th
saaa
went melancholy colors. “I have hit a difficult passage. I cannot get the text to harmonize with the
Paralashath
at all.”

“Maybe it's deliberate,” I said. “You know. Experimental.” Th
saaa
flicked their tendrils impatiently. “Okay, I know! It's all too subtle and complicated for me to understand. We did this poem in English today. It goes:

“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky

And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by . . .”

Th
saaa
normally likes nothing more than discussing poetry, especially if there's an opportunity to explain why Morror poetry is better, but this time they said abruptly: “What are you
weeeearing
?”

“What?
Work clothes,
” I said.
“
Not all of us get to do our National Service just showing
Paralashath
s to little kids in schools.”

“I am aiding the reconciliation process,” Th
saaa
protested. “Can you please put on something more formal?”

“Do I have to wear a ball gown to talk to you now?” I said. “Wait, what are
you
wearing?”

Th
saaa
normally wears a long, plain kilt and nothing else, but today they were wearing an ivory robe with a pattern of oblong holes cut into the fabric over the chest, to show the colors changing with their moods in the spots and tendrils on their skin.

“Fancy,” I observed.

“I am speaking to you as an
official Morror envoy
,” they said. (Don't call Morrors he, she, or it. They aren't, so it's rude.) “I have been entrusted with a message by the Council of Lonthaa-Ra-Mo
raaa
! This is not a casual occasion.”

“Well, you didn't tell me!”

“I'm telling you now!”

“All right!” I sat up straight and tried to behave.
“Do I really have to change my clothes?”

I got a little worried they might be going to say they were leaving. The Morrors have their own country on Earth—Uhalarath-Mo
raaa
, which used to be Antarctica—and there are Morrors dotted about in cold pockets of the world like the Alps, but with the entire Morror species to accommodate, it's still pretty crowded. So they'd just finished terraforming a little moon orbiting a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system, and seven million Morrors who'd been living in spaceships and space stations around Earth had moved there.

Th
saaa
can be a bit of pain in the neck, but they are my friend. And Alpha Centauri is a lot farther away than Switzerland.

“No,” conceded Th
saaa.
“I apologize. I am a little nervous.” They gave their tendrils a brisk little shake and stood up straighter.

“You have heard, perhaps, that the work to make Aushalawa-Mo
raaa
habitable to my people is complete.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling an extra tinge of anxiety.

“Dr. Muldoo-
oooon
has helped my people very much.”

(Th
saaa
rather likes Dr. Muldoon's name.)

“Yes.”

“I will read the message to you now.”

Th
saaa
spread out a long, narrow scroll, illuminated in many colors, across all six tentacles.

“Dear Plucky Kid of Mars—don't
laaaaaugh
,” said Th
saaa
crossly. “This is an important document.”

“Sorry. It's just . . . they do know that's not our official title, don't they?”

Th
saaa
sagged a bit. “They do seem convinced it is,” they admitted. “I tried to explain. You know how it is.”

“Grown-ups don't listen to you,” I agreed.

“Dear Plucky . . . ,” Th
saaa
began again, and gave a very human sigh. “Dear Alice Dare. All the nations of Ra-Mo
raaa
owe you a debt for your part in bringing an end to the long war on Earth. Today, humans and Mo-
raaa
uha-
raaa
live in peace, and a new world welcomes the first Mo-
raaa
uha
-raaa
settlers. To celebrate the peace between our peoples, we invite you and your fellow Plucky Kids of Mars to join us on May the thirty-first of this year, for a ceremony to inaugurate the Mo-
raaa
uha-
raaa
's new home.”

“Oh,
yes
,” I said at once, bouncing a bit on the bed. I didn't hesitate, or think of getting chased by space locusts or crashing spaceships on Mars or anything else bad that had happened the last time I'd left the planet I was born on. “This is amazing, Th
saaa
.
You're coming? You're a Plucky Kid of Mars too.”

“Yes, I will come. It will be an opportunity to learn more about the culture of our people.”

“And also
fun
, maybe,” I said.

“La
hee
la wath-eyaa, Th
saaa
,” complained the voice of one of Th
saaa
's parents, in what I was pretty sure was agreement. An additional set of multicolored tentacles waved through the ChatPort, and Th
saaa
's quth-
laaa
-mi called cheerfully: “
Hiiiiiiiiii
, Alice!”

Th
saaa
's parents are a bit worried Th
saaa
is kind of a stick-in-the-mud.

“And the others?” I said.

“Carl and Noel are coming.”

I hesitated. “What about Josephine?” I asked.

“Josephine seems difficult to reach,” said Th
saaa
.

“Yeah,” I said, relieved it wasn't just me. I used to talk to Josephine on ChatPort all the time; she'd stayed with us in Wolthrop-Fossey twice, and we'd all gone to Switzerland to visit Th
saaa
together. But I hadn't heard from her in a month. I knew she was working hard. She was doing her World Baccalaureate, even though she's my age. Most people do it at eighteen.

She'd said I was her best friend. But I'd been starting to feel a little as if perhaps that was only
because we'd nearly died together several times on Mars. And now that we were back on Earth, perhaps she wasn't so interested in someone reasonably clever but nowhere near ready to take her exams five years early.

I shook the thought away. Josephine wasn't like that, she
wasn't
, and if I knew her at all, there was no way she'd turn down a chance to visit an alien planet. We were all going to be together again in space!

“How will we get there?” I asked. “Morror ships are freezing.”

“It is a human ship, with chilled chambers for Morror passengers.”

“Oh. So, an Archangel Planetary ship,” I said. I knew a bit about Archangel Planetary. Rasmus Trommler, the man who owns the company, had been in the news a lot, partly because he invented Häxeri, which is a programming system that makes computers work so much better it's in practically everything now—even the ChatPort—and partly because of scandals and court cases. Also, I'd been on Mars with his daughter, Christa, and putting it nicely, we hadn't gotten along very well.

Anyway, the only human-made ships that could go as far as Alpha Centauri were Archangel Planetary ships.

“I am honored by the Council of Lonthaa-Ra-Mo
raaa
's kind offer,” I said solemnly, feeling perhaps it was time I started living up to Th
saaa
's fancy outfit and their request for formality. “I accept with gratitude.”

“I hope your parents will let you come,” said Th
saaa
.

Until then it hadn't occurred to me that I had to ask anyone's permission.

“They will,” I said. “I'm sure they will.”

Th
saaa
rippled farewell colors at me, and the ChatPort faded out.

Then it flashed on again. “Oh, and Alice,” said Th
saaa
. “Congratulations on the book.”

I ran downstairs into the living room, where Dad and Gran were watching TV, and said, “We're going back to
space
!”

“What?” said Dad and Gran at the same time. Mum was off on a mission so it was just the three of us.

“The Morrors want us to go to Aushalawa-Mo
raaa
,” I explained. “Carl and Noel and Josephine and me and Th
saaa
, because we helped stop the war.”

“Ausha . . . wah?” Dad seems to have trouble hearing the differences between a lot of Morror words.

“I thought that was what they're calling Antarctica now,” said Gran with an edge of a grumble in her voice.

“No,” said Dad, understanding in his face now. “You know. Morrorworld.”

“Alice! The Morrors want to take you to their
planet
?” said Gran, horrified.

Fair enough. A year ago, that would have been a really scary sentence. But things change.

“They want us there for this ceremony, to sort of declare the planet open.” I wondered if you could cut a ribbon on a whole world. “And we've declared peace with them now. They're nice.”

“Alice,” Dad said, looking a bit gaunt, “I'm glad the war's over. But I think it's a bit of a stretch to say they're
nice
.”

I got slightly upset. “I thought you liked Th
saaa.
”

“Th
saaa
's a kid. It's one thing for you to be friends with a Morror
kid
. . .”

“And what about Th
saaa
's parents? They were nice to you. They gave you baked fal-thra in Switzerland.”

“I'm not saying they're all bad people, Alice.”

Gran grunted. “Then they gave us a good imitation of it for fifteen years.”

“Gran!” I said.

“Of course, you can't remember the world the way it was before.”

“I have to live in the world the way it is
now
,” I said. “And it has Morrors in it. That's partly why I wrote that stupid thing. How're we ever going to have
proper
peace if we don't get to know each other?”