Alien Rain

by Ruth Morgan

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘I grow weary,’ he said. ‘I haven’t the strength for this anymore.’

  ‘No!’ It was too soon.

  ‘The last days were terrible…’ Were. He’d switched to the past tense.

  ‘Then don’t think of them, Jonah. There’s no need to talk about them.’

  ‘I must.’

  A cold shiver ran through me, matching the vibrations of his laboured words. It was impossible to speak, almost impossible to breathe. At any moment Jonah would be snuffed out and I was scared of doing anything. I felt the way you’d feel holding a sick baby bird, scared of doing anything that might extinguish that faint, stilted little heartbeat.

  His voice came in gasps now. ‘Outside, the land was being ripped apart by the creatures … there was no hope…’

  ‘Please, you don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘I must. Before my time … before my time is up…’

  ‘Go on then,’ I said feebly.

  ‘The last days … we were the last few … the people were dead … the last days…’ He seemed to be losing his way.

  ‘You were here at the Museum?’ I couldn’t think what to ask. There were so many questions I should have been asking but I couldn’t collect my thoughts. This was so sudden and frightening.

  ‘I have to tell … have to tell…’

  ‘You were under attack from those creatures?’

  ‘We made a pact … we all went out together…’

  I was struggling to keep calm, groping for questions – it might be my last chance to ask.

  ‘“We”? Who were you fighting? Were the different countries battling against each other, like a world war?’

  ‘We all went together … we looked up in the sky and there they were…’ ‘They’ was said with such disgust.

  I tried a different tack. ‘The dragomansk were in the sky? Was it your side that changed them, Jonah? Were you the ones that altered their genetic code?’

  ‘I don’t … mean … the dragomansk. I mean … them.They were in the sky. You remember, we were at war with … them…’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember. Who, Jonah, who?’

  ‘We were the last… We went out together … hand in hand, to show them … that they couldn’t crush us … we still wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to know … they watched us die but there was nothing they could do…’

  My stomach felt as though it had dropped through a trapdoor.

  ‘Tell us the dragomansk’s code…’ he said, mimicking a different voice.

  Please no, I thought.

  ‘Who were you fighting, Jonah?’

  ‘Tell us the dragomansk’s code…’

  ‘Jonah, who was it? Who was your enemy?’

  ‘Them. The Martians.’

  The words hung between us in the air like a noose.

  ‘Jonah, the War for Earth was between the peoples of Earth.’

  ‘No!’ It was a weird, tormented sound, hardly human. ‘The Martians … the Martians…’

  ‘Jonah…’

  ‘They wanted to take everything…’

  I felt sick.

  ‘We built the creatures to defend ourselves … but we couldn’t control them…’ There was an ominous death rattle in his voice now.

  ‘We chose to go out and be slaughtered … by our own weapons in front of the Martians … the choice was ours, not theirs … we left Earth protected, Bree … from them … from them…’

  A crackling began high above us and the old electric lights began to flicker. I was shaking from the impact of what I’d just heard. The alternate crackling and humming intensified until one of the fittings exploded with a bang and a shower of sparks. The humming became like the mad hum of giant insects and the remaining lights became brighter and brighter until they were an intense, near blinding brightness.

  And there he was again, Jonah, kneeling before me, so close our knees were nearly touching, and his eyes were open. His eyes. His strange Earth human eyes. I’d seen such eyes before, in paintings and on the statues downstairs, but this was the first time a real pair of Earth human eyes had looked straight into mine. Of course, Jonah and I had got to know each other in the dark, where we seemed so very alike, the biggest difference hadn’t occurred to me. Now I could see him properly and it wasn’t his deathly pale skin or thin, drawn cheeks which startled me but his small eyes about a third the size of my own.

  And when Jonah’s small eyes peered into mine, their irises blue as an Earth summer sky, his expression grew so full of horror and disgust I almost turned my head away in shame. For the first time, Jonah could see who and what I was.

  There was no time to plead my case, even if I could have found the words. There was a deafening bang and all the fittings exploded at once. Blooms of sparks vanished as they fell to the floor and I knew that I was alone in the dark again, now and forever. Jonah had gone and he wasn’t coming back. The negative image of his mouth and small eyes open in horror lingered a little before melting away into the blackness.

  I felt numb. For the next few days I didn’t return to the Museum. I hadn’t the heart and there was no point. Jonah wasn’t coming back. Who could blame him?

  Back on site, I set about the mundane tasks I was given pretty mechanically. The cliffs faced the sea and although I had seen this amazing, vast expanse of water once or twice before, now I was there all day long, I could truly appreciate the spectacle, its ever changing appearance against the dramatic, shifting weather in the skies. The waves were dark and silty, unlike the crystal blue waters of the Arabian Sea which had so delighted Halley. There were two islands straight across the water, one steep and the other flat. They looked as lonely as I felt.

  Pico and Lana finally discovered what they’d hoped to find, a burial cave. They got very excited about the artefacts they discovered tucked amongst the skeletons which seemed to point to strange, unrecorded rituals. There was so much to do that afternoons off were cancelled. I carried on sifting and scrubbing, labelling and cataloguing, but my heart wasn’t in it. Doubtless our findings would make a fascinating broadcast back to the interDome network on Mars. Well-known experts would debate the discoveries, but interesting though it all was, to me it was just part of a big cover-up, a diversion. Mining surveys were plotting the best areas to begin drilling and extracting the materials from the ground beneath our feet, but they were barely mentioned. When the scientific teams returned to Base from around the country, they didn’t talk to us students about where they’d been or what they’d been doing, almost like they’d been ordered not to.

  One afternoon, a brief conversation with Pico made me think he felt the same way. He was taking a break in the mouth of the burial cave and I went to sit beside him. He wasn’t doing anything, just staring out to sea. He didn’t acknowledge me, but he began talking.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t matter how many times I see it, it’s just like that first time.’

  ‘You said something similar before,’ I said. ‘The day we landed. About the sky.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Although it’s lonely here and that can get to you.’

  We sat in silence awhile.

  ‘Someday soon it won’t be here,’ I said. ‘That’ll be a shame.’

  Pico looked at me quickly then all around us.

  ‘I wouldn’t let anyone else hear you say that. Not in that tone of voice, anyway.’

  ‘But don’t you think it’s sad?’

  He looked at me steadily for a few moments and nodded.

  ‘You know, there was a time not so long ago when recolonisation was still the plan,’ he whispered. ‘Once we’d found a way of dealing with the you-know-what problem.’ He cocked his thumb at the sky.

  ‘That’s what I’d always thought.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. Somehow, quite recently, those in charge have done a,’ he rotated his finger, ‘180 degree on this one.’

  ‘Don’t you think if they knew, enough people on Mars
would still want recolonisation? Isn’t that what they’d vote for?’

  ‘If they were given the choice.’ Pico raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Don’t they deserve a vote? This is where we all come from.’

  ‘You don’t have to try and persuade me.’ Pico looked around again. ‘Look, we shouldn’t even be talking about this. Forget what I just said. Don’t mention it to anyone, all right? Come on, we have work to do.’

  I followed him back through the tunnel into the burial cave, but I couldn’t forget what he’d said. Although the future for Earth seemed so bleak, at least there was someone else who felt the way I did. And if Pico felt that way, others would too.

  Each evening we got together with the boys to eat and compare notes, and work on ideas for our next broadcast. Halley didn’t seem bored at Base any longer and he and Nisien appeared to be getting on better, having found a common interest at last. They were still on the testing phase of Nisien’s invention and Halley seemed to have found his purpose in life: causing large explosions of frozen debris. He took a childish delight in challenging Nisien’s machine with larger and larger piles of rubble and wood and the two of them would talk animatedly and wave their arms to illustrate the biggest explosions while Robeen and I just smiled weakly in the right places when we could be bothered.

  Nisien had finally settled on a name for the invention. Naturally he’d named it after himself, although the ‘Barroblaster’ (his surname was Barr) wasn’t a name I could imagine anyone taking seriously.

  Doc Carter appeared at the clifftop site one afternoon as we were sorting artefacts in the mobile lab. I hadn’t spoken to him properly since our interview about the celephet. Now he was brusque, giving me a quick, forced smile as he asked me to show him the back of my head. I left the delicate glass beads I had been cleaning on the workbench.

  ‘How’s your analysis going?’ I asked over my shoulder, thinking I’d better show some kind of interest.

  ‘Encouraging,’ he spoke over my head and I felt his fingertips trace my healing wound. ‘Although we haven’t got our answer yet, I’m confident we will. A few more days at the Museum and I’m certain we’ll succeed. Unbelievable how unlucky we were really, having the celephet catch on something and fall off like that. It’s not a chance I’m willing to risk again. There, good. Healing nicely.’ He patted me on the shoulders to show he’d finished and I let my hair fall back down. ‘In another week we’ll try again. I’ve nearly fixed the celephet. Few more tests, that’s all.’

  He walked around me, studying me with cool disdain and I felt a sudden fear. For the first time, I wondered to what lengths he might go to get me to co-operate? If I refused, what then? Would he order me to be held down kicking and screaming, to reconnect his precious invention? Would he anaesthetise me, knocking me out cold to make it easier to reinstall me at the Museum? All the celephet required was a human interface. Did the human in question need to be awake? Although I felt sure Jonah would never willingly reappear to me, it was possible that some traces of his consciousness might remain. I imagined myself, unconscious and chained to a hospital bed in the middle of the fossil room, while the tortured soul of Jonah flew around screaming in agony, like a bird caught in an ever-tightening trap. The image haunted me for the rest of the day.

  Back at Base, I tried not to be on my own with Halley. I was afraid of getting into an argument with him and letting something slip. If Halley found out about Jonah and told Doc Carter, that would be it: I’d be chained to the hospital bed, a dumb instrument of torture. It was impossible to avoid him all the time though, and the morning after Carter’s clifftop visit, he sought me out after breakfast.

  The second stairwell wasn’t much used and I’d got into a habit of going there to be alone. There was a window on the fourth-floor landing facing north and if you climbed on to the deep sill you had a good view of the brown, distant hills, the local breeding ground of the dragomansk in some old legends. This bleak view mirrored my desolate thoughts. I kept thinking about the War for Earth. How could I accept that I’d been lied to my whole life? That this war had not been fought between the warlike Earth human tribes as we’d all been taught? We oh-so-peace-loving Martians had been the enemy of Earth back then – and we still were. In a sense, the War for Earth had never ended and we, the old enemy, were now gearing up for the final, decisive battle. Ours was just the advance party.

  ‘There you are.’ I heard Halley descend the short flight of stairs behind me. ‘I’ve been round the building twice trying to find you.’

  ‘Why were you trying to find me?’

  He hauled himself up next to me on the sill. ‘Squeeze up,’ he said, shoving me over. ‘Why shouldn’t I look for you? Still friends, aren’t we? Huh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, with a terse smile.

  ‘I think I know what’s wrong with you,’ he sung breezily. ‘I’ve worked it out. Earth fever. It’s this place, it gets to you after a while. It’s so big and empty and ruinous and… Well, you mustn’t let it get to you, that’s all. Have you been back to the canals recently?’

  ‘Not for a while,’ I said.

  ‘It might help.’ He bumped me softly with his shoulder. ‘Hey, Bree. I think I’ve managed to work my way back into Doc Carter’s good books, finally. How about if we ask to borrow a class one this afternoon and go back to the canals? Or even somewhere new. That’d cheer you up.’

  ‘I don’t need cheering up,’ I snapped. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Rubbish, you hardly talk these days. I know I’m always messing about but I’ve been worried about you, Bree. Truthfully. Hey, don’t you remember that list we made, of all the things we wanted to do and see on Earth?’

  I knew he was going to start talking about Mumbai again.

  ‘I’ve seen what I came to see.’

  Halley sighed. ‘The Museum? And that’s it? There is so much more out there.’ He stressed every word. ‘The jungles in Mumbai are teeming with life the dragomansk can’t reach, monkeys call out to each other in the treetops at dusk, the wild cats prowl in the night and you just catch a flicker of their eyes in the undergrowth. Glowing. They live in caves to escape the worst of the daytime heat.’

  ‘Halley…’

  ‘Remember our frog at the canal? Well, we saw several, but that first one, I mean? Wasn’t it a magical moment? There are frogs in every shade of every colour of the rainbow in that jungle, you would not believe your eyes. Acid yellows and greens, neon blues… Some of them live up high in the trees and never come down. There are pools up there in the middle of the leaf-cups and they’re like whole little worlds in themselves.’

  ‘You’ve told me this before.’

  ‘You’re just like one of those frogs, you know that? The Museum’s become your little pool, but there’s a lot more to explore, even around here.’ Annoyance crept into his voice.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what’s been going on at the Museum. I’ve been doing a lot more there than you think.’ This was getting dangerous.

  ‘Oh come on!’ he cried in exasperation. ‘What’s wrong with you? It’s as if now you’re here, you’ve shut down. Writing poems in that place seems to be your only goal in life.’

  ‘I don’t go there now, do I?’

  ‘And you’re just moping because you can’t. But don’t you understand what I’m saying? Forget the Museum, Bree. It’ll be time to go back home before we know it and right now is when you should be making the most of your time here on Earth.’

  ‘Because it’s not going to be here much longer? Not when the diggers move in? As soon as we find a way of getting rid of the dragomansk, that can happen much, much quicker, can’t it?’

  He looked stunned, as though I’d slapped him.

  ‘It’s going to happen anyway,’ he said in a small voice. ‘DNA’s been collected from all these creatures. It’s all in storage on Mars. This world can be reproduced again someday.’

  ‘They won’t h
ave collected all the DNA, how can they have? It’s impossible. And anyway, they’ll never recreate this again!’

  ‘It’s going to happen, no matter what we do. It’s our Great Quest and Purpose, Bree.’

  Halley sounded utterly deflated. I didn’t answer, it was best not to, but I so wanted to tell him what a massive, massive hypocrite he was, pretending to be so concerned about Earth whilst all the time he was helping destroy it by doing Carter’s dirty work.

  ‘I just think you should make the most of your time here, that’s all,’ he repeated in a small voice and jumping from the windowsill, he left without saying any more. I returned to the desolate view while his footsteps echoed on the stairs.

  That night I sneaked out to the Museum, only to wander aimlessly through the rooms, remembering Jonah and hating myself for being who and what I was. It felt empty now in a way it never had previously, like a fossilised shell abandoned by life. I sat amongst the statues and cried, then I thought about the pictures on the walls upstairs and shuddered. What had Jonah said?

  ‘We chose to go out and be slaughtered … slaughtered by our own weapons in front of the Martians…’

  After a long time sitting thinking about it, I made myself go up. It was the first time I’d been in the galleries since Halley and I had found them. Flashing my tilelight around, I saw Halley’s staircases of books. The pictures were as gruesome as I remembered; my imagination didn’t have to heighten their terror, they really were the stuff of nightmares. Then, for the first time, I saw what Halley must have failed to see too. High above the dragomansk and metamansk filling the air, small and high up in the clouds like ancient gods inspecting the scene for their own amusement, I could just make out exaggeratedly bug-eyed Martians sitting in ships which looked very like primitive versions of the Byd’s own landing craft. One of them was even performing our salute. With so much else going on in the picture, you would certainly have missed them if you weren’t looking for them. The Martians looked on as the monstrous creatures attacked the very side which had developed them to this, their final and deadliest form. In the face of such horror, the idea that Jonah and his colleagues, the last survivors on this part of Earth, would sooner sacrifice themselves than give up the secret which might have saved them, was haunting and tragic. I’d soon had my fill and descending to the great hall again, I went to the fossil room. I felt ready to say some of the things I should have said to Jonah that last time, even though it was too late. If a trace of his consciousness still survived, it didn’t want to have anything to do with me.