Terra Read online

  Mitch Benn

  TERRA

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  PART ONE: When Worlds Collide

  Chapter 1.1

  Chapter 1.2

  Chapter 1.3

  Chapter 1.4

  Chapter 1.5

  Chapter 1.6

  Chapter 1.7

  PART TWO: The Thing From Another World

  Chapter 2.1

  Chapter 2.2

  Chapter 2.3

  Chapter 2.4

  Chapter 2.5

  Chapter 2.6

  Chapter 2.7

  Chapter 2.8

  Chapter 2.9

  Chapter 2.10

  Chapter 2.11

  Chapter 2.12

  Chapter 2.13

  Chapter 2.14

  Chapter 2.15

  Chapter 2.16

  Chapter 2.17

  Chapter 2.18

  Chapter 2.19

  Chapter 2.20

  Chapter 2.21

  Chapter 2.22

  Chapter 2.23

  Chapter 2.24

  Chapter 2.25

  Chapter 2.26

  Chapter 2.27

  Chapter 2.28

  Chapter 2.29

  Chapter 2.30

  Chapter 2.31

  PART THREE: The Invaders

  Chapter 3.1

  Chapter 3.2

  Chapter 3.3

  Chapter 3.4

  Chapter 3.5

  Chapter 3.6

  Chapter 3.7

  Chapter 3.8

  Chapter 3.9

  Chapter 3.10

  Chapter 3.11

  Chapter 3.12

  Chapter 3.13

  Chapter 3.14

  Chapter 3.15

  Chapter 3.16

  Chapter 3.17

  Chapter 3.18

  Chapter 3.19

  Chapter 3.20

  Chapter 3.21

  Chapter 3.22

  Chapter 3.23

  Chapter 3.24

  Chapter 3.25

  Chapter 3.26

  Chapter 3.27

  PART FOUR: Forbidden Planet

  Chapter 4.1

  Chapter 4.2

  Chapter 4.3

  Chapter 4.4

  Chapter 4.5

  Chapter 4.6

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Hello

  I’m a bit nervous right now.

  As I write this it’s April 2013, and publication of this book is still three months away. I finished writing it a year ago and I’ve just written the sequel. This means I’ve now spent over two years of my life working on a story that, at this moment, I still don’t know if anyone will ever read . . .

  But now you’re here.

  So this book is dedicated, with gratitude, and not a little relief, to YOU, the reader. Whoever and wherever you are. Whether you’re thumbing pages, cradling your eBook or just dawdling in a bookshop (in which case, do crack on and buy it, it gets better than this, and look, it’s stopped raining).

  You’re the reason I wrote this and I am SO pleased to see you.

  I’ve been on an interesting journey and it’s not over yet.

  Thanks for coming with me.

  Mitch Benn

  April 2013

  - Before we begin, a note on notation:

  ‘Dialogue presented as it is spoken will be rendered in the Anglo-American way, like this.’

  - Dialogue that has been translated from the languages of the planet Fnrr will be presented italicised and in the Continental format, like this.

  - Hope that’s clear.

  M x

  PART ONE

  When Worlds Collide

  1.1

  Mr and Mrs Bradbury had been married for six years, and neither of them could remember why.

  Some married couples are lucky. They agree about everything. They like to do the same things and go to the same places. They have the same opinions and ideas. Their lives are peaceful and harmonious and they bring happiness to each other and all around them.

  Mr and Mrs Bradbury were not one of these couples.

  Many married couples disagree about lots of things. Sometimes these disagreements turn into arguments, and on occasion these arguments can become quite heated. But underneath it all, they love and care about each other enough to overlook the things they disagree about, or at least to find a compromise they can both be happy with.

  Mr and Mrs Bradbury were not one of these couples either.

  The Bradburys argued. All the time. About EVERYTHING.

  They would argue about what to do, where to go, what to eat, what to wear, what to watch on TV, what words to use, what books to read, what to think about the books they read, whether to read books or watch TV, whether the TV was too loud or too quiet, the weather, whether or not the weather was what they wanted the weather to be, what they should want the weather to be whether or not the weather was whatever they’d wanted before . . . Anything you could possibly argue about, they argued about. Even some things you couldn’t argue about, or at least things that nobody had ever thought of arguing about. Once they had an argument over whether full-fat mayonnaise was better than ‘light’ mayonnaise which ended with Mr Bradbury slamming the fridge door right off its hinges and Mrs Bradbury chasing him into the street throwing eggs at him.

  That’s the kind of couple the Bradburys were.

  You may know a couple like this. You probably spend a lot of time wondering: Why do they stay together if they’re always arguing? The Bradburys’ friends – a small and diminishing group, as you can imagine – used to ask themselves this question a lot. Some of them came to the conclusion that the Bradburys must like it that way; arguing all the time was the thing that made them happy. But it didn’t seem to make them happy at all, and it certainly didn’t make anyone else happy. So their friends abandoned this theory, and one by one they abandoned the Bradburys as well.

  Then one of the Bradburys’ few remaining friends gave Mrs Bradbury an idea. They’d met one afternoon in the supermarket – quite by chance; people didn’t tend to choose to spend time with the Bradburys. ‘Have you ever thought about a baby?’ Mrs Bradbury’s friend asked her. ‘Babies bring love and harmony to a family. Trust me, if you have a baby all your arguments will seem so unimportant. Having a baby will bring you closer together.’

  Mrs Bradbury mentioned this conversation to her husband in a rare moment of domestic truce, and they considered the idea. They had always thought it might be nice to have a baby (this was one of the few things they’d ever agreed on) and the more they thought about it, the more it did seem that having a baby would indeed help them to stop arguing.

  It didn’t.

  It gave them a whole new fascinating range of things to argue about.

  When the baby was growing inside Mrs Bradbury they would argue about whether they wanted a boy or a girl. They argued about which doctor to visit for advice, and when they’d decided upon one, they argued about whether his advice was any good. They argued about which room of the house should become the nursery, and about what sort of cot to buy. As the baby took up more and more space inside Mrs Bradbury she would complain to Mr Bradbury about how tired she was and how he wasn’t helping enough, and Mr Bradbury would retort that he was sorry he was at work all the time but SOMEBODY had to go and make some money, and so on and so on.

  When it was time for the baby to be born, they argued about whether to have the baby at home or in a hospital, and even after their baby arrived – a beautiful baby girl, by the way – they argued over whether Mr Bradbury was holding her the right way, or if Mrs Bradbury was feeding her enough, or feeding her the right things, or enough of the right things, or feeding her the right things the wrong way, or whether Mr Bradbury was burping her properly, or
hard enough, or too hard, or often enough, or too hard too often.

  Their bitterest arguments were over what to call the baby. Mr Bradbury wanted to call her Jasmine – he’d had a cat called Jasmine when he was a little boy and he’d always liked the name – but Mrs Bradbury said that was disgusting, you couldn’t name a baby after a cat, and anyway she wanted to name the baby Agatha after her grandmother, and Mr Bradbury said that was a ridiculous name for a baby, you couldn’t be called Agatha unless you were at least sixty years old with white hair, pointy glasses and a fierce little dog. So it was that three weeks after their little girl was born, she still had no name.

  What a sweet-natured little baby girl she was. While her parents frothed and fumed at each other high above her, this tiny girl with no name would lie back in her little bouncy chair gazing up at them with huge blinking blue eyes and a look of quiet wonder on her face, then she would smack her tiny lips, close her eyes and go back to sleep. She was indeed bringing love and harmony to her family, but her parents were too busy arguing to notice.

  One evening Mrs Bradbury was having difficulty getting the baby to sleep. She was trying to remember a lullaby to sing, but all the ones she could think of began with something like ‘Hush little . . .’ followed by the baby’s name, and Mrs Bradbury’s baby didn’t yet have a name. Mrs Bradbury could, of course, have just sung ‘hush little baby’ but the fact that she and her husband couldn’t even agree on their child’s name made her feel silly and embarrassed, and she didn’t enjoy being reminded of it. So the poor baby cried on until suddenly, to her own surprise, Mrs Bradbury began to sing a song neither she – nor anyone else – had ever heard:

  ‘Do not cry

  Do not weep

  Floating gently off to sleep

  You are loved and safe from harm

  Sleeping sound in Mummy’s arms.’

  Mrs Bradbury was so taken aback by the simple beauty of the song – and by how well she’d sung it (she’d never sung like that before) – that it took her a moment to notice that her baby was now sound asleep. Perhaps, she thought, as she placed the quietly snoring baby back in the basket beside her own bed (she was still too tiny to sleep in the cot they’d bought), she was going to be quite a good mother after all. From the next room, Mr Bradbury shouted to keep that noise down because he couldn’t hear the TV.

  Then came the night the Bradburys stopped arguing for ever.

  They had spent the day at Mrs Bradbury’s mother’s house. The visit had started awkwardly with Mrs Bradbury’s announcement that the baby would not now be named Agatha after Grandma after all, which she had said while casting a fierce look at Mr Bradbury, and things only got worse from there. By the time they said a terse goodbye to Mrs Bradbury’s mother, strapped their nameless baby girl into her very expensive car seat (oh, the arguments they’d had over buying that) and set off for home, both Mr and Mrs Bradbury were vibrating with bottled-up rage.

  Mr Bradbury started things off by accusing Mrs Bradbury of ruining everything before they’d even sat down by dropping the whole not-naming-the-baby-Agatha bombshell, whereupon Mrs Bradbury countered that it wasn’t her fault that her mother was disappointed, and Mr Bradbury said that Mrs Bradbury’s mother was always disappointed, mainly with him, he knew she’d never liked him, and Mrs Bradbury told Mr Bradbury that her mother didn’t dislike him, he just never gave her a chance, and Mr Bradbury said that was a bit rich coming from her, she never gave anybody a chance, it was no wonder they had hardly any friends, and now look you’ve made the baby cry with all your shouting, and Mrs Bradbury said that no, it was Mr Bradbury who’d made the baby cry by driving too fast . . .

  At that moment, everything changed.

  1.2

  Someone else who didn’t have many friends was on the same road as the Bradburys that night. His name was Lbbp, and he was a long, long, long, LONG way from home.

  Lbbp’s home was a small but comfortable apartment in a very tall cone-shaped building in a busy district of the great city of Hrrng, on the beautiful island of Mlml on the distant orange-green planet of Fnrr. If you have a very very very powerful telescope and you point it at the space between the second and third stars on Orion’s Belt on a very clear summer’s night, you still won’t be able to see the distant orange-green planet of Fnrr. It’s pretty distant.

  Lbbp didn’t have many friends because he was very busy. He had little time to pay attention to the few friends he had and certainly no time to make new ones. The thing that kept Lbbp so busy was his work. Lbbp loved his work, and, though he was too modest to say so, he was very good at it.

  Lbbp was a scientist. On our world he would have been called a biologist. Lbbp was fascinated by living things. All his life he had studied the plants and animals of his own world; going on surveys and expeditions, conducting experiments, writing books and essays until at last he became one of the few scientists on Fnrr permitted to study the plants and animals of other worlds. And of all the worlds he had ever visited, by far his favourite was the one known in the clipped, clickety language of Fnrr as Rrth.

  Lbbp loved Rrth. It had some of the most beautiful plants and fascinating animals of any of the hundreds of worlds Fnrr’s scientists had surveyed, but there were rules to be followed when visiting Rrth. In particular, it was strictly forbidden for a Fnrrn to have any contact with the dominant species of Rrth, the strange and noisy bipedal primates known as Ymns.

  Ymns, it had been decided, were simply too stupid and primitive to be bothered with. Even when they weren’t fighting each other or making a disgusting mess all over the nicest bits of their own planet, they seemed to spend a lot of time smashing into each other in those funny little land vehicles they whizzed round in (but didn’t seem to be very good at controlling). Given the chaos that Ymns already caused with the simple, clumsy machines that they’d thus far managed to invent for themselves, the damage they could do to their planet – or, far worse, to other people’s planets – if they ever got hold of any proper technology did not bear contemplation. They were off-limits. To everyone.

  Besides, as the Fnrrns knew from watching the episodes from Rrth history the Ymns told each other on their picture screens, any time someone from another planet did visit the Ymns it didn’t go very well. Either the visitors would start killing and enslaving the Ymns in their millions, or the Ymns would invent some new weapon and blow the visitors up with it. Usually both.

  Lbbp had his own reasons for distrusting the Ymns. Over a number of visits to Rrth he had studied and catalogued many fascinating life forms; towering trees, dazzling blooms, magnificent beasts and beautiful delicate flying creatures. It saddened and angered him that every time he returned he would find another species gone, another vast area of natural beauty ripped up and destroyed to make way for the Ymns and their nasty square buildings and ridiculous little vehicles, or just blasted bare and left barren for reasons Lbbp couldn’t begin to guess at.

  Lbbp was careful never to express these feelings to his colleagues at the Hrrng Preceptorate, the vast teaching and learning establishment in his home city where he held the post of Postulator. As a scientist he was supposed to be cool and objective in his studies and writings. Still, Lbbp couldn’t help but feel that the Ymns didn’t deserve such a planet as Rrth. Or at least that Rrth deserved better inhabitants than the Ymns.

  In any event, the rule was that any Fnrrn spaceship entering Rrth’s atmosphere had to have its invisibility shield switched on at all times, to avoid attracting unwanted Ymn attention.

  Most Fnrrn scientific expeditions to Rrth would consist of a group of five or six scientists, but Lbbp liked to go alone. He enjoyed his own company and there wasn’t much room for anyone else in his little lemon-shaped spaceship. Lbbp was proud of his little lemon-shaped spaceship, although, since they don’t have lemons on Fnrr, as far as he was concerned it was just spaceship-shaped. In fact, the first time he’d seen lemons, on an earlier visit to Rrth, he’d logged them in his field journal as ‘small yellow sp
aceship-shaped fruits’.

  On this evening, the evening of the Bradburys’ uncomfortable day at Mrs Bradbury’s mother’s house, Lbbp’s little spaceship was hovering invisibly over what, in the darkness, looked to Lbbp like a dried-out river bed. Since there aren’t many roads on Fnrr (not since they invented gravity bubbles) and since Lbbp tried not to pay much attention to the Ymns or their little land vehicles (it just got him tense and angry, and that didn’t help him work) he didn’t really know what roads were or how to recognise them. If he had, he might not have been content to let his little spaceship hover just a few metres above the surface of one.

  Right now, Lbbp’s mind wasn’t on Ymns or their vehicles anyway. His attention was fixed upon the fascinating little Rrth animal his ship’s life-detectors had picked up a few minutes earlier. It was about the size of a small ksks (a Fnrr fruit which tastes almost nothing whatsoever like a melon) with soft grey fur, a twitchy little nose and two long furry flaps sticking straight up from the top of its head. Lbbp was transfixed by these flaps. Were they ears? Lbbp found ears particularly interesting, not having any himself, and he’d never seen such amazing ears before. The animal must have incredible powers of hearing, he thought. Lbbp was just noting in his field journal that the animal’s superior hearing must help it to evade predators with ease, and that, as such, it probably had very few offspring to prevent over-population, when the little animal started suddenly, flattening its ears to its head. Had the animal sensed his presence? Nervously, Lbbp glanced at the switch controlling the ship’s invisibility shield. Relieved to see that it was still in the ‘on’ position he gave it a comforting pat with a long, grey four-fingered hand. A comforting, clumsy, ever so slightly just a bit too hard pat. Just hard enough to switch the invisibility shield off.

  Had Lbbp’s attention not been so fixed on the ksks-sized big-eared animal, he might have noticed the Ymn land vehicle speeding towards his ship from the other direction. But as the ship’s instruments started making angry chirping noises at him, he definitely did notice it. Moreover, he realised with a sick feeling in his chest (where his stomach was), the vehicle’s Ymn occupants would notice him too.