wore them over their thick fleeces when we held a vigil outside the church.
Tea lights spelled out TAMMY on the ground, and people brought flowers and cuddly toys. The older kids from the school taxi-bus started singing Tammy’s favourite Christmas song, an oldie by a singer called Felina who died years ago. It’s supposed to be a funny song that goes like this:
‘Do-do-do-do-do the Chicken Hop!
Da-da-da-da-dance like you can’t stop!
Do-do-do the Chicken Hop this Christmas!’
Father Nick joined in, but it sounded completely wrong, even without the silly actions that go with it. I couldn’t sing along with them because I was too sad to sing a happy song, so I just stood and watched, massively aware that everyone was looking at me but trying to look as though they weren’t.
Soon (soon? It felt like a decade), four agonising days had gone past, and Tammy was still missing.
And still I felt, deep inside me, so deep inside me that I couldn’t even know if the feeling was real, that Tammy was alive. Somewhere.
Then, four days into our ordeal, Iggy Fox-Templeton came to the door with his fishing rod, trying to be normal, and everything got even less normal, if that was even possible. For that was when we met Hellyann: the strange, smelly creature who said she knew where Tammy was, and that we had to tell no one.
I wasn’t at all sure what to do, and I’m not sure you would have been either.
All right, do you want the long story of how I came to Earth, or the short story?
I shall give you the short story. The long story you will have to pick up along the way. Assuming we get there – at present there are no guarantees.
Anyway, here is the short story.
I, Hellyann, am eleven years old, and from another planet to yours. (I know, I know: it will all become clearer later. This is the short version, remember?)
I live in a world where human beings like you (but not like me, for I am not a ‘human being’) are exhibited in zoos. I think this is wrong for so many reasons and I must do what I can to put it right.
And that is how I ended up crossing the universe with two boys and a chicken.
A Note on the Translation
I wrote my part of this story in my native language and it was translated into English by Philip.
I now know that Anthallan does not sound much like a human language. To you, it sounds more like a series of grunts and squeaks and sniffs. My Earth friend Ignatius Fox-Templeton (Iggy) told me I sound like ‘a pug being strangled’ and he and Ethan Tait did not stop laughing for forty-two seconds.
Where the exact word does not exist, Philip, a robot, has tried to choose the nearest equivalent word so as not to interrupt the flow of the story.
(By the way, he is not a metal robot that walks around with a face and flashing lights. He is more … Well, you will find out.)
We are like you in many, many ways. For a start, we look quite like you. Not exactly like you, but still rather similar.
I have two legs, two arms and a head, and I walk upright. I also have a tail, but that is not really important.
It is hard, however, not to focus on the ways we are different.
So let us get the basics out of the way, shall we?
I suppose the main thing is that we are much, much more intelligent than you are. I am sorry if that seems rude, but it is a fact, and facts are important. To us, you are about as intelligent as Iggy’s pet chicken. That is why most people think it is all right to keep you in a zoo.
My home – my planet – is so far away from you that if I were to write out the number of kilometres it would take the rest of this page. Starting with 950 and following it with zero after zero, like this:
950,000,000,000,000,000,000 …
… and so on to the end of the page and maybe beyond. Of course, writing it out implies that there is only distance between us, but we do not calculate it like that. We measure both distance and time (they are related, as your Albert Einstein pointed out more than a hundred years go), plus a quantum-dimensional shift that enables us to ‘travel faster than the speed of light’, although we do not, not really. It is a dimension thing that, so far, is beyond your understanding. To be honest, I am not completely certain I understand it myself, although I do not usually admit this.
Think of it like this: can you explain to me how your ‘televisions’ work? I thought not. Intra-universal Shift is like that to me. I am happy to accept that it works, and to use it, without knowing all of the details.
Our world is clean. We have access to limitless energy that does not pollute.
It is conflict-free. We fight no wars because we have everything we want, and the Advisor makes all the decisions on behalf of everyone.
It is disease-free – and has been even since before the Big Burn, the planet-wide fire that raged for decades and killed almost everything.
We are the only creatures that inhabit it: the last ‘animals’ were almost all successfully eradicated centuries ago and those that were not perished in the Big Burn. The functions that some lower creatures performed (such as digesting waste products or enabling crop growth) have since been carried out efficiently, safely and hygienically by synthetic robots.
Compared with you, we are short-lived (thirty years, as defined by the revolution of your Earth around your sun, is very old, and is the practical limit of our bodies).
At eleven years old, then, I have lived about a third of my life. I finished school at seven, and I live independently.
So, at eleven years old, I am really – as you would say – ‘grown up’.
It was as a ‘grown-up’, then, that I found myself coming to your planet. To a small settlement on an island called Britain.
This was a dangerous idea. Not because of the Intra-universal Shift (what I believe you call ‘space travel’). That is unremarkable although prohibited by the Advisor. No, it is the
