Dr. Franklin's Island (14 page)

Then she did something horrible. She lifted one leg, and stretched it out. The rest of her stayed the same as Miranda the castaway, a sunburned skeleton with long black raggedy hair, in her old gray combat shorts and black T-shirt. But the leg became her bird’s leg: thin and scaled and leathery. She wasn’t out of control this time. She was doing it on purpose, she was showing Arnie who was in charge. The leg stretched out, impossibly long and muscular. The bird’s foot, with its long, strong, scaly fingers and fearsome talons, took hold of him by the front of his T-shirt and hauled him to his feet.

“You bring it to us. You get that stuff to us, some way. Or I will kill you. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I swear I will kill you.”

chapter ten

For a couple of days after that, nothing happened. We stayed in our animal bodies. We didn’t talk to each other on radio telepathy much. I swam up and down the pool, being my fish-self, thinking long thoughts. Miranda flew about the crater valley. Sometimes I’d see her overhead, or hopping on the ground outside our enclosure. Sometimes I’d hear her shrieking somewhere else in the compound. I’d know she’d been getting too near one of the orderlies, and they’d chased her away. We only called each other up last thing at night, to cut our imaginary notch on the imaginary coconut palm. We didn’t care if we were overheard doing that.

It’s strange how things turn out the opposite of what you’d expect. You’d have thought “the white place” would have been a wonderful discovery, a place where we could go (if only in our minds) where we could remember what being human was like. But it made everything worse, not better.

You’d have thought finding out that the experiment was still going on would have cheered us up. It was nasty to know that Arnie was Dr. Franklin’s spy, but at least we hadn’t been abandoned like pieces of rubbish. But it didn’t work like that. Sometimes it’s better to have no hope. You can find a way to live with what you have left. Before we caught Arnie, we’d been almost
happy,
as Semi-the-fish and Miranda-the-bird. Maybe we were going to live our lives as weird animals in Dr. Franklin’s zoo, but we weren’t in pain, we had our radio telepathy, and at least we were near each other. Now Arnie had told us we could be human again, and we didn’t believe him but it was terrible. It was like someone hitting you on a bruise. It was like someone making you try to walk with a broken leg.

On Day Eighty-seven, a small plastic tube appeared on the tiled rim of my pool.

I spotted it first and called to Miranda—not by telepathy but by slapping my tail on the water.

Neither of us knew how it had got there. Our animal selves were daytime creatures. We’d found out that we couldn’t stay awake at night, no matter how hard we tried. Miranda would roost in the mango tree, at the end of the pool farthest from the gate, where the shelter of the trees and bushes was thickest. I would let myself sink a little, into the lower water, and drift there. Someone must have sneaked into the enclosure under cover of darkness, and left us this little mystery. But who? Arnie had told us he was a prisoner. The tube was about the length of my little finger (the finger I had when I was a girl, I mean), and about a finger wide. It was clear plastic with a white screw top, and half filled with a greenish white powder. Miranda picked it up in her foot. In my mind, her voice said softly, “Semi. What do you think?”

This was too complicated for sign language. We had to risk being overheard.

“If it’s the antidote,” I said (thinking about the antidote had been a big part of my long fish-thoughts since we’d talked to Arnie), “then I expect it’s some form of our original DNA. You can dry out DNA. I know there’s such a thing as powdered DNA, and DNA pellets. If we were dosed with a strong infusion of our original girl genetic information, I suppose it could take over again and crowd out the altered DNA. I don’t know. Something like that might work.”

Miranda-the-bird looked at me hard. “So this would be powdered Semirah? Or powdered Miranda? Or both?”

“It might be.”

“The tube is cold, very cold.”

“They probably keep it in a fridge. It can’t have been here long.”

“How are we supposed to know what to do with it?”

“We’d better ask Arnie,” I said.

We were both silent for a minute. We were listening (that’s the best way to describe it) for the eavesdropper on our telepathic link. If he was there, he was keeping very quiet. So we called him, both of us calling his name in our minds.

It took a couple of tries before he answered.

“Okay,” said Arnie’s voice in my “head”—inside my delta-shape
me,
but humans say “head”—“the stuff is for Semi. It won’t do anything for Miranda, so don’t try sharing it. I haven’t managed to get hold of Miranda’s antidote yet. It’ll be more difficult. It doesn’t matter, because Semi’s will take longer to work. You have to sprinkle this powder into the pool, and she has to swallow it. It’ll take several doses. You’ll find the tubes on the side of the pool, the same way as this one.”

“How did the tube get in here, Arnie?” said Miranda’s voice on the chatline, coldly. “And what’s this about stealing from the labs? You told us you were a prisoner.”

“There’s a friendly lab technician. I don’t completely trust him, but he feels sorry for us and he’ll do things. When Semi’s had enough of the antidote, there’s a plan to get her out of the pool and away to safety. That’s all I can say.”

“Why didn’t you tell him to get Miranda’s antidote?” I asked.

Silence . . . Then Arnie’s voice said, “I told you, getting hold of Miranda’s stuff is going to be more difficult. I’m working on a plan.” He sounded very uneasy and shifty. “I can’t talk anymore. Remember, they’ve got me wired up. Whatever I tell them, they can see what’s been happening by looking at the brain-wave printout. They’ll spot that I’ve been talking as well as listening, if we don’t keep it snappy. Then they’ll know I’m double-crossing them. I have to shut up now.”

The best thing about nailing Arnie was knowing that he was still alive. I could understand how Miranda felt, but even so, that was good news. We three had crawled onto the beach together, on the night of the plane crash. We’d been through the first shock of the castaway experience together. It made me feel more human, to know that he’d survived. The worst thing was that it left us exactly where we’d been before. We couldn’t get rid of him: and we couldn’t trust him. We still had nowhere to hide.

“Maybe it really is more difficult to get hold of your cure,” I said.

“Or maybe he’s getting his revenge, because I scared the living daylights out of him.” She half opened her wings, a kind of bird-monster shrug of the shoulders. “It doesn’t matter. If you can be human again, that would be a miracle enough. We can think about what happens to me later. If
you
can get out . . . well, a bird can always fly.”

She hopped closer to the water.

“What shall I do? This could be dangerous. I don’t see any way we can spread it on a small part of you, and see what happens. Do you want time to think about it?”

We both understood that we had no way of knowing what was in that tube. Arnie could be lying, on instructions from the boss. This could be another of Dr. Franklin’s mind games. Or Arnie and his friendly technician could have got hold of the wrong chemicals. Or anything. The stuff in the tube could kill me, or plunge me into worse tortures than ever.

“There’s nothing to think about,” I said, quickly, so I wouldn’t lose my nerve. “Do it!”

Miranda held the tube in her foot, and twisted at the cap with her strong beak.

My heart was in my mouth, my whole body was shivering with fear and anticipation. The cap came off, and went spinning away. Miranda hopped right up to the rim, and shook the powder into the water.

It fell into the sunlit blue, in little swirls and sparkles.

I dropped under it, and all the swirls and sparkles flowed into my mouth. The water flowed out again through my gills, the powder stayed behind. I knew I had swallowed it, like a mouthful of plankton.

Nothing happened. I felt nothing.

I hovered there, staring up at Miranda, until we heard the rumble of wheels. An orderly was arriving with our food. I glided away, and Miranda flapped up into a tree.

When the man had left again, Miranda was nowhere to be seen. I thought she’d gone for a flight. Then I spotted her, hunched in some tall bamboo grass near the fence, halfway down the pool. I swam over and tried to catch her attention. I even leaped out of the water, which is something I can do if I feel like it, but I don’t because it’s too spectacular, and it makes me feel a bit crazy. (It’s my
crush that fishing boat
trick.) She didn’t take any notice. Then I remembered. It may sound strange, but I’d forgotten, for a moment, that I had the power of human speech. I flipped those mental switches, and called her up on Radio Mutant.

“Hey, Miranda!”

No coverage.

“Miranda?” I repeated.

She didn’t seem to know I was there.

I swam away, feeling very worried.

She was all right later. But it was a warning.

Dr. Franklin had said, “The animal traits are very strong.” How long would we be able to take the strain of trying to stay human, under these impossible conditions? How long before we lost our minds?

Day Ninety

Something strange happened today. Skinner came to see us.

Things had been quiet. I’d been swimming around, trying to imagine that I felt some change in myself. Miranda had been playing her usual restless games with sticks and leaves, and chasing a few butterflies. We hadn’t been using our radio telepathy at all, except for the notch-cutting ceremony: partly because we knew Arnie would be listening, and partly because the uncertainty was too painful to discuss. Either I was going to become human again . . . or I wasn’t.

Miranda was out flying when Skinner turned up. He was looking rather shabby. His white coat had grubby stains on the collar and cuffs, and a pen had leaked in the breast pocket. He needed a shave too. He came sidling up to the fence, peering around as if he was afraid one of the orderlies would spot him and chase him away. I came up and looked at him. We shifted along, him on one side of the mesh and me on the other, until we were beside the gate, where there weren’t any flowers or bushes between the fence and the rim of the pool, and we had a good view of each other.

“Hello, Semi,” he said. “Where’s Miranda?”

Imagine a teenager-sized manta ray shrugging vaguely.

I didn’t care if he understood me or not.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” he told me, glancing to and fro again. “It’s bad for the experiment. But I’m a bad boy. I’ve not been myself since I tried to let you two go.” He laughed miserably. “Next thing you know, I’ll be letting that jungle cat loose. . . . Can you hear it howl from here?”

Yes we could, sometimes, especially at night. It wasn’t a very comforting lullaby.

“How have you been getting on, in your new home?”

I glided up and down, and smacked my tail on the water. Skinner took hold of the fence in both his hands, and leaned his face between them, so the mesh was pressing into his cheeks and up against his glasses.

“It’s different close up,” he whispered. “I thought I knew what seeing you changed would be like, but this is bad, this is real . . . I
remember
you, Semi. I remember what you looked like. I think I remember seeing you smile, once—”

I believe Semi-the-fish has the same eyes as Semi-the-girl, at least Miranda says so: although they work much better, if differently. So imagine a teenager-sized manta ray, with dark blue sheeny skin (where the human girl’s skin used to be naturally brown); and brown human eyes looking out of the front of the ray’s smooth winged shape. A girl squashed flat, her legs and arms fused to her body and then
rolled out,
like plasticine, into the delta shape of a big ray fish. That’s what Skinner saw. I was used to the idea of the girl-fish. But no wonder he was staring at me with sickened horror.

I wished he’d go away, but I wanted him to stay. I liked seeing him suffer, to tell you the absolute truth. There was no chance that Dr. Franklin was going to have any painful pangs of guilt, but Skinner was better than nothing.

“
Are
you there inside the fish, Semi? Do you remember being human? We can’t be sure. Humanlike brain activity doesn’t prove that you can really think and feel, like a human girl. Oh God, I hope you don’t! It would be too cruel.”

I didn’t know what to do. According to Arnie’s story, Skinner should know perfectly well that I had a human mind. He’d been getting reports of Miranda and me chatting to each other. But his gibbering remorse looked genuine, and I couldn’t resist feeding it. I zoomed myself backward from the side, zoomed back up to the rim: stopped myself half a centimeter before I rammed the tiles, and smacked my tail down hard.

Dr. Skinner looked like someone who had seen a ghost.

“She’s definitely trying to communicate,” he muttered. “But what kind of mind is in there? That’s what we can’t know. How changed, how alien? The brain activity might not mean anything. Remember, she may be intelligent, she may be
very
intelligent, but she isn’t human anymore.”

Thanks a lot,
I thought.

He gave another furtive glance around. There were no orderlies in sight. He darted to the gate, and tapped the keys on the lock pad rapidly (I tried to see, but I couldn’t). He slipped inside and came and knelt at the edge of the pool. I was right on the surface. He could have tried to touch me, but he didn’t. Shame. I had a sting in my tail. I didn’t know if it was seriously poisonous, but I wouldn’t have minded trying a little experiment.

“Why don’t you swim away, Semi? Aren’t you afraid of humans? You should be!”

I stayed where I was, staring up at him as meanly as I could. Manta rays are not very mean by nature, but I did my best to look nasty and accusing.

“Oh God,” muttered Dr. Skinner. “This can’t be happening. I’m a scientist. I’m not a . . .”

Criminal?
I wondered.
Murderer?
Because we had been murdered, Miranda and I. We were worse than dead, if you weren’t trying desperately hard to take a positive view—

He swallowed and wiped his hands on his coat. I saw his Adam’s apple jerk up and down. “Okay,” he muttered. “I’m a scientist. I’m not supposed to do this, but let me see.” He picked up a handful of pebbles from the gravel border beside the pool. “Semi, watch me.” He set the pebbles down, in nine little groups, in a row along the tiles. “The brain activity that we’ve recorded says you have human minds. Can you show me if that’s true?
He
says we mustn’t interfere. He says you have to be left alone, the way transgenics might be alone on an alien planet. He’s crazy. . . . Give me some proof. If you can understand what I’m saying, do what I tell you. Use your mouth, or your tail, or whatever you like, Semi. But you are to move every third bunch of pebbles. You understand? Every third bunch!”