Dr. Franklin's Island (15 page)

This test,
I thought,
is unfair on animals with no
hands. Not only can I hardly do it, but I don’t
understand
wanting
to do it. But I’ll move the pebbles. To see
you squirm.

I got right to the edge, and moved the pebbles into the water, using the soft paddles by my mouth, which are there to guide the plankton the way it should go. Every third bunch. Any manta ray able to swim and chew plankton at the same time could have done it, if they could understand English (and see the point). I didn’t have to have ever been a girl. I didn’t much want those dirty pebbles in my water, either, but it was necessary for the cause of scientific progress. Ha.

Dr. Skinner’s face went chalky white under the red sunburn, right up to his hair. I thought for a horrible moment he was going to fall into my pool. Yecch. But he didn’t. He stood up. I could see that he was shaking. He started pacing up and down (he reminded me of Miranda when he did that). Then he came back, got on his knees again, and leaned over the water. “Suppose I could help you?” he whispered. “Suppose you could never be truly human again, would you still want to be free?”

I dived. I had a hard time fetching the pebbles up, because my mouth is not built for that sort of thing, but I got a bunch of them up to the rim, and spat them out carefully, in the form of a check. Like,
yes
. I didn’t see any harm in telling him that, it couldn’t be a big secret. I hoped it made him feel even more terrible. Of course I wanted to be free.

Dr. Skinner stared at this message. His eyes rolled behind his glasses. He turned and scuttled for the gate, locked it and hurried out of my sight.

I wondered if that was the last I’d see of him.

Skinner’s behavior was very puzzling. Why had he suddenly turned up? It must have something to do with the fact that we’d contacted Arnie. But he didn’t seem to know that we’d been talking to Arnie. . . . What did that mean? I badly, badly needed to talk to Miranda. But talking to Miranda was getting difficult.

Day Ninety-five (I think)

I have had a second dose. It turned up on the side of the pool, under the mango tree, as before. We’ve never been sure whether we’re under video surveillance in here or not, but I think if there are spy cameras, the tube might be difficult for them to pick up. It’s very small, and almost invisible against the tiles. Miranda opened it for me and chucked the powder in the water, and I swallowed it. Still no sign of any antidote for Miranda. At the notch-cutting ceremony that night she said to me,
We don’t even know if that’s Arnie we’ve
been talking to. It could be Skinner and Franklin, feeding radio signals into our brains, making us see Arnie
the way we remembered him, making us hear the voice
we remember. We don’t know anything, Semi. We can’t
trust anyone, not even ourselves, not even our own
minds. He’s taken it all away.

I’d seen Miranda break down, I’d seen her crying from fear and loneliness. But in all our trials, I’d never, never heard her talk like that before.

She won’t say so, but I know it’s very hard on her that I have the antidote and she doesn’t. I said, I don’t want to get back into human form. If you’re going to stay a bird, I want to stay a fish. She said
don’t be stupid,
and cheered up a bit.

She won’t say so, but I know (and she knows I know) that the reason she got so angry with Arnie in the white place is that
of course
she’s thought of flying away and leaving me if she ever got the chance. She’s thought about it. She wouldn’t be human if she hadn’t thought about it. But she’d never do it.

I haven’t told her about Skinner.

I don’t know whether I’m right or wrong, but I’ve decided to keep quiet.

Miranda’s right. We don’t know who’s listening on Radio Mutant. We don’t know whom to trust. We don’t know anything.

We haven’t found out how the tubes get here. We’ve tried staying awake. We can’t do it, not even if we can hear the jungle cat howling. It’s good to have a few hours of escape, but it’s terrible to feel that our bodies are animal bodies, doing animal things that we can’t control. I keep thinking about how horrible it is to be a monster, more and more. I try to drift and have sunlit dreams, but I seem to have lost the knack. It’s frightening. If I lose my calm, Semi-the-fish state of mind, I think I’ll go crazy.

Maybe I should be worrying about me, not Miranda.

But exciting things have happened! I found a stick floating in the water (the orderly skims the debris out of my pool every day, but this one he’d missed). I started messing with it—copying the things Miranda does, really—and found I could hold it between those mouth-flippers of mine. I would never have thought I could do that. I took it down to the sluice cover, and I poked and pried (dropping my stick a hundred and seven times before I got anywhere). Finally I managed to lever the flap open.

There’s a channel full of water. It’s tight at first, but it gets wider. That’s how much I know so far. I can fold myself enough to squeeze inside, which is brilliant news. I almost feel I’m girl-shaped again when I fold my wings like that. I haven’t explored any farther. I’m scared that one of the orderlies will come along and notice . . . whoops, there’s no mutant manta ray in the water. This pool is worse than our beach. There’s
nowhere
to hide. (The story of our life!) But the real problem is that I can’t tell Miranda—for the same reason as I can’t risk telling her about Skinner. We can’t use the radio telepathy for secrets, and I can’t think of a way a mutant manta ray can say
I can get out of my
pool through a pipe
by swimming up and down or slapping her tail.

Maybe Miranda has the same problem. The other day, I was watching her the way I do, because I like watching her. She noticed me and started bringing things to the rim of my pool. I’d seen her arrange patterns of twigs and flowers before (Miranda says she does it out of boredom, but I think it’s very clever and pretty). I came up to admire. I looked and I saw (maybe it was Skinner’s pebbles that had put me in the right frame of mind) that she had arranged a pattern of numbers. Five seedpods. Six red flower petals. Three manky pieces of melon rind, nine sticks, two dead butterflies.

I splashed my tail to mean “That’s really nice!” She stared at me furiously, gave a shriek, and swept it all away with her wing.

Afterward I realized why she was angry with me, and I
think
I know what she meant, but she had gone, flying free again, so I couldn’t tell her.

Day Ninety-eight

It’s very frightening to think how long we’ve been in this cage. I’m calling this Day Ninety-eight, but when I try to line up all the days in my memory, I know there are gaps in the record, even since we started the count again. I’ve taken three doses of the powder now. My body doesn’t seem to be changing at all.

We haven’t heard from Arnie again. We hardly use the radio telepathy.

We don’t want to and . . . I think we both sometimes forget how.

I think we might be turning into dumb animals.

I’m afraid for Miranda. She’s hardly here. She spends her whole time flying free: and when she
is
here, she pays less and less attention to me.

Before we were changed Miranda was the strong one, and I was the one who panicked. Since we’ve been changed, it seems to be the other way around. Miranda says I’ve always been the tough one, inside. I don’t think that’s strictly true. I think it’s partly because I have a fish-mind and she has a bird-mind; and partly just that different people can be brave in different situations. While we were on the beach, and while we were having our “treatment,” it was Miranda’s kind of strength we needed. Miranda is a high-flier, always striving to be the best, to get things right. As long as she has something to achieve, she’s all right. I’m more of a deep-swimmer, keener on things than people, content with my own thoughts: and that means I’m better able to cope with being locked up and abandoned in a freak zoo. That’s the way it seems to me, anyway. We’re both strong, we’re both weak, in our different ways. But the awful thing is that she helped me, she saved my life a thousand times, and now I don’t know how to help her.

When I call her up she doesn’t answer. I hear her voice in my mind repeating words and scraps of sentences that don’t make sense . . .

Flight . . . airfoil . . . lift . . . the muscles of the sternum . . . always wanted to be able to fly . . . oh, Semi,
always wanted to fly . . .

She’s standing right beside my pool, but she sounds as if she’s very far away.

I remember thinking that being together as animals was the same as being castaways. We knew each other so well we didn’t need to be able to talk, to be company for each other. I was wrong. We’re together but there are bars between us, and that’s no good. I can’t get excited about lifting that sluice cover. I can’t bear to think about escaping. It doesn’t matter whether we can get out of this enclosure or not. If she doesn’t recover her human form soon,
it will be too late.

On the hundredth day from Miami Airport, as far as I could judge, I woke up in the morning and knew that we had missed the notch-cutting ceremony. I tried to remember if we’d done it the night before, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t remember if we’d done it the night before that, either.

I swam around, feeling very miserable. I’d been dreaming about being at home with my mum and dad, and it had been dreadful to wake up. I wanted to cry, but my fish-monster eyes couldn’t cry. I forgot to use my fins like wings, I tried to lift my arms above the surface—which gave me a horrible straitjacket feeling, as if my arms were swaddled up in a slimy wet sheet, and I couldn’t get them free. That panicked me for a few minutes, but I managed to calm myself; only I was very worried about Miranda.

Then I saw her. She was under the mango tree. I knew she was feeling bad, by the droop of her wings. I swam down there. Under the shade of the mango tree was the nearest we could get to being out of sight of the orderlies, or anyone else who might be watching us. I swam up to the rim, and saw the new plastic tube lying there. Another dose. Miranda didn’t seem to have noticed it.

I flipped those mental switches, and called to her, “Hey, Miranda!”

No coverage.

She was standing right in front of me, wide awake, holding a piece of fruit in one foot while she pecked at it with her beak. The bird-monster’s head turned sideways, and a bright, empty eye looked at me without any interest.

She was
gone.
There was nothing human in that look at all.

I was alone, totally alone. Miranda had left me behind, she’d gone ahead of me, on the last stage of our terrible adventure. I seemed to hear, though I knew it was my imagination, the whisper of her human voice, fading away forever:

Exciting, Semi. Say it!

Exciting . . . a great adventure . . .

I knocked the tube into the pool with one of my wing tips.

I didn’t have a chance of removing a screw cap. I kept smacking the thing against the side, with my body, until it crumpled. I gobbled the powder as it spilled out, trying to hoover up every single particle. Then there was nothing more for me to do but swim around, praying that something would happen. Praying that the pain and torture of the change would begin.

chapter eleven

Day One Hundred and Two

On Day One Hundred, Miranda flew away. I didn’t see her leave. She didn’t come back by nightfall. I was awake half the night, afraid she must be lying hurt somewhere. I thought she must have tried to fly beyond the crater rim, and been zapped out of the sky. In the morning Dr. Skinner and Dr. Franklin turned up with some orderlies. They obviously knew that Miranda had gone. They searched the enclosure. I glided up and down my pool, wondering what they were looking for. They didn’t take any notice of me. Dr. Skinner looked very flustered. The orderlies shouted at each other in Spanish. Even the animals in the zoo seemed to be upset. I could hear them hooting and grunting; and the cat was howling. I thought it was like the sound of the prisoners in a jail when they know there’s been a breakout.

Dr. Franklin looked older. His thick gray hair was untidy, his face seemed to have more lines. Even the cold brightness of his eyes seemed dimmed. He stood by my pool talking to Skinner. I listened carefully. I found out that we
had
been under video surveillance, but the camera’s-eye view didn’t show them everything that went on in here. They’d come along today to search for signs of genuinely humanlike activity that the cameras hadn’t picked up, but they’d found none. They talked about Miranda’s flower-and-twig patterns. They said it proved nothing. Some kinds of real, natural birds (like bowerbirds) do that sort of thing, and it doesn’t mean they’re intelligent the way human beings are intelligent. They were saying that the brain-wave readings had fooled them. They thought Miranda had come through the change all right, but she had started to deteriorate soon after, and now she was completely “nonhuman.”

Apparently she wasn’t lost. They knew where she was. She was out beyond the farmland, in the scrubby forest that covered the rest of the valley floor. They could pick her up any time they liked, but Dr. Franklin wanted to observe her for a while. He wanted to see what kind of behavior she came up with, as a formerly human transgenic bird-monster. I heard him say, “Remember, this is not a human mind! The stun ring will prevent her from leaving the valley and from attacking any of the staff. We’ll let her settle down, and then go out and study her, get some video record. . . . Later, we can bring her in for the vivisection, and find out what’s been going on inside. I don’t look on this as a failure, Skinner. Not at all! This is exactly what I planned for my prototypes. It has been a very exciting first trial.”

So now I knew why we hadn’t been abandoned. Our creator had been watching over us, all right. Watching to see us fall apart in the cause of science. This did not make me feel any better. That strange word
vivisection
frightened me. At first I didn’t know why. Then I remembered that it means scientists operating on animals while they’re alive, and I was even more frightened.

She’s been away two days. I’m very lonely and I’m very scared. I think something’s happening to my fish-self. I can feel my human arms and legs again, like phantom limbs inside me. I’m becoming human again, and Miranda is a dumb animal. She doesn’t know they know where she is. She doesn’t know they’ll come after her and bring her back, and cut her open while she’s still alive. There’s no way I can warn her. I flip the mental switches and call and call, but she doesn’t answer me, and Arnie (if that was ever really Arnie) doesn’t answer me either. I don’t know what to do.

Day One Hundred and Three

Skinner came to the enclosure alone, early in the morning. The shadows were lying long and cool on the water, and some bird like a swallow was darting to and fro, dipping down to the surface to drink and skimming away again. The orderly hadn’t come to clean the pool yet. There were a couple of twigs floating on the water; and a bee that had fallen in and drowned. I saw Skinner by the gate, mopping his sun-reddened face with a handkerchief. I hid in the shade of the mango tree.

He opened the door and sneaked inside. Then he came to the edge of the water and knelt down, and lowered something into it. I swam over. I wanted to find out what he was doing. The dangling thing was a kind of big syringe, attached to a box that he held in his hand, with keys to press and a little screen. He didn’t look at me, but he knew I was there. “I’m sampling your water,” he murmured, quietly. “Now that Miranda’s gone, Dr. Franklin’s decided it’s no longer important that we stay away from the enclosure. He wants to know if you are giving off high levels of stress-related chemicals. He wants to know how the disappearance of your companion has affected you.”

Why doesn’t he try asking Arnie?
I thought. Skinner’s glasses were milky with reflected light, the way they’d been that night when he’d tried to help us escape. Mad milky-penny eyes. “I’ll have to make sure something happens to this water sample, won’t I? I’d better drop it in the lab, or spill a cup of coffee into it. I’m sure you’re stressed, but there are other chemicals in this water that shouldn’t be here. Aren’t there, Semi?”

He bent his head, pretending to look at something on the control box. I suppose the camera eyes that we had never found were still recording.

“We don’t want Dr. Franklin to know that you are changing back. Do we?”

So Skinner was the “friendly technician” that Arnie had told us about. That made sense. Who else but Skinner (or Dr. Franklin) would have access to the antidote infusion?

All I could do was stare at him.

He looked at the little screen on his box, tapped some keys, and nodded to himself. Then he leaned down closer to me. “Semi,” he whispered, “it’s time. We have to get you out of here, before it’s obvious what’s happening to you. There’s a way out of the pool. Have you found it? Splash your tail. Once for yes, twice for no.”

I lay there on the surface, rippling my wings, trying to desperately think what I should do now. Should I trust him? How could I trust him?

I splashed my tail.

“Okay,” whispered Skinner. “We’re going to get you out. Listen. Miranda’s been seen soaring above the crater. I’m going to take the motor launch tonight and patrol around the island, ready to get a fix on her exact location, if she gets herself zapped and falls on to the mountainside, on the wrong side of the rim. That’s my excuse for getting away. . . . I’ll be at the east coast jetty, at dawn. Your friend Arnie will be with me. You have to get out of the pool, get to the jetty and wait for me there. I hope you can do that. I’m afraid you’re on your own, I can’t help you. Leave after dark. The cameras in here can’t pick up much after nightfall. This is the best I can do, Semi. Don’t worry about Miranda. We’ll raise a rescue party, and come back for her. Remember,
you have
to come to the jetty.
Don’t take off for the open sea. The change should be easier this time, but I don’t know what it will be like. You may need special care. This is something that’s never been tried before. I’ll be there, with Arnie. We won’t leave without you.”

He fumbled with his water-sampling gadget. Something slipped from his cupped palm into my pool, making a tiny splash. It was another of those little tubes.

“That’s your last dose. Take it immediately, then wait for nightfall.” He stood up, wiping his hands furiously on that handkerchief, as if he was trying to wipe away his guilt. “Miranda was right,” he muttered. “I should have left with the two of you, that first night. Now it’s almost too late. No more games, Semi. This is real. I can’t stand to be here, to see what he’s going to do to Miranda—”

I was doing absolutely nothing. I was an inquisitive ray fish, floating on the surface, watching this human with his funny machine and his funny mumbling. I kept on doing nothing, showing not a sign of “humanlike activity,” until he left.

I let the tube float while I tried to think. I had no rational reason to trust Skinner. The last time he’d tried to save us he’d let us down badly. I could feel that the doses of powder were doing something to me. If he’d really been giving me the antidote, did that mean the rest of his story was true? But how I could bear to leave without Miranda? What if she came back, and I was gone? I thought about that motor launch and the tracking equipment. I thought about Arnie-the-eavesdropper. I thought I should call him up, but when I tried he didn’t answer, and I realized I didn’t dare to trust “Arnie” anyway. I swam around and around, feeling so alone, trying to figure out a cunning plan that would save me, save Miranda, save Arnie (if he was really still alive!).

In the end I just crushed the tube, swallowed the powder and waited.

The orderly came and skimmed the pool, and fed me my plankton.

I decided I didn’t dare trust the radio telepathy at all anymore. Then I decided I had to try, and I called and called for Miranda, but she didn’t answer. Not a word, not a sign.

In the afternoon I started to feel ill. I felt hot inside, and shivery outside. If I’d been human, I’d have said I was running a fever. I remembered what my greatgrandmother in Jamaica used to say: “Get out in the good sun, let de heat drive out de fever.” But the sun didn’t warm me. My thoughts weren’t dreamy and slow. They were tangled up and frightening and confused. I tried to remember how happy I had been, cruising around in the water, full of strength and grace, eating plankton as easily as breathing. It was gone. It was as if my mind was a train that had been switched onto a different track. Semi-the-fish was heading off into the distance, and this other Semi was racing back, faster and faster—the girl who had been put through too many horrors and couldn’t take much more.

I kept thinking of what Skinner had said about me needing special care. What if I was farther on than he realized? I had not seen myself in my bad time. I only knew how it had been for Miranda. I saw her in my mind: Miranda twisted up in agony, her face fallen in, her breastbone bursting out of her chest. Things like that were going to happen to me. Again, soon. If I stayed in my pool, Dr. Franklin would look after me. He’d be angry with me, like a father with a disobedient child. But he would look after me.

I hid in the shade of the mango tree, and watched the swallows dipping over the water. The sun moved across the sky. My head was aching and the inside of my mouth felt strange and sore. How could “my head” be aching? My head wasn’t a separate thing, stuck on, on a little stalk. It was inside me, part of
me.
I felt as if my arms were folded up in front of my face, locked stiff and full of pins and needles: but I had no arms. . . . How could my arms and legs feel cramped and trapped? They should
flow
.

It was as if my body was being squeezed and knotted into different sections, when it should be all of a piece, one smooth delta-wing. I tried to see if anything was actually happening to Semi-the-fish. But I couldn’t look at myself very well, I could only see the shape of the shadow beneath me in the water. It seemed to be the same as ever.

I was so scared.

The seawater is pumped into my pool through the inflow cover. It flows out through the outflow cover. I think the inflow pipe runs together with the outflow, until it reaches underneath the pool to the other side. That would save tunneling through the rock twice. There’ll be pumping machinery, where the inflow and the outflow come out on the beach. I think that will be somewhere hidden, so there isn’t any machinery showing. . . . But how can I know? I’m frightened I’ll push myself through the outflow, and fall into some kind of crushing, thumping, squeezing, metal hell, and then I’ll die.

I’m going to die anyway. I don’t want to die here, in this concrete box.

I don’t want Miranda to suffer. If
my
Miranda is dead, if her human mind is gone forever, I still want to save the creature she’s become. I won’t let them vivisect her.

At last the dusk fell, and the tropic darkness quickly followed.

The orderly had cleaned my sluice-opening stick out of the water, but more stuff always fell in. I found another, and took it to the bottom of the pool. My useless back flippers felt different—tender and aching—but stronger, and better able to understand the peculiar human-type orders I was giving them. From what Skinner had said, it seemed he had known all along there was a way out of the pool. Which meant Dr. Franklin must know about it too. What did that mean? How could I tell what kind of game they were playing now? When I levered open the sluice cover again, most likely a lot of alarms would go off, spotlights would come on, and Dr. Franklin would be there by the pool crying “Excellent! Well done, Semi!”

Or what if Skinner was really trying to help, but he didn’t know? Maybe he just
hoped
that a manta ray creature the size of a flattened teenager could wriggle down the big outflow pipe. The more I thought about it the more I remembered that Skinner was a real mess, gibbering with remorse, probably drunk too, and even if he meant well, I couldn’t trust him to be thinking straight.

I had to take the risk. First chance, last chance.

Like you always said, Miranda,
I thought.
The next
thing we try might work.

I prized open the cover, folded myself up and shoved myself into that black hole.

I don’t know if I could have done it if I hadn’t been so completely desperate. But I put all my strength into that thrust: and I burst through the mouth of the outflow into a wide pipe beyond, like a cork popping out of a bottle.

The walls were smooth and slippery. I could see nothing. I was frightened that I’d come to somewhere where there was no water to breathe, and I wouldn’t be able to get back. I’d keep sliding on, trapped and choking. It didn’t happen. I came to the end of the straight bit, and then slithered around a bend. There was room enough, but my wings were squashed against the sides. I could hear, ahead of me, a sound like soft thunder.

A little farther and the water churned around me, and I was falling.

If I’d had a voice, I would have yelled. My wings flew out wide, instinctively. I was trying to grab at the tunnel sides with the hands I didn’t have. I only hurt myself; I could not get a grip. I was speeding down this steep, slippery tube, in utter blackness, faster and faster. Then I fell again! If I didn’t shriek aloud that time, I certainly shrieked in my mind. But I was still gathering speed, and nothing terrible had happened to me. I could feel that I was in a bigger passageway, still full of water: it seemed to be a natural passage in the rock. I could hear a rushing noise beside me. I kept bumping into something smooth and rounded; that must have been the other pipe, with the water being pumped up from the sea.