Dr. Franklin's Island

by Ann Halam

  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!”

  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 seedpo
ds. 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 hu
man 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?”