by Coral Walker
“I couldn’t make it selective — it had to take everything in the room.”
“But why, why did they go? What could have been the trigger? They’re both physically healthy … stress, could it have been stress?” Brianna said in an urgent tone, her face glowing a rosy red.
“It’s possible but —” muttered the Professor.
“I knew it!” Brianna cut the Professor short. She jerked her head to face Jack, eyes blazing. “You annoyed Mrs Handyman just a day before. Mum and Dad had to see the headmaster.”
For a while, Jack, his head still reeling dreadfully, simply stared. It took him a moment to grasp that Brianna was talking to him and another to absorb that it was an accusation. Then he answered, as a matter of course, with a counter accusation — his usual way of refuting Brianna’s attacks. “What about Mum’s embarrassment, having to read out your poem in front of the year?”
Brianna looked surprised. “I … it was an honour.”
He knew it was a cheap shot, but it was the only thing his dazed mind could think of. She was right, and it was an honour for a parent whose child had won the poetry competition. But he had made his point. “Everyone was laughing at her odd accent. Remember how pale she went!”
Brianna blushed, her voice thin and rasping. “She said she enjoyed it.”
“She was only pretending!”
“Hang on children, no quarrelling,” said the Professor. “Look here.” He drew a box out of his bulging pocket and pressed it. Instantly a translucent screen materialised in the air above the table and showed a graph with two axes and some jagged lines.
“This statistical diagram records the stress levels of your parents,” he said and zoomed in on an area using his fingers. “Look at those spikes. There’s no doubt that your parents had been under pressure lately, but they were still a long way from triggering a sudden return to Cygnore.”
“Stress was not the cause,” he concluded emphatically.
A deep crimson spread across Brianna’s face. Jack lowered his gaze.
The Professor’s lips curved slightly upwards. “There are hidden switches by the side of their bed to allow them to return to their home planet of their own volition. They might have operated it themselves —”
“That’s impossible!” Brianna cried, her face turning pale.
“You must be able to operate it from here, mustn’t you?” said Jack, staring thoughtfully at the Professor’s face.
“Well, yes,” the Professor shrugged, “but I know I didn’t do it.”
“A fault in the device then!” came Brianna’s penetrating voice across the table.
“Unlikely! I am a conscientious man,” the Professor snorted, throwing his head back. “In everything I do I have a rigorous and precise procedure. One teeny mistake could send me thousands of light-years away from where I want to be.”
His eyes narrowed, his head shaking in thought. “As a human, we always see things from our angle, without appreciating there are vast areas beyond the reach of our conscious mind. Among the multitude of decisions that we’ve made, many of them are not made alone by the conscious mind but together with the subconscious mind — the unseen but magisterial God of our lives. It’s Mother Nature, in a more general sense, the invincible force of the universe.”
He paused to clear his throat, his gaze cautious. “There’s no other explanation other than that they felt the call of their land, and they answered the call.”
“You mean Marcus and Zelda simply abandoned their home and their children?” Jack heard his own bitter voice talking. A touch of irony overcame him — he deliberately referred to his parents by their names. It sounded strange.
“Abandon is a strong word, Jack.”
“Brianna and I are, in fact, not their blood children. Perhaps they —”
“But they love us, Jack,” cried Brianna.
“Pretend love, m ... manufactured.” The rancour in his tone was obvious, startling even himself, but he pressed on stubbornly. “They followed the code that was transfused into their minds — parental guidance. Couldn’t you tell that sometimes they acted and talked so mechanically and repetitively as if they were following instructions? Perhaps, deep down, we are nothing to them!”
Head down, Brianna was biting her lower lip.
“What about Bo?” She raised her head and turned to look at Bo, who was slumped half asleep in the chair with his head drooping over his chest. Her face softened with affection as she enfolded him in her arms.
Jack could tell Bo was her last weapon. But she had a point: no matter what, they must still care about Bo — their own blood child. How could they have left without Bo?
The Professor intervened with a cough. “I did receive a request from Bara demanding the return of Bo.”
Brianna looked up, her eyes sparkling. “Was it from Mum and Dad?”
“Well, it was from Lord Shusha, a powerful man behind the King of Bara. As far as I know, they have received both the Prince and Princess.”
Jack frowned at the word “receive” but said nothing.
“Did the message mention Jack and me?” Brianna asked.
“No.”
“But I ...” she blushed as if frustrated in her search for a suitable term. “We … we couldn’t possibly be parted from Bo.”
“Bo has the blood of a Baran and a Rionean — he belongs to Taron, and he needs his parents.”
“Jack …” Brianna whimpered.
He felt her pleading stare but refused to turn his head. “So you want to take Bo away from us, Professor Nandalff?”
The man under his gaze shuddered all of a sudden. “No, no, no … once I knew that your parents had left, I immediately sent Ms Upright and the Ozzies to fetch you all. I thought Bo might have gone with your parents since he used to sleep in their room. I … I … from the very start ... just want to have a happy ending.”
He sighed, for a while his unseeing eyes were staring at the cup before him. Then he let his glance drift aimlessly until it fell on Jack. At once his eyes widened with surprise. “Is that a ring hanging around your neck?”
Jack, puzzled by his disquieting tone, lowered his head to look, feeling a little uneasy.
“Dad’s ring, Bo found it outside their bedroom,” said Brianna.
“Show me.” The Professor stretched out his hand.
Amused by the Professor’s excitement over a small ring, Jack took it off his neck and tossed it across the table. The Professor caught it and eagerly examined it.
“Marcus should never have left this ring,” muttered the Professor, his face dark with dismay.
“What’s the ring for?” asked Jack, alarmed.
“It’s a memory ring that I made for your Dad. I found that for some beings, alien and human alike, hyperspace travel affects their memory. I’m afraid your Dad is one of those who are susceptible to such memory loss after space travel, and the ring was designed to protect him from it.”
“Are you saying that —?” said Brianna in a shrill voice, “Dad might have forgotten his life on Earth, including us —”
“Very likely,” said the Professor gravely, “unless he gets the ring back on his finger soon.”
7
Lab
Skorpias was an artificial island in space, and so wasn’t a big place. In less than half an hour, Jack and Brianna wended their way to the lofty metal wall, marking the boundary of the island. Squinting his eyes against the blinding light, Jack traced the shining surface of the wall upward. Faintly he saw a thin film, iridescent and wobbling like a bubble, sweeping upward and fading away.
The film must wrap around the whole island to keep its air in and maintain its atmosphere, Jack conjectured as he gazed up at the glowing circle in the sky above. It seemed to be the size of the sun, but its light doesn’t have the warmth of natural sunlight. Could it be artificial too?
The island was landscaped with gentle hills, duck ponds and clusters of flowering bushes. If not for the pear-shaped people who giggled every time they
went past them, they might well have mistaken this place for a picturesque English village.
“I’ve got a weird feeling we’ve been on this island before,” Brianna said as they marched up a low hill that overlooked a lake. It was a small lake, immaculately kept, and directly facing the house. For the residents of the house, the view of the lake’s placid water, the lush grassy banks, and the neatly shaped bushes were a real feast for the eyes.
“There used to be swans, rather large ones, and I used to ride on one,” she said with a vague air.
She must be dreaming, Jack decided. She had taken Bo to his room to sleep. Without her usual bubbly spirit, she seemed to need a sleep herself.
They returned to the house, and with Jack leading the way turned immediately into a cramped hallway. After a few more turns, Jack stopped at a non-descript door. Taking the handle in his hand, he turned it.
It didn’t move.
“It’s locked. What’d you expect?” said Brianna.
Without a word, Jack strode down a labyrinth of passages. Before long, they were back at the dining-living room. He could see the surprise in Brianna’s eyes and was glad when she remarked on it.
“How did you know we could get back this way?”
“Super-sense,” he said, grinning.
Across the dining room stood a closed door, distinctively painted half blue and half pink, and bedecked with bright, cheerful wooden characters.
He walked over, and his eyes lingered on each of the characters. A wooden knight wielding his sword arrested his attention. He extended a hand to touch it, and as he did he felt a peculiar surge of joy and wonder sweeping through him. Under the pressure of his fingers, the door opened.
Curious, he looked in. The beds were there exactly as he thought they would be, and the colours were still fresh. The one on the left side was a soft blue, and the one on the right was a subdued pink. In fact, the whole room was furnished bluish on the left and pinkish on the right. The long, creamy-white shelf on the far wall was the only exception. Though, from how the books and toys were arranged, it was easy to tell that an effort had been made to place boy’s stuff on the left side, and girl’s on the right.
“What are we doing here?” whispered Brianna.
“Don’t you see, Brianna,” he paused to take a quick breath, “this used to be our room!”
“No way …” she blurted.
“You said you had a feeling we’ve been here before, and this is it — our own nursery!”
“You mean …” she muttered. Her eyes, alight with alarm, darted from one corner to another before falling to the small pink bed. “That was my bed, and … and I used to stand on it staring at you while you were asleep.”
A wave of colour blushed her cheeks. “How could it be ... I always thought we were both born in Dare Valley — on Earth.”
“Perhaps we weren’t,” said Jack quietly.
He strode over to the creamy shelf and looked from one end to the other. A wooden model of a blue steam train caught his eye.
The train was on a red turntable, and the turntable was screwed to the shelf. Carefully he took hold of the turntable with one hand and rotated the train with the other, backwards and forwards. It turned stiffly under his hand. For an instant, he thought he might have got it wrong. It was just one of those boring models that do nothing. But the images, fragmented and detached from time and space, swelled in his head — so high up, he couldn’t possibly reach it. The longing, the desire and the tears all came back to him, but there was more to it. Someone was playing with the train while he was watching. It turned, and then —
He felt a faint click under his hand, too subtle to be sure. With painstaking care, he manipulated the train slowly backwards, picking up on any slight movement. It clicked again, and this time he stopped and held the train where it was. He could now see a mark on the rim where the train was pointing, too smudged to be taken for a deliberate mark.
Presently, the train came alive. Three whistles sounded, followed by a stream of flashing lights.
“Stand back,” Jack muttered, breathing loudly.
With a low drone, the big heavy shelf and the wall behind shifted, turning anticlockwise towards them.
Swiftly they jumped backwards.
+++
The lights turned on by themselves, illuminating the room in front of them. It was a typical lab, a large bright room with test tubes and beakers cluttering worktops, and bottles and jars arrayed on shelves. In the centre, a sturdy desk was piled with files, papers and books. They entered, and the wall shut stiffly behind them.
Turning to Brianna, Jack hoped to see she was impressed. He had pieced together the old shards of a young toddler’s memory and found this secret entrance.
Brianna, her eyes sparkling with wonder, didn’t look once in his direction but darted her glance from one worktop to another. The shut door on the other side of the room, through which they could have entered earlier if it had been unlocked, held her attention for a while, and then a row of jars on a large table captured her interest. She strode towards them and uttered a cry of bewilderment as she drew near. Following closely behind her, he saw them too.
Soaked in a yellowish liquid inside the jars there were babies — alien babies.
Their skins were wrinkled and flaky. Backs bent, heads bowed, and limbs drawn up towards their torsos, they looked like they were in their mothers’ wombs. There was quite a collection of them. Some were freakish and scaly, and others were greenish or hideously furry. Brianna cooed at a jar next to a scaly one. With its worm-studded head and tiny bony hands, it was unmistakably an Ozzi baby.
Jack shifted his gaze to the last two jars and felt queasy the instant his sight fell on them. Human babies? It was his first thought, and it struck him as odd how much he reacted to dead babies of his own kind. Brianna did not take it well either and ugh-ed loudly behind him. A slender, black thing beneath the baby drew his attention.
It seemed to be a snake coiling underneath. He grasped the jar, turned it round, and immediately saw that the back of the baby was covered thickly with black scales and tapered into the slender body of the snake. With the baby’s face and limbs out of sight, it looked freakishly like a snake with a bulging upper body and a human head.
“Half-snake, half-human, weird!” said Brianna. “How did they die?”
A silver toolbox lay open alongside the jars, revealing its contents of forceps, scalpels and other unknown surgical instruments.
“Experimental failures.” Jack shrugged.
“Experimenting with babies!” Brianna’s voice was thick with disgust.
Jack strode across the room to a corner enclosed within a row of glass panels. Behind the panels the walls were painted a delicate apple green, starkly contrasting with the drab, grey shade of the lab. Along the wall, four identical transparent boxes stood in a row.
“I know what these are. They’re incubators for new-born babies,” said Brianna, excited.
He stuck out a finger and slid it along the surface of one of the incubators. A thick layer of dust was amassed on its tip. He gazed at it in wonder. In his mind’s eye, he seemed to be watching two new-borns lying in the incubators twitching their curled-up limbs. How pathetically their skin wrinkled and how piteously they clenched their hands! Could they be him and Brianna? Were the other two empty? Perhaps two Ozzi babies had stared at them with their beady eyes and wiggling tentacles.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Brianna sharply. “You think we were born here and once lay there like helpless monkeys, probably along with other helpless alien monkeys. That’s absurd … in a lab … and I know what you’ll say next — we were created in one of the test tubes …”
“Why not? There must be artificial wombs somewhere …” said Jack quickly, sweeping his eyes from wall to wall to search for the wombs.
“It’s a joke, isn’t it? All set up to trick me here and fool me with these bizarre ideas. If I believed it, you’d be jumping and poking f
un at me.”
“It’s no joke,” said Jack casting down his eyes.
For a while, Brianna gazed at him, studying him, and then she trembled. “So it is all real. We are just the result of some experiment, and we would have ended up in one of those jars if we had died.”
She sounded dejected and stood staring glumly at the incubators. But in a while, she threw her head back and took on a fierce and determined look.
“It doesn’t matter, does it,” she said in a firm, brisk tone, “where we were born or how we were born? We were brought up by Marcus and Zelda. Nothing can change that.”
“But they left us,” said Jack.
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“Hasn’t the Professor shown us —?”
“That proves nothing! Marcus and Zelda would never abandon us like that.”
“You’re crazy, Brianna!”
“Then I’m crazy, Jack,” she cried in a loud voice.
“All right,” Jack said, retreating. “So you think we should march up to the Professor, and demand transportation to Cygnore.”
“Exactly!” exclaimed Brianna, her face glowing. “We travel to Cygnore and find them! If indeed they are a prince and princess there, then it should be an easy task. Everybody knows where royalty lives. And also, there’s the ring to return. We don’t want Dad to forget about us, do we?”
“What about Bo?”
“We’ll take him with us of course. We stay together!” said Brianna firmly.
Straight away she was on her feet, marching towards the door. The prospect excited her, and she was beaming with anticipation. But before she reached the door, footsteps echoing in the corridor outside of the door brought her to a standstill. The steps paced steadily and stopped right in front of the door.
“Hide, hide,” she cried under her breath, shooting past him. In the blink of an eye, she found a leg space under a worktop, quickly scrambled into it and concealed her hideout with a chair. “Hurry, Jack, hide!” She hissed urgently from behind the chair.
Jack hesitated. He didn’t share the urgency that Brianna felt. Come what may, it didn’t matter if they were caught. Nevertheless, his curiosity was aroused by Brianna scurrying away like a mouse hiding from an approaching cat. After all, they barely knew the cat.
