by Zizou Corder
‘And Ninu … but …’
Charlie told his dad about Ninu. Aneba held him tight.
‘So listen,’ said Aneba. ‘Magdalen, King Boris, Claudio and two of the Lions are here –’
‘What?’ squeaked Charlie. He was so surprised, he almost forgot to disguise his words. Realizing, he laughed loudly. Then started almost getting hysterical. This was too much. First Ninu, then Dad, now everybody else …
‘So we’ll get you off the island,’ said Aneba.
‘Off the island,’ said Charlie, and he blinked.
It was just after dusk, as dinner was being served, that a shadow loomed out of the shade of evening, and landed on the beach near Charlie’s hut.
‘What the heck’s that?’ cried Aneba, but Charlie shushed him with a look and, yawning and stretching, wandered over towards the shape.
It was a bird.
It was the eagle.
‘What!’ shouted Charlie. ‘You – you –!’ He looked around for a rock, a stick, something to hit it with or throw at it, this murderous bird, this thieving friend-killer, this –
‘Charlie! Stop it!’ came a tiny voice.
Charlie stopped.
He could see nothing.
The eagle arced.
Charlie looked round.
‘I’m here,’ said the voice plaintively. ‘Come on, Charlie, I am a chameleon.’
He was purply grey, in the shadow under the eagle’s great feathery breast.
Ninu! Was it?
‘I’m all right!’ Ninu said. ‘He’s my friend!’
Charlie gasped. He wanted to cry out and dance around. Ninu! He crunched his teeth tightly together so that no squeal of joy should give him away, shook his head madly like a dervish and then he threw himself down on the sand, on his back. ‘Dad!’ he said loudly. ‘Dad! Come and look at the stars! They’re fab!’
Aneba came out. Lay down.
‘Watch it!’ squeaked a little voice.
Aneba jumped. ‘What’s that?’ he said, surprised, but remembering he had to keep his voice down.
Charlie giggled. Ninu was stepping delicately on to his tummy and it tickled.
‘Dad, Ninu, Ninu, my dad.’
‘But you’re dead,’ said Aneba.
‘No, I’m not,’ said Ninu.
Charlie couldn’t stop grinning. Not dead!
‘And you’re talking,’ said Aneba.
‘Yes,’ said Ninu. ‘And listen, I don’t mean to be rude, but, um, could you get used to it really quickly because I think there’s quite a lot to do …’
Aneba was goggling, his mouth going like a goldfish’s.
‘Come on, Dad, you’re a scientist, you know the world is full of wonders,’ said Charlie.
‘Er, yeah,’ said Aneba. He was still goggling, though.
‘So what happened?’ said Charlie, eyeing the eagle.
‘I, um, explained to my, um, chauffeur, that I might be more useful if I wasn’t lunch,’ said Ninu. ‘Like most big animals, he wasn’t used to being talked to by a snack, so he put me down and we had a chat. He’s great and he knows all kinds of things …’ Here he broke off and addressed the eagle briefly.
Aneba was beside himself with excitement.
‘Can he talk to anyone?’ he said. ‘To everyone?’
‘Yeah,’ said Charlie.
But Ninu was continuing. ‘He showed me how these humans are ruining the island,’ he said. ‘He sees it all because his nest is right at the top of the mountains. He has lived here many years. He knew the island before these ones came, he knows where they keep the animals prisoner, and where their ships come and go, and where they built their tunnels, and where their poison air comes from –’
‘Really?’ said Aneba. ‘Where?’
Ninu translated. The eagle wanted to know why Aneba wanted to know. Aneba, hardly believing that he was negotiating with an eagle through a chameleon, said, ‘Because I have the antidote – I could perhaps feed it through the system …’
The eagle lowered its fantastic brows and lifted its feathered shoulders.
‘He wants to know your plans,’ said Ninu. ‘He has no time for humans.’
‘Tell him,’ said Aneba, ‘that Charlie and I intend to … to …’
‘To end the reign of these humans,’ said Charlie. ‘To end the Sweet Air, and free the animals, and liberate the people, and make it all right again.’
He found himself staring at Aneba. Was that what they were going to do?
Aneba was staring back.
‘Yes?’ asked Charlie.
‘How do we liberate the people?’ asked Aneba. There was something doubtful in his tone, but Charlie didn’t have time to notice it.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ said Charlie. ‘But – well, we have to do something with them …’
The eagle was giving them his piercing look.
Ninu said, ‘He wants to know, will the humans go away?’
‘Some of them, yes,’ said Charlie.
‘The evil ones?’
Charlie found it hard to believe that anyone was really evil. But he knew evil existed. How could that make sense?
‘Yes,’ he said. Now was a time for decision, not for philosophizing. He’d come back to that later.
The eagle lifted his head and stared out into the darkness over the sea.
‘He says he will tell us where the Sweet Air comes from,’ said Ninu. ‘And where the animals are kept. He says he will help.’
That night, Charlie invited the other kids to come and watch telly with him.
‘OK,’ they said, with empty smiles.
They watched The Simpsons, smiling blankly all the way through and laughing at the wrong bits. It made Charlie really angry to see them out of kilter like that. ‘I’ll get them back,’ he said to himself, through clenched teeth. ‘I’ll get them all back, and then I’ll get them out of here.’ He offered them drinks. They all drank the sugary fizz from the fridge without noticing the drops from his dad’s bottle that Charlie had added.
By the time they were watching their third episode, Seventeen was giggling and making comments, the Starlets’ keeper had started to sing along with the theme tune and Charlie was beginning to think there was hope. But then Sally-Ann arrived to say they had used up all the time allocated for social community integration that night, and that it wasn’t all right to hang out now without advance permission, so they had to return to their rest and privacy units. Charlie looked around, wanting to catch someone’s eye for a giggle at this ludicrous phrase, but the others just quietly filed out.
The drops will work, he told himself. They were starting to.
Early the next morning, Aneba took a long walk to clear his mind for the day ahead. The HCE was not nervous about this: the Sweet Air would be doing its thing, and anyway, Dr Ashanti had embraced Corporacy aspirations! No one could hold out for long. Soon – today! – he would be working away on that asthma cure, and the Corporacy would own all the rights to it. No, the HCE didn’t mind him going for a walk. Where could he go, after all?
Better get his commchip in soon, though.
Aneba went exactly where the eagle had told him to go. It was a low concrete hut, with a magnetism-based security system on it that Aneba was able to dismantle quite swiftly because he had, as a younger man, worked on the prototype. Once inside, he took a quick look at the relatively simple air-conditioning system that had been distributing the Sweet Air across the island, and made a few minor changes.
‘Cunning,’ he said, noticing that the Sweet-Air molecules had been chemically weighted, to prevent them all from just blowing away across the sea.
He sipped again from his personal supply of antidote, keeping a small puddle of it in his mouth. The Sweet Air was strong here, and he didn’t want to be overwhelmed when he disconnected the supply to the distribution system.
Right. That would be the Sweet-Air tank, there was the supply pipe – he cut straight through the heavy black rubber with his big knife, breathing
through his mouth. Swiftly he poured some of the antidote into the air tank as well, and sealed it up, jamming the mechanism, in case anybody might try to reconnect it later. There.
It didn’t take long to reconnect the distribution pipe to his largest bottle of antidote. He fixed the join with rubberized putty. Neither the seal nor the bottle itself would last very long, but for a while it would cover the island and, after that, fresh air and sea breezes would kick in, and the effects of the Sweet Air would wear off anyway.
‘That should do for now,’ he said. ‘And with any luck there won’t be any later.’
That afternoon, Charlie (with the happy reassuring weight of Ninu in his pocket again) was summoned to the new lab in the mountain sector. For a moment, when he had first seen it, Aneba’s heart had lifted – so much equipment! So new! He would have been delighted, under other circumstances, to have settled down to work in this wonderful lab.
‘If only,’ he had said. ‘If only …’
But this afternoon he looked grim. As he turned his head, Charlie saw why.
On his neck, beneath his ear, was a clean white patch of gauze. A tiny spot of blood, red and fresh-looking, seeped at the centre.
It was very difficult for Charlie to regain his composure and congratulate his dad on being accepted as a full member of the Corporacy Community. But he did it.
‘That’s great, Dad!’ he said, as convincingly as he could. He felt sick inside. ‘Your commchip! Is it working yet? Wow! Now you can talk to everybody all the time!’
‘No, it’s not connected yet,’ Aneba said. ‘They’ll turn it on later – not sure when, but probably today. And in the meantime Alex is here with us.’
Charlie had known it would happen, but it made him miserable. He felt as if he and his father would never again be alone together.
‘So we’d better get down to work, eh, Charlie? Because they’ll be needing you for your own testing soon – I won’t have you as my assistant forever, you know.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Charlie. ‘Let’s get on then … We need to see the animals. We’ll need to test the results on them,’ he said grandly. ‘Won’t we, Dad?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Aneba. ‘Take us there, please,’ he said to Alex.
Alex, whose commchip was being monitored full-time so that the HCE could see what Aneba was up to in the lab, was not sure how to respond, but the answer came immediately from the HCE – yes, Dr Ashanti could be taken to the animals. How glad the HCE was that Ashanti wasn’t one of these inconvenient animal rights types. In fact, hearing that he was going to be testing on animals made the HCE feel more confident than ever in his decision to give Dr Ashanti some leeway and freedom in his work. He was relieved now that they’d got his commchip in place, but it looked like he was the Right Type – the Corporacy Type – after all.
This was, of course, exactly what Aneba wanted him to think.
The Animal Farm was high, high up on the mountain: man-made caves as animal sheds; man-made terraces serving as fields and pens, some of them arched with wire netting as aviaries. The breeze kept it cool, it was clean, the food was OK, but it couldn’t have been more of a prison. The only way to or from it was by air, or through the Corporacy’s tunnel. The animals sat there, looking out over the beautiful sea, sniffing the wind, hoping that today was not their day to be taken to the lab. And that was it.
Sergei was already there. The eagle had given him a lift and dropped him in one of the stalls. When Charlie and Aneba arrived, he was deep in conversation with another cat.
Charlie, wary as ever of Alex’s commchip and the possibility of cameras, knelt down and went, ‘Here, kitty kitty,’ in a babyish way. It was kind of pointless, given that the Corporacy knew he could talk to cats, but it was so much part of his nature to be discreet about his Catspeaking – and to conceal whatever he could from the Corporacy – that he did it automatically.
Kneeling, he got a shock.
The cat Sergei introduced him to – her name was Jungko – was small and silky and very beautiful, like the Burmese cats Charlie had seen in London. That was not so unusual. What stopped him short was her tail: at the end, it was forked.
She bowed gently to Charlie and addressed him in a curious form of Cat, which, though he could understand it, he recognized was quite different from what he was accustomed to. It was like the way Petra’s mother used to talk
– Petra was half Oriental.
‘Konichiwa,’ she said. ‘We are glad to see you here. Your friend has been telling us about the world outside. Can you help us?’
Behind her were stall after stall of animals. Immediately to her left, three extraordinary little creatures looked up hopefully. They were bald and silky, with wrinkled skin patterned pink and black, slitty eyes and huge ears. They looked like space creatures.
‘We’re Sphynx kittens,’ one said. ‘Apparently they want our baldness. They can have it! But when can we go home?’
Beyond them was another peculiar cat with pale green eyes, velvety rippled fur like a baby lamb’s, and ears almost as big, if not so intergalactic.
‘I’m John,’ he said. ‘I’m a Devon rex. I can’t think why they’d want me. I’ve been trying to work it out, and perhaps it’s because we’re not very allergenic in my family – I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re up to. I’ve not been here long.’ He drew to a halt, embarrassed to have said so much. ‘Not like …’ He glanced towards a pen on its own, further away, where what looked like a very furry bundle lay in a heap.
Charlie went up to it.
At one end, one eye opened.
‘Hello,’ said Charlie, and sneezed.
It was a cat – the fluffiest, furriest cat Charlie had ever seen. Even though it wasn’t moving, downy lint seemed to float off it of its own accord.
‘Yeah, sorry,’ the cat muttered. ‘Everybody’s allergic to me. You’d better move away. You asthmatic? Yeah – just go away, would you? It’s not my fault … I don’t want to cause trouble …’
Charlie moved away, and took a puff of his inhaler just in case. He was thinking.
Further down the line another cat spoke, the colour of crème caramel, with blue eyes. ‘My name is Marta,’ she said. ‘I am Espanish. In my family we make nests in bamboo.’ Then she too was covered with fear and shyness, and quickly curled up and hid her nose under her paws.
A long-legged, splay-footed reptile spoke up. ‘I walk on water!’ he said. ‘I know, because they call me the Jesus Lizard. I know that’s why they wanted me.’
A smaller, dark lizard beside him said simply, ‘I can go in fire.’
Ninu, fascinated, told Charlie.
Across from the cats were stalls full of dogs. Charlie, with a determined look on his face, went over to them and had Ninu translate. Though Ninu was nervous, he knew he had to oblige.
First up was a dark, curly dog with bright eyes. ‘My name is Blue,’ he said. ‘My family were originally fishermen’s dogs in Portugal, but we’ve been in California for a while now. I was taken from my place by the ocean there. My human will be sad without me …’
‘Ask him why he was taken – does he know?’ whispered Charlie to Ninu.
‘Webbed feet,’ said Blue mournfully. ‘Useful webbed feet. They think they are God! Making animals! Changing animals! Doesn’t the world already have enough beautiful animals? And do the humans look after the ones there are?’
‘Have they made any yet?’ Charlie asked urgently.
‘They made the ones like your friend,’ said Jungko.
Sergei looked around at the animals, embarrassed, shy, sad.
‘I have been here a long time,’ Jungko continued. She glanced at the very fluffy cat. ‘They found the allergenic gene and made all the Allergenie cats and sent them all round the world. And they put Allergenie babies in kidnapped cats and then sent them back where they came from.’
‘That’s likely what happened to me,’ murmured Sergei. ‘I know my dad thought I was his.’ He looked s
uddenly hurt, at the idea of not being his dad’s. He too glanced at the fluffy cat, but it had turned its back on the proceedings.
‘I saw it,’ Jungko continued. ‘I heard them. They think we’re stupid and dumb, but we’re not – we’re just private and quiet. We know what they’re doing. And I knew an Allergenie would come back one day.’ She gave Sergei a proud look.
‘They’re over there,’ whispered Marta to Sergei, peeping towards a stall to her left.
Slowly, Sergei paced over in that direction. His pupils were little black slits in his milky blue eyes. Reaching the rail, he dipped his head and called softly.
A bundle of kittens, skinny little things, rolled and padded and bustled towards him. Behind them was a rank of tired-looking females, and beyond them more kittens, and more females, and more kittens.
‘’Ello,’ he said.
The kittens squeaked and mewed at him. He padded at them gently between the bars.
‘’Ello, you lot,’ he murmured. Then turned and looked at Charlie.
And Charlie turned and looked at Aneba.
And Aneba looked around at all the animals, the cats and dogs and birds and lizards. And back at Charlie.
‘OK,’ Charlie said. ‘Time to get this show on the road.’
‘Well, OK,’ said Alex. All he had seen was a kid enjoying the zoo. ‘What do you need? They’re at your disposal, the HCE said. Obviously he’d prefer you not to, er, finally render any of them, er, finished, as they are being used for ongoing research …’
‘Alex,’ said Aneba, ‘drink a little of this, go and stand over there by the cliff, and breathe deeply. I’ll call you when I’ve finished looking around.’ He handed him the small antidote bottle.
‘Oh – OK,’ said Alex, who had been feeling a little odd since that morning anyway – a little less certain about everything than he usually did – and was glad of the chance just to stand and gaze out to sea. Goodness, it was beautiful. He took a sip from the bottle. The sea reminded him of … of … something. How strange – he hadn’t felt this kind of sweet sadness for he didn’t know how long. What was it called? Nostalgia! That’s right. What a lovely word. How had he ever forgotten it?
