Dr. Franklin's Island Read online

  “What does it look like?” she asked.

  I could barely understand her. “It looks like you’re growing wings,” I said, swallowing back tears, and I smiled at her. “It looks like you’ll soon, soon be able to fly—”

  “Love to be able to fly,” said Miranda. “Oh, love to be able to fly.”

  I buzzed for Dr. Franklin.

  They both came. “What’s happening to her?” I begged. “Is this supposed to happen?” I was sure she was dying. Nobody could live with their chest split open like that.

  Dr. Franklin said, “Please keep calm, Semi. You’re disturbing Miranda.”

  But I could see that even the mad scientist was alarmed. “You don’t know, do you?” I cried, horrified. “You don’t know! You had no idea what your treatment would do to us!”

  On Day Sixty-three I couldn’t hold her hand anymore, because she didn’t have any hands.

  Day Sixty-four

  They took Miranda away. They took the whole bed, they couldn’t have lifted her out of it, she was too twisted up and fragile. All I could see of her that was still Miranda was her eyes.

  “Exciting,” I whispered, as they wheeled her out. “Great adventure. You first, me soon—”

  “Tomorrow,” she gasped, struggling with her twisted mouth. “Fly away.”

  I thought I would never see her again.

  Day Sixty-five

  Miranda’s gone. I’m alone.

  Tomorrow I’m going to be so big and strong, I’ll bust these walls down. I’ll come and find you, Miranda, and let you out of your cage. You’ll pick me up in your beak, we’ll fly away.

  I couldn’t make myself get up the morning that she wasn’t there. I lay there telling myself that I was lying still because I wanted to lie still. I didn’t want to let Miranda down, so I stayed calm. I went to live in my head again. It was nice and peaceful.

  I think Day Sixty-four was probably the last time I got up, but I’m not sure. I know it was from Day Sixty-five that I absolutely couldn’t make my arms and legs obey me. On Day Sixty-seven I woke up and found that my arms . . . didn’t seem to belong to me anymore. That was weird. I could lift my head, barely, and see them lying there on either side of me. They looked like bits of old wood. I couldn’t move them, but it didn’t worry me. I had no feeling for them at all. My mind had sort of dumped them, like rubbish.

  Something strange was happening to my legs too, but it was so much effort to breathe that I couldn’t worry about it. And everything hurt.

  I thought, Oh, I didn’t get the easy option after all, and I was glad.

  I wasn’t awake, I wasn’t asleep, I wasn’t unconscious. I was in some state that was none of those things. Sometimes I glimpsed Dr. Franklin’s face, swimming into focus out of the mists. Occasionally I heard Skinner’s voice in the background. Sometimes I felt hands lifting me, rearranging me, giving me injections (it didn’t hurt when the needle went in). My skin’s getting thicker, I thought. Maybe I’m growing scales and fins now . . . and I’d fall into a long dream, a long flowing dream, where the covers and the bed had disappeared, and I didn’t know who I was, or where I was, or what I was.

  Time didn’t pass anymore, it flowed.

  I went through the change and came out the other side. They moved me, as soon as they possibly could, to an indoor tank (you can’t keep a fish-monster-mutant alive in an intensive care bed). Later on, glimpses of the days I spent in that tank came back to me, but while it was happening I wasn’t really aware of anything. I was adapting, my brain making new connections, my new senses plugging in and testing themselves. I had the vague idea that Skinner and Dr. Franklin were trying to find out what was going on inside my head, measuring my brain waves with a sort of cap of wires . . . and a vague idea that I didn’t perform very well. But when I next woke up properly, all that stuff was gone from my mind. Thinking about any of it was like trying to remember a forgotten nightmare.

  Everything was different, utterly different.

  Day Seventy-eight

  I woke out of a deep sleep, feeling fine. The first thing I thought, before I opened my eyes, was What day is this? I knew there’d been a gap. I didn’t want to let Miranda down, the count was so important. I “lay there” without even thinking whether I was in a bed or where I was, trying to work it out. In the end I calculated this must be about the seventy-eighth day. Anyway, that’s what I decided to call it. So, here I am, I thought. Seventy-eight days from Miami airport, and what a lot of things have happened to me since then!

  I’ve been in a plane crash.

  I’ve swum through a lagoon full of sharks.

  I’ve survived on a beach, made fire, climbed for coconuts,built a house, speared a fish.

  Almost hunted a pig, once—

  And I’m still alive!

  I felt so calm and happy. This didn’t strike me as strange. It seemed the normal way to feel. At last, I opened my eyes. The first tremendous shock was that I could see, perfectly. The world didn’t look anything like the blurred world I’d been used to seeing since the plane crash—the same blurred world that I’d lived with all my life, whenever I didn’t have my contact lenses in or my glasses on. I could tell I was seeing things from a different angle, to say the least. But everything was the way it was supposed to be. There was nothing missing, no lost details, nothing faulty.

  The second, tremendous shock I got was that my arms had turned into wings.

  I thought, What? But I was supposed to turn into a fish!

  I waved my arms up and down. They flowed around me in a smooth, wide delta shape, and I realized there was an even bigger change (apart from the fact that I had no hands, which didn’t bother me). The stick-figure Semi that I used to imagine—normally living in my heart but able to move into my head when things got tough—had gone, or changed tremendously. My head wasn’t separate from my body anymore. My head and my heart were together, in the center of me, and me was this smooth, flowing delta-plane.

  I gave a kind of start, and a jump . . . which is when I realized that my legs weren’t dangling extra things anymore, they were inside me as well. When I “kicked” (the word belonged to that old stick-figure Semi, it was no use anymore, I’d have to think of other words), my whole body responded. I went flying forward, backward, up, down, with perfect control, any direction I wanted. I was free, so free.

  If waking up in a straitjacket was bad, then this freedom, was like . . . How can I describe it? It was as if being normal had been a straitjacket, and this was how it felt when all the horrible restraints, that you’d been suffering all your life without realizing it, were magically taken away.

  It was beautiful. I was flying.

  Oh, Miranda. This is brilliant! It really is a great adventure!

  And I can fly! I’ve turned into a bird as well!

  I don’t know what kind of bird I thought I’d been turned into, a delta-shaped bird with a body in the form of one smooth wing. There’s no such thing.

  Maybe I thought I’d been transformed into a teenager-sized stealth bomber.

  I had called out to Miranda without thinking. It had felt like shouting, though—as if in a dream—I knew I wasn’t making any sound. But when I “shouted” like that, something happened. It was as if I finally woke up, finally came out of dreamland.

  I was floating in water. It was over me, under me, all around me. It was the air that I breathed. I wasn’t frightened. I still felt good, and delighted with my new body. Sunlight was warming my back, and that felt very nice. I glided up toward the shimmering liquid light, until I was breaking the surface, and looked around.

  There was a problem for a moment with my new eyes, which were getting the picture in an altered format. I had to flip some mental switches to sort it into human terms, like wide-screen TV being squeezed onto a square screen. But it wasn’t difficult. I saw that I was in a big pool, swimming-pool-sized, in an enclosure with trees and bushes and bright colored flowers. I could see a fence that stretched up and went over my
pool. High above, I could see a dark mesh against the blue sky. For a moment I thought (still feeling calm and cheerful), For heaven’s sake, there’s no need for that! I’m not going to fly away!

  . . . and then I felt a shadow. I looked up, and saw a great bird-shape gliding over my pool, with dark wings outspread, the flight feathers parted, fingering the air. The shadow left me as the creature banked and dived. I heard a thump, and the water rumbled with vibration. A thing like a big dark bird, big as an eagle, black as a raven, was standing by the edge of my pool. Its folded wings were covered in glossy feathers. The rest of its body was covered in a short pelt of shining black hair. Its legs were scaled and leathery like a bird’s, but jointed like human legs. Its feet were scaled like a bird’s, but its five powerful clawed toes looked as if they were built like human fingers. Its head was very birdlike, the great eyes set on either side of a nose and mouth that had fused into a single red beak. But the base of this beak was wide, like a fledgling’s beak; and it had an expression. The bird was smiling.

  Oh God, I thought. It’s Miranda!

  She turned her head to look at me, the way birds do, one eye at a time. Then she croaked, and hopped, and croaked again. . . .

  Miranda!

  I had no voice, I couldn’t speak. Neither could she.

  She was in the air, I was in the water.

  We were alive. We’d survived. But we were parted forever.

  If Miranda had realized this would happen, she’d never told me. It had never come into our imagining and pretending. I hadn’t thought about it at all. I’d been so sure that we were going to die, the problem of her being a bird and me a fish had never once crossed my mind. The shock was too much. I stared at Miranda, and everything that had delighted me about my new form turned to horror. I wasn’t a girl anymore. I was a monster. My arms, my legs . . . gone! No voice, no hands, a nightmare come true. I tried to scream.

  Of course, I couldn’t scream. I blacked out instead.

  chapter eight

  Next thing I knew, everything was white. It was like being inside a cloud: like being surrounded by the dazzling, soft, white cloud-country you sometimes see from a plane window. I saw Miranda, standing with her back to me. I knew it was Miranda at once, Miranda the way I remembered her from the beach. But there was something wrong. She seemed smaller, her shoulders looked narrower and they were hunched forward as if she was trying to hide. Her legs didn’t look so long, and even her hair looked less thick and shiny. She turned around and smiled at me with a timid, anxious expression. I tried to speak. I think I managed to say her name. I looked down at myself. I saw a human body, I saw my hands, my clothes. But Miranda was not like Miranda, and I knew I couldn’t be human. I panicked. Everything started to shake. The whiteness went away into a kind of grayed-out dark.

  I could hear someone calling me. Miranda was calling my name, over and over. I tried to answer, I couldn’t . . .

  . . . and then I could.

  My voice came out in a whimper, and then a loud wail. I couldn’t control it . . .

  . . . and then I could.

  Then I was in the white place again. Miranda was standing there, hugging her arms around herself. We were dressed in our beach clothes. She still looked strange. A Miranda with all the strength and confidence drained out of her.

  “What’s happening?” I pleaded. “Oh, Miranda, what is this place? Are we dead?”

  I’d had a horrible idea. Maybe this strange white place was . . . was heaven?

  “No, we’re not dead,” said Miranda. “We’re alive . . . as animals, in the cage with the pool. I think . . .” She sounded very unsure. “I think this must be the radio telepathy.”

  “Radio telepathy?” I repeated, helplessly. “What’s that?”

  I tried looking around, but . . . that didn’t work. Everywhere you actually looked at the whiteness, it blurred out, and vanished into nothingness. The effect made me feel as if I was going to be sick. I realized I’d better concentrate on looking at Miranda.

  “There was something else they did to us, Semi. Dr. Franklin told me, when he’d taken me away from the hotel room for the last bit of the change. They put microchips in our brains, little tiny radios connected to our speech centers, so that we can talk to each other although we have animal bodies. They didn’t say it would be like this. I thought it would be . . . like, I would hear your voice in my head. But I think this must be it.”

  “Nobody told me about radio telepathy!” I felt jealous. As usual, Miranda had been given more information, and treated better than me.

  “Maybe they did but you don’t remember. You’ve been in the cage with me for a day and a night. I’ve been calling and calling to you, and you didn’t answer. Oh God, I thought they’d made you into a dumb animal. I thought I would be all alone.”

  “But I don’t understand. What’s this white stuff?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. This isn’t what they told me. They put you in the pool yesterday. I called and called to you, in my head, the way I remembered Dr. Franklin telling me I would be able to. But you didn’t answer. I kept trying for hours, and you still didn’t answer. I thought that you were a dumb animal. I thought they’d destroyed your brain. . . . Then I heard you call my name, and suddenly I was here. I saw you, but you fell apart, and came back together again. . . . I’m not explaining this well.”

  “I think I get it,” I said. “We can see mental images of each other. You see me and I see you, because of the microchips, but nothing else is really here, so apart from each other we just see, um, nothing. Maybe this is what happens when the radio telepathy gets intense. And they didn’t tell us because they didn’t know exactly how it would work.”

  “I suppose that could be it.”

  Both of us sat down. The whiteness under us stayed solid; it behaved like ground. We didn’t try to touch each other, not yet. I thought I would go crazy if I touched her and my hand went right through that “mental image.” I had the weirdest feeling of being in two places at once. I knew that while I sat with Miranda there, the mutant-fish monster that was also me was still swimming around in that pool.

  “Well,” said Miranda at last. “It seems like we survived.”

  I nodded. “Do you think he meant us to turn out like . . . the way we are?”

  She shuddered. “I don’t think so. Remember what Dr. Skinner said? Transgenic experiments can be random. I don’t think they knew how we would turn out. That’s the whole point of being a scientist, isn’t it? You try things, to see what happens. . . . I hate to break it to you, but we’re in the zoo, Semi. When I fly up into the roof, I can see the whole compound. The courtyard next door to ours is where the other pathetic freaks are kept. That’s where we are. In the freak zoo.”

  We’d been supposed to change into a girl who could fly and a girl who could breathe water. Instead we’d joined the capybara with the human legs, the octopus with the monkey’s head, the wild piglet with human hands . . . the howling jungle cat.

  Miranda crouched over, with her head in her hands. She started rocking to and fro. I could see that she was shaking all over. I could hear her muttering, “Freaks, freaks, freaks—”

  I’d seen Miranda in tears, but I’d never seen her like this. It frightened me horribly. It made me feel as if I was falling apart. “Miranda!” I cried, and my voice didn’t sound real. Nothing here was real. Reality was two monsters in a cage, separated forever by more than bars, by more than locks and keys. I fought the terror down. I tried to remember what Miranda used to do when I started to panic.

  Talk to her, talk to her. Say anything, believe anything that makes things better—

  “Hey, Miranda. Miranda! Flight! Think about flight! Think about how wonderful it is, the way birds can fly. Think about a feather, how it has to be built, the amazing way the filaments hook into each other to make a plane surface. Think about an . . . an airfoil. How it has to be shaped, longer on the top than on the bottom, so the . . . the air resistance
that’s pushing it up ends up more than the air resistance that’s pushing it down. . . . The last thing you said to me was love to be able to fly. ”

  I was babbling, trying to remember Dr. Franklin’s lectures. “Miranda, please!”

  I think it was the desperation in my voice that reached her.

  Somehow we were holding hands, and (thank goodness) it felt real.

  “Love to be able to fly,” said Miranda, and laughed shakily.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay. I’m better. It’s just . . . I was alone, and I thought you were a dumb animal.”

  She said she was okay, but she still looked weak and timid. It was horrible of me, but I felt angry with her. How could she betray me like this? I needed Miranda to be strong! I wanted to yell at her, You can’t do this to me!

  Miranda let go of my hands. “Semi, what is it? You . . . you’re frightening me!”

  “Me? Frightening? You’re kidding. It’s you that’s behaving strangely. What’s wrong with you? You were always so cool, so brave. You seem like a different person.”

  I scowled at the timid, anxious girl I didn’t seem to know. I saw in her cringing eyes the Semi that she saw, and I realized she could see my fury at being let down. My deep, secret envy of the person I had thought Miranda was—

  We stared at each other for a long moment.

  “Oh,” said Miranda at last. “I think I get it—”

  “Yeah. Me too. It’s the telepathy.”

  I looked at her, and I saw a girl who had to be best, because she was afraid she could never measure up to what was expected of her, no matter how hard she tried.

  She looked at me and saw the shy nerd who was always secretly angry with the people who found making friends easy. A person I didn’t like very much. The real me.

  “This is the real Miranda,” she said. “This is the way I am inside. I’m not really strong and confident. I pretend. All the time you were relying on me, you and Arnie and then you alone, I was scared to death. I had to keep up a front, but that’s all it was. A big pretense.”