Dr. Franklin's Island by Ann Halam

Author:Ann Halam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307433312
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

chapter nine

On Day Eighty-three, Dr. Franklin came to the enclosure with two orderlies. The uniformed men came into the cage, armed with long metal rods and a big net. They threw the net over Miranda, and held her down. Then Dr. Franklin came into the cage, wearing heavy gloves, reached through the net and fitted a black rubbery ring like a thick watch strap on her leg. There was no need to throw the net over Miranda, or poke her with those rods. She wasn’t doing anything, she didn’t try to resist. But the men behaved as if she was simply a dangerous animal, and Dr. Franklin did nothing to stop them. He treated her the same way. It was horrible to watch: it made me feel sick.

But after it was done, the men went off and came back with a mobile crane. They unfastened a big section of the steel mesh roof, and Miranda flew free.

On Day Eighty-five, I found the sluice covers in the side walls of my pool.

I’d realized, after swimming around in it for a while, that my water was genuine seawater—not fake, saltwater aquarium substitute. Semi-the-girl wouldn’t have known the difference, but Semi-the-fish couldn’t be fooled about things like that. In my dual-nationality mind, it was as if I remembered everything that a natural-born tropical manta ray would know. Only better than remembering, because this wasn’t like Semi-the-girl remembering facts she’d learned, and sometimes getting them wrong. It was certain knowledge, like knowing the difference between light and dark. These “memories” must have come from the fish DNA that had been grafted into my human DNA. But because I was girl as well as fish, I could think about my inbuilt animal knowledge with a human mind. I really enjoyed that.

The cover was a round flap of metal, set thirty centimeters above the floor of the pool. It was eighty-four centimeters across, as wide as the front section of my delta body; and painted turquoise, like the plastic-coated concrete of the wall. Water lapped through a set of ridged gaps out into a pipe, or tunnel, on the other side. There was another, smaller cover on the opposite wall, with water flowing from it into the pool. How interesting!

I think animals without hands have different minds from animals with hands. Animals with hands that they can use to pick things up—like monkeys, humans, birds, mice, rats—tend to like being busy, and tinkering with things. Animals without hands, like snakes, or fish, or cats, are happy doing nothing for long periods. I’d always been a thoughtful person. As a fish, I completely shared the daydreamer-animal attitude to life. I had spent hours thinking about the real seawater, and what that must mean. Wondering about pipes and pumps. Having ideas about passages and tunnels in volcanic rock, like the passage we’d used to get into the hidden valley. Pondering on Dr. Franklin’s plans.

I hadn’t felt as if the problem was urgent. My meaning-of-the-seawater ideas had drifted without any pressure, weaving in and out of other long, dreamy thoughts.

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