Children of Swan: The Land of Taron, Vol 3: (A Space Fantasy Adventure)

by Coral Walker

  “Has there been any change to the security system?”

  “Yes, I think so. They did some updating. I am not sure about the details, but I can find out for you if you like.” Her voice had the sweetness of a young girl, and her eyes glittered pleasantly.

  “No, no, you can do it later. It must be some minor mix-up, you know. Quite often these things get fixed without you even realising it. But I do need to check on my patient, Brianna, right now.”

  With slow deliberation, he took a look at his watch.

  “Are you sure, doctor, while the thing is on?” She looked bemused.

  He was about to ask “What’s on?” but stopped himself in time. As her doctor, he, of course, would know what was going on. Glancing again at his watch, he said with a light-hearted grin, “Of course, it’s on. That’s why I need to check on her now, to make sure she copes well.”

  It seemed to hit home. She nodded, sympathetically.

  He drew a breath and caught sight of the badge that was hanging from her neck. He read the name.

  “Sarah, do you think your card would work?”

  She hesitated, looking down to the badge, her eyes obscured by her heavy eyelids and eyelashes, which were unnaturally thick and long. When her eyes fluttered open to have a quick glance at the card he was holding, he knew she was not far from acquiescing. As one of the most senior scientists, he carried a distinctive card of ultramarine adorned with golden borders that indicated his high rank.

  She moved forward, bent over and swiped the card while it was still hanging around her neck.

  There was a small, satisfying click, and the light turned green.

  “Just be as quick as possible, would you, Dr Pentland?” she said, smiling timidly.

  Of course, she knew. It was not ignorance but something else that made her open the door. He pressed his lips into a thin smile — what could he say?

  “You will need this.” She took something off a peg on the wall and handed it to him.

  Headphones?

  “They’re noise-cancelling headphones. You must put them on as soon as you get into the room. The ultra-high-pitched sound is very harmful to human health. It can cause many problems such as severe headache, nausea, nose bleeds, and in extreme cases, death.”

  The information was daunting, and sounded a bit like a menacing joke. But her face was sincere, and her gaze under the long lashes was steady.

  He took the headphones, and she opened the door.

  As the door shut quietly behind him, he came face to face with a ceiling-to-floor glass panel. He saw Brianna immediately, behind the glass panel, blindfolded, lying flat on a shining metal table with her hands and legs strapped onto it. The metal table, pivoting on a single leg, tilted slightly and was slowly spinning clockwise.

  “Dr Pentland, please put on the protective headphones before I open the glass door.”

  The voice came from the wall behind him. The girl was observing him from the cameras suspended from the ceiling like tentacles. He put on the headphones.

  Ultra-high-pitched sound? What on earth was Kevin doing?

  The glass door in front of him slid open. All at once he felt it — the tightness of the air, the surreal feeling of tension and queasiness that rose in his throat for no particular reason.

  The table was spinning like a ceiling fan on a summer day, rhythmic and unfaltering. Brianna, the captive on the table, was spinning with it. She was mostly still, like a submissive doll, except that her blindfolded head, now and then, jerked from side to side.

  He felt the pressure of the headphones, the swelling of his head, and his frustration built up inside like a volcano about to erupt. Eyes blazing with irritation, he frantically scanned the room for buttons, a control panel, a keypad…but there was none.

  There had to be a switch somewhere.

  Then he saw the cable that went up the side of the wall and disappeared into a square box. It was remotely controlled, of course, and Kevin must be the one who held the controller.

  Brianna’s lips were twitching. One of her hands opened and closed as if to gesture.

  He couldn’t get closer. In fact, he could do nothing except watch helplessly as she spun in front of him. Without knowing he was doing it, he wrenched off the headphones.

  Instantly he felt the piercing pain in his ears. Shocked he hastened to cover his ears. The headphones dropped to the floor.

  “Pe … t … er …”

  A faint sound traced it way into his aching ears.

  “Brianna,” he shouted back, flinching from the smarting pain. It was not just the ears but the whole head, as if a host of needles was simultaneously penetrating his skull.

  “Let me out … Please …”

  “I …” The empty dormitory and the packed suitcase flashed into his mangled mind — he was supposed to return to Earth on the next shuttle.

  All of a sudden, there was quietness, an eerie, alarming quietness. He felt the accumulating tension in his ears, in his head, in his nose and mouth. It felt as if the blood in his veins had been shaken like beer in a sealed bottle and was ready to explode that instant. Something hot and wet dripped from his nose. He lifted a hand to stop it.

  Headphones. He caught a glimpse of them on the floor and faintly thought that he needed to put them back on his ears. Stooping down, he reached for them.

  The next instant he was on the floor.

  He heard her voice again, begging him to stay, as arms and hands grabbed him to carry him out of the room. He staggered to say something to her, something reassuring, but no words came to him, and his tongue was useless.

  It was all very quiet, like a crisp morning in the depths of winter. Everything was frozen, even the noises.

  At least, they had switched off the damned noises.

  12

  The One

  A white tissue was waved in front of him. He gazed at it, puzzled for a moment. Sarah pointed at his nose with a ringed finger.

  Of course, the blood.

  “A glass of water?” she asked.

  Shaking his head and bracing one hand against the chair, he stood up. The weight of his body and the frailty of his legs took him by surprise, and as a result he lurched forward. One of the officers caught him in time. Ungratefully, he jerked his arm to get rid of the grip.

  “I’m not that bad,” he muttered, feeling awkward — he wasn’t the kind of person who liked to be helped.

  Quickly he took his leave, brushed past a startled young officer and plodded off down the corridor.

  “You need to rest a little longer,” Sarah warned, following him.

  Kevin’s office was just around the corner, and the door was wide open. He marched in. Kevin, sitting on a sofa next to the door with a tablet on his lap, seemed to be expecting him, and rose swiftly to greet him. He gestured to him to sit on the sofa he had just got up from.

  He slumped down onto the cushions and straight away noticed the holographic display floating above the glass coffee table. In it was the spinning white figure of Brianna.

  No wonder he had the feeling that Kevin had known he was coming, and was waiting for him.

  “What are you doing with Brianna?” he spluttered.

  Kevin slid a box of tissues across the smooth surface of the table, and Brianna’s image distorted as the box passed through it.

  “Nose … still bleeding,” he said, gesturing.

  Indignantly, he drew a tissue out of the box and pressed it against his nose.

  Kevin’s office was very different from his own spartan style. It was comfortably fitted with sofas and there was a coffee table in the reception area near the entrance. It was meticulously maintained.

  Kevin settled himself down on the substantial sofa arm next to him, one leg bent, one leg stretched, and with his torso slanted slightly towards him. “I’d like to show you something,” he said, with a waggish look.

  The tablet was back on his lap. He gazed down at it, fingers swiping, tapping, zooming in and zooming o
ut.

  “The reason for putting Brianna in a stressful situation,” he started, without taking his eyes from the tablet, “is to disorient her and make her lose control of her power. Here you are, one of the experiments we did earlier.”

  He tapped on the tablet, and the image over the table disappeared and then resumed. It was almost the same image of Brianna on the spinning table.

  “Now you see, there’s a small cage hanging down from the roof, a yard above her. Inside the case is an injured mouse with a stab wound to the chest.”

  He zoomed in the image to show the mouse’s wound.

  “Of course, it’s a serious wound, bad enough to provoke a reaction from Brianna. You would probably expect Brianna to heal it. But she did nothing. The poor little mouse remained in a critical condition — dying. The harsh treatment, the spinning and the terrible sound for a whole hour right before the test was effective. Brianna was profoundly disoriented. Amazingly, her awareness of the victim’s pain wasn’t affected at all — see the spikes in her brain waves here. It’s only her ability to locate the target that had been disrupted.”

  “In this clip, we fixed a magnetic shelf right above her head. The same mouse cage was dropped down from the ceiling while she was spinning and attached itself to the magnetic shelf. Now the mouse was spinning together with her.”

  “She was still blindfolded but, you see, she felt it right away. Look how she stopped jerking her head and looked up … her clenched hands, a sign of concentration. Did you see that — a faint flash from her to the mouse? Amazing! The healing dust was so dense that we can physically see its passage. If we have a closer look — the mouse was still weak — but look at the chest. The wounded area was red and furless a while ago, and now it’s smooth and the wound has gone.”

  “You see the point here, Peter. If she is distressed and disoriented enough, she has little control over her magic power.”

  “What do you mean by ‘has little control’?” asked Peter.

  “The faint flash. We’ve seen it with our naked eyes. According to what we collected, the magic molecules she discharged at that moment were ten times the amount she normally discharges for a rat of that size with that sort of wound.”

  “But that doesn’t mean she lost control. She might simply not feel like it,” Peter reasoned.

  Kevin was gazing down at him, smiling.

  “We did a few experiments before these, Peter. We’ve tried to disorient her by spinning only, without the ultrasound that seems to distress her a good deal. Each time she discharged the same level of healing dust for the same kind of wound. It was not until she was also distressed that the level of dust soared, tenfold in some cases, as if she didn’t trust her own judgement and therefore she tried extra hard. That’s good for us, don’t you see? We need her magic dust — the more, the better.”

  “In addition to that,” he continued, “we have evidence to show that distressing her is one of the critical steps that guarantees the success of the operation.”

  He looked down again at his tablet, fingers busy with tapping and swiping for a while, and the holographic image changed.

  “This was an earlier clip before I made the decision to introduce the ultrasound. According to your report, Brianna dislikes snakes. So I put her together with an injured mouse and an injured snake. Even without spinning her, she refused to discharge any healing dust, as if there were a switch — the very presence of a snake deterred her from performing any healing.”

  “And, in this one, after an hour of ultrasound she was distressed. Blindfolded but without being spun, still she sensed the presence of the snake and refused to do any healing. Once the spinning started, with the injured mouse right above her and the injured snake spinning below in the opposite direction, her senses were disoriented and impaired and became heavily focused on whatever was right in front of her. In the end, the mouse was healed even in the presence of the snake nearby.”

  The image flickered and dissolved into thin air above the table. Before long, the image of Brianna on the spinning table was resumed.

  For a long while Peter stared blankly at the image, watching her twitching her head from side to side. It looked unrealistic, detached and painless.

  “How long are you going to keep her like that?”

  “Until the treatment, I would say, another sixteen hours.”

  Peter winced.

  “Take it easy, Peter. She’s just part of the project. The only thing that concerns me is that it might affect her ability to produce the healing dust. So we must stick to a very rigid routine — for every hour of spinning and ultrasound, she receives an hour break, during which she is injected with nutrients to help her recover. Now it must be about time for the next break.”

  As if to prove his accuracy, the metal table slowed down and came to a standstill.

  “It’s set up to run automatically,” Kevin explained.

  Almost at the same time, two white-coated officers wheeled in a table laden with equipment. Peter recognised that the slender one of the two was the young officer who had dragged him out of the room. The young man felt the vein on Brianna’s arm before injecting her, while his colleague handled the wires and sensors. The whole time, Brianna was motionless as if absorbing the quietness of the moment.

  A display window appeared at the top of the screen with multiple waveforms of various colours. In the top right corner, the heart rate was displayed in bold red font. ‘368’, it read.

  “368 is definitely within the range of a bird,” Kevin remarked.

  From the zoomed-in image of her still blindfolded face, she seemed to have sunk into a sound sleep.

  “Sleep, recovery, wake, spinning and ultrasound. I am sure she will be ready in time for the treatment.”

  +++

  Nina hurried in. “Dr Renshell.” She called and then caught sight of Peter and hesitated. “Peter, you’re here.”

  She looked cautious when she turned back to Kevin, and her tone was lowered. “He’s here now in the operation room.”

  Peter rose from the sofa.

  “No, please stay.” Kevin made an emphatic gesture and pressed him on the shoulder. “Make a coffee for yourself and watch her sleep if you like.”

  He subsided back onto the sofa — a rest alone and a cup of coffee were both tempting.

  The door was shut behind them.

  An elegant shiny coffee maker sat on top of a stylish corner table. He glanced at it sluggishly — perhaps, after a short doze. The sofa was soft and inviting, and he was tired and drowsy. Before his eyes shut, he caught sight again of Brianna’s sleeping figure, placid and untroubled, and his heart ached and opened unexpectedly to a medley of feelings — she would soon be woken again and put through another callous, distressing ordeal.

  He had seen them growing up — all three of them. Brianna was the sweetest one. Now and then she was a little bossy towards her brothers, but she had always tried to make amends afterwards. For all that time, he had been aware, as much as he was aware of his own inescapable shadow, that an unfavourable future was waiting for the family. He had taken care of them with that future in mind, like forest workers caring for trees to be cut or farmers for cows to be slaughtered. Rarely had he paused to consider or question it. He had always assumed that their unhappy future was still far away.

  Bo, Brianna and Jack. The faces of each of them, smiling as they were in happier days, flashed into his mind and made his heart shudder. All of a sudden he sprang up, startled by a flash of thought so real and practical that he had to check it out.

  His knees wobbled as he stood on his feet. There was a sharp pain in his joints — perhaps the ultra-high-pitched sound had triggered his arthritis. He limped, nevertheless, and rushed out of the room.

  +++

  “Peter, I thought you were having a rest in my office.”

  Brushing past Kevin and Nina, he headed straight to the operating table.

  Jack Goodman!

  He knew it was him, and s
till his heart lurched at the sight of him lying there. Wasn’t this all part of the plan? All three of the children were meant to be sacrificed to satisfy Shusha’s demands, and thus save the Earth from its slow death by energy starvation.

  But something inside him altered and turned, like flipping a switch.

  “Isn’t he just perfect? Peter, it was all your idea. Ingenious isn’t it? Brianna couldn’t bear to see her brother suffer. He is the perfect means to extract the maximum amount of healing dust from her.”

  “No!” he blurted out, shivering suddenly from a burst of emotion that he struggled to contain. For a moment he hesitated, unsure what to say next, but then things started flowing into his mind.

  “They have never got on well with each other,” he declared in a slightly quivering tone. “They are the worst siblings you can imagine.”

  He wasn’t lying. Nearly every time he saw them together, there were conflicts and quarrels.

  “What about you and Linda?” he asked.

  Kevin frowned.

  He knew he had hit the right spot. Kevin had never liked his sister Linda. As far as he knew, it went all the way back to their school days, when Linda had succeeded in almost everything that Kevin had tried and failed at.

  “Do you think you’d even blink if she were dying of cancer now?”

  Kevin looked at him, eyes fixed. He was thinking. Good man.

  He continued, “We cannot afford a failure, can we? If, in the middle of the operation, we suddenly find out Brianna cannot produce enough healing dust, we all know what will happen, Prince Mapolos could die — the end of the energy stones. Think about it!”

  Kevin winked and, finally, spoke, “Who else could we use if not Jack?”

  “There’s a perfect substitute here,” he answered. Slowly, he took off his jacket and threw it on a table top.

  Kevin’s eyes narrowed with an incredulous look.

  “No, you don’t mean it, Dr Pentland,” Nina interrupted. “We’re taking the next shuttle home.”

  She was blinking rapidly behind her thick glasses. Throwing her a sympathetic glance, Pater turned back to Kevin. “I’ve taken care of each of the children since they were born. Brianna was the one closest to me. She knows me well, and trusts me.”