Teranesia

10

The expedition’s ship was anchored outside the reef; the biologists had landed in small boats and set up camp in half a dozen tents on a grassy plain not far from the beach. It was mid-afternoon, and the camp was almost deserted; nearly everyone was still out in the field. But one of the expedition members taking a day off was a woman with medical training; she examined Prabir to confirm that he had no broken bones, and gave him glucose and a sedative.

The three of them were covered in swamp matter; they washed themselves in the ocean, and Ojany found them clean clothes. Prabir was still shaky; he was being led through everything like an infant. Ojany said, ‘Come on, champ, you can use my bed for now, and we’ll organise something later for tonight.’

Prabir lay down on the rectangle of foam and stared up at the roof of the tent. He had a sudden, vivid memory of lying exhausted in his hammock, the day he’d walked halfway up Teranesia’s dead volcano to try to measure the distance to the nearest island. There was nothing especially poignant about the memory itself, but the sharpness of the recollection was enough to make him want to bash his head against the ground. He was tired of having to think about that idiot child, tired of having been him, but every attempt to get rid of him was like trying to slough off dead skin, only to find that it was still full of living nerves and blood vessels.

Grant shook him gently. It was dusk. She said, ‘Everyone’s eating now. Do you want to come join us?’

At least thirty people were gathered in the space between the tents. There were hurricane lamps set up, and a man was serving food from a butane stove. Grant said, ‘This isn’t just the expedition. A fishing boat turned up while you were asleep. Word seems to have leaked back to Ambon; a few people hitched a ride down.’

Prabir followed her into the serving line, looking around for Madhusree. He spotted several of the barflies from Ambon; Cole was wandering about delivering Delphic pronouncements to anyone who’d listen, his eyes glistening in the lamplight. ‘I have pursued the black sun across the salt flats of millennium, into the heart of the primeval calenture!’ Grant whispered to Prabir, ‘For God’s sake, someone give that man an antipyretic.’

When his turn came, Prabir gratefully accepted a steaming plate of stew, though he was unable to determine its exact nature even after he’d taken a mouthful. He walked to the edge of the gathering to eat; he could see Grant talking shop with Ojany, but he wasn’t in the mood to join in. As some of the diners began to improvise seats out of packing crates or rolled-up sleeping bags, he saw Madhusree standing with two other women, talking and laughing as they ate. She saw him watching her, and stared back for a moment with an utterly neutral expression, neither welcoming nor angry, before rejoining the conversation. Someone would have broken the news of his arrival to her as soon as she’d returned to the camp, but perhaps she still hadn’t decided whether or not to forgive him.

Cole’s student, Mike Carpenter, wandered over from the serving line. He stood beside Prabir, eating in silence for a while, then said, ‘You know Sandra Lamont?’

‘Not personally.’

‘I saw her once, in real life,’ Carpenter boasted. ‘She’s got terrible skin. Pores, wrinkles. They just smooth it all out with software.’

‘Gosh. How scandalous. Would you excuse me?’

Prabir made his way across the camp. A man with a Philippines accent in a Hawaiian shirt and a Stetson was saying to a similarly attired companion, ‘… welcomed by an animatronic dinosaur! Full marina facilities! And the hook-line is, “Earth is the alien planet!” ’ Two biologists were arguing heatedly about transposons; one of them seemed to have independently reached an idea similar to Grant’s: ‘… shuffles back in the sequence for a complete functional protein domain that was cut out and shelved aeons ago… ’

He walked up to Madhusree and touched her arm.

‘Hi Maddy.’

She turned to him, and smiled impassively. ‘Hi.’

Her friends smiled too, but they appeared distinctly uncomfortable. Madhusree said, ‘This is Deborah, and Laila. This is my brother Prabir, who narrowly avoided becoming one of Seli’s stomach content samples.’ Prabir nodded in acknowledgement; they were all holding plates, it was too awkward to try to shake hands.

He said, ‘How’s the work going?’

‘Good, good,’ Madhusree replied smoothly. ‘We’ve gathered lots of data: behavioural, anatomical, DNA. No conclusions yet, but we’ve started posting it all on the net, so everyone can take a look for themselves.’

‘Yeah? I should tell Felix about that.’

Madhusree frowned. ‘Don’t you think he’d already know that he could follow everything from back in Toronto? I would have thought it would be obvious to anyone, how easy and convenient that would be.’

Prabir was impressed by her self-control. The message wasn’t exactly subtle, but she hadn’t let the slightest hint of anger spoil her innocent delivery: there was no flash in her eyes, no tension in her voice. He said, ‘I’m not sure. I’ll have to ask him.’

Madhusree glanced at her watch. ‘You could do that right now. It would be the perfect time to catch him.’

‘Yeah. Thanks. That’s a good idea.’

He nodded again to her friends, and turned away. As he hunted for a place where he could stand and finish his meal alone, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. He’d done what he’d done, and she’d told him how she felt, and now that it was over it was insignificant. He’d no more seriously undermined her dignity than those embarrassing parents who’d turned up with forgotten boxed lunches and sent his sixth-grade classmates into paroxysms of humiliation. And unlike schoolchildren, most of her colleagues would surely sympathise with her, rather than ridicule her, for having to go through life with such a cross.

He could see now that she’d be safe here, his own close call notwithstanding; she had ten times as many people looking out for her. He’d leave in the morning with Grant; the sting of resentment would wear off in a day or two, and when they met again in Toronto she’d punch him in the shoulder and call him a shit and laugh without malice, and the whole thing would be transmuted into a joke forever.

‘Come out of the tent. I want to talk to you.’

Madhusree was standing over him in the darkness, prodding his chest with her foot.

Ojany shared the tent with two other postdocs, but they’d found some spare bedding, and agreed to let him stay for the night. The tents all had insect-proof groundsheets; though it was unbearably hot, Prabir wouldn’t have liked to have tried sleeping outside, tempting the ants.

‘What time is it?’ he whispered.

‘Just after two,’ she hissed. ‘Now come out of the tent.’

Prabir grinned up at her. ‘When they ask me back at work what I did on my vacation, do you think I should admit to having spent a night with three beautiful women on a tropical island?’

Madhusree was infuriated. ‘Don’t fuck me about! Just get up!’

‘All right. It might help if you take some of your weight off me.’

He followed her out, into the deserted centre of the camp.

She said, ‘How dare you! How dare you come here!’

Prabir had never seen her so enraged, but he was having trouble adjusting; in his mind it had all been resolved, she’d already punished him.

He said gently, ‘I’m sorry if I’ve embarrassed you. I just wanted to see for myself how you were. I wanted to see what it was really like here.’

Madhusree stared at him, almost weeping with frustration. ‘I don’t care if you embarrass me! Just how shallow do you think I am? What do you think I used to say to my friends at school? Do you think I renounced you every day? Do you think I made up pretend parents? I don’t give a fuck what anyone here thinks about either of us. If they don’t like my family, they can screw themselves.’

Prabir ran his hand through his hair, touched by her passionate declaration, but a great deal more afraid now.

He said haltingly, ‘What then? Treat me like an idiot. Spell it out.’

She wiped her eyes angrily. ‘All right. How’s this for a start? You couldn’t trust me to make this one decision, and live with it. You couldn’t trust me to look into the risks myself: the mines, the border skirmishes, the diseases, the wildlife. They’re not trivial. I never said they were trivial. But I’m nineteen years old. I’m not retarded. I had access to people who could give me good advice. But you still couldn’t trust my judgement.’

Prabir protested, ‘I never stopped you doing anything in your life! What have I ever done, before this? Did I interrogate your doped-up boyfriends? Did I stop you going to nightclubs when you were fourteen years old? Name one thing I did that showed I didn’t trust you.’

She bit her lip, breathing hard. Finally she said, ‘That’s all true, but it’s not good enough. You didn’t treat me like a child then. Why do you have to treat me like one now?’

‘I’m not treating you like a child. And you know why this is different.’

Madhusree’s face contorted with pain. ‘That’s the worst part! That’s the worst insult! Different for you, but not for me? You think it isn’t hard for me too, coming back to where they died? Just because I don’t remember them the way you do?’

She started sobbing drily. Prabir wanted to embrace her, but he was afraid he’d only anger her. He looked around helplessly. ‘I know you miss them too. I know that.’

‘I’m sick of having to go through you to reach them!’

That was unfair. He’d told her every detail of their lives that he’d remembered, and a few he’d invented to fill in the gaps. But what else could he have done? Offered her a ouija board?

He said, ‘I never wanted it to be like that. But if that’s how it felt to you, then I’m sorry.’

Madhusree shook her head wearily; she wasn’t forgiving him, but she didn’t have the energy to resolve the matter now. Prabir could see her putting aside all her grief and anger, steeling herself for something more pressing.

‘I made a promise in that note I left you,’ she said. ‘And I’ve kept it: I haven’t told anyone about the butterflies. But tomorrow, I’m going to the head of the expedition and explaining everything. Our parents’ work was important. What they did was important. Everyone should know about it.’

Prabir bowed his head. ‘All right. I have no problem with that. Just promise me you won’t go to the island yourself. Leave it to someone else. There must be plenty of work to be done right here.’

‘I have to go. I’ll check the huts for records while the others are gathering samples. And if I can find the remains, I’ll have them taken back to Calcutta for the proper ceremonies.’

He looked up at her, stunned. ‘ “Proper ceremonies” What the fuck does that mean?’

Madhusree said calmly, ‘Just because they weren’t religious, it doesn’t mean we have to leave them lying where they fell. Like animals.’

Prabir’s skin went cold. She was saying this just to wound him. The implication was that if he’d loved them enough, he would have done this himself long ago, instead of cowering on the other side of the world like a scared little boy for eighteen years. But it was all right now: an adult had come along, with the strength to do what needed to be done.

He turned away, unable to look at her.

She said, ‘It’s the right thing to do. You know that. I wanted to talk to you about it, but you just shut me out.’

Prabir said nothing. He knew that if he opened his mouth and spoke now, he’d pour out so much contempt for her that they’d never be reconciled.

‘You should be happy. We’ll finally put them to rest.’

He stared at the ground, refusing to reply, refusing to acknowledge her. She stood there for a while, repeating his name, pleading with him. Then she gave up and walked away.

Prabir found Grant in the third tent he entered; she woke instantly when he whispered her name, and followed him out without a word.

She must have sensed the seriousness of his purpose; once they were beyond earshot of anyone who might have been awake, she asked without a trace of irritation, ‘What’s going on?’

Prabir said, ‘I know where this all began. Do you want me to take you there?’

‘What are you talking about?’ But he could already see her reassessing their old conversations. ‘Are you telling me you saw something as a child? When you were travelling with your parents?’

‘Not travelling. My parents knew exactly where they wanted to go, long before we left Calcutta. We spent three years there. They were biologists, not seafood exporters. They came here to study the very first mutant, back in 2010.’

Grant didn’t waste time contesting this possibility; she just demanded, ‘What species? Where?’

Prabir shook his head. ‘Not yet. This is the deal: you post all the data you’ve gathered on the net, so everyone has access to it. Just like the expedition scientists. If you agree to that, I’ll take you there, and I’ll tell you everything I know.’

Grant smiled wearily. ‘Be reasonable. You know I can’t do that.’

‘Fine. It’s your loss.’ He turned and started walking away.

‘Hey!’ She grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘I could always ask your sister.’

He laughed. ‘My sister? You’re a complete stranger to her, a rival scientist and a data burier, and you think she’s going to give you a better deal?’

Grant scowled, more baffled than angry. ‘Why are you being such a prick? You might as well have kept me in the dark completely; at least I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. I can’t do what you’re asking. I’ve signed a contract; they’d cut my hands off.’

‘Would you go to prison?’

‘I doubt it, but that’s hardly—’

‘So it’s just money? They’d just need to be bought off?’

‘Yeah, that’s all. Is this the point where you reveal that you’re also Bill Gates’ love child?’

Prabir said, ‘If this is important enough, and you crack it wide open, do you really think there’ll be no opportunities to make money out of that fact? Face it: none of the real cash is likely to be in biotech applications anyway. Whatever’s happening here isn’t going to solve any medical problems—and even if your theory’s right, it’s not going to give people pet dinosaurs any more easily than standard genetic methods. But if you handle this properly, you can be a celebrity scientist with a nine-figure media deal for your story.’

Grant was amused. ‘That’s pure fantasy. Is that why you’re doing this? You think you’ll get an eight-figure deal as co-star?’

Prabir didn’t dignify that with an answer. ‘Maybe the rights wouldn’t be that much. But I don’t believe that you couldn’t find a way to make money from this, if you put your mind to it.’

‘I never realised you had such a high opinion of me.’

‘I could always lead the expedition there, instead. Madhusree’s decided not to tell them anything; she wants to leave our parents undisturbed. The only reason I’m even asking you is to avoid putting her through the ordeal of going back there.’

Grant hesitated, re-evaluating old clues again. ‘Your parents died there? In the war? And the two of you were left alone?’

‘Yes.’ Prabir hadn’t meant to reveal so much; he could see the sympathy it evoked eating away at Grant’s natural cynicism, and it made him feel much worse than when he’d merely lied to her. But he pushed the advantage for all it was worth. ‘They were gagged by their sponsor, just like you. That’s why nothing they did was ever published. I want what they began to be completed, properly, with everyone sharing the information. The way it should have been all along.’

Grant shook her head regretfully. ‘I can’t risk it. It could bankrupt me.’

‘So your sponsor will bury you in obscurity instead, just like Silk Rainbow buried my parents? You had the best theory, first. You’ve worked as hard as any of these people.’ He gestured at the tents around them. ‘If I lead them to the source, and some prat from Harvard beats you to the answer, you won’t even get a footnote.’

Prabir watched her uneasily, wondering if he’d put his case too bluntly. But if she couldn’t conform to the strictures of academic life, she’d also resent every curtailment of freedom her sponsor had forced upon her. If there was a way to shaft both sides and survive the experience—and a chance to emerge covered in glory—she’d have to be tempted.

She whispered angrily, ‘I can’t decide this now. I have to think about it, I have to talk to Michael—’

‘I’ll give you until dawn. I’ll wait for you down on the beach.’

Grant looked at her watch, horrified. ‘Three hours?’

‘That’s three times as long as you gave me in Ambon.’

‘That was time to pack! You weren’t gambling with your life.’

‘I didn’t think I was. But you didn’t mention anything then about leaving me behind as snake food.’

Grant opened her mouth to protest.

Prabir said, ‘I’m joking. I’m joking! It’s been a long day.’

Prabir lay unsleeping on his borrowed bed. He’d told his watch to wake him at a quarter to six, but by five o’clock he was too restless to stay in the tent. He dressed in his own clothes—he’d rinsed them in fresh water and hung them out to dry—and headed down to the beach.

He sat and watched the stars fade, listening to the first bird calls. Broken sleep had left a foul taste in his mouth, and there was a rawness to all his perceptions, as if his senses had been doused in paint-stripper; even the faint brightening of the sky hurt his eyes. He was aching all over, from something more than exertion; he could remember the pain in his calves as he’d trekked through the swamp, but now every muscle in his body seemed equally wrecked. It was the way he’d felt at dawn on the Tanimbar Islands, after the long boat ride. After the dying soldier had let him in on the big secret.

He heard a sound from further down the beach. One of the men from the fishing boat was performing salat al-fajr, the Muslim dawn prayers. Prabir’s skin crawled, but the sense of being haunted only lasted a split second; the fisherman was a young Melanesian who looked nothing like the soldier.

When he’d finished praying, the man approached and greeted Prabir amiably, introducing himself as Subhi and offering a hand-rolled cigarette. Prabir declined, but they sat together while he smoked. The tobacco was scented with cloves; the potential this recipe offered as a fumigant had definitely been underexploited.

It was a struggle making conversation; Indonesian was still being taught in schools throughout the RMS, but as far as Prabir could judge the two of them were equally bad at it. He gestured at Subhi’s prayer rug and asked, jokingly, if he was the only devout man on the boat.

This slur horrified Subhi. ‘The other men are all pious, but they’re Christians.’

‘I understand. Forgive me. I didn’t think of that possibility.’

Subhi generously conceded that it was an understandable mistake, and launched into a long account of the virtues of his fellow crew members. Prabir listened and nodded, only making sense of half of what he heard. It was several minutes into the story before he realised that he was being told something more. Subhi’s village in the Kai Islands had been destroyed during the war. His family had all been killed; he was the sole survivor out of more than two hundred people. The Christian village with pela obligations to his own had sheltered him and raised him, and he’d continued to live there, though when he wasn’t at sea he attended Friday prayers at the mosque in another village. This was a very satisfactory arrangement, at least until he married, because he could continue to uphold the faith of his parents without moving away from his friends.

When he’d finished, Prabir was unable to speak. How could anyone lose so much, and emerge with so little bitterness? Religion had nothing to do with it; pela did not derive from either Islam or Christianity, it was a conscious strategy developed to detoxify the unavoidable mixture of the two. But some combination of personal resilience and an accommodating culture had pulled this man out of the conflagration of his childhood, apparently intact.

Prabir felt a need to reciprocate, to relate some of his own history. He asked Subhi if he knew of an island with a dead volcano, seventy kilometres south-west.

Subhi’s face became grim. ‘That’s not a good place, there are spirits there.’ He looked at Prabir anew. ‘Are you the son of the Indian scientists who went there before the war?’

‘Yes.’ Prabir was amazed to be identified this way, but then he remembered the labourers from the Kai Islands who’d helped his parents set up the kampung. If Teranesia had since gained a supernatural reputation, its whole recent history might have become widely known.

He said, ‘What kind of spirits? Spirits in the form of animals?’ Any advance intelligence about the modified fauna could help them prepare.

Subhi nodded uneasily. ‘There are many kinds of spirits there, released as punishment for the crimes of the war. Visible and invisible. Possessing animals, and men.’

‘Possessing men?’ Prabir wondered if this was merely a formulaic recitation of metaphysical possibilities. ‘Who? No one lives there now, do they?’

‘No.’ Subhi looked at the ground, discomforted.

‘So who did the spirits harm? Did a boat stop there?’

He nodded.

‘When?’

‘Three months ago. To make repairs.’

‘And the men on board became sick?’

‘Sick? In a way,’ Subhi agreed reluctantly.

‘Did they eat something on the island? Did they catch some of the animals? How were they sick?’

Subhi shook his head, pained. ‘It’s not respectful to talk about this.’

Prabir didn’t want to offend him, but if there was any evidence of effects on human DNA, nothing could be more important than tracking it down. ‘Could I meet these men? If I went to their village?’

‘That’s not possible.’ Subhi rose to his feet abruptly, brushing sand from his clothes. ‘It’s time I joined my friends.’ He reached down and shook Prabir’s hand, then started walking away along the beach.

Prabir called after him, ‘The men who visited the island? Are they alive, or dead?’

There was a long silence, then Subhi replied without turning. ‘God willing, they’re at peace.’

Grant arrived at twenty past six. Prabir said, ‘I’d almost given up on you. Have you decided?’

She held up her notepad. Prabir took out his own and cloned the page she was displaying, then reread it independently via a randomly chosen proxy, to verify that it really was publicly available.

He flipped through the sequence data; there was no way he could tell whether or not it was correct, he’d simply have to trust her. Then he noticed the sponsorship logo: Borromean rings built of rotating plasmids. The logo detected his gaze and said proudly, ‘This information is brought to you by PharmoNucleic, as a service to the scientific community.’

He looked up at Grant, amazed. ‘You’re rubbing their face in it? Isn’t that begging to be sued?’

Grant said matter-of-factly, ‘They’re not going to sue anyone. I told them the choice you’d offered me, and they agreed to release all the data. They don’t see any serious patent prospects, given that the expedition has collected so much data of its own. Instead of wasting all the money they’ve invested so far, they’d rather have some good PR. Oh, and an eighty per cent share of any media rights.’

Prabir was delighted. ‘You’re a genius! Why didn’t I think of that?’

‘Misdirected hostility towards authority?’

‘Ha! You’re the one who told me how much you hated being gagged. I thought you’d be dying for an excuse to bite their hand off.’

Grant said drily, ‘I’m the one who still has a family to support.’

Prabir hefted his backpack. He was still aching all over, but the oppressive mood he’d felt at dawn had lifted. Even if Madhusree’s colleagues took her belated revelations seriously, the expedition would be saddled with enough logistical inertia to keep them from doing anything about it immediately. If he and Grant could return in a day or two with samples from the island—and all their findings were in the public domain—there’d be no urgent need for a second visit. Maybe their results would merit a comprehensive follow-up, eventually, but the expedition had a finite budget and a limited timetable. Madhusree would be back in Toronto long before anyone went near Teranesia again.

He said, ‘Are you ready?’

‘Yeah. Are you sure you’re up to this?’

‘I’m up to anything that doesn’t involve mangroves.’

Grant put an arm across his shoulders and said solemnly, ‘I shouldn’t have left you behind. It was a stupid thing to do, and I’m truly sorry. We won’t get separated again.’

The route back along the coast was infinitely less arduous than the jungle. They swam past the inlet to the mangrove swamp through crystalline water at the reef’s inner edge, where at least they’d have a chance to see any predators approaching. But they made the crossing unmolested; despite the multitude of fish, the swamp and the forest were apparently considered better hunting grounds.

As they trudged along the beach again, Prabir told Grant about Subhi’s story of the fishermen.

She said, ‘That could mean anything. They might have cooked a plant they were accustomed to eating safely, and it turned out to have acquired some extra protective toxins.’

‘Yeah.’ That did sound like the simplest explanation, and if the men had died badly, psychotic and hallucinating, it would have been enough to confirm the presence of spirits. Prabir wished he could have questioned someone else about the incident, but they didn’t have time to go off to the Kai Islands to hunt for reliable witnesses to an event nobody wanted to talk about.

Grant said, ‘Tell me about your parents’ work.’

Prabir sketched the sequence of events that had led Radha and Rajendra to the island. It was a long time since he’d discussed this with anyone but Madhusree, and as he listened to himself betraying her—handing over the family history to this stranger, to keep Madhusree from making use of it herself—he felt far worse than he’d anticipated. But Grant had kept her side of the deal, and he had no reason to believe that his parents would have wanted him to keep any of this secret.

‘Can you describe the butterflies?’

‘They were green and black. Emerald green. There was a pattern, a sort of concentric striping; not quite eye spots, but a bit like that. They were pretty large; each wing was about the size of an adult’s hand. There was something about the veins in the wings, and the position of the genitals, that my parents made a big deal about. But I’ve forgotten the details.’

‘Would you recognise the other stages? The eggs, the larvae, the pupae?’

Prabir pictured the sequence laid out in front of him. He’d been inside the butterfly hut, just once: at night, in the dark. In his memory, though, he could see the contents of all the cages. Spiked, hissing larvae. Orange and green pupae like rotten fruit.

‘I’m not sure.’ The words came out like an angry denial.

Grant turned to look at him, surprised by his tone. ‘They might be easier to collect than the adults, that’s all. But if you can’t remember, it’s not the end of the world.’

They reached the boat just after noon. Prabir unpacked the samples he’d collected before entering the swamp; the python had crushed half his tubes of gelled blood, but even so, the morning hadn’t been a complete loss.

Grant had no trouble finding the island on her chart from his description, but she asked Prabir to confirm it. He ran his finger over the bland set of contour lines on the screen, some satellite’s radar echo blindly cranked through a billion computations to spit out a shape that would have taken a human surveyor a month of hardship to map.

He said, ‘That’s it. That’s Teranesia.’

Grant smiled. ‘Is that really what you called it?’

‘Yeah. Well, it was the name I came up with, and my parents went along with it. But it was nothing to do with the butterflies; after about a week I was bored to tears with them. I didn’t pay much attention to any of the real animals; I used to make up my own. Child-eating monsters that chased us around the island, but never quite caught up.’

‘Ah, everyone has those.’

‘Do they? I never had them in Calcutta. There was no room.’

Grant said, ‘I packed a pretty good bestiary into the stairwell of a twelve-storey block of flats. Not that I didn’t have competition: one of my idiot brothers tried to give the whole building a kind of layered metaphysical structure—full of ethereal beings on different spiritual levels, like some lame cosmology out of Doris Lessing or C.S. Lewis—but even when his friends went along with it, I knew it was crap. All his little demons and angels had endless wars and political intrigues, but apparently no time for either food or sex.’

‘You had trouble attracting as many believers to a world of rutting carnivores?’

She nodded forlornly. ‘I even had hermaphroditic dung beetles, but no one cared. It was so unfair.’

Grant programmed the autopilot, and the engines started up smoothly. The boat circled around to face the reef, then retraced the safe path it had found on arrival.

As they rounded the coast and headed out to sea, Prabir stood on deck near the bow, waiting for the tip of the volcano to appear on the horizon. It was still too far away, though, too small to stand out from the haze.

Grant joined him. ‘So who do you want to play your character in the movie?’

Prabir cringed. ‘Did I really suggest going for the movie rights? I thought I must have dreamt that part. Can’t you just bring out a cologne, like the physicists do?’

‘Only because they have nothing worth filming. And I think they make more from donor gametes.’ She eyed him appraisingly. ‘One of the Kapoor brothers might just be dashing enough.’

‘That’s very flattering, but I doubt that any of them would be willing to take the role.’

Grant laughed, baffled. ‘Why on Earth not?’

‘Never mind. What about you?’

‘Oh, Lara Croft, definitely.’

She’d brought a pair of binoculars; she lifted them to the horizon. After a few seconds she announced, ‘I can see it now. Do you want a look?’

Prabir’s throat filled with acid. He still wasn’t ready. But everyone went back: to battlefields, to death camps, to places ten thousand times worse than this. Subhi to his lost village, no doubt. Every piece of land, every stretch of sea, was a graveyard to someone. He wasn’t special.

He took the binoculars and turned his head until the red azimuth needle was centred; the autopilot was providing the correct bearing. At first the image was nothing but a dark triangular smudge, blurred by turbulence. Then the processing chip recalibrated its atmospheric model and the scene leapt into focus: a cone of black igneous rock rising above the forest canopy. The distortion of the lowest light paths was impossible to correct; the image broke down into blobs of grey and green before the sea blocked the view completely.

He said, ‘That’s the place.’

We’re going to the island of butterflies.

11

Prabir was hoping that they’d find a previously undetected passage through the reef, but as they inched their way around the island watching the sonar display, the chance of that diminished, then vanished altogether. The old southern approach was narrow, and twenty years before no one would have attempted to pass through it in such a large craft, but the autopilot confidently declared that there was sufficient clearance.

They dropped anchor just inside the reef. It was too late to go ashore, with less than an hour of light remaining. The beach appeared smaller than Prabir remembered it, though whether the jungle had encroached, a storm had gouged sand away, or he was just misjudging the tide it was impossible to say. There were still coconut palms standing at the edge of the sand, but he could see the strange thorned shrubs choking out everything else in the undergrowth. There was no sign at all of the path that had once led from the beach to the kampung.

After they’d eaten, Grant made her nightly call home. Prabir sat out on deck, stupefied by the heat. He couldn’t call Felix; he didn’t want to be forced to justify what he’d done to Madhusree, let alone risk some kind of mediated confrontation if the two of them had been in contact.

He lay down and tried to sleep.

Just after midnight, he heard Grant come out on deck. She stood beside him. ‘Prabir? Are you still awake?’

As he rolled over, he saw her gazing down at him with the kind of unguarded fascination that he’d learnt never to betray on his own face by the time he was about fifteen. But then her eyes shifted to a neutral point behind his shoulder, and he doubted the significance of whatever he’d seen.

‘I just thought you ought to know that your extortion has borne its first fruit.’ She handed him her notepad. He glanced at the banner at the top of the page, then sat up cross-legged on his sleeping bag and read through the whole thing.

A molecular modelling team in São Paulo had examined the sequence data from the two expeditions, and identified a novel gene common to all the altered organisms; they’d sent Grant a copy of their results, as well as submitting them to a refereed netzine. Preliminary models of the protein the gene encoded suggested that it would bind to DNA.

Prabir said, ‘You think this is it? Your mythical gene-repair-and-resurrection machine?’

‘Maybe.’ Grant seemed pleased, but she was a long way from claiming victory. ‘Part of what they’ve found makes sense: this gene has a promoter that causes it to be switched on in meiosis—germ cell formation—which explains why there’s no need for a mutagen to activate it in these organisms. But there’s no evidence of a similar gene in any of the original genomes, let alone one that would only be switched on when it was needed to repair mutations.’

Prabir thought it over. ‘Could we be seeing the gene that the original version resurrected in place of itself? Once it went hyperactive, it not only substituted old versions of other genes, it substituted a completely unrecognisable version of itself?’

Grant laughed, through gritted teeth. ‘That’s possible, and it would make things very tricky. These modelling people might be able to determine the current protein’s function, but I wouldn’t count on them to be able to work backwards and determine the structure of an unknown protein that changed its own sequence into the current one. What we really need is DNA from two consecutive generations of the same organism, for comparison.’ She hesitated. ‘And if possible, DNA from two early consecutive generations of the butterflies.’

Prabir said, ‘You mean samples my parents took? They didn’t have your magic gelling agent. And I think the refrigeration would have failed by now.’

Grant looked uncomfortable, unsure whether to pursue the matter.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind talking about this.’ They’d come here for the butterflies; he couldn’t afford to clam up every time the subject was raised.

She said, ‘They might have preserved whole specimens for storage under tropical conditions; there were treatments available twenty years ago that would have protected against bacteria and mould, without damaging the DNA. You said they bred the butterflies in captivity. One or two well-documented samples could tell us a lot.’

‘I appreciate that. But don’t get your hopes up. With all the vegetation changed and the old paths gone, I’m not even sure that I could find my way back to the kampung. And if I can, who knows what state the buildings would be in?’

Grant nodded. ‘Yeah. It was just a thought. We’ll go ashore tomorrow, and we’ll find what we find.’ She stood up. ‘And we’d both better get some sleep now.’

Prabir woke badly, to another Tanimbar dawn. When he opened his eyes there was a message in the sunlight: His parents were dead. Everyone alive would follow them. The world he’d once seen as safe and solid—a vast, intricately beautiful maze that he could explore from end to end, without risk, without punishment—had proved itself to be a sheer cliff face, to which he’d cling for a moment before falling.

He rose from the deck and stood by the guard rail, shielding his eyes. He was tired of the pendulum swings, tired of finding that all the carefully reasoned arguments and deliberate optimism that shored him up well enough, on the good days, could still count for nothing when he needed it the most.

But this could be the last cycle, the downswing deep enough to carry him through to the other side. Wasn’t this the day he’d step ashore and demonstrate once and for all that Teranesia was powerless to harm him, like an IRA debunker striding triumphantly across a bed of hot coals? He might yet return to Toronto at peace, as infuriatingly tranquil as Felix, free of his parents, free of Madhusree, every useless fear banished, every obligation to his past, real or imagined, finally discharged.

And he’d told Grant not to set her hopes too high.

They brought the boat closer to shore, then waded on to the beach. Grant was carrying a rifle now, as well as the tranquilliser gun. They went through the rituals of the insect repellent and the mine detector tests. As Prabir sat pulling his boots on, looking back at the reef, he pictured a water man rising from the waves, angry and ravenous, teeth shining like glassy steel. Then he punctured the illusion, scattering the figure into random spray. That was the trouble with the demons dreamed up by children and religions: you made the rules, and they obeyed them. It wasn’t much of a rehearsal for life. Once you started believing that any real danger in the world worked that way, you were lost.

They penetrated the jungle slowly; the thorned shrubs were even denser and more tangled than the species they’d seen before, with long, narrow involuted branches like coils of barbed wire. Prabir cut off a sample, tearing his thumb on a barely visible down of tiny hooks that coated the vines between the large thorns. He sucked the ragged wound. ‘Nice as it would be to solve the mystery, I’m beginning to hope we don’t stumble across a herbivore that needs this much discouragement.’

‘It’d probably be no worse than a rhinoceros or a hippo,’ Grant suggested. ‘But apparently it has no descendants here, to give birth to something similar.’

Prabir fished in his backpack for a band aid. ‘OK, I can accept that: seeds get blown about, continents drift, animal lineages die out locally. But why is it always the most extreme trait that gets resurrected? Why couldn’t these shrubs just grow something mildly inappropriate, like flowers optimised for a long-vanished pollinating insect?’

Grant mused, ‘There’s no evidence of the São Paulo protein ever having been used for mutation repair. So maybe that was never the case; maybe I’ve been clinging to that idea too stubbornly. It could be that the protein’s role has always been to reactivate old traits, to bring old inventions back into the gene pool from a dormant state.’

Prabir considered this. ‘A bit like a natural version of those conservation programmes where they cross endangered animals with frozen sperm from twenty years ago, to reinvigorate the species when the population becomes too inbred?’

‘Yeah. And sometimes they use a closely related species, not the thing itself. If this protein manages a kind of “frozen gene bank”, it would be even less purist about it: it wouldn’t have any qualms about creating a hybrid with a distant ancestor.’

To Prabir this sounded both simpler and far more radical than the mutation repair hypothesis: shifting the mechanism from an esoteric emergency response to a major factor in genetic change. Most of the same problems remained, though.

He said, ‘That still doesn’t explain how particular traits get frozen and thawed. Are you saying that this plant’s ancestors knew that they’d evolved a spectacularly effective set of defences, and deliberately tucked away a copy of the genes for the next aeon when they’d come in handy?’

Grant smiled, refusing to be provoked. ‘More likely it’s just a matter of the genes that persist the longest having the greatest chance of being duplicated at some point, which then increases their chance of surviving in an inactive form.’

‘And the mimicry? The symbiosis? How does something like that get synchronised?’

‘That, I don’t know.’

They pressed on. Prabir kept waiting for a flash of recognition, for the sight of an old gnarled tree or an outcrop of rock to awaken memories more strongly than the beach. He’d explored this side of the island completely; every step he was taking here was one he must have taken before. But too much had changed. Though the trees themselves appeared unaltered, there were no ferns, there were no small flowers on the ground, just the carnivorous orchids they’d seen on the other islands, and the ubiquitous barbed-wire shrubs. Even the scent of the forest was alien to him. It was like returning to a city to find it repaved and repainted, emptied of its old inhabitants and repopulated by strangers with new customs and new cooking smells. Ambon with its nouveau-colonial refurbishment had seemed more familiar than this.

The black cockatoos were here, too. Prabir stood and watched one for half an hour, waiting for Grant to finish dissecting an orchid.

The bird was sitting in a kanari tree. Using its teeth, it chewed straight through a slender branch that sprouted twigs bearing half a dozen white blossoms swollen with fruit. The cluster of twigs and fruit fell at the bird’s feet, landing on the large, solid branch where it was perched. It proceeded to attack one of the fruits, chewing through the leathery hull, which had not quite ripened to the point where it would split open and spill the seeds, the almonds, on to the ground.

Grant came over to see what he was looking at. Prabir described what he’d observed so far. The bird had extracted one of the almonds from the fruit, and was performing an even more elaborate routine to penetrate the hard shell.

She said, ‘This part’s old hat: its a famous case of specialisation for a food source.’ The bird had broken away part of the shell, and was now holding the nut with one foot while it used the sharp, hooked part of its upper beak to tear out fragments of the kernel; a tongue like a long-handled pink-and-black rubber stamp darted out to pick up the pieces and take them into the bird’s mouth. ‘Going for the unripe fruit is new, though.’

‘So it doesn’t have to wait for the nuts to fall. Which means the teeth are there to help it stay off the ground?’

‘I suppose so,’ Grant conceded. ‘But there might have been any number of reasons in the past why that was a good idea. It doesn’t require co-evolution with the ants.’

Prabir turned to her. ‘If you’d come to this island knowing nothing about its history, nothing about the ordinary fauna of the region—if you’d dropped in out of the sky in a state of complete ignorance about this entire hemisphere—what would you think was going on here?’

‘That’s a stupid question.’

‘Humour me.’

‘Why? What point is there in ignoring the facts?’

Prabir shook his head earnestly. ‘I’m not asking you to do that. I just want you to look at this afresh. If you’d just arrived from the insular British Isles with an immaculate, theoretical training in evolutionary biology, but no contact for a thousand years with anyone east of Calais, what would you conclude about the plants and animals here?’

Grant folded her arms.

Prabir said, ‘I’m withdrawing my labour until you answer me. Forgetting all the history you know, what does this really look like to you?’

She replied irritably, ‘It looks to me as if the affected species originally shared territory with all the others, then became isolated on some remote island and co-evolved separately for a few million years—and now they’re being progressively reintroduced. OK? That’s what it looks like. But on what island is this meant to have happened?’ She spread her arms. ‘It didn’t happen here: you can vouch for that yourself. There’s no island in the whole archipelago sufficiently isolated, and sufficiently unexplored.’

‘Probably not.’

‘Certainly not.’

Prabir laughed. ‘OK. There’s no such island! All I’m saying is, when the account you’ve just given sounds so much simpler than a hundred separate genes in a hundred separate species marching back from the past in perfect lock-step—I have a lot of trouble seeing how it can’t be telling us something about the truth.’

Grant’s expression softened, her curiosity getting the better of her defensiveness. ‘Such as what?’

‘That, I don’t know.’

Prabir had rewritten the image-processing software to run directly on Grant’s camera. In the afternoon, she found the camouflaged fruit pigeons all around them.

Fluttering across the viewfinder between the pigeons were the butterflies. The wing patterns had changed dramatically—the dappled imitation of foliage and shadows they’d acquired was far less striking, far less symmetric, and far more variable from insect to insect than the old concentric bands of green and black—but when Grant finally captured one and Prabir saw the body, he knew they were the descendants of the insect he’d first seen pinned to a board in his father’s office at the university.

The tranquilliser darts were useless for insects, but Grant had a spray based on wasp venom that could temporarily paralyse the butterflies without killing them. Using a net to keep their victims from falling to the ants, they managed to collect half a dozen live specimens of both the pigeons and the butterflies.

Back on the boat, Grant killed and dissected one of the male pigeons, removing the testes and then working under a microscope to extract stem cells and various stages of maturing spermatocytes. She was hoping to catch the São Paulo protein in the act, though given the uniformity of the pigeons it seemed unlikely that it was still producing radical changes in their genome.

Prabir left her to it and stood out on the deck, staring back into the harmless shadows of the jungle, numb with relief as he realised how painlessly the day had passed. Between the distracting riddle of the altered species and the sheer physical effort of gathering samples, he’d had little time or reason to dwell on the significance of the place. And that was how it should be. He’d already mourned his parents, in the camp, in Toronto, and he’d recounted their triumphs a thousand times for Madhusree. There was nothing to be done here, nothing to be remembered, nothing to be learnt but the secret of the butterflies. He refused to imagine them trapped on the island. In the only sense that they survived at all, they’d left in the very same boat as he had.

And though Teranesia had proved to be no more dangerous than the other islands, he was still glad that he’d kept Madhusree away. She might resent his intervention for years to come. She might accuse him of standing between her and the memory of her parents. But the alien jungle would have meant even less to her than it did to him, and he’d spared her the pointless anguish of digging through the ruins of the kampung. His mother had told him, ‘Take her away! She mustn’t see!’ He’d completed what he’d begun when they’d set out on the boat. It had been a long trip, but now it was over.

Grant emerged from the cabin frowning, carrying her notepad.

‘More news from São Paulo,’ she said. ‘They’ve refined their model.’

‘And?’

She propped the notepad on the guard rail in front of Prabir; it was displaying a graphic of a couple of large molecules bound to strands of DNA. ‘I don’t know what to make of this. I was hoping they’d find evidence that some part of the protein resembled a transcription factor, and recognised disabled promoters—’

Prabir stopped her. ‘I used to know all these terms when I was a kid, but I’m pretty hazy now. Can you—?’

Grant nodded apologetically. ‘Promoters are sequences of DNA that sit next to the coding region of a gene, which is the part that actually describes the protein. Transcription factors bind to promoters to initiate the copying of the gene into RNA, which is then used to make the protein: to “express the gene”.

‘If a gene is accidentally duplicated, mutations that build up in the promoter of one copy might eventually stop that copy from being expressed. To identify a gene that’s become inactive like that, you’d need something that was capable of binding to a damaged promoter—something roughly the same shape as a transcription factor, but a little less fussy. And then to reactivate the gene, there’d be a number of possible strategies, either working base by base to repair point mutations in the promoter, or snipping the whole thing out and splicing in an intact version.’

Prabir said, ‘OK, that all makes sense. Now what have the modellers found?’

Grant hit a button on the notepad and animated the graphic. ‘This bloody thing just crawls along causing havoc during DNA replication. What normally happens is: the double helix unwinds, the two strands separate, and DNA polymerase comes along and stitches together a new complementary strand for each of them, from free-floating bases. What the São Paulo protein does is slide along each single strand, cutting it up into individual bases, while splicing together a whole new strand of DNA to take its place. Then DNA polymerase comes along and duplicates that.’

Prabir took the notepad from her and slowed down the animation so he could follow the steps. ‘But what’s the relationship between the old sequence and the new sequence?’

‘Basically, the new one is the old one, plus noise. SPP changes shape as it binds to each base of the original strand—it assumes a different conformation depending on whether it’s cutting out adenine, guanine, cytosine, or thymine—and that in turn determines the base it adds to the new strand. But the correlation isn’t perfect; there are some random errors introduced.’

Prabir laughed, disbelieving. ‘So it’s just an elaborate, self-inflicted mutagen? These creatures might as well be bathing their gonads in radiation or pesticide?’

Grant replied dejectedly, ‘That’s what they’re claiming.’

He replayed the animation. ‘No. This is crazy. If you wanted to add a few extra random errors to your offspring’s DNA, would you take the easy way out and just alter your DNA polymerase slightly, so it made occasional mistakes—or would you invent a whole new system like this for making deliberately flawed single-strand copies?’

‘Well, exactly,’ Grant said. ‘And even if you had a good reason to take that approach, the whole protein’s vastly over-engineered. There are commercial enzymes that do something similar, and they’re about one-hundredth the molecular weight.’

‘Maybe there’s a bug in their software. Or maybe there’s some logic to the changes, some pattern that they simply haven’t noticed.’

Grant shrugged morosely. ‘They’ve synthesised some of the protein for real now; they’re doing test-tube experiments as we speak, to try to confirm all this.’

She seemed to be taking it all too much to heart. Prabir said, ‘You know that the things we’ve seen here can’t be explained by random mutations. Maybe there’s still some way this can be compatible with your theory. But whatever’s going on, at least we’re closing in on it.’

‘That’s true.’ She smiled. ‘They have synthesised protein in São Paulo, and I have cultured fruit pigeon spermatocytes. By morning they’ll know what happens in a test tube, and we’ll know what happens in a living cell.’

When Prabir woke, this prediction had been fulfilled. Grant had been up since three o’clock trying to make sense of the results.

The experiments in São Paulo had confirmed the computer model: fed a few hundred different test strands of DNA, the protein had chopped them up and synthesised new strands of exactly the same length, copying the original sequence but introducing random errors. Another group, in Lausanne, had repeated the work and found the same thing.

Grant had detected RNA transcripts for the São Paulo protein in the pigeon spermatocytes, which implied that the protein itself was being made in the cells; she had no direct test for it. But when she compared sequence data for cells before and after meiosis, the error rate was about a thousand times less than for the two experiments in vitro.

She said, ‘There has to be a second protein, some kind of helper molecule that modifies the whole process.’

‘So they need to look harder at the sequence data?’ Prabir suggested. ‘The gene for it must be in there somewhere.’

‘They’re looking. SPP alone is a bit like a pantograph with a whole lot of superfluous hinges. So maybe this is something that binds to it and stabilises it—not enough to produce perfect copies, but enough to allow its internal state to reflect the last few dozen bases to which it was bound.’

Prabir opened his mouth to say, Turing machine, but he stopped himself. Most processes in molecular biology had analogies in computing, but it was rarely helpful to push them too far. ‘So it could recognise a sequence of something like a promoter, even though it only binds to one base at a time?’

‘Maybe,’ Grant agreed cautiously. ‘They’ve also got hold of samples from the Ambon fruit pigeon, and they’re going to see what pure, synthetic SPP does to an entire chromosome, in the presence of nothing but a supply of individual bases.’

As they waded ashore, Prabir looked down into the warm, clear water where he’d swum with Madhusree, then across the dazzling white beach where they’d played. He wasn’t just cheating her out of a role in the study of the butterflies, he was depriving her of the chance to demystify the island, to purge it of its horrors the way he was doing for himself.

But he could never have brought her back here. He could never have undone the one good thing.

Grant wanted to collect specimens of the butterfly’s other stages, so they spent the morning doing nothing but searching appropriately succulent leaves for the spiked larvae, and the branches of the same trees for pupae. The original versions would not have been hard to spot: both had been covered in bright-orange patches, warning colours to signal their toxicity. Grant found signs of leaf damage that looked promising, but there were no culprits nearby. If the larvae had switched strategy and opted for camouflage that was as efficient as the adults’, their movements would be far too subtle for the image-processing software to detect.

They stopped and ate lunch in the middle of the forest, in a rare spot where the ground was rocky enough to keep the shrubs at bay. Prabir still didn’t feel safe sitting down until he’d sprayed a cordon of insect repellent on the ground; the ants were never content to stay inside the orchids, waiting for easy prey. He wasn’t sure why they didn’t swarm up the trees and take nestlings; maybe they were lacking some crucial adaptation for the task, or maybe it just wasn’t worth the energy.

Grant said, ‘So your whole family was here for three years, from 2010? Was your sister born on the island?’

He laughed. ‘We weren’t quite that isolated. We went to Ambon on the ferry four times a year. And we flew down to Darwin for the birth.’

‘Still, it must have been a rough place to raise a young child.’ Grant added hastily, ‘I’m not criticising your parents. I’m just impressed that they could cope.’

Prabir shrugged. ‘I suppose I took that for granted. I mean, the people in small villages on the other islands had better access to transport, clinics they could get to, and so on. But we had a satellite link, which made it easy to forget the distance. I even had lessons from a school in Calcutta; they’d set up a net service for kids in remote villages, but I could join in just as easily.’

‘So at least you had some friends your own age through the net.’

‘Yeah.’ Prabir shifted his position on the rock, suddenly uncomfortable. ‘What about you? What were your school days like?’

‘Mine? Very ordinary.’ Grant fell silent for a while, then she took out her camera and began scanning the branches around them.

She said, ‘The butterflies spend a lot of their time quite high in the canopy. Maybe they lay their eggs there.’ She lowered the camera and asked casually, ‘What are you like at climbing trees?’

‘Seriously out of practice.’

‘It’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget.’

Prabir gave her a stony look. ‘You’re the field biologist, remember? I’m the desk zombie. And I don’t care how ancient you are: you’re twice as fit as I am.’

‘You put that so gallantly.’

Prabir said flatly, ‘I’m not doing it! The deal we made in Ambon—’

Grant nodded effusively. ‘OK, OK! I only asked because I’m not used to judging the strength of the branches of these species. I thought you might be more confident, since you must have climbed them as a kid. I’ll go back to the boat and get a rope—’

‘A rope? You’re not serious?’

‘I had a bad experience in Ecuador,’ she admitted. ‘I broke a lot of bones. So I’m ultra-careful now.’

Prabir’s resentment faded. There was a principle at stake, but he didn’t want to be petty and sadistic. ‘I’ll do it, but you have to pay me. Ten dollars a tree.’

Grant considered this. ‘Make it twenty. I’ll feel better.’

‘With a conscience like that, who needs labour laws?’

Grant selected a nutmeg tree. Prabir took off his boots and rolled up his trouser legs. He hesitated, unsure how to begin. The lowest branch of this tree was just above his head; he must have been able to scale a sheer trunk once, gripping the bark with his arms and legs—he’d even climbed coconut palms—but he felt certain he’d make a fool of himself if he tried that now.

He grabbed the branch and raised himself up, then hooked his feet around it and hung sloth-like for a while before figuring out how to right himself. It was a clumsy start, but once he was standing squarely on the branch, with a firm grip on the next one up, he was elated. The scent of the bark, the feel of it against his soles, was utterly familiar; even the view straight across into the other trees was far closer to anything he remembered than the view from the ground. He glanced down at Grant, not wanting to lose perspective, not wanting to be drawn back too strongly.

She shaded her eyes and looked up at him. ‘Be careful!’

He took a few steps along the branch, feeling it flex, trying to recalibrate his old instincts for his adult weight. He called down, ‘I promise you, I have no intention of breaking my neck for a caterpillar.’

He scoured the clusters of leaves hanging around him for signs of larval feeding, but there was nothing. He climbed higher. Fruit pigeons fled as he approached, a rush of air and a blur of motion. There were foul-smelling beetles on the trunk, but they scurried away from the repellent. There’d been pythons in the trees once, but even the lowest branches wouldn’t have taken the weight of anything remotely like the one he’d met in the mangrove swamp; as long as he didn’t panic and fall to his death, he probably had nothing to fear from its tree-dwelling cousins. Assuming they hadn’t acquired venom.

Twenty metres up, Prabir found something hanging from a slender branch. At first glance he’d mistaken it for a nutmeg fruit, but then a hint of unexpected structure had made him look again. When he was close enough to examine it properly, he found a butterfly, wings folded, suspended from the branch. It had to be a pupa, but it looked more like a tiny sleeping bat than an insect about to emerge from metamorphosis—and it still looked more like a nutmeg fruit than anything else. He touched it warily; it even felt like a nutmeg fruit.

He took out his notepad and recorded some vision, to document the attachment method before he broke the pupa free. The silk girdle around the bulk of the insect was virtually undetectable, the colour matched so well; the short length anchoring it to the branch looked exactly like a stalk. He sent the images down to Grant, and spoke to her through the notepad; it was easier than shouting.

‘What do you make of that? Pretty good camouflage, at the risk of being eaten by mistake.’

‘Maybe they smell bad to the fruit pigeons,’ Grant suggested.

‘Why not just—oh, forget it.’ Whatever anything did, why not do it differently? It was frozen history, not rational design. He broke the pupa free, and dropped it in his backpack. ‘I’ll go up one more level, just to see if there are any larvae.’

‘Are you sure it’ll take your weight?’

The next branch above him was barely chest high now. He wrapped his arms around it and lifted his feet off the one below. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

He clambered up. He had a firm hold and a secure footing, but he could feel the top of the tree swaying, and the branches around him had thinned enough to make him feel exposed. Looking sideways through the forest at this level, the distant branches appeared uncannily like the struts for some elaborate geodesic folly. Maybe the Stetsoned entrepreneurs who’d followed the expedition down from Ambon could anchor a perspex roof to all this scaffolding, and turn the whole island into an exhibition centre.

He looked down and saw the ruins of the kampung.

A wave of vertigo swept over him, but he kept his grip on the branch beside him. The centre of the kampung had been reclaimed by the forest, but the trees couldn’t quite obscure the roofs of the huts: the matt-grey photovoltaic surface was still visible through a thin layer of creepers. The buildings had all become badly skewed, but none of them appeared to have collapsed completely. The six huts had been arranged in a regular hexagon, and in their current state he couldn’t tell them apart; with the path from the beach erased there were no cues to enable him to orient the view.

He looked away, remembering his purpose. There wasn’t much foliage around him, but he examined it dutifully. Then he spoke into his notepad.

‘There’s nothing else here. I’m coming down.’

Three more trees yielded five more pupae, but still no sign of the larval stage. It was mid-afternoon; Grant decided there was no point looking further. Prabir was dripping with sweat, and itching from all the contact with bark and sap. When they reached the beach, he handed his samples to Grant and swam out to the reef and back. After the heat of the forest, the water was glorious beyond belief.

He collected his clothes from the beach and waded back to the boat. As he climbed up on to the deck, Grant met him with the latest news from Brazil. ‘They’ve copied whole, purified pigeon chromosomes, using just SPP,’ she said. ‘And the error rate was the same as mine, for the cultured cells.’

It took Prabir a moment to interpret this result. ‘So there is no second protein after all?’

‘Apparently not,’ Grant concurred. ‘SPP alone in a test tube does just as good a job as SPP in an intact cell, if and only if the sequence being copied is the same. Which shows that these changes aren’t errors at all. Or at least, they’re not just random copying mistakes. They must depend in some way on the sequence itself.’

Prabir pondered this. ‘The pigeon genome has probably been copied in the presence of SPP dozens of times. So whatever transformation SPP causes must be convergent: the genome must change less and less with each iteration, until by now it’s virtually stable under the process.’

Grant nodded. ‘Whereas there’s no reason at all why the test sequences they first tried copying would have been stable. Randomly chosen input sequences would have undergone apparently random changes.’

Prabir had a minor epiphany. ‘And all the different fruit pigeons on Banda that ended up looking identical—the process must also be convergent for sufficiently similar genomes. Not only is there a stable endpoint for a given starting point, but similar starting points—closely related species—get dragged towards the same endpoint.’ He beamed with delight. ‘It all makes sense!’

Grant was pleased, but slightly less rapturous. ‘Except we still don’t know what SPP actually does, or how it’s doing it.’

‘But the Brazilians have all the information they need to crack this now, don’t they? They just have to look more closely at their model.’

‘Maybe. For a molecule as large as a protein you can never solve the equations for its shape and binding properties exactly, and it can be hard to choose a set of approximations that only cause trivial discrepancies. They’ve already tried simulating the pigeon chromosome being copied by SPP, and the simulation produced exactly the same error rate as for any other sequence.’

Prabir winced. ‘So their model has just proved that it’s missing the most important subtlety of the real protein.’

Grant didn’t see it quite so bleakly. ‘Missing it now, but they might yet be able to capture it with a little fine-tuning. At least they know what they’re aiming for, what they need to get right.’

Prabir said, ‘OK. So what do we do next?’ Grant had been posting all their results on the net, stating precisely where they’d been collecting their samples; the expedition biologists would already know that there was no need for anyone else to come here. So long as Grant didn’t cut corners.

She said, ‘I’ll have a proper look at these pupae, see what that tells us. I don’t know whether it’s worth going back to hunt for the larvae; I mean, the life cycle is of interest in itself, but larvae don’t make germ cells.’

Prabir filled a bucket with sea water and set about washing his sap-stained clothes, while Grant went for a swim. The travel shop in Toronto had sold him a detergent with enzymes that worked in the presence of salt; as long as you didn’t leave it too late you could remove almost anything with the stuff.

When he walked back into the cabin to get fresh water for rinsing, he glanced at the wire cage holding the adult butterflies they’d captured.

There was a pupa, similar to the ones he’d collected in the forest, hanging from the top of the cage. Except it couldn’t be a pupa. The adults had only been there for a day; at most they might have laid eggs. Grant had been in the cabin twenty minutes before. This had happened since then.

Prabir counted the adults. One of them was missing.

He ran out on deck. ‘Martha! You have to see this!’

She was halfway to the reef. ‘See what?’

‘The butterflies.’

‘What about them?’

‘You won’t believe me if I tell you. You have to see it for yourself.’

Grant turned back towards the boat. She followed him into the cabin, dripping. Prabir watched her expression go through several changes.

He said, ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to try, if you’ll let me.’

‘I’m listening.’

He picked up one of the dormant adults he’d taken from the forest. ‘This insect hangs there, looking like a nutmeg fruit, unable to fly away. So presumably it has some defence: it must smell bad, or taste bad, to the birds that would otherwise want to eat it on sight.’

‘Presumably.’

Prabir approached the cage where they’d placed the fruit pigeons, and gave Grant a questioning look.

She said, ‘Go ahead, please. I want to see this too.’

He opened the door just wide enough to toss the dormant adult on to the floor of the cage. All of the fruit pigeons rushed forward; one of them managed to shoulder the rest aside and grab the insect. The bird stretched its jaws to their full extent and swallowed the sleeping butterfly whole.

Grant sat down heavily on one of the stools. After a long silence, she declared, ‘Maybe there’s a parasitic larval stage. Maybe the adults don’t lay their fertilised eggs; maybe they’re incubated inside the pigeons, after the adults act as a lure.’

‘And that’s why we’ve seen no larvae?’

‘Maybe.’ Grant stretched her arms and leant back on the stool. ‘I suppose it could burrow out through the skin, but I’m beginning to have visions of sifting through a large pile of pigeon shit.’

Prabir walked over to the butterfly cage. They’d placed some foliage in the bottom, but there’d been no elevated twigs or branches from which the would-be martyr could hang itself. He squatted down to try to get a better view of it, and saw a long string of dark-grey beads sticking to the underside of one of the leaves.

He said, ‘Was this foliage clean when you put it in the cage?’

‘I believe so. Why?’

‘I think I’ve just found some butterfly eggs.’

Prabir lay awake, listening to the waves breaking on the reef. The eggs would allow them to observe every stage of the butterfly, but that still wouldn’t be enough. The butterfly’s genome would be stable now; only samples from the kampung could show the way the São Paulo protein had changed it, from generation to generation, twenty years before. They needed to extract every clue the island held; if they didn’t finish the job properly, the expedition would follow them here.

He went into the cabin and woke Grant, calling out to her from the doorway. Her bunk was hidden in shadows, but he heard her sit up. ‘What is it?’

He explained what he’d seen from the treetops. ‘I know where it is now. I can get to it from the beach.’

She hesitated. ‘Are you sure you want to do this? You could draw me a map, I could go by myself.’

Prabir was tempted. The place meant nothing to her: she could walk in and take whatever she needed, ransacking the site unflinchingly, immune to its history.

But this was his job. He couldn’t claim to be sparing Madhusree the pain of returning, only to hand the task over to a stranger.

‘I’d rather go alone.’

Grant said decisively, ‘We’ll go together, first thing tomorrow. I promised you after the mangrove swamp: we won’t get separated again.’

12

Prabir took comfort in the usual routine: wading to the beach, insect repellent, mine detector checks. Looking back at the reef as he pulled on his boots. They’d gather some samples and return to the boat. It would be a day like any other.

He’d estimated GPS coordinates for the kampung, from his notepad’s log of its position the previous day and his recollection of the treetop view. They picked their way laboriously through the shrubs; this was the first time they’d had no choice about their destination, no option of taking an easier route. Grant had once tried clearing a path in the undergrowth using a parang she’d bought in Ambon, but it had been a waste of effort; the machete was perfect for chopping through occasional vines, but the knee-high thicket was too tangled, there were too many strands to sever.

Grant was unusually quiet; she might have done this easily enough alone, but his presence must be making her feel more like a trespasser. Prabir said, ‘You wouldn’t believe it only took me half an hour a day to maintain this path.’

‘That was one of your jobs?’

‘Yeah.’

She smiled. ‘I thought I was hard done by having to clean the bath. And at least I had somewhere to spend my pocket money. I suppose you got paid in net privileges?’

‘I don’t remember.’

Prabir’s eyes kept filling with sweat. As he wiped them clear, he could almost see the approach as it had once been. He’d heard the thud of the mine and raced towards the kampung with Madhusree in his arms. Sailing past the trees ever faster, as if he was falling.

Grant spotted one of the huts before he did: it was leaning precariously, covered in fungus and lianas. Unlike the roofing panels he’d seen from above, the walls were stained and encrusted to the point where they might as well have been deliberately camouflaged. Prabir was suddenly much less sure that they’d followed the old path; he didn’t expect the hut to be recognisable, but its position was not where he’d imagined it. Maybe they’d taken a different route entirely, one that had always been uncleared jungle.

Even when they were standing at the edge of the kampung, it took him a while to find all six huts amid the trees. He said numbly, ‘I don’t know where we are. I don’t know where to start.’

Grant put a hand on his shoulder. ‘There’s no rush. I can look inside one of these buildings and describe it for you, if you like.’

‘No. It’s all right.’ He turned and walked towards the hut on his right. The doorway facing the centre of the kampung was hidden beneath a dense mat of creepers, but the walls had split apart at one corner, leaving a gap that made a much easier entrance.

Grant came after him. ‘You need a torch, and we need to do this slowly. We don’t know what’s in there.’

Prabir accepted the flashlight from her. She unslung her rifle and followed behind him as he ducked down to enter the hut. Enough soil had blown in, and enough sunlight came through the gap in the walls and the vine-draped windows to cover the floor in pale weeds. There was a hook on one wall, and the cracked, shrivelled remnants of a rectangle of canvas curled up beneath it.

He said, ‘This was mine.’ He gestured at the hammock. ‘That was where I slept.’

‘Right.’

Termites must have devoured the packing crate where he’d kept his clothes, once the preservative had leached out of the wood. The hut looked barer than a prison cell now, but it had never been full of gadgets and ornamentation; all the possessions he’d valued most had been stored in his notepad.

He’d looked out at night from this hut, his stomach cramped with anxiety. And then he’d thought of an act that would justify everything he was feeling: a crime to match his sense of guilt, an alibi to explain it.

Guilt about what, though? Had he stolen something, broken something? What could be worse than sabotaging his parents’ work?

‘The butterfly hut.’ He backed out, then tried to orient himself. ‘It was straight across the kampung.’

He threaded his way between the trees, with Grant walking beside him in silence. It was the most direct route, but he lost sight of the surrounding huts, lost count of their position in the circle.

The door had fallen off the hut he approached, leaving an entrance curtained with creepers. Grant handed him the parang and he slashed them away. Then he pointed the flashlight into the darkness.

Madhusree’s plastic cot was covered in fungus, warped and discoloured but still intact. Behind it, his parents’ folding bunk was strewn with debris, the foam mattress rotted, the metal frame a shell of corrosion.

He’d been afraid for them. Afraid the war would reach them, in spite of the island’s obscurity, in spite of his father’s reassurances.

But why would he feel guilty? Why would he imagine that he’d be to blame if the war came to the island? Even if he’d fought with his parents and wanted them punished—even if he’d shouted from the slopes of the volcano that he’d wanted them dead—he’d never been superstitious enough to believe that his wishes would be granted.

Prabir said, ‘Wrong hut. It’s the next one.’

One wall of the butterfly hut had collapsed outwards, leaving the two half-supported roofing panels to swing down almost to the ground. The result was a rickety triangular prism, with a narrow space between one standing wall and the tilted roof through which Prabir could just squeeze. Grant followed him.

The wall that had fallen had borne the hut’s windows and door, and the soft forest light hit the gaps in the structure at the wrong angle to penetrate the darkness ahead. Prabir played the flashlight beam along the floor, looking for signs of the lab bench, but the wood had all gone to termites and fungus. The hut was knee deep in twigs and rotting leaves, debris that had blown in and never found its way out again.

In the far corner, two yellow eyes caught the beam. There was a python, maybe half the size of the one in the mangroves, coiled on top of a pile of litter. Prabir felt his legs turn to water at the sight of it, but he didn’t want it killed unnecessarily.

‘Maybe we can work around it,’ he suggested. ‘Or drive it out with sticks.’

Grant shook her head. ‘Normally I’d agree, but right now we can do without the aggravation.’ She raised her rifle. ‘Stand aside and cover your ears.’ She dropped a pinprick of laser light between the snake’s eyes, then blew its head off. Clumps of white fungus rained from the ceiling. The snake’s decapitated body twitched and rose into a striking position, uncoiling enough to reveal a clutch of fist-sized blue-white eggs.

Grant held the flashlight while Prabir sifted through the mess on the floor. It was slow work, and the humid air above the decaying leaves was suffocating. When he found the metal stage of his father’s microscope he gave up all pretence of being in control and let tears of grief and shame run down his face.

He knew what he’d done. He knew why he’d poisoned the chrysalis, he knew what he’d needed to hide.

He’d killed them. He’d brought the plane to the island, he’d brought the mines.

It was too much to face. He couldn’t live, staring into that light—but he’d lost all power to avert his gaze, and every lie he’d held up as a shield was transparent now. He had to let it melt him, he had to let it burn him away.

He was determined to find the specimens first; they were the last things left that he could hope to salvage. Grant stopped asking him if he wanted to rest or swap positions. Beetles and pale spiders fled as he plunged his hands into the leaves, again and again.

He pulled out a slab of light, cool plastic, thirty centimetres wide, covered in filth. He wiped it on his jeans. It was an adult butterfly, embedded in something like lucite. An adult from twenty years ago, with the old concentric green-and-black stripes.

Grant said something encouraging. Prabir nodded dully. There was a bar code engraved in the plastic; any pigmentation it had once held was gone, but the ridges still felt sharp, the code could still be read. The numbers wouldn’t mean a lot without matching computer records, but they’d probably be sequential. He delved around in the same spot, and his fingers hit another slab.

They left the hut with twelve preserved specimens: eight adults and four larvae. Prabir looked around, getting his bearings.

He turned to Grant. ‘You might as well go back to the boat now. I’ll follow you in a little while.’ He handed her his backpack, in which they’d placed all the specimens. She accepted it, but remained beside him, waiting for an explanation.

He said, ‘I want to visit my parents’ grave.’

Grant nodded understandingly. ‘Can’t I come with you? I don’t want to intrude, but we should be careful.’

Prabir pulled his shirt over his head, mopped his face with it, then held it bunched at his side to conceal his hand as he switched off the mine detector. He tried to compose his face into an appropriate mask.

He said, ‘Look, how many snakes that size can there be in this area? I’ll be fine. You might as well start working on the samples. I just want to be alone here for a few minutes.’

She hesitated.

‘Is that too much to ask?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve given you everything you wanted. Can’t you show some respect for my feelings?’

Grant bowed her head, chastened. ‘All right. I’m sorry. I’ll see you back there.’ She turned and headed across the kampung.

Prabir made his way around to what he thought was the storage hut. But he didn’t trust his memory, he had to be sure. The door had fallen away; he squeezed through the vines. When his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, he saw the two life jackets hanging on the wall.

He walked out of the hut and headed for the garden.

Suddenly the device on his belt started chanting, ‘Mine at seventeen metres! Mine at seventeen metres!’ He stared down at the machine: a red arrow was flashing on its upper surface, pointing to the hazard. He flicked the ON switch back and forth; it had no effect whatsoever. You couldn’t turn the fucking thing off. All he’d done was stop it wasting power by showing its usual reassuring green light.

He heard Grant call his name from a distance.

Prabir backed away until the detector fell silent, then he shouted in a tone of light-hearted exasperation, ‘It’s all right! I knew there’d be mines here! The detector’s working, and I’ll stay well clear of them! I’ll be fine!’

There was a long pause, then she shouted back reluctantly, ‘OK. I’ll see you on the boat.’

He waited a couple of minutes to be sure that Grant was gone, then he unclipped the detector and tossed it away towards the centre of the kampung. He’d noted the direction the arrow had pointed. He was very tired, but there was nothing left to do now. He turned and started walking.

Something sharp pierced his right shoulder. He felt the skin turn cold, then numb. He reached back and pulled it out. It was a tranquilliser dart.

He didn’t know whether to laugh or to weep with frustration. He looked around for Grant, but he couldn’t see her. He called out, ‘I weigh seventy kilograms. Do the arithmetic. You don’t have enough.’

She shouted back, ‘I can blow a hole in your knee if I have to.’

‘And what would that achieve? I’d probably bleed to death.’

Grant showed herself. She was at least twenty metres away. Even if she was capable of tackling him to the ground, she wouldn’t stop him with anything but a bullet before he could reach the mine.

She said, ‘Maybe I’ll risk that.’

He pleaded irritably, ‘Go back to the boat!’

‘Why are you doing this?’

Prabir rubbed his eyes. Wasn’t it obvious? Wasn’t the evidence all around them?

He said, ‘I killed them. I killed my parents.’

‘I don’t believe you. How?’

He stared at her despairingly; he was ready to confess everything, but it would be a slow torture to explain. ‘I sent a message to someone. A woman in New York, a historian I met on the net. But I was pretending to be my father, and what I said made him sound like an ABRMS supporter. The Indonesians must have read it. That’s why they flew over and dropped the mines.’

Grant absorbed this. ‘Why did you pretend to be your father?’

‘He wouldn’t let me tell anyone my real age. He was paranoid about it—maybe something happened to him as a child. But I didn’t know how to pretend to be anyone else, and I didn’t know how to say nothing at all.’

‘OK. But you don’t know that the message was intercepted, do you? They might have dropped the mines anyway. It might have all been down to aerial surveillance, rebel activity in the area, deliberate misinformation from someone. It might have had nothing to do with you!’

Prabir shook his head. ‘Even if that’s true: I heard the plane come over, and I didn’t warn them. And it was my job to weed the garden, but I went swimming instead. If I didn’t kill them three times, I killed them twice.’

Grant said, ‘You were nine years old! You might have done something foolish, but it was the army who killed them. Do you really imagine that they’d blame you?’

‘I was nine years old, but I wasn’t stupid. After I’d sent the message, I knew what I’d done. But I was too afraid to tell them. I was so full of guilt I went and poisoned one of the butterflies, to try to fool myself. To make myself believe that was why I felt so bad.’

Grant hesitated, searching for some escape route. But she had to see that there was none.

She said, ‘However much it hurts, if you’ve lived with this for eighteen years, you can keep on doing it.’

He laughed. ‘Why? What’s the point? Madhusree doesn’t need me any more. You know why I came after her? You know why I followed her here? I was afraid she’d work it out. I was afraid she’d find something here that would tell her what I’d done. I wasn’t trying to protect her. I just wanted to keep her from discovering the truth.’

‘So how am I going to explain your death to her?’

‘As an accident.’

‘I’m not going to perjure myself. There’ll be an official inquiry, it’ll all come out.’

‘Are you blackmailing me now?’

Grant shook her head calmly. ‘I’m telling you what will happen. That’s not a threat, it’s just the way it will be.’

Prabir covered his face with his arms. The prospect seemed unbearable, but maybe it would help Madhusree put his death behind her if she understood that she owed him nothing. He hadn’t acted out of love for her, or some sense of duty towards their parents. He hadn’t even been protecting their shared genes. Everything he’d ever done for her had been to conceal his own crime.

He turned and started walking towards the minefield. Grant shouted something, but he ignored her. A rain of darts hit his upper back; he lost all feeling after the fourth or fifth, he could no longer count them. He began to feel slightly giddy, but it didn’t slow him down. Grant still had no chance of catching up with him.

He felt a sting on the side of his right leg, like a hot sharp blade passing over the skin. He lost his footing, more from surprise than from the force of the bullet, and toppled sideways into the undergrowth. With his shoulders paralysed he had no strength in his arms: he couldn’t right himself, he couldn’t even crawl.

A minute later, Grant knelt beside him and plucked out the darts, then helped him to his feet. He was bleeding almost as much from the barbed-wire shrubs as from the grazing wound she’d made in his leg.

She asked, ‘Are you coming back to the boat now?’

Prabir met her eyes. He wasn’t angry with her, or grateful. But she’d robbed him of all momentum, and complicated things to the point where it would have been farcical to keep opposing her.

Farcical, and monumentally selfish.

He was silent for a while, trying to come to terms with this. Then he said, ‘There’s something I want to do here, if you’re willing. But we’ll need some tools, and I’ll have to wait until this shit wears off.’

They returned to the kampung in the afternoon, with a chainsaw and a mallet. Grant cut branches into metre lengths and Prabir drove them into the ground, making a small fence all the way around the mined garden. He nailed warning signs to each side, in six languages, using his notepad to translate the message. There wasn’t much chance of fishermen coming this far into the jungle, but when the next biologists arrived it would be one small extra safeguard.

Grant said, ‘Do you want to put up a plaque?’

Prabir shook his head. ‘No shrines. They’d have hated that.’

Grant left him, trusting him now. Prabir stood by the fence and tried to picture them, arm in arm, middle-aged, with another half-century ahead of them. In love to the end, working to the end, living to see their great-great-grandchildren.

That was what he’d destroyed.

Grant had kept insisting: They wouldn’t have blamed you! But what did that mean? The dead blamed no one. What if his mother had survived, crippled by grief, knowing he was responsible? She might have tried to shield him at first, when he was still a child. But now? And for the rest of his life?

And his father—

He had no right to test them like this, asking them to choose between rejection and forgiveness. And whatever excuses they might have made for him, however much compassion they might have shown, it made no difference in the end. He didn’t want their imaginary blessing, he didn’t want any kind of plausible solace. He only wanted the impossible: he wanted them back.

He sat on the ground and wept.

Prabir made his way back to the beach, before the light failed. He’d lost the will to die, to anaesthetise himself out of existence.

But to live, he’d have to live with the pain of what he’d done, not the hope that it could be extinguished. That would never happen. He’d have to find another reason to go on.