Teranesia

13

Grant spent the next morning extracting tissue from the preserved butterflies, then sequencing their DNA. Even with the São Paulo protein scrambling parts of the genome, it was possible to construct a plausible family tree from genetic markers, using the serial numbers as a guide to chronology.

Prabir had guessed one thing correctly: the São Paulo gene had changed. Its own protein had gradually rewritten it, though the twenty-year-old protein seemed to have made much subtler changes from generation to generation than the modern version. This added a new twist to the convergence process: at least in the butterflies, the transformation itself had been subject to successive refinements. Whatever SPP did to produce its strangely beneficent mutations, over time the mutations it had wrought in its own gene had enabled it to perform the whole process more efficiently.

Grant posted the historical data on the net, giving credit to Radha and Rajendra Suresh. Then she set to work on the dormant adults, taking samples for RNA transcript analysis. They weren’t in any danger of running out of specimens: apart from the six Prabir had plucked from the trees, all their captive adults had now entered the same state.

Prabir sat and watched her work, helping where he could. Maybe it was just the realisation of what she’d done for him in the kampung finally sinking in, but her face seemed kinder to him now, her whole demeanour warmer. It was as if he’d finally learnt to read the dialect of her body language, in the same way as he’d adjusted to her unfamiliar accent.

In the evening, after they’d eaten, they sat on the deck, facing out to sea, listening to music and planning the voyage’s end. Unless news from São Paulo or Lausanne reached them by morning to suggest otherwise, they’d conclude that they’d gathered all the data needed to fuel research into the mutants for the foreseeable future. They’d rejoin the expedition for a day or two, to compare notes face to face, then Grant would sail back to Sulawesi to return her hired boat. Prabir wasn’t sure yet whether he’d hitch a ride with her to Ambon. It would depend on the reception he got from Madhusree.

‘What are you going to say to her?’ Grant asked.

Prabir shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell her the things I told you. I’m not going to poison her life with that. But I don’t want to lie to her any more. I don’t want to feed her some line about coming here to spare her from the trauma.’

Grant shot him an exasperated look. ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that that could still be true? You can have more than one reason for doing something.’

‘I know, but—’

She cut him off. ‘Don’t let this blight everything. Don’t let it rob you of the things you have a right to be proud of. Do you honestly believe that you’ve never once tried to protect her just because she’s your sister?’

Prabir replied fiercely, ‘If I haven’t, then at least I’m not a slave to my genes.’

Grant’s eyes narrowed. ‘And that matters more to you?’ For a moment Prabir thought he’d lost her, that his words were unforgivable, but then she added drily, ‘At least in a bad enough movie you could turn out to be adopted.’

He said, ‘If that’s your idea of a bad movie, you’ve had a very sheltered life.’

He reached over and stroked her face with the back of his hand. She kept her eyes on his, but said nothing. He’d acted on a barely conscious sense of rightness, half expecting to have his instinct proved utterly mistaken, but she neither encouraged nor rebuffed him. He remembered her watching him, the night they’d arrived; at the time he’d doubted it meant anything at all, but now he felt as if scales had fallen from his eyes.

He bent down and kissed her; they were sitting propped up against the wall of the cabin, it was hard to face her squarely. For a moment she was perfectly still, but then she began to respond. He ran a hand along her arm. The scent of her skin was extraordinary; inhaling it sent warmth flooding through his body. The Canadian girls in high school had smelt as bland and sexless as infants.

He slipped his hand under the back of her shirt and stroked the base of her spine, pulling her towards him, aligning their bodies. He already had an erection; he could feel his pulse where it pressed against her leg. He moved his hand to her breast. He had to fight away any image of where they were heading; he was afraid that if he pictured it he’d come at once. But he didn’t have to think, he didn’t have to plan this: they’d be carried forward by the internal logic of the act.

Grant pulled away suddenly, disentangling herself. ‘This is a bad idea. You know that.’

Prabir was confused. ‘I thought it was what you wanted!’

She opened her mouth as if to deny it, then stopped herself. She said, ‘It doesn’t work like that. I’ve been faithful to Michael for sixteen years. I’ll sit up all night and talk if you want, but I’m not going to fuck you just to make you feel better.’

Prabir stared down at the deck, his face burning with shame. What had he just done? Had it been some clumsy attempt at gratitude, which he’d imagined she’d accept without the slightest scruple?

She said gently, ‘Look, I’m not angry with you. I should have stopped you sooner. Can we just forget about it?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’

He looked up. Grant smiled ruefully and implored him, ‘Don’t make a big deal out of this. We’ve been fine until now, and we can still be fine.’ She rose to her feet. ‘But I think we could both do with some rest.’ She reached down and squeezed his shoulder, then walked into the cabin.

After the lights had gone out, Prabir knelt at the edge of the deck and ejaculated into the water. He rested his head on the guard rail, suddenly cold in the breeze coming in off the sea. The images of her body faded instantly; it was obvious now that he’d never really wanted her. It had been nothing but a temporary confusion between the friendship she’d shown him in the kampung, and the fact that he hadn’t touched Felix for what seemed like a lifetime. It had never occurred to him that he might have lost the knack for celibacy, that after nine years it could take any effort at all to get through a mere three or four weeks.

When he returned to his sleeping bag and closed his eyes, he saw Felix lying beside him, smiling and sated, dark stubble on the golden skin of his throat. When had it become conceivable to betray him? But instead of agonising over one stupid, aberrant attempt at infidelity, better to think of the changes he could make back in Toronto to put an end to all the far greater risks he’d been courting ever since they’d met. Felix had been patient beyond belief, but that couldn’t last forever. The simplest thing would be to let Madhusree have the apartment to herself; he’d keep paying the rent until she graduated. He’d move in with Felix, they’d have a life of their own, a mutual commitment without reservations.

It was not unimaginable any more. Even if he’d had the power to imitate his father in every respect, it would not have brought Radha and Rajendra back to life. And he no longer cared that he couldn’t read between the lines and extract some kind of unspoken blessing from his parents. There had to be an end to what they would have wanted and what they would have done.

He had to take what he believed was good, and run.

An hour after they’d left Teranesia behind, Grant emerged from the cabin looking bemused.

She said, ‘Strange news from São Paulo.’

Prabir grimaced; it sounded like the title of one of Keith’s Country Dada albums. ‘Please tell me we’re not turning back.’

‘We’re not.’ Grant ran her hand through her hair distractedly. ‘I’d say the last thing they need is more data. We seem to have given them rather more than they can cope with.’

‘What do you mean?’

She handed him her notepad. ‘Joaquim Furtado, one of the physicists on the modelling team, has just posted a theory about the protein’s function. The rest of the team have refused to endorse it. I’d be interested to hear what you think.’

Prabir suspected that she was merely being polite, but he skimmed down the page. Furtado’s analysis began with a statement no one could dispute: the discrepancies between the computer model and the test tube experiments proved that there were crucial aspects of the molecule’s behaviour that the simulation was failing to capture. Various refinements to the model had been tried, but so far they’d all failed to improve the situation.

One of the many approximations made by the modellers involved the quantum state of the protein, which was described mathematically in terms of eigenstates for the bonds between atoms: quantum states that possessed definite values for such things as the position of the bond and its vibrational energy. A completely accurate description of the protein would have allowed each of its bonds to exist in a complex superposition of several different eigenstates at once, a state that possessed no definite angles and energies, but only probabilities for a spectrum of different values. Ultimately, the protein as a whole would be seen as a superposition of many possible versions, each with a different shape and a different set of vibrational modes. However, to do this for a molecule with more than ten thousand atoms would have meant keeping track of an astronomical number of combinations of eigenstates, far beyond the capacity of any existing hardware to store, let alone manipulate. So it was routine practice for the most probable eigenstate for each bond to be computed, and from then on taken to be the only one worth considering.

The trouble was, when the São Paulo protein was bound to DNA, many of its bonds had two main eigenstates that were equally probable. This left no choice but to select the state of each bond at random: the software tossed several thousand dice, and singled out a particular conformation of the molecule to analyse. And in the first test tube experiments, nature had appeared to be doing virtually the same thing: when the strands of DNA had been copied with random errors, SPP had seemed to be merely amplifying quantum noise when it chose a different base to add to the new strand. But the near-perfect copying of the fruit pigeon chromosome, and the successive intergenerational changes in the DNA from the Suresh butterfly specimens, showed that something far subtler was going on.

The crucial subtlety, Furtado claimed, was that none of the probabilities that controlled the shape of the protein really were precisely equal. One or the other would always be favoured, though the balance was so fine that the choice would depend, with exquisite precision, on the entire quantum state of the strand of DNA to which the protein was bound. Furtado conjectured that SPP was exploiting this sensitivity to count the numbers of various ‘counterfactual cousins’ of the DNA: similar, but non-identical sequences that might have been produced in its place, if only its recent history of random mutations had been different. If the most numerous cousins dictated the sequence of the new copy of the DNA, that explained why the mutations weren’t random, why they never killed or disadvantaged the organism. They’d been tested, and found to be successful: not in the past, as Grant had hypothesised, but in different quantum histories.

Prabir looked up from the notepad. ‘I don’t know what to say. Nobel prize-winning physicists have been throwing rotten fruit at each other for a hundred years over interpretations of quantum mechanics, and as far as I know they’re still at it. Nobody has ever resolved the issues. If Furtado thinks the Many Worlds Interpretation is right, there’s a long list of famous physicists who’d back him up, so who am I to argue? But drawing information from other histories is something different. Even most believers would tell you it could never be done.’

Grant said, ‘That’s pretty much my own feeling.’ She leant over to see how far he’d read. ‘There’s some interesting speculation later on, suggesting the kind of data analysis the protein could be performing to extract the interference patterns between the DNA and its cousins from all the noise produced by thermal effects. If any of it’s true, though, SPP must have evolved into a veritable quantum supercomputer.’

Prabir scrolled down and glanced over the section she’d described; most of the equations were completely over his head, but there were passages of text he could follow.

Could a very bad quantum supercomputer have found a gene for a slightly better one? And so on? Furtado was claiming as much, but in the final section of the article he admitted that it was impossible to prove this directly; modelling any version of the São Paulo protein to the necessary level of precision was out of the question. He was, however, planning an experiment that could falsify his hypothesis: he was synthesising a copy of one of the fruit pigeon chromosomes, right down to the methylation tags. This molecule would be identical to the biological chromosome in both its raw sequence of bases and every known ‘epigenetic’ chemical subtlety, but its quantum state would not be correlated with that of the DNA in any living bird, real or counterfactual. If SPP copied this with the same low error rate as the natural version, Furtado’s flamboyant theory would go down in flames.

‘If this were true,’ Prabir mused, ‘it would explain a lot of things. You yourself admitted that Teranesia looked like a place where relatives of the locals, who’d parted company and co-evolved elsewhere, were being gradually reintroduced. If Furtado is right, that’s exactly what’s happened. Only they parted company when different mutations put them into different quantum histories, and they’re being “reintroduced” via a gene that goes out of its way to steal ideas from the most successful members of the family.’

Grant smiled indulgently. ‘Explain the fruit pigeons, then. And the barbed-wire shrubs. What’s going on with the camouflage, and the thorns?’

Prabir pondered this for a while. ‘It’s a counterfactual defence. Once you have the São Paulo gene, you can block predators that have never even tried to prey on you, in your own history. And so long as you maintain the defence, they won’t bother evolving in that direction, because they can see that there’s no point. It’s like a simple chess program: no elaborate strategies copied from grand masters, just the power to look ahead a few moves and assess the consequences. If brute force computation reveals a strategy—like castling, say—that gives a medium-term advantage over all possible moves by its opponents, the program will use it. And it will never reverse it, even if there’s no immediate threat, because it can look far enough ahead to see that any back-down would be exploited.’

Grant was beginning to look slightly uncomfortable. ‘You don’t seriously believe that’s what’s happening, though?’

‘Absolutely not. He’ll run the experiment on the synthetic chromosome, and prove himself wrong.’

Grant made a half-hearted sound of agreement, as if she was afraid that excessive confidence might be tempting fate.

Prabir said, ‘I meant to ask you: did you get the results of the RNA analysis of the dormant adults?’ The last he’d heard, it had been running overnight.

‘Yeah. There’s a peptide being produced that’s virtually identical to a well-known hormone that puts the adults of certain temperate species of butterflies into diapause when they hibernate over winter. And the alteration in the texture and pigmentation of the wings seems to have followed from a cascade of gene activity very similar to one that happens in ordinary metamorphosis. It’s all pretty much what I’d expected: just a few existing tricks redeployed.’

‘OK. But redeployed to what end? I know it’s pointless now, because the adults have already laid their eggs externally, but could this be a throwback to a species that used to reproduce via parasitic larvae?’ Maybe the gene resurrection idea could still be salvaged, after all.

Grant shook her head. ‘Not unless it’s gone even more awry than that. The males are all doing it too.’

Prabir held the guard rail and pushed against it, trying to unknot his shoulders. ‘If the gene didn’t start off as something every species has for mutation repair, we still have to account for its spread from the butterflies to everything else.’ He turned to Grant, smiling disarmingly, hoping she’d suffer a little more frivolous speculation. ‘Just for argument’s sake: if Furtado was right, maybe the São Paulo gene saw this as an easy way to get copies of itself into the fruit pigeons.’

Grant didn’t respond immediately; Prabir assumed she was thinking up a suitably withering reply.

‘I found something else in the RNA analysis,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Large amounts of an endonuclease—an enzyme for cutting and splicing DNA—being produced throughout the bodies of the dormant adults. I haven’t characterised it any further yet…’ She trailed off.

Prabir said, ‘But if it’s the right kind of endonuclease, it might be perfect for the job of splicing the São Paulo gene into the genome of the fruit pigeons?’

Grant nodded, and continued reluctantly. ‘The fraction of DNA and endonuclease that survived digestion and entered the bloodstream would always be tiny, though I suppose it could be packaged in something like liposomes to protect it, and help it get absorbed by the wall of the gut. There’s then another hurdle to get the gene into the ovaries or testes. This might be the transmission route, but the whole picture’s not clear, by any means.’

Prabir looked back across the water; he could still see Teranesia’s volcanic cone in the distance. ‘Everything else could be a throwback, couldn’t it? If mimcry was once used to get parasitic larvae into the fruit pigeons, then if the genes for that have been reactivated now, pointlessly, in egg-laying females, they might also have been reactivated in males—simply because the switch isn’t functioning properly.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And there are other uses for endonucleases, aren’t there? It might be a coincidence that the endonuclease gene is switched on at the same time as the others?’

‘It might.’

Prabir laughed suddenly. ‘Listen to me. We’ve been to Teranesia, we’ve been to the source, and I expect everything to fall into place in a day. I’ve gone twenty-one years without an answer. I can wait a little longer.’

He glanced down at the graphic of SPP in Furtado’s article, which was cycling through sixteen of the conformations it could adopt, binding to each of the four bases in the old strand while adding each of the four to the new. Between them, these sixteen simple transformations could generate every conceivable change: as the old strand was broken apart and the new one constructed, the potential existed for the organism to become anything at all.

And from that limitless sea of possibilities, what marvellous inventions did the São Paulo gene pluck?

Those that made as many copies of the São Paulo gene as possible.

They reached the island of the mangroves and made use of the same approach as before, then sailed around the coast inside the reef. As they drew nearer to the point where the expedition had set up camp, Prabir saw that the fishing boat was gone, but another vessel had taken its place alongside the research ship.

They dropped anchor and waded ashore. They were halfway to the camp when a young man appeared on the beach about fifty metres ahead of them, dressed in camouflage trousers, combat boots, and a Chicago Bulls T-shirt. He raised a rifle and aimed it at them, then barked out a series of commands in English.

‘Halt! Put your hands on your heads! Squat down!’

They complied. The man walked up to Prabir and held the rifle to his temple. ‘What are you doing here? Where have you come from?’ Prabir was too agitated to reply immediately, but as he struggled to relax his larynx sufficiently to speak he took some comfort from the realisation that the man was probably not a pirate. Only a soldier would be so interested in their movements, and whatever misunderstanding was provoking his hostility would surely be easy enough to resolve.

Grant explained calmly, ‘I’m a biologist, this is my assistant. I have a permit from the government in Ambon.’

The soldier’s reaction to this last phrase was not encouraging. ‘Pig-fucking ecumenical heretics!’ Prabir’s heart sank. The man was not a Moluccan soldier: he was with the Lord’s Army, West Papua’s born-again Christian militia. Officially, they weren’t even part of that country’s armed forces, though it was widely assumed that they received clandestine government support. They’d been making trouble in Aru for years. But Aru was almost three hundred kilometres east.

‘Where have you been?’ the man demanded.

Prabir said, ‘On the other side of the island.’ If Teranesia’s infamy had spread throughout the region, it might not be wise to admit to having visited the place.

‘You’re lying. Yesterday, there was no sign of your boat.’

‘You must have missed us. We were halfway into the mangroves.’

The man snorted with derision. ‘You’re lying. You come and see Colonel Aslan.’

As they walked through the camp, Prabir saw three more armed men lounging around looking bored, and several of the expedition members standing nervously at the entrances to their tents. The biologists weren’t exactly being guarded like hostages, but this was definitely not a guest/host relationship. There was no sign of Madhusree. Prabir kept telling himself that there was no reason for the soldiers to have harmed anyone, but nor was there any obvious reason for them to be here at all. Maybe there’d been a case that Aru should have joined West Papua at independence—even if that was now about as attractive a prospect as West Bengal being declared a part of Pakistan—but it was hard to imagine what kind of mileage the Lord’s Army expected to gain for the cause by bullying foreigners deep in RMS territory.

The Colonel had taken up office in one of the expedition’s supply tents; Prabir and Grant were made to stand and wait outside in the early-afternoon sun. After twenty minutes, the soldier guarding them muttered something irritably in his native language and went and sat in the shade of a tree, his rifle propped up on one knee to keep it pointing vaguely in their direction.

Prabir whispered, ‘You do know who we’re dealing with?’

‘Yeah, yeah. I’ll be on my best Sunday-school behaviour.’ Grant seemed more weary than afraid, as if this was just another tedious obstacle to get through, no different from slogging through the mangroves. But she’d travelled widely, so perhaps she’d grown accustomed to occasional periods of arbitrary detention.

‘ “Colonel Aslan”’ Do you think he’s a foreign mercenary? It sounds more like a name from central Asia than anything from around here.’

Grant smiled, somewhat condescendingly. ‘I believe it’s now a common choice upon conversion to Christianity all over the planet, at least when the evangelists get their hooks in early enough. Just don’t admit to a fondness for Turkish delight, and you should be OK.’

‘Turkish delight?’

‘Don’t worry. It would take too long to explain.’

A second young soldier emerged from the tent and shot a warning glance at their guard, who leapt to his feet. The two of them escorted Grant and Prabir into the tent, past drums of flour and boxes of toilet paper.

Colonel Aslan turned out to be a muscular Papuan man in his thirties, apparently devoted to the Dallas Cowboys. He was seated behind a desk improvised from crates. When Grant handed over her permit, he smiled graciously. ‘So you’re the famous Martha Grant! I’ve been following your work on the net. You’ve been to the heart of the contagion, and returned to tell the tale.’

Grant replied warily, ‘There’s no evidence that the mutations are contagious.’

‘Yet these creatures turn up hundreds of kilometres away. How do you account for that?’

‘I can’t. It will take time to explain.’

Aslan nodded sympathetically. ‘Meanwhile, my country and my people remain at risk from these abominations. What am I expected to do about that?’

Grant hesitated. ‘The impact on agriculture and health of flora and fauna transported across national borders by inadvertent human actions, or acts of nature, is the subject of a number of treaties. There are international bodies where these issues can be discussed, and any appropriate response coordinated.’

‘That’s a very diplomatic answer. But there are boats weaving back and forth across the Banda Sea as we speak, without regard to anything some subcommittee of the World Health Organisation might have to say on the matter in five years’ time.’

Grant said neutrally, ‘I can’t advise you on this. It’s beyond my expertise.’

‘I understand.’ Aslan nodded at the soldier from the beach, who led Grant out of the tent. Then he turned to Prabir.

‘You accompanied her on this trip?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you fornicate with her, on the boat?’

Prabir was unsure for a moment that he’d heard correctly. Then he replied icily, ‘I’m not familiar with that dialect of English.’

Aslan was indulgent. ‘Did you have sexual intercourse?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

The soldier who’d remained took a step towards Prabir, holding up his rifle like a club.

Prabir stared down at the tent’s mud-spattered ground sheet. What was going on in these people’s heads? Were they looking for an excuse to brand Grant as promiscuous, so they could rape her with a clear conscience?

‘No. We didn’t have sex.’

There was a long silence, then Aslan said calmly, ‘Look at me.’

Prabir raised his eyes reluctantly.

‘Are you a Muslim?’

‘No.’

Aslan seemed disappointed; maybe he’d been hoping to demonstrate his sophistication in the presence of the enemy. ‘Then I won’t ask you to swear on the name of the Prophet. But you’re a healthy young man, and she is a very charming woman.’

‘She is a virtuous married woman.’

‘But you took advantage of her? You raped her?’

Prabir was about to offer an outraged denial, when he realised that there’d be no end to this until Aslan had an explanation for his discomfort at the line of questioning. He looked him in the eye and said, ‘Why would I want to? I’m homosexual.’

Aslan blinked bemusedly, and for a moment Prabir wondered if he only knew derogatory terms and Biblese. Then he spread his arms and proclaimed joyously, ‘Hallelujah! That can be cured!’

Prabir muttered, ‘Not half as easily as Christianity.’

The soldier beside him swung the rifle butt into his temple. Prabir reeled, and fought to keep his balance. But the blow hadn’t been heavy, he wasn’t even bleeding.

‘You can cut off a man’s cock,’ Aslan declaimed, ‘but you can’t cut out his soul.’

Prabir was sorely tempted to improvise a maximally offensive rejoinder involving kuru and communion wafers, but it didn’t seem worth the risk of discovering that this homily was actually a recipe for surgical intervention.

Aslan said mildly, ‘Get him out of here.’

Prabir was led to another tent, where the expedition member who’d examined him after the python attack—he thought he remembered Ojany calling her Lisa—took a blood sample from him. She was clearly acting under duress as much as he was, but he’d rather she stuck the hypodermic in his arm than have one of the Lord’s Army do it.

Another soldier, closer to Aslan’s age, took the sealed tube of blood from her and spiked it on to the input nozzle of a robust-looking machine that resembled nothing so much as a field radio in a World War II movie. Well, not quite: it had an LCD flatscreen in the lid, like an old laptop computer. The soldier hit some buttons, and the machine began to whir. Prabir glanced down at the markings on the case, and saw the acronyms NATO and PCR. NATO had been the US imperial force in Europe, PCR was Polymerase Chain Reaction. It was an old army surplus genetic analyser, presumably designed to detect traces of DNA from biological weapons. But its current owners could have cut and pasted any sequence they liked into the software, and it would have happily purred away and spat out the necessary primers and probes.

They were testing his blood for the São Paulo gene.

Prabir felt a surge of panic—what did they know that he didn’t?—then grew calm again almost immediately. A medical officer in the Lord’s Army could grab a sequence of codons off a web page as easily as anyone; it didn’t mean they’d found evidence of human effects. They were merely paranoid about contagion. And if passing this witchfinder’s test meant ceasing to be of interest to them, so be it. Grant would pass, he would pass. Everyone in the expedition had surely passed already.

Prabir was allowed to join Grant and a dozen of the expeditioners, who were eating lunch under an awning. Cole and Carpenter were with them, but the businessmen seemed to have left with the fishing boat. A soldier sitting on a fuel drum in the corner looked on listlessly; compared to burning Muslim villagers out of their homes in Aru, this could hardly be a stimulating tour of duty.

Prabir approached Seli Ojany, who was standing with a small group of people beside a crate covered in plates of sandwiches. He caught her eye and whispered, ‘Do you know where my sister is?’

Ojany put a finger to her lips, then pretended she’d been wiping off breadcrumbs. It occurred to Prabir belatedly that half the expedition could have been out in the field when the Lord’s Army arrived, and some of them would have had the opportunity to see what was happening and stay away. It wasn’t an entirely comforting thought; Madhusree would probably have been safer in the camp than in the jungle, unless there was some brutality going on here that he’d yet to observe.

Prabir glanced at the soldier, but he didn’t seem to be paying them much attention. ‘So what’s brought the Inquisition here?’ he asked. ‘Are there really that many animals turning up in West Papua?’

Ojany gestured at a colleague beside her. ‘Mayumi heard the story closer to first-hand.’

‘Not animals in West Papua,’ Mayumi said, ‘but there were some fishermen who went to Suresh Island.’ Prabir did his best to accept this casual use of his parents’ name; it seemed Madhusree had put them on the map forever, pinning their memories to the spot. ‘They came back to Kai and ran amok in their own village; most of them were captured, but one of them escaped and ended up on Aru. That seems to be why the LA got interested.’

‘What do you mean “ran amok”? What exactly did they do?’ Prabir was hoping for some solid evidence at last to write this off as the result of a psychotropic plant toxin.

Mayumi shrugged. ‘The Kai islanders who were here earlier wouldn’t tell me. And the LA aren’t exactly forthcoming either.’

Deborah, one of Madhusree’s friends whom Prabir had met earlier, responded impatiently, ‘Forget what the Lord’s Army think: we know from the fruit pigeons and the butterflies that the São Paulo gene can cross between species. We can’t assume that we’re immune to that possibility, so we have to stop taking risks. At the very least, we should quarantine Suresh Island. Maybe even sterilise it, if it comes to that. You wouldn’t need to use an atomic weapon: just enough herbicide to kill all the vegetation, so the whole food chain collapsed.’

Ojany said, ‘But what if that increases selection pressure for a version that can cross into marine species?’

‘If Furtado is right—’ Mayumi began, at which point almost everyone in earshot groaned. ‘If Furtado is right,’ he persisted, ‘it would do a lot more than increase selection pressure. Any avoidable risk of extinction would only sharpen the contrast between favourable and unfavourable mutations: if every surviving counterfactual cousin would have moved into the sea, the strategy would become impossible to miss. It would be like herding the gene straight into a new ecosystem.’

Deborah glanced at her watch and predicted, ‘In less than twenty-four hours, we’ll be able to stop worrying about Furtado.’ Prabir looked at her enquiringly; she explained, ‘The Lausanne team have gone ahead and started the synthetic chromosome test themselves. The verdict will be out by about noon tomorrow, our time.’

Cole, who’d been hovering at the edge of the group, interjected urbanely, ‘All this fear of “contagion” would be put swiftly to rest if you took the trouble to consult my seminal text on ambivalence towards the natural world, M/Other. My analysis of the relevant cultural indices across a time span of several centuries reveals that the predominant passion changes cyclically, from deep filial affection to pure xenophobia and back. Pastoralism, industrialism, romanticism, modernism, environmentalism, transhumanism, and deep ecology are all products of the same dynamic. The anxiety in the midst of which we stand at this very moment is a stark validation of my thesis, whereby the nurturing, enfolding presence of the mother is radically reinterpreted, psychically transmuted into a threatening, disempowering, even alien force. But this perception will not endure. In due course, the pendulum will swing back again.’

Prabir had been watching Carpenter while Cole spoke; there’d been an encouragingly troubled expression building on his face. Some of the biologists followed Prabir’s gaze, until everyone in the group was looking at the student, waiting for his response.

Carpenter began tentatively, ‘If this gene does spread, wouldn’t it be neat, though? All the animals would evolve: they’d grow hands, and opposable thumbs, and we could talk to them. And if it happened to us too, we’d become telepathic. That’s the next level, right? And why keep it out of the ocean? What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you want the reefs to dream? The super-dolphins won’t stop us surfing. They’ll be our friends!’

Prabir detected movement in the corner of his vision; he turned to see the medical officer and two junior soldiers approaching.

The medical officer addressed him. ‘Come with me, please.’

‘Why?’ Prabir looked around for support. ‘You’ve taken a blood sample, what more do you want?’

‘This is for your own protection,’ the man insisted blandly.

‘What is for my own protection?’ Prabir caught sight of Grant, who was watching with an expression of alarm. But she gave him a reassuring glance, as if to say that she hadn’t abandoned him, that she’d be working to get him out of this.

The medical officer said, ‘You’re infected. You’re going into quarantine.’

14

Prabir had expected to be placed under guard in a tent at the edge of the camp, or perhaps imprisoned in a cage built from rough-hewn branches tied together with rattan—the kind of thing they always seemed to be able to construct at short notice in movies, whenever someone on a tropical island needed to be restrained. What the Lord’s Army did instead was trash the control console of Grant’s boat, dispose of all the pigeons, butterflies and blood samples in a bonfire on the beach, steal Grant’s rifle and tranquilliser gun, and lock Prabir in the cabin. They posted one sentry on deck and another on the beach.

Prabir sat in the captain’s chair in front of the ruined console, swinging the seat slowly back and forth. The ancient PCR machine might have malfunctioned. Or it might have amplified nothing but a fragment of plant DNA that had entered his bloodstream through a scratch from a barbed-wire shrub. A foreign cell in the process of being taken apart by his immune system wouldn’t even have been replicating, let alone creating germ cells through meiosis—the prerequisite for the São Paulo gene to be expressed. Whatever the powers of SPP in the right context, an inert copy of its gene was just another piece of junk to be scavenged, broken down and recycled.

The gene had found ways to cross between other species, though; he couldn’t pretend it was unthinkable that it had breached his body’s defences. He’d been cut, scratched, bitten, and glued by half a dozen kinds of Teranesian plants and animals, and handled dozens more with broken skin. The gene might not have created a transmission route specifically for humans, but having been exposed to so many different mechanisms tailored for other animals, he could have been infected with a viable copy by sheer bad luck.

What did it do when it succeeded? Headed for the place where germ cells were made, carrying an endonuclease to incorporate itself into the genome. What was the worst possible scenario, then? His sperm would all carry the São Paulo gene, their DNA would be rewritten by the protein. But if there was any risk of transmission through sex, he could always learn to use condoms—and if he ever wanted a genetic child, that could be done almost as easily with another cell type in place of sperm. If it was warranted, he could even have new testes grown for transplant from a single uninfected skin cell.

That was not the worst scenario. What had the fishermen done in their village? And why had Aslan been so ready to accuse him of rape? Could a gene that was switched on only in the stem cells that manufactured sperm influence sexual behaviour? Testosterone was made by other cells nearby; perhaps SPP could rewrite the genes of spermatocytes in such a way that they emitted chemical signals to enhance the secretion of testosterone by their neighbours. If the level in the blood had been cranked up sufficiently, could that alone have transformed the fishermen into rapists? It wasn’t completely far-fetched; body-builders had once gone psychotic from injecting similar hormones. The progression would not be inevitable, though: there were drugs that blocked testosterone. And again, in the longer term a transplant could dispose of the affected cells entirely.

Still not the worst. Why had he tried to make love to Martha? Because she’d saved his life, and he’d imagined she’d welcome it? Because he’d wanted to be comforted any way he could, after facing the kampung? Because a surge of testosterone and a lack of alternatives had been enough to overwhelm both his nature and his judgement?

He had no end of rationalisations, no end of excuses. But the worst scenario was that none of them had really been enough. If the gene could gauge the reproductive consequences of everything it did, it might ‘sense’ the fact that it was in a cul-de-sac, and find a way to change that. If Furtado was right, once the gene was active, whatever it was physically capable of doing to his brain or body that would lead to it counting more copies of itself would be done.

At dusk, they brought him a meal. The sentry ordered him to the far side of the cabin then left the plate inside the door. Prabir tried to think lustful thoughts as he ate, but the situation was not conducive. What was he hoping to do: assay his sexuality by introspection, hour by hour, like a diabetic monitoring blood sugar? What had happened with Grant proved nothing, except that strong emotions could breach a barrier that he’d come to think of as inviolable.

It did not prove that the São Paulo gene was in the process of tearing it down.

Later in the evening, as the sentries were changed, Colonel Aslan appeared on the moonlit beach. Prabir stood by the cabin window watching him. They both wanted the same thing: for the São Paulo gene to be contained, for the risks to humans to be minimised even if the gene itself could not be eliminated. The only problem was, Prabir was still hoping to fall on the right side of the line when the abominations were incinerated, but the Colonel might have some trouble with his criterion for judging that.

‘We are praying for you,’ Aslan announced. ‘If you repent, you will be forgiven. You will be healed.’

‘Repent of what?’ Prabir demanded angrily.

Aslan seemed to take pleasure in refuting the assumption that he had a one-track mind. ‘All your sins.’

Skin crawled on Prabir’s arms. What would it be like, to believe in a God as corrupt as that? But if his parents had been floating in fairy-floss heaven, there would have been a whole lot less to forgive. Lying about death was the only way these elaborate pathologies remained viable; all the milksop Christian sects that diverged from the dominant strain and embraced mortality with a modicum of honesty soon withered and vanished.

He called back, ‘What happened to the fishermen? Were they forgiven? Were they healed?’

Aslan replied, ‘That is between them, and God.’

‘I want to know what their crimes were, and how they died. I want to know what’s in store for me. You owe me that much.’

Aslan was silent, and too far away for Prabir to read anything from his face. After a moment, he turned and walked away along the beach.

Prabir shouted after him, ‘You can stop praying: I can already feel the power of the creator inside me! That’s who you’re fighting, you idiot! After four billion years, the old donkey’s finally woken up, and he’s not going to keep on carrying any of us the way he used to!’

By two a.m., Prabir felt tired enough to sleep. He had nothing to gain from vigilance, and he knew that if he didn’t grab at least a couple of hours he’d lose whatever judgement he had left. He lay down on Grant’s bunk; the air moved far more freely out in the cabin than in his allotted corner. He could still smell her sweat on the sheets, though, and the scent conjured up images of her, vivid memories of the night before.

He rolled off the bunk and stood in the darkness. He was becoming paranoid. He’d never been repelled by the thought of sex with women, merely indifferent, and despite all his failed, dutiful attempts in adolescence, he might yet simply be bisexual. Either way: he loved Felix, and nothing would change that. Their history together, brief as it was, had to count for something. He was not a tabula rasa, he was not an embryo.

If his brain could be melted and rewired, though, anything could change. It wasn’t just his sexuality at stake: the human species was riddled with far stranger compromises, any of which the São Paulo gene might find superfluous. Most of evolution had been down to luck; apart from the first few hundred thousand years of simple chemical replicators, there’d never been an opportunity for every physically possible variation to compete. At every step, chance and imperfection had created organisms with outlandish traits that would not have been favoured by a comprehensive exploration of the alternatives. Complexity had ridden on the back of success, but if the efficiency of the process had been tightened a few more notches, single-celled organisms—still the most successful creatures on the planet—would never have bothered to become anything else. The São Paulo gene wasn’t that far-sighted, it hadn’t dissolved every bird and butterfly into a swarm of free-living bacteria. But if it was allowed to reshape the evolutionary landscape for humans, many more things would vanish than the oxbow lakes.

Prabir heard a dull thud outside the cabin. He peered out on to the deck. The soldier had slumped to his knees; as Prabir watched, he keeled over on to his side.

The sentry on the beach was still standing, facing the jungle, oblivious to his comrade’s fate. Prabir searched the moonlit water, but the cabin was so low that the deck hid most of the view near the boat. The sentry reached back as if to slap away an insect, then staggered. Prabir couldn’t see the dart in his neck, but it could not have been a bullet. Grant must have borrowed a tranquilliser gun, but what had she loaded it with to have such an effect? Strychnine?

The man collapsed face-down in the sand. Grant would probably search him—and it seemed unwise to shout out to warn her not to bother—but neither sentry had the key to the boat: Prabir had seen it passed from hand to hand when his meal had been delivered, it had been brought from the camp and taken back again. There was no point both of them wasting time; he tried his strength against the door of the cabin, but neither the lock nor the hinges gave any sign of yielding. He picked up a stool and bounced it repeatedly against a window, hoping to flex the pane enough to snap the rivets that held it to the frame; the assault was gratifyingly silent, but completely ineffectual.

Someone tapped a staccato rhythm on the window on the other side of the cabin. He put down the stool and turned. Madhusree called out softly, ‘I’m told you can slide this one open from the inside.’

Prabir approached her. She was dripping wet, her hair tied back, long bare limbs catching the moonlight. She hadn’t seemed so beautiful to him since the day she was born, and all the reasons were reversed now: her vulnerability, her ungainliness, her bewilderment, had all been replaced by their opposites. His parents should have seen this transformation, not him, but he savoured the sweet kick in the chest, unearned or not.

He said, ‘I don’t want to infect you. You’d better get off the boat.’

Madhusree sighed. ‘Are you sneezing? Are you covered in pustules? What’s it going to do, launch missiles? It’s a molecule, not a voodoo curse. If you want to be careful you can stand away from me, but I need to come into the cabin and check out the equipment.’

Prabir was mystified. ‘Why?’

‘So I don’t waste time bringing things from the other boat.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Madhusree grimaced with impatience. ‘I don’t know what we’ll need. Martha said I could take whatever’s working from here, so it will help if I know what that is. Now open the window.’

Prabir complied, then retreated to the far corner as she climbed into the cabin and began inspecting the rack of biochemical instruments. The soldiers had attacked the autopilot with a crowbar, and taken away everything organic to be burned, but they seemed to have left these machines untouched.

‘You’ve spoken with Martha?’

‘Yeah, through the wall of a tent. She couldn’t get away herself, but it’s not exactly maximum security back there. They’ve got poor Dr Sukardi tied up somewhere and guarded round the clock, but they seem to think that’s all that matters, as if he’s our own little tinpot colonel and we’re all helpless drones without him.’

Madhusree had a tranquilliser gun tucked into the back of her shorts. Prabir asked nervously, ‘What was in the darts?’

She replied almost absent-mindedly, ‘The normal sedative, but I added something to wreck the catalytic portion. It’s a self-degrading molecule, that’s why it’s safe to use on so many species: half of it forms an enzyme that lyses the whole thing into harmless junk in the presence of ATP, so it doesn’t require anything fancy in the organism to detoxify it. But it breaks itself down so quickly once it enters the bloodstream that if you disable the enzyme, it makes a huge difference: the potency goes up a thousandfold.’ She turned to him and added pointedly, as if she’d finally realised what he’d been fearing, ‘We have enzymes in the liver that can deal with it, though. It’s still not toxic to humans.’

She finished her inventory. ‘OK, this is great. You start unmounting these and stacking them on the deck. I’ll go and get the inflatables. I should be back in about ten minutes.’

Prabir said, ‘I must be slow, but I think I’m missing something. Where are we going with all this? What’s the plan?’

Madhusree smiled, proud and conspiratorial, as if Amita might walk in at any moment and ask why they were whispering.

‘What do you think? We’re heading south.’

Prabir followed his instructions while Madhusree swam out to the expedition’s ship. Then he checked the sentry curled up on the deck; the man was still breathing, slowly and deeply.

He stood and waited for Madhusree to return. Simply by travelling with her, he’d endanger her to some degree. But Grant had remained uninfected, after handling every Teranesian species he’d touched himself, after they’d kissed. With no one to keep him grounded he’d let his imagination run wild: the only hard facts were that a trace of the gene had been found in his bloodstream, and the fishermen had changed in some way that nobody wanted to talk about.

Madhusree appeared from behind the ship, rowing a bright-orange inflatable dinghy towards him, with a second one in tow, loaded with cargo. For one awful moment, Prabir wondered if she planned to get to safety under human power alone, but both dinghies had outboard motors, she was just minimising noise. He looked back towards the camp; the sentries had been changed around ten p.m., and it was now nearly twenty to three. In the moonlight, the orange polymer might as well have been fluorescent. Would they have until dawn, or just till the hour, to vanish over the horizon?

Madhusree brought the dinghies up against the boat. ‘Hand those down to me, one at a time.’

Prabir passed her the first of the machines. ‘What’s this all for?’ There were already half a dozen identical silver boxes in the second dinghy, as well as bottles of reagents, and four large fuel cans.

‘To monitor you, of course. And treat you, if necessary.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘I hope it won’t be necessary. I’m hoping nothing will happen before we reach Darwin.’

‘Darwin? If the Australians get the slightest idea of what I’m carrying, they’ll lock me in a hut in the middle of the desert on top of their nuclear waste dump.’

‘No, they’ll deport you back to Canada in a military jet with biohazard containment facilities, then send you the bill. I can think of worse fates if we head in other directions.’

Prabir said, ‘What exactly is it you’re hoping won’t happen en route?’

‘If I knew that, we’d be travelling lighter.’ She slid the last machine into place between the others and tested the whole pile for stability. Then she tossed him a life jacket; she was already wearing one herself. ‘OK. Get in.’

‘I’ll ride in the back.’

‘You just don’t want to help me row.’

Prabir climbed over the guard rail and lowered himself into the second dinghy. He was afraid it would sink perilously low, but the air-filled walls gave it a lot of buoyancy and his weight barely made a difference. The tide was high, and Madhusree seemed to have crossed right over the submerged reef on her way in, without bothering to steer any special course.

She began rowing them laboriously towards the open sea. ‘Remember Orr, in Catch-22?’ she asked cheerfully. ‘He rowed a lifeboat all the way to Sweden.’

‘I remember.’ He’d given her the book for her eleventh birthday. ‘But I take it we’re going to stop at Yamdena and hitch a ride in something more seaworthy?’

‘That’s the plan. I wouldn’t want to cross the Arafura Sea in these things.’

Prabir was silent for a while, then he said, ‘Are you angry with me?’

Madhusree laughed. ‘How can I be angry? Not only do I have the first authenticated specimen of a Teranesian mammal, I have exclusive access to all his biochemical data. I’ll be able to spin this into a PhD, for sure.’ She turned to him without missing a stroke and said, ‘We should have done all of this differently. You should have come along as part of the expedition. We should have been open about everything from the start. But it doesn’t matter now. Their work’s been acknowledged, and someone will complete it. That’s good enough for me.’

They were well past the reef, but still in easy sight from the beach. Madhusree’s arms were trembling from fatigue; she’d swum several hundred metres before picking up the oars. Prabir said, ‘Swap places, I’ll do some rowing.’

‘OK.’

They swam between the dinghies; it was easier than trying to leap across the gap without landing on something. Prabir took the oars and settled into a rhythm. The emptiness ahead of them, the useless stars, the circle of moonlit water that followed the boat were all the same as they’d been eighteen years before.

He struggled to stay in the present. ‘How many people are hiding in the jungle?’

‘Ten, now.’

‘So what are they going to live on?’

‘It’s not that hard to smuggle out food. Anyway, we’ve already sent word up to Ambon; the situation should be resolved in a couple of days. I gather that it’s all a matter of diplomats calling in favours, until one of West Papua’s major aid donors agrees to apply some muscle. I know that sounds horribly convoluted, but it’s probably a lot safer than Ambon sending in a warship.’

‘Yeah. Can you see anything happening back on the beach?’

Madhusree had brought a pair of binoculars. ‘That guy’s still lying where he fell.’ She added teasingly, ‘Still glowing at body temperature.’

‘I never thought you’d killed them,’ Prabir protested.

‘You’re a bad liar.’

‘Martha might have. Not you.’

‘You don’t think I’m commando material?’ Madhusree sounded disappointed.

‘I certainly hope not.’ He glanced over his shoulder at her; she was grinning. She didn’t remember the soldier in the grass, bleeding slowly to death. He joked, ‘I knew I should have never let you take up muay thai. All that brutality. You’ve been scarred for life.’

After a while they swapped places again. Prabir looked back with the binoculars in IR mode, waiting not only for the prone soldier to vanish, but for the haze of distortion above the water to swallow the entire beach.

‘You can start the motor.’

Madhusree hit the ignition and her dinghy shot forward, pulling the connecting rope taut. The motor was running on diesel, but it was so quiet that Prabir almost wept. They could have fired it up half an hour ago; they’d been making more noise just by talking.

‘Do you think they’ll come after us?’ she asked. ‘It might not be hard to guess the right direction.’

Prabir said, ‘I don’t know if I’m worth the trouble to them. As long as I’m not heading for their country, I’m someone else’s problem now.’

The dinghy’s outboard motor had its own GPS, its own inertial navigation, its own autopilot. Madhusree zeroed in on their chosen destination on a map displayed on a small panel, confirmed the choice, then left the machine to steer. The only thing not automated was obstacle avoidance; they’d have to take over manually if they ran into shipping, and with any luck that would mean cutting the motor and waiting to be rescued, not swerving wildly to avoid getting mown down.

As dawn approached, she tossed Prabir a plastic-wrapped hypodermic. ‘If you’re going to be paranoid, you’ll have to take your own blood samples.’

‘Urgh. This should be fun.’ He tore open the packet; there was a disinfectant swab enclosed, like an airline’s miniature scented towel. He pulled off his belt and tightened it around his left arm. ‘I feel like a drug addict.’

Madhusree shook her head despairingly. ‘Junkies use sonics: transdermal acoustic delivery systems that make the skin permeable to small molecules like opiates. There’s no risk of infection, because viruses are too large to get through. How do you think hepatitis C got wiped out?’

‘I knew all that,’ he lied. He applied the swab then slid the needle carefully into the crook of his elbow, but the dinghy lurched just as he was applying pressure, and the needle transected the vein. ‘Fuck.’ He steeled himself, then tried again at a different point; this time the blood spurted satisfyingly into the low-pressure sample tube. ‘How often do we have to do this?’

‘Every couple of hours at first, just to see what’s going on.’

Prabir left the hypodermic in place and flung the tube of blood across to Madhusree. A valve had shut off the flow automatically, but it was awkward trying to stop the needle slipping out. ‘Have you got some tape or something? I might as well keep this in.’

‘Good idea. There’s an anticoagulant coating on the needle, so it won’t clog up. But you knew that, of course.’ She tossed him a packet of band aids.

‘What are you looking for? In the samples?’

‘Levels of the gene, tissue types affected.’ Madhusree tinkered with one of Grant’s silver boxes until it emitted an encouraging boot-up chime.

‘Tissue types?’

She fed the blood to the machine. ‘If the gene is being incorporated into various kinds of cells in your body, occasionally one will break free and end up in your bloodstream. If I sort the cells with flow cytometry before bursting them and probing the DNA, I can track what’s happening.’

Prabir said, ‘It should only be in my testes, though, shouldn’t it? I mean, it has a promoter that will only switch it on during meiosis, so why bother incorporating anywhere else?’

The machine began whirring. Madhusree looked up and said encouragingly, ‘I hope it hasn’t even got a hold there. We’ll probably never know how it got into your bloodstream, but it certainly hasn’t come to you via another mammal, so its past experience is of limited relevance. Nothing works the first time in a new environment.’

‘You don’t believe in Furtado’s theory, then?’

She laughed and said flatly, ‘No.’

Prabir didn’t challenge her to provide her own explanation; he didn’t want to derail her, he didn’t want to erode her confidence. She’d track the gene through his body, and they’d fight it. However it worked, whatever it did.

When the sun cleared the water there was no land in sight, though Prabir could see Teranesia’s peak to their west through the binoculars. Straight ahead he saw nothing but sea. They wouldn’t reach Yamdena till midnight.

Madhusree said, ‘First results. Are you ready?’

‘Yeah.’

‘The São Paulo gene’s been incorporated into spermatogenic stem cells, complete with the usual promoter.’

Prabir nodded acceptingly. He’d been prepared for that, and however tainted it made him feel, a transplant could still rid him of the gene completely.

‘But it’s also present in dermal stem cells. With a different promoter.’

‘In my skin?’ He stared at her, more baffled than alarmed. ‘Why?’

Madhusree shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

Prabir looked down at his arms and hands; they appeared perfectly normal. He lifted his shirt above his waist. There was a glossy patch on his abdomen, a shiny purplish-black region the size of a large coin. He touched it warily. The surface of his skin felt the same as ever, but when he applied enough pressure to sense what lay beneath, instead of the usual springiness of muscle he met resistance from an object as hard as bone.

‘It’s solid. It’s some kind of tumour.’ He was numb with revulsion. ‘Can you cut it out? Please?’

Madhusree said, ‘Stay calm.’

Prabir removed his life jacket and pulled off his shirt, almost dislodging the hypodermic in his haste; there were two more patches higher on his chest. He turned so Madhusree could see his back. ‘There are five,’ she announced. ‘About the same size.’

‘You could anaesthetise me with the tranquilliser gun,’ he implored her. ‘They’re not that deep. I won’t lose much blood.’ The gene would still be in his body, but he didn’t care. He wanted this visible, palpable sign of it removed.

‘Are they causing you any pain? Any burning sensation? They could be completely benign.’

‘Benign?’

Madhusree held her hands up, pleading with him for cool-headedness. ‘If there’s no pain or bleeding, they might only be replacing the normal dermis rather than invading other tissues. And if there’s no inflammation, at least they’re not provoking an autoimmune reaction.’

Prabir took several deep breaths. He’d handled a peppering with shrapnel better than this. He said, ‘There’s no pain, no inflammation.’

‘OK. I’ll synthesise growth factor blockers tailored to the receptors the cells are expressing. That should at least stabilise them.’

‘You can do that?’

‘Of course. It’s a second-year lab project: “Here’s a cultured organ with an unknown tumour. Characterise the tumour, and stop it growing.” ’ Madhusree regarded him tenderly across the narrow channel of water. ‘You’re going to be fine! We just have to be patient. We’ll get to Yamdena, we’ll get to Darwin, we’ll get to Toronto. And then we’ll fix you up for good.’

As Madhusree worked on the growth factor blockers, the hard, shiny plaques beneath his skin grew thicker and larger. New ones blossomed, on his arms and legs and buttocks. The sensation of their presence when he moved was strange, but only rarely painful, and Prabir took some comfort from their uselessness; the São Paulo gene was behaving as stupidly and randomly as a virus blundering into a brand-new host. Leprosy would have had about the same effect on his mating prospects. He’d hardly dared admit to the fear before, but as they’d left the island of the mangroves behind, he’d thought: It could have the power to do anything. It could have the power to make me rape my own sister.

It didn’t. If the fishermen had been affected in the same way as him, they’d probably been hounded for their disfigurement by a superstitious mob, and merely tried to defend themselves. What had happened with Grant had just happened; he was tired of probing it for significance.

He lay back between the fuel cans and watched the blue water around them sparkling in the morning sun.

Just before eight o’clock, Madhusree threw him a plastic tube with a clear, oily preparation, still warm from the machine; the synthesiser, on request, had welded the tube closed. When Prabir placed it in the hypodermic’s receptacle and hit the injection button, the various mating surfaces were sterilised by laser flash, then the tube was punctured at both ends and the contents driven into his vein.

He took another blood sample. Half an hour later, Madhusree had the results: the number of cells containing the gene had risen substantially, but that was hardly surprising given the visible evidence of his skin. If the blockers didn’t work there’d be no hiding his condition by the time they hit Yamdena, but he’d given Madhusree his account details, so even if he was crippled she could summon enough money from the net to compensate for any squeamishness people might have about giving him a ride.

He watched her at the bow of their twin vessel, checking their position against her notepad’s GPS to be sure that the motor was running true, scouring the horizon with the binoculars for landmarks, validating everything three different ways. He was not going to tell her: You’re carrying your parents’ killer. You’re saving a life that should not have been saved. He couldn’t pretend to untangle his own shame and cowardice at the thought of her knowing, from his understanding of the effect the revelation would have had on her, but he didn’t need to. He was not going to rob her of this feat. He was not going to corrupt it.

The data from his ten o’clock sample worried Madhusree. ‘Another line of dermal cells with different growth factors has taken over; I’ll have to make new blockers. And there are traces…’ She trailed off.

Prabir said, ‘Traces of what? No more tantrums, I promise.’ He joked lamely, ‘It’s got me by the balls, how much worse can it get?’

‘Traces of everything,’ Madhusree admitted. ‘Every cell type in your body that can be found in your bloodstream now has a small proportion bearing the São Paulo gene.’

‘Could that just be spillage? Whatever kind of cells the packaging around the gene is tailored for, mightn’t it work inefficiently almost anywhere?’ He was afraid, but he wasn’t going to panic again. He was suffering from something like cancer. No one died of cancer in a day.

‘I don’t know.’ Madhusree’s confidence was fraying. She was a nineteen-year-old biology student, and there was no reference site, no expert pathologist, no repository anywhere in the world with any real knowledge of what was happening to him. ‘I could synthesise antisense DNA,’ she said tentatively. ‘To bind to the transcripts from the São Paulo gene, maybe stop it being expressed.’

Prabir’s spirits soared. ‘OK! Let’s try it!’

‘I’ll wrap it in lipids similar to the ones they use in gene therapy, but it won’t get into every cell type.’

‘Some cells will get a dose, some won’t. We’ll have controls. What more can you ask for?’

Madhusree regarded him nervously. ‘It might have no effect. Sometimes the cell just chops up the oligonucleotides—the pieces of DNA—before they can interfere.’

Prabir snorted, unimpressed. ‘They couldn’t manage that with the São Paulo gene, could they? Will this have agonising side effects?’

‘I doubt it. But I can’t be sure.’

‘No one can. This is all new.’

‘I’m out of my depth,’ she confessed.

He said, ‘It’s my decision. Let’s try it.’

Madhusree synthesised and packaged the antisense DNA. Prabir injected it, followed by a new set of growth factor blockers. Then he sat back in the dinghy and waited.

The sun was high now, the heat was surreal. The boats seesawed mechanically in the swell; it was like being strapped to some laboratory device for ensuring a thorough mixing of reagents. Prabir was amazed at the clarity of his senses, the sharpness to everything. It was the opposite of the suffocating blackness he’d felt when he’d willed himself towards death: in the bathtub in Toronto, in the swamp when he’d lost all hope against the snake, in the kampung as he’d strode towards the minefield. He thought savagely: I am not going to die in front of her. It’s not going to happen.

His skin had begun to itch and chafe, so he’d removed his jeans; he was wearing nothing but shorts and his life jacket. As he tried to move his legs to shift position, he discovered that he couldn’t. Where one ankle had rested on top of the other foot, the skin had glued itself together.

Prabir swore softly, and probed the weld with his hand. It seemed the plaques had broken through the skin above and merged, though he hadn’t felt a thing. He almost didn’t want to tell her, but he could hardly conceal it indefinitely. He called out, ‘Maddy!’ When she turned, he smiled and raised his conjoined feet for inspection. ‘One of us might finally have to wield a knife, or I’m going to need crutches on Yamdena.’

She leant across the gap for a better look. Then her face contorted suddenly and she started weeping.

Prabir said, ‘Hey! Ssssh! Stop that!’ He reached out a hand towards her face, not close enough to touch her, but the gesture alone made him feel as if they’d made contact.

He said, ‘You know what we’re doing next year, to get away from Toronto? Now that we’ve joined the jet-setting class?’

‘No.’

‘The IRA parade in Calcutta. You promised you’d help me pull the truck.’

Madhusree looked away. ‘I don’t remember that.’

‘You’re a bad liar.’

‘Your skin grafts won’t be healed.’

Prabir shook his head, laughing. ‘You’re not squirming out of this. I did the kebab skewer through my cheeks. You’re helping me pull the truck!’

Prabir was unable to take the noon blood sample. The second set of growth factor blockers hadn’t worked; the plaques had meshed and solidified across his shoulders, and though he could still bend his elbows, he didn’t have enough movement overall for the task. Madhusree put on surgical gloves, stepped across between the boats, and pushed an empty tube into the hypodermic’s receptacle.

She surveyed him unhappily. ‘It really doesn’t hurt? It’s beginning to look like acute psoriasis.’

‘It just itches a bit.’

‘Try to move as much as you can. I don’t want you getting pressure sores from lying on one spot.’

‘I’ll try. I don’t think this stuff could form ulcers, though.’

As she jumped back, Prabir said, ‘Hey! You know what we’re missing? Radio Lausanne. The Furtado verdict.’

Madhusree nodded unenthusiastically. She picked up her notepad and went to the Lausanne site.

Prabir couldn’t read the screen, so he watched her face. Finally she admitted, ‘The synthetic chromosome came through randomised, like the test sequences. Not conserved, like the real one from the pigeon. So the theory hasn’t been falsified.’ She regarded Prabir warily. ‘There might be something missing in the chemistry, though, something we can’t characterise about the natural DNA. It took a long time to understand methylation tags. There could be another modification, even subtler than that.’

Prabir said nothing, but he knew she was clutching at straws, the way he and Grant had when they’d first heard the theory and far too many things had fallen into place. Furtado was right: the gene could look sideways across a virtual family tree and quantify the usefulness of every potential change.

No treatment would ever destroy it. It couldn’t literally foresee Madhusree’s assault with the growth factor blockers and the antisense DNA, but it would always be prepared for whatever she injected, ready to make the best possible choice at the next replication.

It wouldn’t kill him, though. His condition could not be an accident, a random side effect of the gene’s naivety in the body of a man. It had done this to him because it would benefit, somehow.

‘How many tranquilliser darts do you have left?’ he asked.

Madhusree was alarmed. ‘Why? Are you in pain?’

Prabir almost lied, but he said, ‘No.’

He’d sworn he wouldn’t die on the boat. How could he ask her to kill him, knowing what it would do to her?

But this would be different in every way. She would do it by choice, out of love. Not through stupidity and cowardice.

He explained calmly, ‘It wants to change me, Maddy. It wants to take me apart and build something new.’

She stared at him, horrified. ‘I don’t believe that.’

‘It’s making a chrysalis. The covering is there to immobilise me, and it’s started on all the other tissues now. It knows it’s never going to have offspring if it leaves me unchanged, but all that’s done is make it look further for ways to escape. It’s found some kind of human cousin that undergoes metamorphosis. And I doubt there’ll be anything left of me with the power of veto when I emerge as the reproductive stage.’

Madhusree shook her head fiercely. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions! You have a skin condition. An accidental product of the gene. That’s all.’

Prabir said gently, ‘OK. Let’s wait for the next results.’

The fraction of infected cells had almost levelled off for his skin, but it had risen in every other tissue type. The antisense DNA had made no difference.

Madhusree added hurriedly, ‘I’ll give you another dose. I’ll change the lipid package.’

Prabir agreed. ‘Give it one more try.’

As she crouched over him with the vial, struggling to keep her balance on the swaying dinghy, Prabir said, ‘You know, if I’d been alone on the island when they died, I would never have left. I wouldn’t have got away at all, without you to keep me going.’

She said angrily, ‘Don’t talk like that.’

He laughed. ‘Like what?’

‘You know exactly what I mean, you shit.’ Madhusree pulled the empty syringe away, refusing to look at him.

‘You even hooked me up with Felix. I’d never have managed that alone.’

‘Don’t, Prabir.’

‘If I ask you to do this, it’ll be my responsibility. I can’t stop it hurting you, but don’t let it damage you.’

Madhusree met his eyes; her face was burning with resentment.

He said, ‘No one in the world could have done more for me.’

She spat back angrily, ‘How can you say that? You’re already writing off everything I’m trying!’

He shook his head as far as he could; his neck was almost rigid now. ‘It might work, but if it doesn’t, you have to be ready. You’re going to have to be strong for more than this. The gene is going to try to take everything. All it cares about is reproducing. Everything that matters to us: love, honesty, intelligence, reflection—they’re all just accidents. A few freak waves swept them up on to the beach. Now the tide’s coming in, to wash them away again.’

Prabir could see nothing but the cloudless sky. His sense of the heat of the sun was gone, and the motion of the boat had almost receded from consciousness. Fear and claustrophobia came in slower, deeper waves. He wanted more of everything. More knowledge, more friendship, more sex, more music. He wanted to see the revolution, he wanted to see the battle won. His sense of loss merged with the sense of confinement; he was buried alive and he could still see the sky. When the wave retreated he could almost laugh: he had nothing to fear from death now, he’d just been through the worst part of dying. A minute later, this observation was no comfort at all.

Madhusree moved into view. Prabir said, ‘At least it put the adult butterflies into diapause. You’d think it could cook up something for me.’

‘I’ll tranquillise you now. Do you want that?’ There wasn’t much skin left where they could be sure of a dart penetrating, but the venous line was still open.

‘Yeah. Then the rest of your supply. Then burn the body. Whatever fuel you can spare. Right?’

Madhusree nodded, almost imperceptibly.

Prabir said, ‘I’m sorry to put you through this, but there’s no other way. Don’t ever blame yourself.’

She turned away. ‘Who’ll pull the truck with me now?’

‘What about Felix?’

She laughed. ‘Felix with hooks through his back?’

‘He’d love it. He’d see fireworks with every step.’

As she looked down at him, half smiling, wiping away tears, something tore open behind his eyes and he was flooded with joy. It was everything he’d felt for Felix that was more than desire, everything he remembered inside himself as his father or mother had spun him in their arms, everything he’d seen on their faces, gazing up at him as they held him to the sky.

He didn’t care any more where it came from. He didn’t care if he’d stolen it or not, earned it or not. If he loved her like this and she felt some part of it, it was not selfish, it was not evil, it was not dishonest. And however ancient it was, however mindless, he’d torn it out by its billion-year-old roots, dragged it into the full light of consciousness, and claimed it as his own.

He said, ‘Gather up the good things, and run.’

As he heard the needle pierce the vial and felt the first cool touch of liquid in his vein, Prabir saw the sea from above. Madhusree leant back, her hair flying in the wind, and cut the rope between them. She broke free and sped away, leaving the burning boat behind.

15

Madhusree leant over the side of the dinghy and vomited into the water. Her teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. ‘I’m sorry, bhai, I’m sorry. I mess everything up. I fuck everything up.’ She checked again, but Prabir was still breathing. After six doses.

She fitted the last vial into the hypodermic. It was impossible. His brain should be flooded now, every tissue poisoned. Nothing could allow him to metabolise so much of it, so fast.

She hit the injection button then rocked back on her haunches, tearing at her hair. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ She wiped mucus from her face on to her shoulder. She shouldn’t touch herself with the gloves.

She waited, humming to herself, trying not to weep. Later. She’d mourn him later, when she’d done what he’d wanted.

She started sobbing. ‘Why did you follow me? Why did you come here? You stupid shit! I should have gone to the island. It should have been me.’

She bent forward and touched the still human skin of his neck. Even through the gloves, she could feel its ordinary softness. His pulse had slowed, but it hadn’t weakened. She lifted her hand to his nostrils, and felt the fine film of polymer quiver against her fingertips.

Nothing she pumped in would kill him. And even if that wasn’t true, she couldn’t sit here trying poisons, dose after dose, until the thing metabolised the tranquilliser away so completely that Prabir woke, in agony from whatever she’d poured into his veins.

He couldn’t be conscious, he couldn’t be sensate. He was in the deepest of comas; he’d feel nothing. She tried to peel back one eyelid, but it was frozen in place. She turned away, choking, her throat knotted. ‘I can’t! I can’t do it!’

She stared out across the sea, breathing deeply, trying to grow calm enough to finish this. If he lived through the metamorphosis, he would not be her brother. Worse, he’d not be anything he’d wanted to be. When the truth had become plain, she’d almost offered to follow him. You don’t have to do it alone. I’ll inject some of your blood, we’ll change together. But then she’d realised that even if she’d meant it at the time, she would have backed out later. It was not impossible that the gene would give benefits to its host that they’d find worthwhile themselves, but she wasn’t betting her soul on someone else’s card game, however well it cheated for itself.

Not her own, and not Prabir’s.

She turned without looking at him and picked up one of the fuel cans. She unscrewed the cap and tossed it into the sea. ‘OK, OK. He won’t feel it.’

She squatted down. He was still wearing the life jacket; she couldn’t stand the thought of the burning plastic clinging to him, even if the dinghy was made of almost the same thing. She undid the straps and pulled it off.

‘OK. There now.’ She poured some diesel on to his chest.

Where the fuel touched the carapace, it blistered instantly, spitting a visible puff of vapour. Madhusree backed away, wailing with distress. ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ She crouched at Prabir’s feet, covering her head. ‘I can’t do it! I’ve fucked up!’ She drove the heels of her hands into her eyes, then started punching her forehead.

She waited to grow numb. Just for a few minutes, long enough to finish it. She hummed to herself. ‘You’ve gone into my head. You’ve gone into my memories.’

That wasn’t enough.

But it was more than the gene would leave of him.

She opened her eyes and stood up wearily. ‘OK. We’ll do this together.’ She looked down; she could still recognise his face beneath the plaques. There was a blister full of grey fluid where the diesel had splashed his chest, but there was no blood in it. No Prabir. She didn’t believe he’d felt any pain at all.

‘Why did you take him? What do you want from us?’

Nothing at all. It had no purpose for anyone, no destiny. No journey in mind, no endpoint. It wanted nothing but itself. More of the same.

It didn’t want him.

She’d been fighting it the wrong way.

She turned his frozen body over and searched his back. There had to be another blister, a boil, or a pustule, however tiny, in a place the fuel hadn’t touched. Nothing was perfect, nothing. Some tiny fraction of the infected cells must have made the kind of mistake that let his body drag them to the surface in the hope of disposing of them.

Why hadn’t the São Paulo gene hatched itself into a virus? Because a viral genome would be too remote to register as a cousin to any of its hosts, the changes required were too extreme. It thought it would lose by leaving his body; it thought it could only perish. All she had to do was prove otherwise—in a way that wouldn’t give it the power to spread.

There. In a patch of real skin, a tiny boil.

Madhusree turned and leapt to the front dinghy, picked up a fresh hypodermic and an empty culture flask, then jumped back. She squatted down and pierced the boil, then drew up a few millilitres of grey fluid. She squirted it into the culture flask, then leapt the gap again and filled the flask with growth medium.

‘If you learn to come, I’ll give you what you want. Just a couple of the right mutations, and you can surface like pus. My brother will do the work for you; you just have to surrender. I’ll give you more of the same than you’ve ever dreamt of.’

How much of his body weight did it actually have now? Five per cent? Three or four kilograms? She had enough medium to support about the same weight in tissue culture, for maybe half a day. Enough to distract it, enough to hold it in check.

If it was omniscient, she could never win: it would see beyond the lure and continue to reprogramme his body for the greater long-term gain of reproduction. But any offspring it could produce that way were still hundreds of cellular generations into the future, a distant peak in a desolate landscape of extinction. It could see far enough to know that a burst of somatic cell division would simply kill its host: it had no choice but to find a way to make that host go forth and multiply. But once she offered it a path into a sheltered environment where it could feed and reproduce, cell by cell, without facing the same limits, a new feature would appear on the landscape of possibilities. A new peak, not as tall, but far closer.

She’d have to make that new peak as high as she could. High enough to draw the gene away from the route to freedom. High enough to hide Prabir’s children.

She couldn’t hope to do that with the supplies she had on board. But by midnight, she’d reach Yamdena. She could synthesise all the exotic peptides for the medium herself, the growth factors, the cell adhesion modulators. What about the base, the matrix? What could she make do with? Gelatin? Agar? She’d kick down the door of every shop in town until she found what she needed.

As they approached Darwin harbour, Prabir opened his eyes. He took in the sight of Madhusree, the culture flasks and pickle jars and other scavenged glassware spread all around her on the deck of the trawler, the needle drawing pus from his arm.

She asked him, ‘Are you in there? Is it still you?’

She watched his face. The skin was sagging and full of lymphatic fluid, where the cells of the carapace had stretched it before deserting his body for an easier life, but she believed she could read his expression in the tightening of the muscles below.

He drooled, ‘Calcutta. Next year. You’re not getting out of it.’

Madhusree wrapped her arms around him, shaking from exhaustion. ‘Welcome back.’

She clung to him, selfish with joy, but she’d won back more than her brother. What had worked for him should work again, in the next infected human. They’d never be free of the gene, they could never hope to eradicate it. As long as they were made from DNA, as long as they were part of nature, they would remain vulnerable.

But they’d tricked it, this once.

They’d won the first battle.

Prabir said, ‘How? How did you do it, Maddy?’

She sat back and looked at him. He was grinning with amazement beneath the soggy mask, as if she was the one who’d risen from the dead.

‘It was something you taught me. Something you learnt from them.’ She reached down to stroke his forehead, then smiled.

‘Life is meaningless.’