‘Prabir Suresh.’
She held up her forearm and inspected the wound, then announced glumly, ‘I’m sweating like a pig. I won’t find a thing; it’ll
all be washed away or degraded by now.’
A vivid red weal had spread along her arm. Prabir said, ‘Forget about DNA. Drown the whole area in disinfectant, and take
whatever antibiotics you can get your hands on. You should have seen what happened to my mother’s leg once from an insect
bite. You don’t want to take any chances.’
‘Yeah.’ Grant rubbed her eyes, and smiled at him ruefully. ‘What a farce. That bird just flew down to me, like a gift, and
I didn’t even get an image of it.’
Prabir gave up on the idea of waiting to be asked. He said, ‘If you want a guide, I’ll do it for nothing. I’ll even pay for
my own food. The only down side is, I might have to leave you at some point to meet up with my sister. But you’ve got maps,
you’ve got translation software. It’s not as if you’d be lost without me.’ It was hard saying the last part with a straight
face; he’d be relying on maps and software himself. But he wasn’t seeking money under false pretences, or endangering
this woman’s life. She was the one whose skills would have the most bearing on their safety.
Grant regarded him with a mixture of sympathy and scepticism. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to call your sister? I can’t guarantee
that we’ll even get close to the expedition.’
That was true. But though Madhusree had promised him that she wouldn’t disclose anything about their parents’ work, Prabir
had no doubt that she’d still do her best to steer the expedition in the right direction. If he could do the same, not only
would that lead him to Madhusree, but he’d end up being far more use to Grant than the most experienced guide Ambon had to
offer.
He shrugged. ‘I’m willing to take that risk. I mean, it’s not as if I have much hope of reaching her any other way.’
Grant still seemed to be uneasy about something. Prabir said, ‘You don’t have to decide right away. Think it over. Sleep on
it.’ He reached for his notepad to give her his number.
She said, ‘Can you tell me why your sister doesn’t want you to find her?’
Prabir gave her a long, hard look, trying to decide how to take this.
What exactly did you have in mind, memsahib? You think I’ve come to drag her off to an arranged marriage? Doing my bit for
the international conspiracy to throw all women into purdah?
That was unfair, though. Grant didn’t know the first thing about him; she didn’t need to be a racist to have qualms about
helping him pursue an unwilling quarry.
He tried to think of a way to put her at ease. ‘Do you have any children?’
‘Yes. I have a son.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘At home with his father, in Cardiff.’
‘Suppose he was camping out in the countryside with friends, and you saw the weather changing, but you knew he
wouldn’t understand what that meant in the same way you did. How do you think he’d react if you called him up and suggested
that you join him at the campsite, just to keep an eye on things? Just to give him the benefit of your experience?’
Grant said gently, ‘OK, I get the point. But why do you think the weather’s changing? Why are you so afraid for her?’
‘I don’t know,’ Prabir confessed. ‘I’m probably wrong. I’m probably mistaken. But that doesn’t change the way I feel.’
Grant did not appear entirely reassured by this answer. But there was no obvious next question, no simple way to pursue the
matter. Finally she said, ‘All right, I’ll stop prying. Meet me here tomorrow at eight, and I’ll show you the boat.’
At dinner, Prabir managed to avoid Lowe and company, but he found himself sharing a table with Paul Sutton, an English science
journalist who’d come to write a book about the Moluccan mutants. These were proof, Sutton insisted, of a ‘cosmic imperative
for biodiversity built into the laws of physics’ which was compensating for the loss of species caused by human activities.
The distinctly non-random nature of the mutations showed that ‘the nineteenth-century science of entropy’ had finally been
overtaken by ‘the twenty-first-century science of
ecotropy’
.
‘I just can’t decide on the title,’ he fretted. ‘It’s the title that will sell it. Which do you think sounds best:
The Genesis Gene, The Eighth Day of Creation, or The Seventh Miracle?’
Prabir mulled it over. ‘How about
God’s Third Testicle?’
That summed up the book’s three themes concisely: religiosity, superabundance, and enormous bollocks.
Sutton seemed quite taken by this, but then he shook his head regretfully. ‘I want to evoke a separate act of creation, but
that’s a bit too … genitally focused.’ He stared into the distance, frowning intently. Suddenly his eyes lit up.
‘Gaia’s Bastards
. That’s it! That’s perfect! Ecology with an edge. Nature breaking all the rules, walking on the wild side to keep the Earth
in balance! It’s got best-seller written all over it!’
In the morning Prabir met Grant, and they walked down to the marina where her boat was docked. It was a twenty-metre magnetohydrodynamic
craft, with a single large cabin sunk
partly below deck. Most of the cabin space was taken up with equipment; Grant showed him the bunk where he’d be sleeping,
in a narrow slot behind a row of storage lockers. ‘You won’t have much privacy, I’m afraid. You can see why I didn’t want
six deckhands and a cook on board.’
‘Yeah. I was expecting to travel in crowded conditions, though. This is one step up from my wildest dreams of luxury.’ He
turned away from his ‘quarters’ and eyed a rack full of spectrometers and chromatographs; there was a whole analytical chemistry
lab packed on to half a dozen chips here. ‘I have no idea what a freelance biologist does, but it must pay well.’
Grant made an amused choking sound. ‘I don’t own any of this; it’s all on loan from my sponsor.’
‘Can I ask who that is?’
‘A pharmaceuticals company.’
‘And what do they get out of it?’
‘That remains to be seen. But there’s no such thing as a useless discovery in molecular biology. At the very least they can
always play pass-the-patents, so someone else is left holding them when it finally becomes obvious that they have no commercial
value whatsoever.’
They sat on the deck and talked for a while, looking out across the harbour. It was humid, but still quite cool; the fishing
boats had all left long ago, and the marina was almost deserted. When Grant asked about his childhood Prabir spoke of the
family’s rare trips to Ambon, and tried to create the impression, without actually lying, that they’d travelled all over the
region. But when she came right out and asked him what his parents had done, he said they’d been involved in seafood exports.
‘So they made a fortune and retired to Toronto?’
‘No. They both died here.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She quickly changed the subject. ‘Do you have
anything you want to ask me? Before you decide to trust me not to run us into the nearest reef?’
Prabir hesitated, wary of offending her. ‘Do you use alcohol much?’
Grant was scandalised. ‘Not
at sea!
’
Prabir smiled. ‘No, of course not. How could I forget the long nautical tradition of sobriety?’
‘There is one, actually. Dating back to the Industrial Health and Safety Laws of nineteen … something-or-other.’ She was treating
it as a joke, but she did seem slightly wounded. ‘Was I very drunk yesterday?’
Prabir replied diplomatically, ‘You were a lot more lucid than anyone else in the bar.’
Grant stood up abruptly, stretching her shoulders. ‘Well, you have a deal, if you’re still interested. And if you’re willing
to do the cooking, you can forget about paying for food.’
‘That sounds fair.’ He rose to his feet beside her.
‘When would you be able to leave?’
‘Whenever you like. I just have to get my things and check out of the hotel.’
‘If you can be back in an hour, we can go this morning.’
‘An hour?’ Prabir was taken aback, but he had no reason to object. ‘OK. I’d better get moving then.’ He raised a hand in farewell
and headed for the pier.
Grant called after him, ‘See you soon.’
Replaying parts of their conversation in his head as he walked along the marina, Prabir felt a belated sense of panic. If
he’d hitched a ride on a crowded fishing boat, he could have sat in a corner and disappeared amidst the bustle, wrapped in
the shield of his imperfect Indonesian. He and Grant could be stuck with each other’s company for weeks, and there’d be no
easy way to retreat into silence.
But this was the best opportunity he’d have of reaching Madhusree. And Grant would have far more important things to do than
probe his story every waking moment. They’d
probably get on well enough, but he could still keep her at arm’s length. He’d worked harmoniously for nearly ten years with
people at the bank to whom he’d never said a word about the war, or his parents, or the island. He really had nothing to fear.
Before checking out of the hotel, Prabir sat on his bed and called Felix. It was eight p.m. in Toronto, but he decided to
leave a message rather than talking live. He’d promised to keep Felix informed of his plans, but the prospect of exchanging
small talk held no attraction for him. They were twenty thousand kilometres apart, he was on his own, and he didn’t want to
forget that for a second.
Back at the marina, Grant was in high spirits, eager to depart after being delayed for so long. Prabir threw his backpack
under his bunk and watched over her shoulder as she programmed the boat.
Ambon Harbour was as automated as any airport. Grant lodged a request for a southbound route into the Banda Sea, and the Harbour
Master’s software fed it to the autopilot. The engines started up, with a sound like water flowing through plumbing, and they
began backing out of the dock immediately. There were several large cargo ships moored further along the wharves, but there
was no traffic in sight other than the tiny water taxis and a few pleasure craft.
It was ten kilometres to the harbour entrance, and the speed limit made it a leisurely trip. Grant had pointed out the visible
parts of the boat’s machinery earlier, but at Prabir’s request she summoned up schematics on the console and had the software
deliver its full technospiel.
The boat’s fuel cells doubled as batteries which could be charged either by solar electricity, from the deck and cabin roof,
or by pouring in methanol which was split into water and carbon dioxide. A single elaborate polymer contained both catalytic
sites which ‘burnt’ the methanol, and embedded
vanadium ions which stored and released the energy by toggling between oxidation states. All the chemicals involved were bound
firmly in place; the water emerged pure enough to drink.
The engines were polymer too, corrosion-resistant electrodes and superconducting coils that accelerated sea water through
any of the six channels that ran through a streamlined hub on the underside of the hull. With no moving parts, the only routine
problem the engines could suffer was seaweed fouling the sieve-like filters guarding the channels, and even that was usually
cleared automatically with a few pulses of reverse thrust.
Prabir said, ‘This is elegant. This is how a boat should be.’
Grant appeared noncommittal. ‘You don’t long for the romance of sail?’
‘Ha. Did you ever long to spend your time fighting ropes and canvas in the middle of a storm on the North Sea?’
Grant smiled. ‘No, but—’ She gestured at the cloudless blue sky. ‘As a boy, you must have been on
prahus
all the time.’
He shook his head. ‘Everything was diesel. We never lived in the kind of small villages where people built their own traditional
fishing boats.’ He wasn’t even lying, but as soon as he began talking about the past he could feel muscles in his face growing
tense from the effort of concealment.
‘Well, MHD certainly outclasses diesel,’ Grant conceded. ‘Though I wouldn’t use the word “elegant” myself. On that score,
an eel leaves a boat like this for dead.’ She leant back against the bench beside the console; she was teasing him, but Prabir
couldn’t resist the bait.
He said, ‘That’s professional bias talking. An eel isn’t optimised for swimming, just because it’s done no better for the
past few million years. It fritters away half its energy on just being alive: every cell in its body needs to be fed, whether
or not it’s working. Like the crew you didn’t want to hire. Evolution does a lot of things very nicely: shark skin minimises
turbulence, crustacean shells are strong for their weight. But we can always do better by copying those tricks and refining
them, single-mindedly. For a living creature, everything like that is just a means to an end. Show me an eel without gonads,
and
then
I’ll concede that nature builds the perfect swimming machine.’
Grant laughed, but she admitted begrudgingly, ‘You’re right, in a sense: it costs us a lot of energy to build each new boat,
but it’s still convenient to segregate that from ordinary fuel use. I wouldn’t want to travel in a pregnant ship, let alone
one that had to prove itself to prospective mates in a ramming contest. And even marine engineers can get by without children;
they just need good designs that will propagate memetically. But none of this is truly divorced from biology, is it? Someone,
somewhere has to survive and have offspring, or who inherits the designs, and improves upon them, and builds the next boat?’
‘Obviously. All I’m saying is, technology can potentially do better than nature because of the very fact that it’s not always
a matter of life or death. If an organism has been fine-tuned to maximise its overall reproductive success, that’s not the
same thing as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. Evolution appears inventive to us because
it’s had time to try so many possibilities, but it has no margin at all for real risks, let alone anything truly whimsical.
We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them.’
Grant gave him a curious look, as if she was wondering what kind of nerve she might have touched. She said, ‘I don’t think
we really disagree. I suppose I’m just ready to take beauty where I can find it. The average mammalian genome would make the
ink-stained notebooks of a syphilitic eighteenth-century poet look positively coherent in comparison: all the layers of recycled
genes, and redundant genes, and duplicated genes that have gone divergent ways. But when I see how
it manages to work in spite of that – every convoluted regulatory pathway fitting together seamlessly – it still makes hair
stand up on the back of my neck.’
Prabir protested, ‘But if the pathways didn’t fit together, they wouldn’t be there for you to study, would they? Would you
marvel the same way at the botched job in the thirty per cent of human embryos that have too much chromosomal damage even
to implant in the uterine wall? Every survivor has a complicated history that makes it look miraculous. My idea of beauty
has nothing to do with survival: of all the things evolution has created, the ones I value most are the ones it could just
as easily crush out of existence the next time it rolls over in its sleep. If I see something I admire in nature, I want to
take it and run: copy it, improve upon it, make it my own. Because I’m the one who values it for its own sake. Nature doesn’t
give a fuck.’
Grant said reasonably, ‘Evolution takes a long time to roll over in its sleep. I’m a lot more worried that the things I admire
are going to get crushed out of existence by people who don’t give a fuck.’
‘Yeah.’ There was no arguing with that. Prabir felt foolish; he’d let himself rant. He said, ‘I could make lunch now, if you’re
as hungry as I am. What do you think?’
The sight of the open sea made Prabir feel strangely calm. It wasn’t that it brought back fewer, or less painful memories
than Darwin or Ambon; quite the reverse. But there was something almost reassuring about finally making literal the state
he’d imagined himself in for so long. He’d never reached the destination he’d promised Madhusree: the island where their parents
were waiting. After eighteen years he still hadn’t struck land.
Grant joined him on the deck, beaming madly. She must have caught a trace of bemusement on his face; she said, ‘I
know
, but I can’t help it. A sky like this makes my poor heart
sing. Sunlight deprivation as a child, I suppose; when I finally get a good dose of it, my brain just wants to condition me
to come back for more.’
Prabir said, ‘Don’t apologise for being happy.’ He hesitated, then added obliquely, ‘Everyone else I met in Ambon who’d arrived
from temperate regions seemed to have suffered rather less beneficial effects.’
Grant feigned puzzlement. ‘I can’t think who you could mean. Mind you, some people really do go a bit psychotic when they
hit the tropics for the first time. That’s the down side. But you must have encountered that before, surely?’
‘The British Raj was a bit before my time.’
Grant smiled, then closed her eyes and raised her face to the sky. Prabir glanced back towards Ambon, but the grey smudge
on the horizon had vanished. He’d have happily stood in silence like this for hours, but that was too much to hope for; what
he really needed was a topic of conversation that wouldn’t keep leading them back to his supposedly boundless familiarity
with everything in sight. Grant was hardly going to throw him overboard if she caught him out on some minor inconsistency,
but if the whole mess of half-truths unravelled and he was forced to confess just how limited and rusty his grasp of the region’s
language, custom and geography really was, he wouldn’t put it past her to abandon him on the nearest inhabited island.