Prabir said, ‘If this is important enough, and you crack it
wide open, do you really think there’ll be no opportunities to make money out of that fact? Face it: none of the real cash
is likely to be in biotech applications anyway. Whatever’s happening here isn’t going to solve any medical problems – and
even if your theory’s right, it’s not going to give people pet dinosaurs any more easily than standard genetic methods. But
if you handle this properly, you can be a celebrity scientist with a nine-figure media deal for your story.’
Grant was amused. ‘That’s pure fantasy. Is that why you’re doing this? You think you’ll get an eight-figure deal as co-star?’
Prabir didn’t dignify that with an answer. ‘Maybe the rights wouldn’t be that much. But I don’t believe that you couldn’t
find a way to make money from this, if you put your mind to it.’
‘I never realised you had such a high opinion of me.’
‘I could always lead the expedition there, instead. Madhusree’s decided not to tell them anything; she wants to leave our
parents undisturbed. The only reason I’m even asking
you
is to avoid putting her through the ordeal of going back there.’
Grant hesitated, re-evaluating old clues again. ‘Your parents died there? In the war? And the two of you were left alone?’
‘Yes.’ Prabir hadn’t meant to reveal so much; he could see the sympathy it evoked eating away at Grant’s natural cynicism,
and it made him feel much worse than when he’d merely lied to her. But he pushed the advantage for all it was worth. ‘They
were gagged by their sponsor, just like you. That’s why nothing they did was ever published. I want what they began to be
completed, properly, with everyone sharing the information. The way it should have been all along.’
Grant shook her head regretfully. ‘I can’t risk it. It could bankrupt me.’
‘So your sponsor will bury you in obscurity instead, just like Silk Rainbow buried my parents? You had the best theory,
first. You’ve worked as hard as any of these people.’ He gestured at the tents around them. ‘If I lead them to the source,
and some prat from Harvard beats you to the answer, you won’t even get a footnote.’
Prabir watched her uneasily, wondering if he’d put his case too bluntly. But if she couldn’t conform to the strictures of
academic life, she’d also resent every curtailment of freedom her sponsor had forced upon her. If there was a way to shaft
both sides and survive the experience – and a chance to emerge covered in glory – she’d have to be tempted.
She whispered angrily, ‘I can’t decide this now. I have to think about it, I have to talk to Michael—’
‘I’ll give you until dawn. I’ll wait for you down on the beach.’
Grant looked at her watch, horrified. ‘Three hours?’
‘That’s three times as long as you gave me in Ambon.’
‘That was time to pack! You weren’t gambling with your life.’
‘I didn’t think I was. But you didn’t mention anything then about leaving me behind as snake food.’
Grant opened her mouth to protest.
Prabir said, ‘I’m joking.
I’m joking!
It’s been a long day.’
Prabir lay unsleeping on his borrowed bed. He’d told his watch to wake him at a quarter to six, but by five o’clock he was
too restless to stay in the tent. He dressed in his own clothes – he’d rinsed them in fresh water and hung them out to dry
– and headed down to the beach.
He sat and watched the stars fade, listening to the first bird calls. Broken sleep had left a foul taste in his mouth, and
there was a rawness to all his perceptions, as if his senses had been doused in paint-stripper; even the faint brightening
of the sky hurt his eyes. He was aching all over, from something more than exertion; he could remember the pain in his calves
as he’d trekked through the swamp, but now every muscle in his body
seemed equally wrecked.
It was the way he’d felt at dawn on the Tanimbar Islands, after the long boat ride. After the dying soldier had let him in
on the big secret
.
He heard a sound from further down the beach. One of the men from the fishing boat was performing
salat al-fajr
, the Muslim dawn prayers. Prabir’s skin crawled, but the sense of being haunted only lasted a split second; the fisherman
was a young Melanesian who looked nothing like the soldier.
When he’d finished praying, the man approached and greeted Prabir amiably, introducing himself as Subhi and offering a hand-rolled
cigarette. Prabir declined, but they sat together while he smoked. The tobacco was scented with cloves; the potential this
recipe offered as a fumigant had definitely been underexploited.
It was a struggle making conversation; Indonesian was still being taught in schools throughout the RMS, but as far as Prabir
could judge the two of them were equally bad at it. He gestured at Subhi’s prayer rug and asked, jokingly, if he was the only
devout man on the boat.
This slur horrified Subhi. ‘The other men are all pious, but they’re Christians.’
‘I understand. Forgive me. I didn’t think of that possibility.’
Subhi generously conceded that it was an understandable mistake, and launched into a long account of the virtues of his fellow
crew members. Prabir listened and nodded, only making sense of half of what he heard. It was several minutes into the story
before he realised that he was being told something more. Subhi’s village in the Kai Islands had been destroyed during the
war. His family had all been killed; he was the sole survivor out of more than two hundred people. The Christian village with
pela
obligations to his own had sheltered him and raised him, and he’d continued to live there, though when he wasn’t at sea he
attended Friday prayers at the mosque in another village. This was a very satisfactory arrangement, at
least until he married, because he could continue to uphold the faith of his parents without moving away from his friends.
When he’d finished, Prabir was unable to speak.
How could anyone lose so much, and emerge with so little bitterness?
Religion had nothing to do with it;
pela
did not derive from either Islam or Christianity, it was a conscious strategy developed to detoxify the unavoidable mixture
of the two. But some combination of personal resilience and an accommodating culture had pulled this man out of the conflagration
of his childhood, apparently intact.
Prabir felt a need to reciprocate, to relate some of his own history. He asked Subhi if he knew of an island with a dead volcano,
seventy kilometres south-west.
Subhi’s face became grim. ‘That’s not a good place, there are spirits there.’ He looked at Prabir anew. ‘Are you the son of
the Indian scientists who went there before the war?’
‘Yes.’ Prabir was amazed to be identified this way, but then he remembered the labourers from the Kai Islands who’d helped
his parents set up the kampung. If Teranesia had since gained a supernatural reputation, its whole recent history might have
become widely known.
He said, ‘What kind of spirits? Spirits in the form of animals?’ Any advance intelligence about the modified fauna could help
them prepare.
Subhi nodded uneasily. ‘There are many kinds of spirits there, released as punishment for the crimes of the war. Visible and
invisible. Possessing animals, and men.’
‘Possessing men?’ Prabir wondered if this was merely a formulaic recitation of metaphysical possibilities. ‘Who? No one lives
there now, do they?’
‘No.’ Subhi looked at the ground, discomforted.
‘So who did the spirits harm? Did a boat stop there?’
He nodded.
‘When?’
‘Three months ago. To make repairs.’
‘And the men on board became sick?’
‘Sick? In a way,’ Subhi agreed reluctantly.
‘Did they eat something on the island? Did they catch some of the animals? How were they sick?’
Subhi shook his head, pained. ‘It’s not respectful to talk about this.’
Prabir didn’t want to offend him, but if there was any evidence of effects on human DNA, nothing could be more important than
tracking it down. ‘Could I meet these men? If I went to their village?’
‘That’s not possible.’ Subhi rose to his feet abruptly, brushing sand from his clothes. ‘It’s time I joined my friends.’ He
reached down and shook Prabir’s hand, then started walking away along the beach.
Prabir called after him, ‘The men who visited the island? Are they alive, or dead?’
There was a long silence, then Subhi replied without turning. ‘God willing, they’re at peace.’
Grant arrived at twenty past six. Prabir said, ‘I’d almost given up on you. Have you decided?’
She held up her notepad. Prabir took out his own and cloned the page she was displaying, then reread it independently via
a randomly chosen proxy, to verify that it really was publicly available.
He flipped through the sequence data; there was no way he could tell whether or not it was correct, he’d simply have to trust
her. Then he noticed the sponsorship logo: Borromean rings built of rotating plasmids. The logo detected his gaze and said
proudly, ‘This information is brought to you by PharmoNucleic, as a service to the scientific community.’
He looked up at Grant, amazed. ‘You’re rubbing their face in it? Isn’t that begging to be sued?’
Grant said matter-of-factly, ‘They’re not going to sue anyone. I told them the choice you’d offered me, and they agreed
to release all the data. They don’t see any serious patent prospects, given that the expedition has collected so much data
of its own. Instead of wasting all the money they’ve invested so far, they’d rather have some good PR. Oh, and an eighty per
cent share of any media rights.’
Prabir was delighted. ‘You’re a genius! Why didn’t I think of that?’
‘Misdirected hostility towards authority?’
‘Ha! You’re the one who told me how much you hated being gagged. I thought you’d be dying for an excuse to bite their hand
off.’
Grant said drily, ‘I’m the one who still has a family to support.’
Prabir hefted his backpack. He was still aching all over, but the oppressive mood he’d felt at dawn had lifted. Even if Madhusree’s
colleagues took her belated revelations seriously, the expedition would be saddled with enough logistical inertia to keep
them from doing anything about it immediately. If he and Grant could return in a day or two with samples from the island –
and all their findings were in the public domain – there’d be no urgent need for a second visit. Maybe their results would
merit a comprehensive follow-up, eventually, but the expedition had a finite budget and a limited timetable. Madhusree would
be back in Toronto long before anyone went near Teranesia again.
He said, ‘Are you ready?’
‘Yeah. Are you sure you’re up to this?’
‘I’m up to anything that doesn’t involve mangroves.’
Grant put an arm across his shoulders and said solemnly, ‘I shouldn’t have left you behind. It was a stupid thing to do, and
I’m truly sorry. We won’t get separated again.’
The route back along the coast was infinitely less arduous than the jungle. They swam past the inlet to the mangrove swamp
through crystalline water at the reef’s inner edge, where at
least they’d have a chance to see any predators approaching. But they made the crossing unmolested; despite the multitude
of fish, the swamp and the forest were apparently considered better hunting grounds.
As they trudged along the beach again, Prabir told Grant about Subhi’s story of the fishermen.
She said, ‘That could mean anything. They might have cooked a plant they were accustomed to eating safely, and it turned out
to have acquired some extra protective toxins.’
‘Yeah.’ That did sound like the simplest explanation, and if the men had died badly, psychotic and hallucinating, it would
have been enough to confirm the presence of spirits. Prabir wished he could have questioned someone else about the incident,
but they didn’t have time to go off to the Kai Islands to hunt for reliable witnesses to an event nobody wanted to talk about.
Grant said, ‘Tell me about your parents’ work.’
Prabir sketched the sequence of events that had led Radha and Rajendra to the island. It was a long time since he’d discussed
this with anyone but Madhusree, and as he listened to himself betraying her – handing over the family history to this stranger,
to keep Madhusree from making use of it herself – he felt far worse than he’d anticipated. But Grant had kept her side of
the deal, and he had no reason to believe that his parents would have wanted him to keep any of this secret.
‘Can you describe the butterflies?’
‘They were green and black. Emerald green. There was a pattern, a sort of concentric striping; not quite eye spots, but a
bit like that. They were pretty large; each wing was about the size of an adult’s hand. There was something about the veins
in the wings, and the position of the genitals, that my parents made a big deal about. But I’ve forgotten the details.’
‘Would you recognise the other stages? The eggs, the larvae, the pupae?’
Prabir pictured the sequence laid out in front of him.
He’d
been inside the butterfly hut, just once: at night, in the dark
. In his memory, though, he could see the contents of all the cages. Spiked, hissing larvae. Orange and green pupae like rotten
fruit.
‘I’m not sure.’ The words came out like an angry denial.
Grant turned to look at him, surprised by his tone. ‘They might be easier to collect than the adults, that’s all. But if you
can’t remember, it’s not the end of the world.’
They reached the boat just after noon. Prabir unpacked the samples he’d collected before entering the swamp; the python had
crushed half his tubes of gelled blood, but even so, the morning hadn’t been a complete loss.
Grant had no trouble finding the island on her chart from his description, but she asked Prabir to confirm it. He ran his
finger over the bland set of contour lines on the screen, some satellite’s radar echo blindly cranked through a billion computations
to spit out a shape that would have taken a human surveyor a month of hardship to map.