He said, ‘That’s it. That’s Teranesia.’
Grant smiled. ‘Is that really what you called it?’
‘Yeah. Well, it was the name I came up with, and my parents went along with it. But it was nothing to do with the butterflies;
after about a week I was bored to tears with them. I didn’t pay much attention to any of the real animals; I used to make
up my own. Child-eating monsters that chased us around the island, but never quite caught up.’
‘Ah, everyone has those.’
‘Do they? I never had them in Calcutta. There was no room.’
Grant said, ‘I packed a pretty good bestiary into the stairwell of a twelve-storey block of flats. Not that I didn’t have
competition: one of my idiot brothers tried to give the whole building a kind of layered metaphysical structure – full of
ethereal beings on different spiritual levels, like some lame
cosmology out of Doris Lessing or C.S. Lewis – but even when his friends went along with it, I knew it was crap. All his little
demons and angels had endless wars and political intrigues, but apparently no time for either food or sex.’
‘You had trouble attracting as many believers to a world of rutting carnivores?’
She nodded forlornly. ‘I even had hermaphroditic dung beetles, but no one cared. It was so unfair.’
Grant programmed the autopilot, and the engines started up smoothly. The boat circled around to face the reef, then retraced
the safe path it had found on arrival.
As they rounded the coast and headed out to sea, Prabir stood on deck near the bow, waiting for the tip of the volcano to
appear on the horizon. It was still too far away, though, too small to stand out from the haze.
Grant joined him. ‘So who do you want to play your character in the movie?’
Prabir cringed. ‘Did I really suggest going for the movie rights? I thought I must have dreamt that part. Can’t you just bring
out a cologne, like the physicists do?’
‘Only because they have nothing worth filming. And I think they make more from donor gametes.’ She eyed him appraisingly.
‘One of the Kapoor brothers might just be dashing enough.’
‘That’s very flattering, but I doubt that any of them would be willing to take the role.’
Grant laughed, baffled. ‘Why on Earth not?’
‘Never mind. What about you?’
‘Oh, Lara Croft, definitely.’
She’d brought a pair of binoculars; she lifted them to the horizon. After a few seconds she announced, ‘I can see it now.
Do you want a look?’
Prabir’s throat filled with acid.
He still wasn’t ready
. But everyone went back: to battlefields, to death camps, to places ten thousand times worse than this. Subhi to his lost
village,
no doubt. Every piece of land, every stretch of sea, was a graveyard to someone. He wasn’t special.
He took the binoculars and turned his head until the red azimuth needle was centred; the autopilot was providing the correct
bearing. At first the image was nothing but a dark triangular smudge, blurred by turbulence. Then the processing chip recalibrated
its atmospheric model and the scene leapt into focus: a cone of black igneous rock rising above the forest canopy. The distortion
of the lowest light paths was impossible to correct; the image broke down into blobs of grey and green before the sea blocked
the view completely.
He said, ‘That’s the place.’
We’re going to the island of butterflies
.
Prabir was hoping that they’d find a previously undetected passage through the reef, but as they inched their way around the
island watching the sonar display, the chance of that diminished, then vanished altogether. The old southern approach was
narrow, and twenty years before no one would have attempted to pass through it in such a large craft, but the autopilot confidently
declared that there was sufficient clearance.
They dropped anchor just inside the reef. It was too late to go ashore, with less than an hour of light remaining. The beach
appeared smaller than Prabir remembered it, though whether the jungle had encroached, a storm had gouged sand away, or he
was just misjudging the tide it was impossible to say. There were still coconut palms standing at the edge of the sand, but
he could see the strange thorned shrubs choking out everything else in the undergrowth. There was no sign at all of the path
that had once led from the beach to the kampung.
After they’d eaten, Grant made her nightly call home. Prabir sat out on deck, stupefied by the heat. He couldn’t call Felix;
he didn’t want to be forced to justify what he’d done to Madhusree, let alone risk some kind of mediated confrontation if
the two of them had been in contact.
He lay down and tried to sleep.
Just after midnight, he heard Grant come out on deck. She stood beside him. ‘Prabir? Are you still awake?’
As he rolled over, he saw her gazing down at him with the kind of unguarded fascination that he’d learnt never to betray
on his own face by the time he was about fifteen. But then her eyes shifted to a neutral point behind his shoulder, and he
doubted the significance of whatever he’d seen.
‘I just thought you ought to know that your extortion has borne its first fruit.’ She handed him her notepad. He glanced at
the banner at the top of the page, then sat up cross-legged on his sleeping bag and read through the whole thing.
A molecular modelling team in São Paulo had examined the sequence data from the two expeditions, and identified a novel gene
common to all the altered organisms; they’d sent Grant a copy of their results, as well as submitting them to a refereed netzine.
Preliminary models of the protein the gene encoded suggested that it would bind to DNA.
Prabir said, ‘You think this is it? Your mythical gene-repair-and-resurrection machine?’
‘Maybe.’ Grant seemed pleased, but she was a long way from claiming victory. ‘Part of what they’ve found makes sense: this
gene has a promoter that causes it to be switched on in meiosis – germ cell formation – which explains why there’s no need
for a mutagen to activate it in these organisms. But there’s no evidence of a similar gene in any of the original genomes,
let alone one that would only be switched on when it was needed to repair mutations.’
Prabir thought it over. ‘Could we be seeing the gene that the original version resurrected in place of itself? Once it went
hyperactive, it not only substituted old versions of other genes, it substituted a completely unrecognisable version of itself?’
Grant laughed, through gritted teeth. ‘That’s possible, and it would make things very tricky. These modelling people might
be able to determine the current protein’s function, but I wouldn’t count on them to be able to work backwards and determine
the structure of an unknown protein that changed its own sequence into the current one. What we really need is DNA from two
consecutive generations of the same organism,
for comparison.’ She hesitated. ‘And if possible, DNA from two early consecutive generations of the butterflies.’
Prabir said, ‘You mean samples my parents took? They didn’t have your magic gelling agent. And I think the refrigeration would
have failed by now.’
Grant looked uncomfortable, unsure whether to pursue the matter.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind talking about this.’ They’d come here for the butterflies; he couldn’t afford to clam up
every time the subject was raised.
She said, ‘They might have preserved whole specimens for storage under tropical conditions; there were treatments available
twenty years ago that would have protected against bacteria and mould, without damaging the DNA. You said they bred the butterflies
in captivity. One or two well-documented samples could tell us a lot.’
‘I appreciate that. But don’t get your hopes up. With all the vegetation changed and the old paths gone, I’m not even sure
that I could find my way back to the kampung. And if I can, who knows what state the buildings would be in?’
Grant nodded. ‘Yeah. It was just a thought. We’ll go ashore tomorrow, and we’ll find what we find.’ She stood up. ‘And we’d
both better get some sleep now.’
Prabir woke badly, to another Tanimbar dawn. When he opened his eyes there was a message in the sunlight:
His parents were dead. Everyone alive would follow them. The world he’d once seen as safe and solid – a vast, intricately
beautiful maze that he could explore from end to end, without risk, without punishment – had proved itself to be a sheer cliff
face, to which he’d cling for a moment before falling
.
He rose from the deck and stood by the guard rail, shielding his eyes. He was tired of the pendulum swings, tired of finding
that all the carefully reasoned arguments and
deliberate optimism that shored him up well enough, on the good days, could still count for nothing when he needed it the
most.
But this could be the last cycle, the downswing deep enough to carry him through to the other side. Wasn’t this the day he’d
step ashore and demonstrate once and for all that Teranesia was powerless to harm him, like an IRA debunker striding triumphantly
across a bed of hot coals? He might yet return to Toronto at peace, as infuriatingly tranquil as Felix, free of his parents,
free of Madhusree, every useless fear banished, every obligation to his past, real or imagined, finally discharged.
And he’d told Grant not to set her hopes too high.
They brought the boat closer to shore, then waded on to the beach. Grant was carrying a rifle now, as well as the tranquilliser
gun. They went through the rituals of the insect repellent and the mine detector tests. As Prabir sat pulling his boots on,
looking back at the reef, he pictured a water man rising from the waves, angry and ravenous, teeth shining like glassy steel.
Then he punctured the illusion, scattering the figure into random spray. That was the trouble with the demons dreamed up by
children and religions: you made the rules, and they obeyed them. It wasn’t much of a rehearsal for life. Once you started
believing that any real danger in the world worked that way, you were lost.
They penetrated the jungle slowly; the thorned shrubs were even denser and more tangled than the species they’d seen before,
with long, narrow involuted branches like coils of barbed wire. Prabir cut off a sample, tearing his thumb on a barely visible
down of tiny hooks that coated the vines between the large thorns. He sucked the ragged wound. ‘Nice as it would be to solve
the mystery, I’m beginning to hope we don’t stumble across a herbivore that needs this much discouragement.’
‘It’d probably be no worse than a rhinoceros or a hippo,’
Grant suggested. ‘But apparently it has no descendants here, to give birth to something similar.’
Prabir fished in his backpack for a band aid. ‘OK, I can accept that: seeds get blown about, continents drift, animal lineages
die out locally. But why is it always the most extreme trait that gets resurrected? Why couldn’t these shrubs just grow something
mildly
inappropriate, like flowers optimised for a long-vanished pollinating insect?’
Grant mused, ‘There’s no evidence of the São Paulo protein ever having been used for mutation repair. So maybe that was never
the case; maybe I’ve been clinging to that idea too stubbornly. It could be that the protein’s role has
always
been to reactivate old traits, to bring old inventions back into the gene pool from a dormant state.’
Prabir considered this. ‘A bit like a natural version of those conservation programmes where they cross endangered animals
with frozen sperm from twenty years ago, to reinvigorate the species when the population becomes too inbred?’
‘Yeah. And sometimes they use a closely related species, not the thing itself. If this protein manages a kind of “frozen gene
bank”, it would be even less purist about it: it wouldn’t have any qualms about creating a hybrid with a distant ancestor.’
To Prabir this sounded both simpler and far more radical than the mutation repair hypothesis: shifting the mechanism from
an esoteric emergency response to a major factor in genetic change. Most of the same problems remained, though.
He said, ‘That still doesn’t explain how particular traits get frozen and thawed. Are you saying that this plant’s ancestors
knew
that they’d evolved a spectacularly effective set of defences, and deliberately tucked away a copy of the genes for the next
aeon when they’d come in handy?’
Grant smiled, refusing to be provoked. ‘More likely it’s just a matter of the genes that persist the longest having the greatest
chance of being duplicated at some point, which then increases their chance of surviving in an inactive form.’
‘And the mimicry? The symbiosis? How does something like that get synchronised?’
‘That, I don’t know.’
They pressed on. Prabir kept waiting for a flash of recognition, for the sight of an old gnarled tree or an outcrop of rock
to awaken memories more strongly than the beach. He’d explored this side of the island completely; every step he was taking
here was one he must have taken before. But too much had changed. Though the trees themselves appeared unaltered, there were
no ferns, there were no small flowers on the ground, just the carnivorous orchids they’d seen on the other islands, and the
ubiquitous barbed-wire shrubs. Even the scent of the forest was alien to him. It was like returning to a city to find it repaved
and repainted, emptied of its old inhabitants and repopulated by strangers with new customs and new cooking smells. Ambon
with its nouveau-colonial refurbishment had seemed more familiar than this.
The black cockatoos were here, too. Prabir stood and watched one for half an hour, waiting for Grant to finish dissecting
an orchid.
The bird was sitting in a kanari tree. Using its teeth, it chewed straight through a slender branch that sprouted twigs bearing
half a dozen white blossoms swollen with fruit. The cluster of twigs and fruit fell at the bird’s feet, landing on the large,
solid branch where it was perched. It proceeded to attack one of the fruits, chewing through the leathery hull, which had
not quite ripened to the point where it would split open and spill the seeds, the almonds, on to the ground.
Grant came over to see what he was looking at. Prabir described what he’d observed so far. The bird had extracted one of the
almonds from the fruit, and was performing an even more elaborate routine to penetrate the hard shell.
She said, ‘This part’s old hat: its a famous case of specialisation for a food source.’ The bird had broken away part of the
shell, and was now holding the nut with one foot
while it used the sharp, hooked part of its upper beak to tear out fragments of the kernel; a tongue like a long-handled pink-and-black
rubber stamp darted out to pick up the pieces and take them into the bird’s mouth. ‘Going for the unripe fruit is new, though.’
‘So it doesn’t have to wait for the nuts to fall. Which means the teeth are there to help it stay off the ground?’
‘I suppose so,’ Grant conceded. ‘But there might have been any number of reasons in the past why that was a good idea. It
doesn’t require co-evolution with the ants.’
Prabir turned to her. ‘If you’d come to this island knowing nothing about its history, nothing about the ordinary fauna of
the region – if you’d dropped in out of the sky in a state of complete ignorance about this entire hemisphere – what would
you think was going on here?’
‘That’s a stupid question.’
‘Humour me.’
‘Why? What point is there in ignoring the facts?’
Prabir shook his head earnestly. ‘I’m not asking you to do that. I just want you to look at this afresh. If you’d just arrived
from the insular British Isles with an immaculate, theoretical training in evolutionary biology, but no contact for a thousand
years with anyone east of Calais, what would you conclude about the plants and animals here?’
Grant folded her arms.
Prabir said, ‘I’m withdrawing my labour until you answer me. Forgetting all the history you know, what does this really look
like to you?’
She replied irritably, ‘It looks to me as if the affected species originally shared territory with all the others, then became
isolated on some remote island and co-evolved separately for a few million years – and now they’re being progressively reintroduced.
OK? That’s what it
looks like
. But on what island is this meant to have happened?’ She spread her arms. ‘It didn’t happen here: you can vouch for that yourself.
There’s
no island in the whole archipelago sufficiently isolated, and sufficiently unexplored.’
‘Probably not.’
‘Certainly not.’
Prabir laughed. ‘OK. There’s no such island! All I’m saying is, when the account you’ve just given sounds so
much
simpler than a hundred separate genes in a hundred separate species marching back from the past in perfect lock-step – I
have a lot of trouble seeing how it can’t be telling us
something
about the truth.’
Grant’s expression softened, her curiosity getting the better of her defensiveness. ‘Such as what?’
‘That, I don’t know.’
Prabir had rewritten the image-processing software to run directly on Grant’s camera. In the afternoon, she found the camouflaged
fruit pigeons all around them.
Fluttering across the viewfinder between the pigeons were the butterflies. The wing patterns had changed dramatically – the
dappled imitation of foliage and shadows they’d acquired was far less striking, far less symmetric, and far more variable
from insect to insect than the old concentric bands of green and black – but when Grant finally captured one and Prabir saw
the body, he knew they were the descendants of the insect he’d first seen pinned to a board in his father’s office at the
university.