‘As an accident.’
‘I’m not going to perjure myself. There’ll be an official inquiry, it’ll all come out.’
‘Are you
blackmailing me now?’
Grant shook her head calmly. ‘I’m telling you what will happen. That’s not a threat, it’s just the way it will be.’
Prabir covered his face with his arms. The prospect seemed unbearable, but maybe it would help Madhusree put his death behind
her if she understood that she owed him nothing. He hadn’t acted out of love for her, or some sense of duty towards their
parents. He hadn’t even been protecting their shared genes. Everything he’d ever done for her had been to conceal his own
crime.
He turned and started walking towards the minefield. Grant shouted something, but he ignored her. A rain of darts hit his
upper back; he lost all feeling after the fourth or fifth, he could no longer count them. He began to feel slightly giddy,
but it didn’t slow him down. Grant still had no chance of catching up with him.
He felt a sting on the side of his right leg, like a hot sharp blade passing over the skin. He lost his footing, more from
surprise than from the force of the bullet, and toppled sideways into the undergrowth. With his shoulders paralysed he had
no strength in his arms: he couldn’t right himself, he couldn’t even crawl.
A minute later, Grant knelt beside him and plucked out the darts, then helped him to his feet. He was bleeding almost as much
from the barbed-wire shrubs as from the grazing wound she’d made in his leg.
She asked, ‘Are you coming back to the boat now?’
Prabir met her eyes. He wasn’t angry with her, or grateful. But she’d robbed him of all momentum, and complicated things to
the point where it would have been farcical to keep opposing her.
Farcical, and monumentally selfish.
He was silent for a while, trying to come to terms with this. Then he said, ‘There’s something I want to do here, if you’re
willing. But we’ll need some tools, and I’ll have to wait until this shit wears off.’
*
They returned to the kampung in the afternoon, with a chainsaw and a mallet. Grant cut branches into metre lengths and Prabir
drove them into the ground, making a small fence all the way around the mined garden. He nailed warning signs to each side,
in six languages, using his notepad to translate the message. There wasn’t much chance of fishermen coming this far into the
jungle, but when the next biologists arrived it would be one small extra safeguard.
Grant said, ‘Do you want to put up a plaque?’
Prabir shook his head. ‘No shrines. They’d have hated that.’
Grant left him, trusting him now. Prabir stood by the fence and tried to picture them, arm in arm, middle-aged, with another
half-century ahead of them. In love to the end, working to the end, living to see their great-great-grandchildren.
That was what he’d destroyed.
Grant had kept insisting:
They wouldn’t have blamed you!
But what did that mean? The dead blamed no one. What if his mother had survived, crippled by grief, knowing he was responsible?
She might have tried to shield him at first, when he was still a child. But now? And for the rest of his life?
And his father—
He had no right to test them like this, asking them to choose between rejection and forgiveness. And whatever excuses they
might have made for him, however much compassion they might have shown, it made no difference in the end. He didn’t want their
imaginary blessing, he didn’t want any kind of plausible solace. He only wanted the impossible: he wanted them back.
He sat on the ground and wept.
Prabir made his way back to the beach, before the light failed. He’d lost the will to die, to anaesthetise himself out of
existence.
But to live, he’d have to live with the pain of what he’d done, not the hope that it could be extinguished. That would never
happen. He’d have to find another reason to go on.
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.
Although the Hilbert space in which the pure states reside cannot be reconstructed with certainty, it has been shown theoretically
for simpler systems [Deutsch 2012, Bennett 2014] that an exhaustive search for global entropy minima over the unknown degrees
of freedom can identify probable candidates in polynomial time by exploiting quantum parallelism
.
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.’