Teranesia (13 page)

Prabir was about to move on when he noticed the exhibit at the singers’ feet, largely obscured by the pedestrians passing
in front of it. Some kind of animal had been inexpertly dissected,
and the parts laid out on a stained canvas sheet. Reluctantly, he moved closer. The viscera and the separated bones meant
nothing to him; the intended audience had probably had more experience with butchering animals, and would at least know what
was meant to impress them. The skull looked like a small marsupial’s, a tree kangaroo or a cuscus. Some pieces of the hide
were thickly furred; others were covered in shiny brown scales. But if the creature really had been some kind of astonishing
chimera, why lessen the impact by cutting it up?

One of the evangelists opened her eyes and beamed at him. His clothes and backpack must have given him away as a foreigner;
the woman addressed him in halting English. ‘End times, brother! End times upon us!’

Prabir replied apologetically, in Bengali, that he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

The desk clerk at the Amboina Hotel was far too polite to laugh when Prabir asked where he might hire a boat as cheaply as
possible. The response – couched in the most diplomatic language – was that he could forget about the ‘cheap’ part and join
the queue. Everyone who’d arrived in town for the last two months had been looking for a boat; it was a seller’s market.

This was a dispiriting start, but Prabir fought down the urge to retreat into pessimism. ‘There was a group of about twenty
people who would have passed through Ambon three weeks ago. Scientists, on an expedition being mounted by some foreign universities.
Have you heard anything about that?’ There were half a dozen other places they could have stayed, but he had nothing to lose
by asking.

‘No. But we have many guests here from foreign universities.’

‘You mean, in general? Or in the hotel right now?’

The man glanced at his watch. ‘Mostly in the bar, right now.’

Prabir couldn’t believe his luck. They must have completed the first stage of their work and returned to base to recuperate.
They could hardly have been stranded here all this time; they would have organised transport well in advance.

He sat in his room for forty minutes, trying to decide exactly what he’d say to Madhusree. How he’d explain his presence,
what he’d propose they do. If he’d picked up his notepad and called her from Toronto, she would have talked him into staying
there, but this was scarcely any better. He’d imagined tracking her down somewhere so remote that she couldn’t simply order
him home, but here there was nothing to stop her. The next flight out of Ambon was never more than a day away.

He wouldn’t push his luck: he wouldn’t ask to be allowed to tag along with the expedition. He’d suggest that he stayed on
in the hotel, so he could see her each time she came back into town. That wouldn’t embarrass her too much, surely?

The longer he thought about it, the more nervous he became. But it was no use trying to rehearse the whole encounter, writing
scripts for both of them in his head. He’d go downstairs and face her, see how she reacted, and play it by ear.

The bar opened into a shaded courtyard; all the customers were out there catching the afternoon breeze. Prabir bought a syrupy
fruit concoction whose contents defied translation; the bartender assured him that it was non-alcoholic, but that seemed to
be based on the dubious assumption that the whole thing wouldn’t spontaneously ferment before his eyes, like an overripe mango.
Prabir took one sip and changed his mind; the sugar concentration was high enough to kill any micro-organisms by sheer osmosis.
He steeled himself and walked out into the courtyard.

He scanned the tables, but he couldn’t see Madhusree anywhere. There were only about thirty people in the
courtyard; it didn’t take him long to convince himself that she was not among them.

Someone stretched a hand out to him. ‘Martin Lowe, Melbourne University.’ Prabir turned. Lowe was a middle-aged man, visibly
sunburnt – not surprising if he’d been at sea for the past three weeks. There were two other men seated at the same table,
intent on some kind of printout. He shook Lowe’s hand distractedly and introduced himself.

Lowe asked amiably, ‘Are you looking for someone?’

Prabir hesitated; he couldn’t announce his intentions baldly to one of Madhusree’s colleagues, before he’d even spoken to
her. ‘Is the whole expedition staying here? In this hotel?’

‘Expedition? Ah. I think you’d better have a seat.’

Prabir complied. Lowe said, ‘You mean the biologists, don’t you? I’m afraid you’ve missed them; they left weeks ago. They
took a boat and headed south.’

‘But I thought they were back.’ Prabir blinked at him, confused. He’d had nine hours’ sleep in Darwin, and woken at dawn feeling
perfectly normal, but now jet-lag was catching up with him again. ‘I thought you said you were—’

‘You thought I was one of them? God, no!’ The older man seated opposite glanced up from his work. Lowe said, ‘Hunt, this is
Prabir Suresh: he’s chasing the biologists, for some unfathomable reason. Hunter J. Cole, Georgetown University. And this
is Mike Carpenter, one of his postdocs.’

Prabir leant across the table and shook hands with them. The desk clerk hadn’t been mistaken; the bar was full of foreign
academics. But if the biologists hadn’t returned, who were these people?

‘You’re here to observe the Efflorescence?’ Cole wore a fixed, slightly self-effacing smile, as if he knew from long experience
that it was only a matter of time before he said something devastatingly clever, and he was already basking graciously in
Prabir’s anticipated response.

‘I suppose so. Though I hadn’t heard it called that before.’

‘My own terminology,’ Cole confessed, raising one hand dismissively as he spoke. ‘My
Taxonomy of Eucatastrophe
has not been widely read. And still less widely understood.’

Prabir was feeling increasingly disorientated. The title sounded as if it should have made sense to him – something to do
with population ecology, maybe? – but the actual meaning eluded him completely.

‘Whatever terminology we choose to deploy,’ Lowe responded earnestly, ‘what we’re witnessing here is a classic manifestation
of the Trickster archetype, taking gleeful pleasure in confounding the narrow expectations of evolutionary reductionism. After
biding its time for almost two centuries, indigenous mythology has finally given rise to the ideal means of undermining the
appropriations of Wallace. This meshes perfectly with my over-arching model of nature as “The Unruly Woman”: disruptively
fecund; mischievously, subversively bountiful.’

Cole smiled contentedly. ‘That’s an interesting framework, Martin, but I find many aspects of it deeply problematic. The only
safe assumption we can make at this point is that we’re moving into a Suspensive Zone, where normal logics and causalities
are held in abeyance. To reify the disruptive impulse is to presuppose that every teleological trajectory implies an agent,
and ultimately to misunderstand the entire dynamic of Wrongness.’

Prabir was experiencing severe
déjà vu:
Keith and Amita had had arguments like this, all Big Dumb Neologisms and thesaurus-driven bluster. It was like listening
to two badly written computer programs trying to convince each other that they were sentient. He glanced hopefully at Cole’s
student, Carpenter; surely his generation had regained some mild interest in reality, if only for the sake of rebelling against
half a century of content-free gibberish.

Carpenter tipped his head admiringly towards his mentor. ‘What he said.’

The rest of the courtyard had fallen silent. Prabir looked around to see what had caught their attention. A huge black bird,
fifty or sixty centimetres tall, had landed on one of the unused tables, and was sitting with its back to him, preening its
feathers. Though it was dark as a raven, it was unmistakably a species of cockatoo, with a slender, almost thread-like crest.
He’d seen them on the island now and then, but never in the metropolitan heart of Ambon. Maybe this was a sign that the city
really had brought its pollution levels under control.

The bird turned its head to peck at its shoulder, revealing a row of sharp brown teeth embedded in the lip of its beak.

Prabir felt a small, hot trickle of urine flow across one leg. Mercifully, he’d emptied his bladder half an hour ago; there
was almost nothing to soil his clothes. He glanced at Lowe, who was staring at the creature with a glazed expression. No one
in the courtyard was moving or speaking. The bird emitted a brief raucous cry, then began grooming under one wing.

‘You’re a fine boy, aren’t you? You’re my beautiful boy!’ A woman had risen from one of the tables; she approached the bird
slowly, crooning to it softly, circling around it to get a better view. Prabir watched her, horrified at first, then impressed
by her presence of mind. The thing was still a cockatoo, after all, not some taloned bird of prey. As a child he’d been entirely
unafraid of its equally imposing cousins, and the teeth scarcely added to the kind of damage its beak could have inflicted
anyway.

The woman announced, to no one in particular, ‘I can see no sign of reversal of normal fusion in the vertebrae of the pygostyle.
No vestigial claws on the wing tips. Naive to look for these things, I suppose, but whose instincts wouldn’t tell them to
cherchez la theropod?’
Prabir found it hard to judge whether her speech was slurred – she spoke with a strong Welsh accent for which his ear was
not well calibrated – but her movements seemed a bit uncoordinated.

She made a grab for the bird’s legs. It squawked and ascended half a metre, then came down on the table again, lunging at
her. Prabir rose to his feet, but he was too far away to help. The bird sank its teeth into the woman’s forearm, shook its
head vigorously to and fro half a dozen times, then opened its jaws and flew away.

‘Fuck.
Fuck!’
She stared after it angrily, then glanced down at her wound. ‘Buccal fauna. Food residues.
Saliva!’
She tipped her head back and laughed with delight, then dashed from the courtyard.

Prabir caught up with her outside the hotel. ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry. Can I talk to you for a second?’

The woman scowled at him. ‘What’s your problem? I’m in a hurry.’

‘I understand. I won’t slow you down; I can explain while we walk.’

She didn’t look too happy with this, but she nodded reluctantly. ‘It’s too crowded for me to run, and I don’t want to raise
a sweat.’ Prabir thought it unwise to point out that this was a lost cause, unless she planned to conjure up an air-conditioned
limousine in the next thirty seconds.

He said, ‘I’m hoping to get in touch with someone on the expedition. Do you think you’d be able to let me have a copy of the
itinerary?’ She must have arrived late in Ambon, or succumbed to a temporary illness when the others were leaving. Since she
hadn’t given up and gone home, she was presumably in the process of arranging to rejoin her colleagues. If he offered to split
the cost, she might even let him hitch a ride.

She took a few seconds to make sense of his question. ‘You mean the university biologists? I’ve only been here six days; they
left weeks ago.’

‘You’re not with them?’

‘Hardly. I’m freelance.’

‘You’ve had no contact with them at all?’

‘No.’ She turned to face Prabir, without slowing her pace. ‘Can’t you just call whoever it is? There’s no reason for them
to be having reception problems.’

‘It’s my sister. And no, I can’t call her.’ He added defensively, ‘It’s complicated.’

The woman shrugged; this was none of her business. ‘I’m sorry. But I really don’t know where they’ve gone.’

Prabir was bitterly disappointed, but he struggled to regain some perspective. Before he’d checked into the hotel he hadn’t
expected to learn anything useful for days.

He said, ‘Well, good luck with the saliva. I can’t think what possessed you to walk into a bar without a sequencer on you.’

She laughed. ‘There’s no excuse, is there? I carry a camera about the same size, and I didn’t even think to use it. The sequencer
would have been a thousand times more valuable … but no, I had to leave it on the boat.’

Prabir didn’t bother to conceal his amazement. ‘You have a
boat?
And you’re still here after six days?’

‘Don’t get me started.’ She regarded him darkly. ‘I gave myself three days to buy provisions and hire a guide. But everyone
I speak to wants to drag all their friends and family into the deal: no guide without hiring a whole crew.’

‘You have a crew already?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘It’s a brand-new MHD craft, not a
prahu
with sails and masts and rigging. There’d be nothing for a crew to do, except fish and sunbathe at my expense. I brought
it here from Sulawesi; I can handle it perfectly on my own. I put myself through a doctorate in Aberdeen working part-time
on a North Sea fishing trawler. This whole place looks like a millpond to me.’

Prabir wondered if it had occurred to her that not everyone in Ambon necessarily doubted her seacraft, or was intent on ripping
her off. Most men here would consider it inappropriate to be alone on a boat with a foreign woman, and not many
women would be willing to take on the job at all. The simplest thing to do would be to reconcile herself to the need to hire
as many hangers-on as decorum required.

There was one cheaper alternative, though.

He said, ‘If you could cope with the North Sea, I’d trust you here any day. And I grew up in these islands.’

‘You did?’

He nodded calmly, planning to lie by omission only. ‘I was born in Calcutta, but my family moved here when I was six. I live
in Canada now, but I still think of this as—’ He trailed off, unable to say it, though a few more honest alternatives came
to mind.

They were almost at the harbour. She stopped walking, and offered him her hand.

‘I’m Martha Grant.’