Teranesia (15 page)

He said, ‘What do you think’s going on here? With the animals?’

‘I have absolutely no idea.’

Prabir laughed. ‘That’s refreshing.’

‘I do have a few vague hypotheses,’ Grant admitted, opening her eyes. ‘But nothing I’d reveal except under extreme duress.’

‘Oh, come on! You’re not talking to a fellow biologist here. I’m much too ill informed to recognise heresy, and my opinion
has no bearing on your reputation anyway. What have you got to lose?’

Grant smiled and leant on the railing. ‘You might blab to your sister, and then where would I be?’

Prabir was affronted. ‘Madhusree can keep a secret.’

‘Ha! Her, not you! That shows how far I can trust you.’

Prabir said, ‘What if some kind of toxin, some kind of mutagenic poison had been dumped on one of the uninhabited islands
here, decades ago? A few dozen drums of industrial waste, chemically related to the kind of stuff they use to induce mutations
in fruit flies?’ It seemed far-fetched that anyone would go to the trouble of doing that, rather than just dumping it at sea,
but it wasn’t impossible. He wouldn’t necessarily have stumbled across the site; he hadn’t explored every last crevice on
the island. The shift from the butterflies to all the other species could be due to a dramatic change in exposure levels:
the drums might have split open after a few more years of weathering, or the land where they were buried might have subsided
in a storm. Or maybe the poison had simply worked its way up the food chain. ‘The successful mutants thrive and breed, and
some of the healthiest ones manage to cross to other islands. The only reason we’re not seeing any unfavourable mutations
is because the afflicted animals are dying on the spot.’

Grant regarded him with undisguised irritation; she seemed genuinely reluctant to be drawn on the subject. But she wasn’t
prepared to let this scenario go unchallenged. ‘Maybe you could explain the sheer number of genetic changes with a strong
enough chemical mutagen, but the pattern still doesn’t make sense. Given everything else we’ve seen, some proportion of the
animals who escaped from this hypothetical island should have had at least a couple of neutral alterations: changes to their
anatomy or biochemistry that wouldn’t kill them or significantly disadvantage them, but which served no
useful function at all. So far no one’s seen anything of the kind.’

‘Yes, but even the most “insignificant” disadvantage could be serious dead weight if you have to travel hundreds of kilometres
just to be noticed. Maybe we’re only seeing mutants with changes that have been positively beneficial. I mean, you’d have
to be pretty fit to fly all the way to Ambon from any of the remote islands in the south.’

Grant gave him an odd look. ‘They found a mutant tree frog in Ceram. That couldn’t have come from too far south – assuming
it wasn’t hatched on the spot, which it might well have been.’ Ceram was a large island just ten kilometres north of Ambon.
It was heavily populated around the coast, and parts of the interior had been logged and mined, but a considerable amount
of rainforest remained intact. If Grant got it into her head to veer north and start traipsing through the jungles of Ceram,
he’d never get anywhere near Madhusree’s expedition.

‘There are ferries running between the major islands,’ Prabir reminded her. ‘Something like a tree frog could have hidden
in a crate of fruit, or even got on board a plane. Human transport can always complicate things to some degree.’

‘That’s true. But what makes you so sure that these animals have travelled at all?’

Prabir thought carefully before replying. Even if he’d known nothing about Teranesia, wouldn’t it be reasonable to suppose
that there was an epicentre somewhere? He said, ‘If they haven’t, their parents or grandparents must have. If you follow the
mutations back to their source, every animal must have had at least one ancestor exposed to the same mutagen at some point.
I mean, whatever the cause, isn’t it stretching things to think that the same conditions could be repeated in half a dozen
different locations?’

Grant shrugged. ‘You’re probably right.’ But she didn’t sound as if she meant it.

Prabir tried to read her face. If the animals weren’t travelling, what was? Any chemical spill severe enough to retain its
potency across thousands of square kilometres could hardly have gone undetected this long. A hushed-up nuclear accident was
even less plausible.

He said, ‘You think it’s a virus? But if it’s spreading all over the Moluccas, doesn’t that make it a thousand times harder
to explain why we’re not seeing any unhealthy mutants? And isn’t it a bit far-fetched to think that it could infect so many
different species?’

Grant gave him her sphinx impression. Prabir folded his arms and glowered at her. He wasn’t just killing time now: he was
genuinely curious. He’d kept pushing the question aside as a distraction, but what Felix had called his cover story wasn’t
entirely false: this was Radha and Rajendra’s life’s work, and part of him really did want to know what they would have discovered
if they’d had the chance to complete it.

He said, ‘Unless the two mysteries are one and the same? Unless whatever makes the animals so impossibly successful makes
the virus successful too?’

Grant said firmly, ‘We’ll gather some data, and we’ll see what we find. End of discussion. OK?’

Prabir lay on his bunk with his notepad’s headset on, brushing up on his Indonesian vocabulary. It was after midnight, but
Grant was apparently still awake and busy. Most of the cabin was hidden from view by the row of lockers alongside the bunk,
and the faint glow that diffused around them might have come from nothing but the phosphorescent exit sign, but whenever he
took a break from his lessons he could hear the distinctive metallic squeaks of the ‘captain’s chair’. He had no idea what
she was doing; with the collision avoidance radar
and sonar switched on there was no pressing need for anyone to keep watch.

His concentration was faltering. He froze the audio and took off the headset. The humidity had become almost unbearable; the
sleeping bag he was using as a mattress was soaked, and the air was so heavy that it felt as if he was drawing every breath
through a straw. Maybe he’d be better off sleeping on deck, now that they were far enough out to sea not to worry about insects.
The genetic quirk that had required him to be a walking mosquito killer as a child had no effect on the modern vaccine – another
triumph for biotechnology, though when they reached some of the islands with undrained swamps he’d probably wish he still
sweated repellent.

He rolled up his sleeping bag and headed for the cabin door. Grant was seated at the console, examining a chart of the Banda
Sea stretching all the way down to Timor. Prabir explained what he was doing. ‘Is that OK with you?’

‘Yeah, of course. Go ahead.’ She turned back to the chart. Prabir wondered belatedly if he was eroding her privacy; the cabin
windows had no blinds, so the two of them would no longer be as manifestly out of each other’s sight as when he’d been tucked
away behind the lockers. But she hadn’t raised any objection, and once she switched off the console she’d be all but invisible
anyway.

As he unrolled his sleeping bag on the deck, he tried to decide whether or not he owed it to Grant to tell her he was gay.
On one level it seemed like an insult to both of them to suggest that it mattered; unless he’d misread her completely, she
was the kind of person who’d start from the assumption that he wouldn’t try to exploit their situation, and she’d certainly
shown no sign of wanting to exploit it herself. But he knew that his judgements were sometimes skewed; he was so accustomed
to ruling out by fiat the whole idea of sex that he forgot that other people weren’t necessarily viewing him
through the same filter. A few years after he’d started at the bank, he’d been assigned two graduate trainees to supervise
while they were on a month’s rotation in his department: a man and a woman, both about his own age. He’d done his best to
put them at ease, remembering how nervous he’d been in his own first weeks on the job, and as far as he could tell he’d been
equally hospitable to both of them. But after they’d moved on, the news had got back to him that the woman had found his behaviour
positively oppressive. He’d
been too nice. He must have wanted something
.

There was a gentle breeze moving across the water; for a minute or two Prabir was almost chilly, until his skin reached a
kind of clammy equilibrium. The boat was pitching slightly as it crossed the waves, but that bothered him even less than it
had in the confined space of the cabin.

He’d brought his notepad with him, but he was too tired to continue with the language lessons. He stared up at the equatorial
sky, the sky he’d seen from the kampung at night: obsidian black, with stars between the stars. He could fix his eyes on one
spot and try to map it, but his mind stopped taking in information long before he hit the limits of vision.

A few hours before he’d almost welcomed being back on the Banda Sea, but the connection seemed a thousand times more immediate
now, the details of his memory sharper by starlight. He could feel the years melting away in the face of the accumulating
evidence: the musical sound of the half-familiar language ringing in his ears, the struggle to sleep on a humid night. That
was how memory worked, after all: placing like moments side by side. There was no linear tape inside his head, no date stamp
on every mental image. It didn’t matter what had happened since. Nothing could stop the days and nights of eighteen years
before becoming like yesterday.

He picked up his notepad and scrolled to the address book. Felix would be at work, but they could still talk for a few minutes.
Though he’d never admit to it, he’d probably been
offended that Prabir had only left a message when he’d called from the hotel. He’d probably welcome a civilised conversation
to make up for the slight.

Prabir put down the notepad. He was sure it would work, he was sure it would help: watching the face of his lover in Toronto
painted before him in a fine grid of light. That would banish the night terrors. But it still felt like the kind of crutch
he didn’t want to lean on.

Prabir woke at dawn to the sight of Gunung Api, a black volcanic mountain rising out of verdant hills to tower over the Banda
Islands. White mist – he hoped it was just mist – swirled around the peak. Gunung Api was still active, and though it hadn’t
done serious harm for fifteen years, a recent report had said that clouds of hot gas and ash were being vented every month
or so.

Api, Bandanaira and Lontar, the three main islands of the group, were about as close to each other as they could be without
merging like Ambon’s Siamese twins. Lontar, to the south, was the largest, and Prabir could just make out the tips of it protruding
on either side of the smaller northern pair.

He glanced towards the cabin. Grant didn’t seem to be up, so he urinated overboard to save disturbing her. He wondered if
the boat would stop for him if he dived in for a swim to clear his head; the autopilot would certainly detect the event, but
exactly how it responded would depend on the settings Grant had chosen. He decided not to risk it.

He sat on the deck and watched the volcano. Birdsong carried across the water, a faint, distorted version of the chorus that
had woken him as a child. He laughed wearily.
He’d sailed this sea before, he’d seen these stars before, he’d heard these birds before … but so what?
Most people lived on in the very same town where their parents had died, some in the very same house. It was only because
he’d left the whole country behind that it had come to seem so charged with
significance. This was just a place like any other; it couldn’t drag him back into the past.

Grant emerged from the cabin and stood beside him, yawning and groggy, but smiling at the spectacle in front of them.

She said, ‘I don’t know about you, but quite frankly I stink. I’m going swimming.’

They sailed into the gently curved channel between Lontar and the other islands, past a moss-encrusted Dutch fort, towards
the main town of Bandanaira. A vast coral garden lay beneath them, visible clearly through the water. Grant almost swooned
with delight, crying out excitedly every now and then when she recognised yet another species of fish or sponge or anemone.
Prabir stood beside her trying to be blasé; even if he couldn’t put a name to every one of these creatures, he
had
seen this all before, when the ferry had passed through on the way to Ambon. The Bandas had been a major tourist destination
then, the harbour full of thirty-something Beijing honeymooners snorkelling and – rather more bafflingly, and a great deal
less benignly – jet-skiing. But between the war, the 2016 eruption, and a number of subsequent minor earthquakes, the tourist
industry seemed to have gone the way of the spice trade.

They found a mooring and set out into town. Apart from one abandoned modern hotel the buildings were in good repair, and Prabir
felt no sense of poverty or decay; Bandanaira seemed to have shrunk back into obscurity gracefully. People moved unhurriedly
on foot or on bicycles. The volcano loomed over the main street, barely three kilometres away; it was impossible to tell from
here that it was on another island altogether.

After a while a swarm of children surrounded them: not beggars, just curious, exuberant kids, born long after the last tourists
had departed. When they asked where the visitors
were from, and Prabir said, ‘Canada and Wales,’ they dissolved into fits of laughter; maybe they were too young to have heard
of either place and thought these were unlikely-sounding made-up names. When Prabir managed to get a question of his own in,
the answer was disappointing but no great surprise: the biologists’ expedition hadn’t stopped here.

One of the older boys told him earnestly, ‘Your wife is very beautiful. Tell her she is very beautiful.’ Prabir translated
the compliment but left out the presumption of matrimony. It had occurred to him back in Ambon that it might simplify things
if they agreed to let people assume this as a matter of course, but he hadn’t had a chance to discuss it with Grant, and he
didn’t want to argue the point in public.