Teranesia (16 page)

Grant consulted her notepad and they turned down a side road. The children fell away. Prabir said, ‘Do you want to tell me
where we’re going?’

‘Up into the nutmeg plantations.’

‘They’re hardly plantations any more. They’ve been abandoned for decades.’

‘Forests, plantations, call them what you like. We haven’t come here to negotiate a shipment of mace.’

Prabir couldn’t imagine what she was hoping to find; centuries of cultivation had left the islands with little in the way
of wildlife. He’d assumed that they’d only dropped anchor here to ask the locals for news from travellers passing through
from further south, or to scour the market for curiosities that might not have been shipped up to Ambon.

As they left the town behind, the dirt road became increasingly overgrown; they trudged through the heat, encountering no
one. Grant had a licence from the government in Ambon to collect specimens for research purposes throughout the RMS, but Prabir
suspected that they should still have asked for permission from the Bandanese themselves before heading out into the countryside.
Under
adat
, customary law, all visitors to the island would be seen as guests of the raja – an
honour that carried an obligation to inform him of their movements – but short of requesting an audience with His Whateverness,
they might at least have checked with the nearest villagers that they wouldn’t be disturbing any ancestral shrines. The trouble
was, if they went back into town so Prabir could sound people out about the correct protocol, Grant would soon realise that
he was playing it by ear and start asking herself why she couldn’t have done the same without him.

The narrow, unkempt path that the road had become led them into the plantation, then abandoned them completely. They picked
their way slowly through the undergrowth. Even at the height of the spice trade the plantations had never been a monoculture,
and the tall, white-blossomed kanari almond trees interspersed with the nutmeg – planted to give shade to the saplings – seemed
to have retained their share of the light long after the withdrawal of human intervention. It was the space between the trees
that had reverted to jungle: rattan and lianas snaked from trunk to trunk, some of them unpleasantly spiked, and there were
waist-high ferns everywhere. Prabir was glad he was in boots and jeans; he’d wandered Teranesia barefoot as a child, but his
soft city feet wouldn’t have lasted five minutes here. Grant had gone so far as to wear a long-sleeved shirt, and after half
an hour his own arms were so scratched that, despite the heat, he envied her.

He stopped to catch his breath. ‘If you tell me what you’re looking for, we might find it a little faster.’

‘Fruit pigeons,’ Grant replied curtly.

Prabir almost responded with an acerbic remark about the difficulty of doing field work with such limited powers of observation,
but he stopped himself in time. Fruit pigeons might easily have been classed as vermin and hunted to extinction by the plantation
owners, but they’d been spared for the sake of their convenient habit of shitting out the nutmeg seed, sowing it naturally.
They weren’t exactly
overwhelmed by competition or predators on any of the islands, but here they’d be in paradise.

So why hadn’t he seen one yet?

The pigeons he remembered had all been large, noisy and brightly coloured, but he knew there were smaller species too, some
of them quite well camouflaged. They hardly needed to be silent and invisible, though, here of all places. And there had to
be thousands of them.

He said, ‘Can we stop here for a while? Maybe we’re scaring them with all the noise.’

Grant nodded. ‘That’s worth a try.’

Prabir stood motionless for ten minutes, staring up into the branches. He could hear other birds in the distance, and a constant
hum of insects, but nothing like the discordant clacking he remembered.

Grant couldn’t resist needling him. ‘So where are they, eagle-eyes? You have my advantage in both youth and experience; if
you can’t see them, we might as well go back to the boat.’

‘Don’t tempt me.’ He had a better idea, though. ‘Have you got a camera on you?’

‘Yeah, of course.’

‘Can I borrow it?’

Grant hesitated, then handed it to him.

He examined it carefully. ‘How much did this cost?’

‘Five hundred euros. Which is well above my personal definition of “disposable”. Why? What are you planning to do with it?’

Prabir commanded her loftily, ‘Be patient.’ Five hundred euros meant that the lens would give a much sharper image than his
notepad’s camera, and the stabiliser would be a laserring system, not a trashy micro-mechanical accelerometer.

Grant brushed the debris off a fallen trunk and sat down. Prabir set the camera to the widest possible angle, aimed it at
a tree twenty metres away, and recorded sixty seconds of vision.
Then he passed the data to his notepad through the infrared link.

The program he needed was three lines in Rembrandt, his favourite image-processing language. As he watched the result on the
notepad’s screen, Grant saw the expression of delight on his face and came over to see what he’d found.

Outlined in fluorescent blue by the software, half a dozen small green-and-brown birds moved along the branches. Prabir glanced
up from the screen to the tree, but even now that he knew exactly what to look for, he couldn’t see the birds for himself.
The software was only identifying them in retrospect by comparing hundreds of consecutive frames, and even then it sometimes
lost track of their edges against the pattern of leaves.

Grant complained indignantly, ‘You don’t know how galling this is. I grew up on smug biologists’ jokes about pathetic computerised
attempts at vision.’

Prabir smiled. ‘Things change.’ Grant was probably only ten years old than he was, but the idea seemed as quaint to him as
jokes about heavier-than-air flight.

‘Can you replay it?’

‘Sure.’

As she watched the scene again, she mused, ‘I’ve seen stick insects with that level of camouflage. And some predatory fish.
But this is extraordinary.’ She laughed and swatted something on her neck. Prabir had expected her to be elated by their find,
but the birds’ proficiency seemed to unnerve her.

He struggled to recall the images Madhusree had shown him back in Toronto. ‘You think this is the pigeon that turned up in
Ambon nine months ago?’

Grant nodded. ‘We’ll need specimens to be sure, but it looks like it.’

‘But how did you know it would be here? I thought no one had traced it back from the bird dealer.’

‘They hadn’t, but this seemed the most likely spot. I can’t
think why no one else looked here. Maybe it was just prejudice: the Bandas aren’t wild, they aren’t pristine, they aren’t
havens of biodiversity. How could a new species possibly be born in a place that was so “barren”?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I will, when I know.’

Grant had brought a tranquilliser gun. Prabir improvised software to display the outlines with the minimum possible time lag,
but it still took them three hours to hit their first target. As he picked the sleeping bird out of the undergrowth, he reflected
uneasily on the possible source of its mutations. He still believed it was more than likely that he was looking at a recent
descendant of a Teranesian migrant, but if it had brought along a mutagenic virus that could cross between species, tens of
thousands of people were potentially at risk. The virus might have taken eighteen years to leap the biochemical gulf between
butterflies and birds, but birds were notorious for harbouring potential human diseases. He wished he could get some straight
answers out of Grant; it was one thing to avoid starting groundless rumours, but she owed him an informed opinion on whatever
it was she thought they were dealing with.

They returned to the boat at dusk, grimy and exhausted, with blood from four pigeons. Prabir looked on as Grant prepared the
samples for analysis; the preservative that had kept them stable in the heat had transformed them into blobs of puce jelly.

He said, ‘Do you know anything about the species that used to be here? I don’t mean prior to the Dutch; just ten or twenty
years ago.’

‘There’s a 2018 report that mentions half a dozen sympatric species of
Treron, Ptilinopus and Ducula.’

‘ “
Ducula”
You’re making that up.’

‘No, they’re the big ones. Imperial pigeons.’

‘So what does “sympatric” mean?’

‘Sorry. Co-existing, sharing territory.’

Prabir nodded, ashamed at his laziness; the child who’d named Teranesia wouldn’t have needed to ask. He’d never studied European
classical languages, but everyday English had inherited all the clues: just hybridise ‘symmetry’ and ‘repatriate’.

Grant said,
‘Treron
are green, but the others are usually brightly coloured, presumably for the sake of mate recognition. The theory is, that’s
how they formed separate species in the first place: runaway sexual selection based on plumage, overriding any need for camouflage
in the absence of predators.’

‘So where have they all gone?’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe the bird trade wiped them out. The prettiest fetch the highest prices, and they’re also the easiest to
catch.’

Prabir wasn’t so sure; fruit pigeons weren’t exactly birds of paradise. Still, times must have been hard after the war, and
maybe there’d been enough of a market to make it worth hunting them down.

Grant pulled open a panel on the rack of analytic equipment, and pushed one of the tubes of blood on to a spike. ‘Now we wait.’

Prabir went for a swim in the deserted harbour, staying in the water until it was so dark that he began to wonder what he
might be sharing it with. He’d forgotten to bring a towel out with him, so he sat on the deck for a while to avoid dripping
all over the cabin. When he walked back in, Grant glanced up from her workbench, taken unaware. He went over to his bunk to
put on a T-shirt.

He called out, ‘Any news?’

‘I’ve got all the sequences.’

‘And?’ He approached her. ‘Is it the same species as the one they found in Ambon?’

Grant replied hesitantly, ‘One of our sequences is almost identical to the Ambon data. And all four have the same novel blood
proteins as the Ambon bird.’

Prabir cheered. ‘So you were right: you found it in the wild. Congratulations!’ Grant didn’t look particularly pleased, though.
He said, ‘What else?’

She glanced down at her notepad. Prabir could see strings of base-pair codes and a cladogram. ‘They also have genetic markers
in common with some of the uncamouflaged species we assumed were gone.’

Prabir tried to make sense of this. ‘You mean, they weren’t wiped out, they started breeding with each other?’

‘No, there’s no evidence of that. Each individual specimen we collected shows signs of a distinct recent ancestry. I’m not
even sure that they’re not still separate species.’

‘Now I’m confused.’ He laughed. ‘They look identical, they share exotic blood proteins, but you think they have completely
different lineages?’

Grant spread her hands on the bench. ‘I can’t be certain, but it looks to me as if they’ve all converged on the same set of
traits, within a couple of generations, without interbreeding. Something has given rise to the same genes for the blood proteins
and the camouflage, independently, in at least four different species.’

Prabir sat on the stool beside her. ‘Something?’ This was absurd, she had to be mistaken, but he was hardly equipped to tell
her where she’d gone wrong in her analysis. ‘What are you suggesting? There’s a retrovirus on the loose that splices a set
of
fruit pigeon genes
into anything it infects – including some genes that happen to be exactly what fruit pigeons need to vanish into the foliage?’

Grant scowled. ‘I haven’t taken leave of my senses completely. And I don’t have viruses on the brain like you do.’

‘OK, I’ll shut up about viruses. But what’s doing it then? Where did these genes come from?’

She stared down at the bench, still angry with him. He was sure she had an answer, though; she just wasn’t willing to commit
it to words.

Prabir said gently, ‘I know how important it is for you to be cautious. But I’m not going to leak your theory to Nature, or
sell your data to some rival pharmaceuticals company. And if I’m at risk of fathering children with bright-green feathers,
don’t you think I deserve to be told?’

He regretted the words as soon as they were out, but Grant’s expression softened. She said, ‘If these pigeons haven’t interbred
for hundreds of thousands of years, what do they still have in common?’

Prabir shrugged. ‘They share the same habitat.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose they’d still share most of their genes, dating back to their last common ancestor.’

Grant said, ‘Exactly. But not just working genes: whole stretches of inactive DNA as well. Don’t you see? That has to be the
source of all these “innovations” – they’re not innovations at all! You can’t get functional genes appearing out of nowhere
in two or three generations. You just can’t! A random sequence of amino acids doesn’t merely form a useless protein, it forms
an ill-conditioned one: a molecule that doesn’t even fold predictably into a well-defined shape. These blood proteins are
perfectly conditioned: they have conformations with energy troughs as sharp as haemoglobin’s. The same with the pigmentation
morphogenesis proteins that produce the camouflage. The odds of that happening by chance –
de novo
, in the time frame we’re talking about – are nil.

‘Somehow, these birds must have repaired and reactivated genes from an old common ancestor. They’ve reached back into the
archives and dusted off blueprints that haven’t been used for a million years.’ She shook her head, smiling slightly, shocked
at her own audacity but triumphant too. ‘That’s what
I half suspected all along, but this makes the case a whole lot clearer.’

Prabir was still catching up. ‘You’re saying that all these different species of pigeon have found a way to resurrect fossil
genes buried in their DNA, and because they have so much old baggage in common, the same traits have emerged in all of them?’