Teranesia (19 page)

‘Why not do it yourself?’

She shrugged. ‘Not my style. Begging to foundations for charity to do something beautiful and useless.’

Prabir felt like grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her; this sounded so defeatist. He said, ‘Maybe in a few years
you’ll feel differently. Once you’re not facing the same financial pressures—’

Grant pulled a face. ‘Don’t organise me; I hate that. No wonder your sister ran away from home.’

Prabir crouched down beside the orchid. ‘First mimicry, now symbiosis. These gene-recovery enzymes of yours can hit a bull’s-eye
at fifty million years.’

‘And don’t gloat, it doesn’t suit you. I admit it, freely: there’s something going on here that I don’t understand.’

Prabir said, ‘I still think your basic idea must be right.
Functional genes take thousands of years to develop. If they appear overnight, the organism has to be cheating. “Here’s one
I prepared earlier.” What else can it be?’

Grant seemed ready to accept this, but then she shook her head. ‘I can’t answer that, but it’s starting to look as if I’m
missing something fundamental. Perfectly camouflaged birds with no predators. Thorned plants with nothing even trying to munch
on them. There are misses as well as bull’s-eyes. But even the misses are too
precise
.’

She squatted beside Prabir. The ants were methodically criss-crossing the tear in the stem, secreting a papier-mâché-like
scaffolding a thousand times faster than any plant could have grown new tissue. She said, ‘Don’t you wish you could just ask
them for the whole story? When did they get together and sort this all out? Why did they stop? Why did they start again? What
is it we don’t understand?’

It was late morning on the second day when they reached the mangrove swamp. They were at least a kilometre inland, but there
was a narrow valley running from the heart of the jungle to the coast, its floor a would-be river bed with too little runoff
feeding it to prevent sea water flooding in at high tide. At low tide, the halophytic trees would stand naked in an expanse
of salty mud, but that was still hours away; for now, the way ahead was inundated.

Grant peered into the tangle of branches and aerial roots. ‘It’s only a few hundred metres across. We should be able to wade
through without too much trouble.’

‘And then time it so we can cross back at low tide?’

‘Yeah.’

Prabir found that part appealing; if they had to do this at all, he’d rather do it while he still had the energy.

He double-checked that all the sample tubes he was carrying were sealed; his watch and notepad were fully waterproof. There
didn’t seem much point taking any of his clothes off;
they’d get coated in slime however he carried them, and the more protection he had against scrapes and splinters from the
roots, the better.

Grant waded in up to her knees. Prabir followed her, every step like an exaggerated mime of walking as his boots stuck afresh
in the mud. The water was turbid with silt, almost opaque where it could be seen at all, but most of the surface was covered
with a layer of algae and dead leaves. The odour of salt and decay was insistent – like breathing over a garden compost heap
with seaweed added for effect – but not overpowering or stomach-turning. Other parts of the forest had smelt worse.

The protruding brown roots of the mangroves were dotted with snails, but Prabir spotted small brown crabs as well. Clouds
of mites and mosquitoes approached them and then backed away; at least their repellent was holding out. The trees were twenty
or thirty metres tall; it was eerie to look up into the branches, decorated with small white blossoms and tiny green fruit,
then down into what was essentially dirty sea water, as if a forest had sprouted in the middle of the ocean.

The mud was annoying, but it wasn’t treacherous; the hidden mangrove roots were far more pernicious. Every time Prabir thought
he’d learnt to judge where a clear stretch of ground might lie between two trunks, he walked into a root at shin height. The
water was above his waist now, and the clues from the visible roots were getting harder to read. He’d started out following
directly behind Grant, unashamedly letting her blaze the trail, but then his concentration had lapsed, and he’d skirted a
submerged obstacle on his own to find that they’d been shunted to either side of it. Since then, they’d been moving further
apart, following entirely separate paths through the drowned maze.

Grant called out to him, ‘Hey, watch out!’ Prabir looked around; a black snake about a metre long with narrow yellow stripes
was swimming towards him. He scanned the tangle of
litter around the nearest trunk, looking for a forked stick he could use to persuade the snake to keep its distance, but it
veered away of its own accord, blinking elliptical green eyes like a cat’s.

The water grew deeper, reaching high on his chest; the trees thinned slightly, but not enough to compensate for the loss of
visibility. Grant was a few centimetres shorter than he was, and she was submerged almost up to her chin. Prabir shouted,
‘Next time, we cheat and take the boat around the coast.’

‘Amen to that.’

‘I don’t want to come back this way, even when the tide’s out. We’d be better off walking along the beach, and swimming across
the inlet if we have to.’

Grant swore suddenly; Prabir assumed she’d just been bruised twice in the same spot in rapid succession, which was particularly
painful. She shouted, ‘This is ridiculous! I’m going to try swimming, here and now.’ She leant forward into the water and
began a slow breast-stroke.

Prabir observed the experiment with interest. She was scooping aside some of the surface muck as she went, but it was still
piling up around her face and shoulders. ‘What’s it like?’

‘Not too bad. The current’s pretty strong, though.’ She wasn’t exaggerating; as the water carried her sideways she almost
collided with a trunk, but she managed to swim clear of it. It looked no more dangerous than tripping through the roots, and
a whole lot faster.

Grant was wearing light canvas shoes; Prabir would have to take his boots off to swim. He hesitated, wondering if it was worth
the trouble. He crouched down, submerging his head to reach the laces, but they were too slippery and waterlogged to untie;
his fingernails slid uselessly over the knots he’d made to secure the bows.

He stood up, scraping mulch off his face. Grant was no longer in sight.

He shouted after her, ‘Wait for me at the shore!’

A faint reply came back. ‘Yes!’

Prabir trudged on, occasionally making a half-hearted attempt to swim over obstacles. He’d grown fitter over the last two
weeks, and reached the point where their normal day-long excursions were bearable, but just stepping over the endless, unpredictable
succession of mangrove roots was turning the muscles in his legs to jelly. Once he was out of this shit-hole, he had no intention
of spending three hours gathering samples for Grant; he’d walk down to the ocean, wash the slime off his body, and curl up
under a palm tree. How had she managed to stretch his unpaid duties so far beyond bad translations, bad cultural advice, and
surprisingly reasonable cooking?

He could see a grassy clearing ahead, with ordinary trees behind it. The water was still up to his chest, but dry land was
just ten or fifteen metres away. He shouted, ‘Grant? I’ve had enough! I’m going on strike!’ If she was in earshot she didn’t
deign to reply.

The ground climbed abruptly, the water dropped to waist height; the shore was within reach, no longer an unattainable mirage.
Prabir’s shins collided with an obstacle that felt like a large fallen branch; wearily, he stepped back in order to step over
it, but then his calves hit something behind him, just as high, that felt much the same.

For a moment he was simply bemused. Could he have sleep-walked right over the first branch, without even noticing it?

Then the gap between the two obstacles tightened, and he realised that they were parts of the same thing.

He quickly pulled his right foot out of the enclosing coil, and probed forward for a safe place to put it. As his foot touched
mud, the snake shifted, dragging his left leg back, overbalancing him. He hit the water with his hands over his face, cringing
with fear – terrified of coming eye to eye with
the thing, though he knew that was the least of his problems. He swam forward clumsily, fighting both the instinct to right
himself and the weight of his boots dragging his feet down. Then he felt something pass by swiftly and smoothly in the water
ahead of him, and his arms came down against the body of the snake, blocking his way again.

He backed away, staggering to his feet, shifting the tightening noose from his lungs to his abdomen just in time. He still
couldn’t see any part of the snake, but he’d felt its girth. This wasn’t one of the placid four-metre pythons he’d seen feeding
on birds as a child, merely adapted to salt water. It was half as thick as his torso. It would be more than capable of swallowing
him.

He opened his mouth to cry for help, but the sound died in his throat. What could Grant do? Tranquilliser darts wouldn’t penetrate
the water, and even if she could pump her whole supply into the snake, its body weight would be hundreds of times greater
than the largest of the birds they’d used the darts to subdue. She’d end up standing helplessly on the shore watching him
die, or getting killed herself trying to rescue him. He couldn’t do that to her. He couldn’t sentence her to either fate.

Prabir groped for his pocket knife, shivering with fear. He scanned the water desperately; if he plunged the knife into the
snake’s head with enough force, the blade might just penetrate its skull. The coil of its body slid smoothly over his hips,
tightening its hold. He followed his sense of where the motion was coming from, and saw a ripple in the water, a faint wake
disturbing the surface.

It was six metres away. He’d be wrapped all the way up to his shoulders before the head came within reach.

He started stabbing wildly at the snake’s body, bringing the knife down from high above his head. The blade bounced off its
skin. He collected himself; he was wasting his energy splashing up water. He put both hands underwater and drew
the knife up towards his belly with all the strength in his arms and back,
seppuku
in self-defence. The knife burst through the leathery hide and sank up to the hilt. He tried to drag it along, to make a
cut, giddy for a moment with triumphant visions of flaying the snake from head to tail. The knife wouldn’t budge; he might
as well have tried to split a tree trunk this way. He pulled it out, and repeated the thrust that had proved successful. As
the blade made contact, the snake shifted again, and the knife went spinning out of his hands.

He bent down and fumbled for it. The snake jerked him off balance, immersing him completely. He groped across the mud, but
he couldn’t find the knife. He lifted his face up, arching his back to get his mouth out of the water, spluttering for breath.
The tell-tale wake was passing in front of him again; the snake had almost completed a second coil.
Grant might be able to reach its head. She might find a way to attack it without risking her own life
.

And if she couldn’t?

She wouldn’t martyr herself. And if there was nothing she could do, and he died in front of her, she wouldn’t be crippled
by the experience. She wasn’t a child.

He filled his lungs and bellowed, ‘Gra-a-a-ant!
Help me!
’ The snake had finally worked out how to drown a biped: Prabir could
feel it change the tension in its muscles, skewing the angle of the coils, forcing him down. He tried to fill his lungs again
while he still had the chance, but the constriction around the bottom of his ribcage stopped him dead half way through; it
was like hitting a brick wall.

Then he went under.

Prabir lay beneath the water, no longer struggling, faint lights dancing in front of his eyes. This was all wrong: he should
have died in the minefield of the garden instead. The first blast would have been enough to kill him instantly; no one would
have had to follow him in. His parents would have
grieved for the rest of their lives, but they would have had Madhusree, she would have had them.

Suddenly he heard a loud, rhythmic splashing noise. It wasn’t the snake turning hyperactive: someone was beating the water
with a heavy object. The timbre gradually changed, as if the water was being struck in successively shallower locations. Then
there was a resounding thwack, wood against wood.

The snake’s muscles slackened perceptibly. Prabir fought to raise his head. He caught a shallow breath, and then a glimpse
of the lower half of someone standing on the shore. Not Grant: a woman with bare dark legs. The snake twitched back to life
and jerked him down again. The beating sound resumed, ten, fifteen powerful blows.

As he struggled to snatch another mouthful of air, Prabir heard the woman slip into the water. He didn’t question his sanity:
he knew he wasn’t hallucinating. As he turned the strange miracle over in his head, he felt no fear for her. Everything would
be all right, now that they’d been reunited.

The woman said urgently, in bad Indonesian, ‘You need to work, you need to help me! It’s only stunned. And I can’t pull you
out on my own.’ Prabir forced himself upright, fighting the passive weight of the snake. The woman wasn’t Madhusree.

She helped him loosen the coils enough for him to climb up on to her back. He didn’t seem to have any broken bones, but he
was even weaker from the ordeal than he’d realised; she carried him like a child to the water’s edge, then manoeuvred him
on to the ground before she clambered out of the water herself. She picked up the heavy branch she’d used to bash the python
senseless, then reached down and hauled him to his feet. ‘Come on. Back from the water before we rest. It won’t be out cold
much longer.’

Prabir staggered after her, still holding her hand. His teeth
were chattering. He said in English, ‘You’re a biologist, aren’t you? You’re with the expedition?’