Prabir had expected to be placed under guard in a tent at the edge of the camp, or perhaps imprisoned in a cage built from rough-hewn branches tied together with rattan — the kind of thing they always seemed to be able to construct at short notice in movies, whenever someone on a tropical island needed to be restrained. What the Lord’s Army did instead was trash the control console of Grant’s boat, dispose of all the pigeons, butterflies and blood samples in a bonfire on the beach, steal Grant’s rifle and tranquilliser gun, and lock Prabir in the cabin. They posted one sentry on deck and another on the beach.
Prabir sat in the captain’s chair in front of the ruined console, swinging the seat slowly back and forth. The ancient PCR machine might have malfunctioned. Or it might have amplified nothing but a fragment of plant DNA that had entered his bloodstream through a scratch from a barbed-wire shrub. A foreign cell in the process of being taken apart by his immune system wouldn’t even have been replicating, let alone creating germ cells through meiosis — the prerequisite for the São Paulo gene to be expressed. Whatever the powers of SPP in the right context, an inert copy of its gene was just another piece of junk to be scavenged, broken down and recycled.
The gene had found ways to cross between other species, though; he couldn’t pretend it was unthinkable that it had breached his body’s defences. He’d been cut, scratched, bitten, and glued by half a dozen kinds of Teranesian plants and animals, and handled dozens more with broken skin. The gene might not have created a transmission route specifically for humans, but having been exposed to so many different mechanisms tailored for other animals, he could have been infected with a viable copy by sheer bad luck.
What did it do when it succeeded? Headed for the place where germ cells were made, carrying an endonuclease to incorporate itself into the genome. What was the worst possible scenario, then? His sperm would all carry the São Paulo gene, their DNA would be rewritten by the protein. But if there was any risk of transmission through sex, he could always learn to use condoms — and if he ever wanted a genetic child, that could be done almost as easily with another cell type in place of sperm. If it was warranted, he could even have new testes grown for transplant from a single uninfected skin cell.
That was not the worst scenario. What had the fishermen done in their village? And why had Aslan been so ready to accuse him of rape? Could a gene that was switched on only in the stem cells that manufactured sperm influence sexual behaviour? Testosterone was made by other cells nearby; perhaps SPP could rewrite the genes of spermatocytes in such a way that they emitted chemical signals to enhance the secretion of testosterone by their neighbours. If the level in the blood had been cranked up sufficiently, could that alone have transformed the fishermen into rapists? It wasn’t completely far-fetched; body-builders had once gone psychotic from injecting similar hormones. The progression would not be inevitable, though: there were drugs that blocked testosterone. And again, in the longer term a transplant could dispose of the affected cells entirely.
Still not the worst. Why had he tried to make love to Martha? Because she’d saved his life, and he’d imagined she’d welcome it? Because he’d wanted to be comforted any way he could, after facing the kampung? Because a surge of testosterone and a lack of alternatives had been enough to overwhelm both his nature and his judgement?
He had no end of rationalisations, no end of excuses. But the worst scenario was that none of them had really been enough. If the gene could gauge the reproductive consequences of everything it did, it might ‘sense’ the fact that it was in a cul-de-sac, and find a way to change that. If Furtado was right, once the gene was active, whatever it was physically capable of doing to his brain or body that would lead to it counting more copies of itself would be done.
At dusk, they brought him a meal. The sentry ordered him to the far side of the cabin then left the plate inside the door. Prabir tried to think lustful thoughts as he ate, but the situation was not conducive. What was he hoping to do: assay his sexuality by introspection, hour by hour, like a diabetic monitoring blood sugar? What had happened with Grant proved nothing, except that strong emotions could breach a barrier that he’d come to think of as inviolable.
It did not prove that the São Paulo gene was in the process of tearing it down.
Later in the evening, as the sentries were changed, Colonel Aslan appeared on the moonlit beach. Prabir stood by the cabin window watching him. They both wanted the same thing: for the São Paulo gene to be contained, for the risks to humans to be minimised even if the gene itself could not be eliminated. The only problem was, Prabir was still hoping to fall on the right side of the line when the abominations were incinerated, but the Colonel might have some trouble with his criterion for judging that.
‘We are praying for you,’ Aslan announced. ‘If you repent, you will be forgiven. You will be healed.’
‘Repent of what?’ Prabir demanded angrily.
Aslan seemed to take pleasure in refuting the assumption that he had a one-track mind. ‘All your sins.’
Skin crawled on Prabir’s arms. What would it be like, to believe in a God as corrupt as that? But if his parents had been floating in fairy-floss heaven, there would have been a whole lot less to forgive. Lying about death was the only way these elaborate pathologies remained viable; all the milksop Christian sects that diverged from the dominant strain and embraced mortality with a modicum of honesty soon withered and vanished.
He called back, ‘What happened to the fishermen? Were they forgiven? Were they healed?’
Aslan replied, ‘That is between them, and God.’
‘I want to know what their crimes were, and how they died. I want to know what’s in store for me. You owe me that much.’
Aslan was silent, and too far away for Prabir to read anything from his face. After a moment, he turned and walked away along the beach.
Prabir shouted after him, ‘You can stop praying: I can already feel the power of the creator inside me! That’s who you’re fighting, you idiot! After four billion years, the old donkey’s finally woken up, and he’s not going to keep on carrying any of us the way he used to!’
By two a.m., Prabir felt tired enough to sleep. He had nothing to gain from vigilance, and he knew that if he didn’t grab at least a couple of hours he’d lose whatever judgement he had left. He lay down on Grant’s bunk; the air moved far more freely out in the cabin than in his allotted corner. He could still smell her sweat on the sheets, though, and the scent conjured up images of her, vivid memories of the night before.
He rolled off the bunk and stood in the darkness. He was becoming paranoid. He’d never been repelled by the thought of sex with women, merely indifferent, and despite all his failed, dutiful attempts in adolescence, he might yet simply be bisexual. Either way: he loved Felix, and nothing would change that. Their history together, brief as it was, had to count for something. He was not a tabula rasa, he was not an embryo.
If his brain could be melted and rewired, though, anything could change. It wasn’t just his sexuality at stake: the human species was riddled with far stranger compromises, any of which the São Paulo gene might find superfluous. Most of evolution had been down to luck; apart from the first few hundred thousand years of simple chemical replicators, there’d never been an opportunity for every physically possible variation to compete. At every step, chance and imperfection had created organisms with outlandish traits that would not have been favoured by a comprehensive exploration of the alternatives. Complexity had ridden on the back of success, but if the efficiency of the process had been tightened a few more notches, single-celled organisms — still the most successful creatures on the planet — would never have bothered to become anything else. The São Paulo gene wasn’t that far-sighted, it hadn’t dissolved every bird and butterfly into a swarm of free-living bacteria. But if it was allowed to reshape the evolutionary landscape for humans, many more things would vanish than the oxbow lakes.
Prabir heard a dull thud outside the cabin. He peered out on to the deck. The soldier had slumped to his knees; as Prabir watched, he keeled over on to his side.
The sentry on the beach was still standing, facing the jungle, oblivious to his comrade’s fate. Prabir searched the moonlit water, but the cabin was so low that the deck hid most of the view near the boat. The sentry reached back as if to slap away an insect, then staggered. Prabir couldn’t see the dart in his neck, but it could not have been a bullet. Grant must have borrowed a tranquilliser gun, but what had she loaded it with to have such an effect? Strychnine?
The man collapsed face-down in the sand. Grant would probably search him — and it seemed unwise to shout out to warn her not to bother — but neither sentry had the key to the boat: Prabir had seen it passed from hand to hand when his meal had been delivered, it had been brought from the camp and taken back again. There was no point both of them wasting time; he tried his strength against the door of the cabin, but neither the lock nor the hinges gave any sign of yielding. He picked up a stool and bounced it repeatedly against a window, hoping to flex the pane enough to snap the rivets that held it to the frame; the assault was gratifyingly silent, but completely ineffectual.
Someone tapped a staccato rhythm on the window on the other side of the cabin. He put down the stool and turned. Madhusree called out softly, ‘I’m told you can slide this one open from the inside.’
Prabir approached her. She was dripping wet, her hair tied back, long bare limbs catching the moonlight. She hadn’t seemed so beautiful to him since the day she was born, and all the reasons were reversed now: her vulnerability, her ungainliness, her bewilderment, had all been replaced by their opposites. His parents should have seen this transformation, not him, but he savoured the sweet kick in the chest, unearned or not.
He said, ‘I don’t want to infect you. You’d better get off the boat.’
Madhusree sighed. ‘Are you sneezing? Are you covered in pustules? What’s it going to do, launch missiles? It’s a molecule, not a voodoo curse. If you want to be careful you can stand away from me, but I need to come into the cabin and check out the equipment.’
Prabir was mystified. ‘Why?’
‘So I don’t waste time bringing things from the other boat.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Madhusree grimaced with impatience. ‘I don’t know what we’ll need. Martha said I could take whatever’s working from here, so it will help if I know what that is. Now open the window.’
Prabir complied, then retreated to the far corner as she climbed into the cabin and began inspecting the rack of biochemical instruments. The soldiers had attacked the autopilot with a crowbar, and taken away everything organic to be burned, but they seemed to have left these machines untouched.
‘You’ve spoken with Martha?’
‘Yeah, through the wall of a tent. She couldn’t get away herself, but it’s not exactly maximum security back there. They’ve got poor Dr Sukardi tied up somewhere and guarded round the clock, but they seem to think that’s all that matters, as if he’s our own little tinpot colonel and we’re all helpless drones without him.’
Madhusree had a tranquilliser gun tucked into the back of her shorts. Prabir asked nervously, ‘What was in the darts?’
She replied almost absent-mindedly, ‘The normal sedative, but I added something to wreck the catalytic portion. It’s a self-degrading molecule, that’s why it’s safe to use on so many species: half of it forms an enzyme that lyses the whole thing into harmless junk in the presence of ATP, so it doesn’t require anything fancy in the organism to detoxify it. But it breaks itself down so quickly once it enters the bloodstream that if you disable the enzyme, it makes a huge difference: the potency goes up a thousandfold.’ She turned to him and added pointedly, as if she’d finally realised what he’d been fearing, ‘We have enzymes in the liver that can deal with it, though. It’s still not toxic to humans.’
She finished her inventory. ‘OK, this is great. You start unmounting these and stacking them on the deck. I’ll go and get the inflatables. I should be back in about ten minutes.’
Prabir said, ‘I must be slow, but I think I’m missing something. Where are we going with all this? What’s the plan?’
Madhusree smiled, proud and conspiratorial, as if Amita might walk in at any moment and ask why they were whispering.
‘What do you think? We’re heading south.’
Prabir followed his instructions while Madhusree swam out to the expedition’s ship. Then he checked the sentry curled up on the deck; the man was still breathing, slowly and deeply.
He stood and waited for Madhusree to return. Simply by travelling with her, he’d endanger her to some degree. But Grant had remained uninfected, after handling every Teranesian species he’d touched himself, after they’d kissed. With no one to keep him grounded he’d let his imagination run wild: the only hard facts were that a trace of the gene had been found in his bloodstream, and the fishermen had changed in some way that nobody wanted to talk about.
Madhusree appeared from behind the ship, rowing a bright-orange inflatable dinghy towards him, with a second one in tow, loaded with cargo. For one awful moment, Prabir wondered if she planned to get to safety under human power alone, but both dinghies had outboard motors, she was just minimising noise. He looked back towards the camp; the sentries had been changed around ten p.m., and it was now nearly twenty to three. In the moonlight, the orange polymer might as well have been fluorescent. Would they have until dawn, or just till the hour, to vanish over the horizon?
Madhusree brought the dinghies up against the boat. ‘Hand those down to me, one at a time.’
Prabir passed her the first of the machines. ‘What’s this all for?’ There were already half a dozen identical silver boxes in the second dinghy, as well as bottles of reagents, and four large fuel cans.
‘To monitor you, of course. And treat you, if necessary.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I hope it won’t be necessary. I’m hoping nothing will happen before we reach Darwin.’
‘Darwin? If the Australians get the slightest idea of what I’m carrying, they’ll lock me in a hut in the middle of the desert on top of their nuclear waste dump.’
‘No, they’ll deport you back to Canada in a military jet with biohazard containment facilities, then send you the bill. I can think of worse fates if we head in other directions.’
Prabir said, ‘What exactly is it you’re hoping won’t happen en route?’
‘If I knew that, we’d be travelling lighter.’ She slid the last machine into place between the others and tested the whole pile for stability. Then she tossed him a life jacket; she was already wearing one herself. ‘OK. Get in.’
‘I’ll ride in the back.’
‘You just don’t want to help me row.’
Prabir climbed over the guard rail and lowered himself into the second dinghy. He was afraid it would sink perilously low, but the air-filled walls gave it a lot of buoyancy and his weight barely made a difference. The tide was high, and Madhusree seemed to have crossed right over the submerged reef on her way in, without bothering to steer any special course.
She began rowing them laboriously towards the open sea. ‘Remember Orr, in Catch-22?’ she asked cheerfully. ‘He rowed a lifeboat all the way to Sweden.’
‘I remember.’ He’d given her the book for her eleventh birthday. ‘But I take it we’re going to stop at Yamdena and hitch a ride in something more seaworthy?’
‘That’s the plan. I wouldn’t want to cross the Arafura Sea in these things.’
Prabir was silent for a while, then he said, ‘Are you angry with me?’
Madhusree laughed. ‘How can I be angry? Not only do I have the first authenticated specimen of a Teranesian mammal, I have exclusive access to all his biochemical data. I’ll be able to spin this into a PhD, for sure.’ She turned to him without missing a stroke and said, ‘We should have done all of this differently. You should have come along as part of the expedition. We should have been open about everything from the start. But it doesn’t matter now. Their work’s been acknowledged, and someone will complete it. That’s good enough for me.’
They were well past the reef, but still in easy sight from the beach. Madhusree’s arms were trembling from fatigue; she’d swum several hundred metres before picking up the oars. Prabir said, ‘Swap places, I’ll do some rowing.’
‘OK.’
They swam between the dinghies; it was easier than trying to leap across the gap without landing on something. Prabir took the oars and settled into a rhythm. The emptiness ahead of them, the useless stars, the circle of moonlit water that followed the boat were all the same as they’d been eighteen years before.
He struggled to stay in the present. ‘How many people are hiding in the jungle?’
‘Ten, now.’
‘So what are they going to live on?’
‘It’s not that hard to smuggle out food. Anyway, we’ve already sent word up to Ambon; the situation should be resolved in a couple of days. I gather that it’s all a matter of diplomats calling in favours, until one of West Papua’s major aid donors agrees to apply some muscle. I know that sounds horribly convoluted, but it’s probably a lot safer than Ambon sending in a warship.’
‘Yeah. Can you see anything happening back on the beach?’
Madhusree had brought a pair of binoculars. ‘That guy’s still lying where he fell.’ She added teasingly, ‘Still glowing at body temperature.’
‘I never thought you’d killed them,’ Prabir protested.
‘You’re a bad liar.’
‘Martha might have. Not you.’
‘You don’t think I’m commando material?’ Madhusree sounded disappointed.
‘I certainly hope not.’ He glanced over his shoulder at her; she was grinning. She didn’t remember the soldier in the grass, bleeding slowly to death. He joked, ‘I knew I should have never let you take up muay thai. All that brutality. You’ve been scarred for life.’
After a while they swapped places again. Prabir looked back with the binoculars in IR mode, waiting not only for the prone soldier to vanish, but for the haze of distortion above the water to swallow the entire beach.
‘You can start the motor.’
Madhusree hit the ignition and her dinghy shot forward, pulling the connecting rope taut. The motor was running on diesel, but it was so quiet that Prabir almost wept. They could have fired it up half an hour ago; they’d been making more noise just by talking.
‘Do you think they’ll come after us?’ she asked. ‘It might not be hard to guess the right direction.’
Prabir said, ‘I don’t know if I’m worth the trouble to them. As long as I’m not heading for their country, I’m someone else’s problem now.’
The dinghy’s outboard motor had its own GPS, its own inertial navigation, its own autopilot. Madhusree zeroed in on their chosen destination on a map displayed on a small panel, confirmed the choice, then left the machine to steer. The only thing not automated was obstacle avoidance; they’d have to take over manually if they ran into shipping, and with any luck that would mean cutting the motor and waiting to be rescued, not swerving wildly to avoid getting mown down.
As dawn approached, she tossed Prabir a plastic-wrapped hypodermic. ‘If you’re going to be paranoid, you’ll have to take your own blood samples.’
‘Urgh. This should be fun.’ He tore open the packet; there was a disinfectant swab enclosed, like an airline’s miniature scented towel. He pulled off his belt and tightened it around his left arm. ‘I feel like a drug addict.’
Madhusree shook her head despairingly. ‘Junkies use sonics: transdermal acoustic delivery systems that make the skin permeable to small molecules like opiates. There’s no risk of infection, because viruses are too large to get through. How do you think hepatitis C got wiped out?’
‘I knew all that,’ he lied. He applied the swab then slid the needle carefully into the crook of his elbow, but the dinghy lurched just as he was applying pressure, and the needle transected the vein. ‘Fuck.’ He steeled himself, then tried again at a different point; this time the blood spurted satisfyingly into the low-pressure sample tube. ‘How often do we have to do this?’
‘Every couple of hours at first, just to see what’s going on.’
Prabir left the hypodermic in place and flung the tube of blood across to Madhusree. A valve had shut off the flow automatically, but it was awkward trying to stop the needle slipping out. ‘Have you got some tape or something? I might as well keep this in.’
‘Good idea. There’s an anticoagulant coating on the needle, so it won’t clog up. But you knew that, of course.’ She tossed him a packet of band aids.
‘What are you looking for? In the samples?’
‘Levels of the gene, tissue types affected.’ Madhusree tinkered with one of Grant’s silver boxes until it emitted an encouraging boot-up chime.
‘Tissue types?’
She fed the blood to the machine. ‘If the gene is being incorporated into various kinds of cells in your body, occasionally one will break free and end up in your bloodstream. If I sort the cells with flow cytometry before bursting them and probing the DNA, I can track what’s happening.’
Prabir said, ‘It should only be in my testes, though, shouldn’t it? I mean, it has a promoter that will only switch it on during meiosis, so why bother incorporating anywhere else?’
The machine began whirring. Madhusree looked up and said encouragingly, ‘I hope it hasn’t even got a hold there. We’ll probably never know how it got into your bloodstream, but it certainly hasn’t come to you via another mammal, so its past experience is of limited relevance. Nothing works the first time in a new environment.’
‘You don’t believe in Furtado’s theory, then?’
She laughed and said flatly, ‘No.’
Prabir didn’t challenge her to provide her own explanation; he didn’t want to derail her, he didn’t want to erode her confidence. She’d track the gene through his body, and they’d fight it. However it worked, whatever it did.
When the sun cleared the water there was no land in sight, though Prabir could see Teranesia’s peak to their west through the binoculars. Straight ahead he saw nothing but sea. They wouldn’t reach Yamdena till midnight.
Madhusree said, ‘First results. Are you ready?’
‘Yeah.’
‘The São Paulo gene’s been incorporated into spermatogenic stem cells, complete with the usual promoter.’
Prabir nodded acceptingly. He’d been prepared for that, and however tainted it made him feel, a transplant could still rid him of the gene completely.
‘But it’s also present in dermal stem cells. With a different promoter.’
‘In my skin?’ He stared at her, more baffled than alarmed. ‘Why?’
Madhusree shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
Prabir looked down at his arms and hands; they appeared perfectly normal. He lifted his shirt above his waist. There was a glossy patch on his abdomen, a shiny purplish-black region the size of a large coin. He touched it warily. The surface of his skin felt the same as ever, but when he applied enough pressure to sense what lay beneath, instead of the usual springiness of muscle he met resistance from an object as hard as bone.
‘It’s solid. It’s some kind of tumour.’ He was numb with revulsion. ‘Can you cut it out? Please?’
Madhusree said, ‘Stay calm.’
Prabir removed his life jacket and pulled off his shirt, almost dislodging the hypodermic in his haste; there were two more patches higher on his chest. He turned so Madhusree could see his back. ‘There are five,’ she announced. ‘About the same size.’
‘You could anaesthetise me with the tranquilliser gun,’ he implored her. ‘They’re not that deep. I won’t lose much blood.’ The gene would still be in his body, but he didn’t care. He wanted this visible, palpable sign of it removed.
‘Are they causing you any pain? Any burning sensation? They could be completely benign.’
‘Benign?’
Madhusree held her hands up, pleading with him for cool-headedness. ‘If there’s no pain or bleeding, they might only be replacing the normal dermis rather than invading other tissues. And if there’s no inflammation, at least they’re not provoking an autoimmune reaction.’
Prabir took several deep breaths. He’d handled a peppering with shrapnel better than this. He said, ‘There’s no pain, no inflammation.’
‘OK. I’ll synthesise growth factor blockers tailored to the receptors the cells are expressing. That should at least stabilise them.’
‘You can do that?’
‘Of course. It’s a second-year lab project: “Here’s a cultured organ with an unknown tumour. Characterise the tumour, and stop it growing.” ’ Madhusree regarded him tenderly across the narrow channel of water. ‘You’re going to be fine! We just have to be patient. We’ll get to Yamdena, we’ll get to Darwin, we’ll get to Toronto. And then we’ll fix you up for good.’
As Madhusree worked on the growth factor blockers, the hard, shiny plaques beneath his skin grew thicker and larger. New ones blossomed, on his arms and legs and buttocks. The sensation of their presence when he moved was strange, but only rarely painful, and Prabir took some comfort from their uselessness; the São Paulo gene was behaving as stupidly and randomly as a virus blundering into a brand-new host. Leprosy would have had about the same effect on his mating prospects. He’d hardly dared admit to the fear before, but as they’d left the island of the mangroves behind, he’d thought: It could have the power to do anything. It could have the power to make me rape my own sister.
It didn’t. If the fishermen had been affected in the same way as him, they’d probably been hounded for their disfigurement by a superstitious mob, and merely tried to defend themselves. What had happened with Grant had just happened; he was tired of probing it for significance.
He lay back between the fuel cans and watched the blue water around them sparkling in the morning sun.
Just before eight o’clock, Madhusree threw him a plastic tube with a clear, oily preparation, still warm from the machine; the synthesiser, on request, had welded the tube closed. When Prabir placed it in the hypodermic’s receptacle and hit the injection button, the various mating surfaces were sterilised by laser flash, then the tube was punctured at both ends and the contents driven into his vein.
He took another blood sample. Half an hour later, Madhusree had the results: the number of cells containing the gene had risen substantially, but that was hardly surprising given the visible evidence of his skin. If the blockers didn’t work there’d be no hiding his condition by the time they hit Yamdena, but he’d given Madhusree his account details, so even if he was crippled she could summon enough money from the net to compensate for any squeamishness people might have about giving him a ride.
He watched her at the bow of their twin vessel, checking their position against her notepad’s GPS to be sure that the motor was running true, scouring the horizon with the binoculars for landmarks, validating everything three different ways. He was not going to tell her: You’re carrying your parents’ killer. You’re saving a life that should not have been saved. He couldn’t pretend to untangle his own shame and cowardice at the thought of her knowing, from his understanding of the effect the revelation would have had on her, but he didn’t need to. He was not going to rob her of this feat. He was not going to corrupt it.
The data from his ten o’clock sample worried Madhusree. ‘Another line of dermal cells with different growth factors has taken over; I’ll have to make new blockers. And there are traces …’ She trailed off.
Prabir said, ‘Traces of what? No more tantrums, I promise.’ He joked lamely, ‘It’s got me by the balls, how much worse can it get?’
‘Traces of everything,’ Madhusree admitted. ‘Every cell type in your body that can be found in your bloodstream now has a small proportion bearing the São Paulo gene.’
‘Could that just be spillage? Whatever kind of cells the packaging around the gene is tailored for, mightn’t it work inefficiently almost anywhere?’ He was afraid, but he wasn’t going to panic again. He was suffering from something like cancer. No one died of cancer in a day.
‘I don’t know.’ Madhusree’s confidence was fraying. She was a nineteen-year-old biology student, and there was no reference site, no expert pathologist, no repository anywhere in the world with any real knowledge of what was happening to him. ‘I could synthesise antisense DNA,’ she said tentatively. ‘To bind to the transcripts from the São Paulo gene, maybe stop it being expressed.’
Prabir’s spirits soared. ‘OK! Let’s try it!’
‘I’ll wrap it in lipids similar to the ones they use in gene therapy, but it won’t get into every cell type.’
‘Some cells will get a dose, some won’t. We’ll have controls. What more can you ask for?’
Madhusree regarded him nervously. ‘It might have no effect. Sometimes the cell just chops up the oligonucleotides — the pieces of DNA — before they can interfere.’
Prabir snorted, unimpressed. ‘They couldn’t manage that with the São Paulo gene, could they? Will this have agonising side effects?’
‘I doubt it. But I can’t be sure.’
‘No one can. This is all new.’
‘I’m out of my depth,’ she confessed.
He said, ‘It’s my decision. Let’s try it.’
Madhusree synthesised and packaged the antisense DNA. Prabir injected it, followed by a new set of growth factor blockers. Then he sat back in the dinghy and waited.
The sun was high now, the heat was surreal. The boats seesawed mechanically in the swell; it was like being strapped to some laboratory device for ensuring a thorough mixing of reagents. Prabir was amazed at the clarity of his senses, the sharpness to everything. It was the opposite of the suffocating blackness he’d felt when he’d willed himself towards death: in the bathtub in Toronto, in the swamp when he’d lost all hope against the snake, in the kampung as he’d strode towards the minefield. He thought savagely: I am not going to die in front of her. It’s not going to happen.
His skin had begun to itch and chafe, so he’d removed his jeans; he was wearing nothing but shorts and his life jacket. As he tried to move his legs to shift position, he discovered that he couldn’t. Where one ankle had rested on top of the other foot, the skin had glued itself together.
Prabir swore softly, and probed the weld with his hand. It seemed the plaques had broken through the skin above and merged, though he hadn’t felt a thing. He almost didn’t want to tell her, but he could hardly conceal it indefinitely. He called out, ‘Maddy!’ When she turned, he smiled and raised his conjoined feet for inspection. ‘One of us might finally have to wield a knife, or I’m going to need crutches on Yamdena.’
She leant across the gap for a better look. Then her face contorted suddenly and she started weeping.
Prabir said, ‘Hey! Ssssh! Stop that!’ He reached out a hand towards her face, not close enough to touch her, but the gesture alone made him feel as if they’d made contact.
He said, ‘You know what we’re doing next year, to get away from Toronto? Now that we’ve joined the jet-setting class?’
‘No.’
‘The IRA parade in Calcutta. You promised you’d help me pull the truck.’
Madhusree looked away. ‘I don’t remember that.’
‘You’re a bad liar.’
‘Your skin grafts won’t be healed.’
Prabir shook his head, laughing. ‘You’re not squirming out of this. I did the kebab skewer through my cheeks. You’re helping me pull the truck!’
Prabir was unable to take the noon blood sample. The second set of growth factor blockers hadn’t worked; the plaques had meshed and solidified across his shoulders, and though he could still bend his elbows, he didn’t have enough movement overall for the task. Madhusree put on surgical gloves, stepped across between the boats, and pushed an empty tube into the hypodermic’s receptacle.
She surveyed him unhappily. ‘It really doesn’t hurt? It’s beginning to look like acute psoriasis.’
‘It just itches a bit.’
‘Try to move as much as you can. I don’t want you getting pressure sores from lying on one spot.’
‘I’ll try. I don’t think this stuff could form ulcers, though.’
As she jumped back, Prabir said, ‘Hey! You know what we’re missing? Radio Lausanne. The Furtado verdict.’
Madhusree nodded unenthusiastically. She picked up her notepad and went to the Lausanne site.
Prabir couldn’t read the screen, so he watched her face. Finally she admitted, ‘The synthetic chromosome came through randomised, like the test sequences. Not conserved, like the real one from the pigeon. So the theory hasn’t been falsified.’ She regarded Prabir warily. ‘There might be something missing in the chemistry, though, something we can’t characterise about the natural DNA. It took a long time to understand methylation tags. There could be another modification, even subtler than that.’
Prabir said nothing, but he knew she was clutching at straws, the way he and Grant had when they’d first heard the theory and far too many things had fallen into place. Furtado was right: the gene could look sideways across a virtual family tree and quantify the usefulness of every potential change.
No treatment would ever destroy it. It couldn’t literally foresee Madhusree’s assault with the growth factor blockers and the antisense DNA, but it would always be prepared for whatever she injected, ready to make the best possible choice at the next replication.
It wouldn’t kill him, though. His condition could not be an accident, a random side effect of the gene’s naivety in the body of a man. It had done this to him because it would benefit, somehow.
‘How many tranquilliser darts do you have left?’ he asked.
Madhusree was alarmed. ‘Why? Are you in pain?’
Prabir almost lied, but he said, ‘No.’
He’d sworn he wouldn’t die on the boat. How could he ask her to kill him, knowing what it would do to her?
But this would be different in every way. She would do it by choice, out of love. Not through stupidity and cowardice.
He explained calmly, ‘It wants to change me, Maddy. It wants to take me apart and build something new.’
She stared at him, horrified. ‘I don’t believe that.’
‘It’s making a chrysalis. The covering is there to immobilise me, and it’s started on all the other tissues now. It knows it’s never going to have offspring if it leaves me unchanged, but all that’s done is make it look further for ways to escape. It’s found some kind of human cousin that undergoes metamorphosis. And I doubt there’ll be anything left of me with the power of veto when I emerge as the reproductive stage.’
Madhusree shook her head fiercely. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions! You have a skin condition. An accidental product of the gene. That’s all.’
Prabir said gently, ‘OK. Let’s wait for the next results.’
The fraction of infected cells had almost levelled off for his skin, but it had risen in every other tissue type. The antisense DNA had made no difference.
Madhusree added hurriedly, ‘I’ll give you another dose. I’ll change the lipid package.’
Prabir agreed. ‘Give it one more try.’
As she crouched over him with the vial, struggling to keep her balance on the swaying dinghy, Prabir said, ‘You know, if I’d been alone on the island when they died, I would never have left. I wouldn’t have got away at all, without you to keep me going.’
She said angrily, ‘Don’t talk like that.’
He laughed. ‘Like what?’
‘You know exactly what I mean, you shit.’ Madhusree pulled the empty syringe away, refusing to look at him.
‘You even hooked me up with Felix. I’d never have managed that alone.’
‘Don’t, Prabir.’
‘If I ask you to do this, it’ll be my responsibility. I can’t stop it hurting you, but don’t let it damage you.’
Madhusree met his eyes; her face was burning with resentment.
He said, ‘No one in the world could have done more for me.’
She spat back angrily, ‘How can you say that? You’re already writing off everything I’m trying!’
He shook his head as far as he could; his neck was almost rigid now. ‘It might work, but if it doesn’t, you have to be ready. You’re going to have to be strong for more than this. The gene is going to try to take everything. All it cares about is reproducing. Everything that matters to us: love, honesty, intelligence, reflection — they’re all just accidents. A few freak waves swept them up on to the beach. Now the tide’s coming in, to wash them away again.’
Prabir could see nothing but the cloudless sky. His sense of the heat of the sun was gone, and the motion of the boat had almost receded from consciousness. Fear and claustrophobia came in slower, deeper waves. He wanted more of everything. More knowledge, more friendship, more sex, more music. He wanted to see the revolution, he wanted to see the battle won. His sense of loss merged with the sense of confinement; he was buried alive and he could still see the sky. When the wave retreated he could almost laugh: he had nothing to fear from death now, he’d just been through the worst part of dying. A minute later, this observation was no comfort at all.
Madhusree moved into view. Prabir said, ‘At least it put the adult butterflies into diapause. You’d think it could cook up something for me.’
‘I’ll tranquillise you now. Do you want that?’ There wasn’t much skin left where they could be sure of a dart penetrating, but the venous line was still open.
‘Yeah. Then the rest of your supply. Then burn the body. Whatever fuel you can spare. Right?’
Madhusree nodded, almost imperceptibly.
Prabir said, ‘I’m sorry to put you through this, but there’s no other way. Don’t ever blame yourself.’
She turned away. ‘Who’ll pull the truck with me now?’
‘What about Felix?’
She laughed. ‘Felix with hooks through his back?’
‘He’d love it. He’d see fireworks with every step.’
As she looked down at him, half smiling, wiping away tears, something tore open behind his eyes and he was flooded with joy. It was everything he’d felt for Felix that was more than desire, everything he remembered inside himself as his father or mother had spun him in their arms, everything he’d seen on their faces, gazing up at him as they held him to the sky.
He didn’t care any more where it came from. He didn’t care if he’d stolen it or not, earned it or not. If he loved her like this and she felt some part of it, it was not selfish, it was not evil, it was not dishonest. And however ancient it was, however mindless, he’d torn it out by its billion-year-old roots, dragged it into the full light of consciousness, and claimed it as his own.
He said, ‘Gather up the good things, and run.’
As he heard the needle pierce the vial and felt the first cool touch of liquid in his vein, Prabir saw the sea from above. Madhusree leant back, her hair flying in the wind, and cut the rope between them. She broke free and sped away, leaving the burning boat behind.