At dinner, Prabir managed to avoid Lowe and company, but he found himself sharing a table with Paul Sutton, an English science journalist who’d come to write a book about the Moluccan mutants. These were proof, Sutton insisted, of a ‘cosmic imperative for biodiversity built into the laws of physics’ which was compensating for the loss of species caused by human activities. The distinctly non-random nature of the mutations showed that ‘the nineteenth-century science of entropy’ had finally been overtaken by ‘the twenty-first-century science of ecotropy’.
‘I just can’t decide on the title,’ he fretted. ‘It’s the title that will sell it. Which do you think sounds best: The Genesis Gene, The Eighth Day of Creation, or The Seventh Miracle?’
Prabir mulled it over. ‘How about God’s Third Testicle?’ That summed up the book’s three themes concisely: religiosity, superabundance, and enormous bollocks.
Sutton seemed quite taken by this, but then he shook his head regretfully. ‘I want to evoke a separate act of creation, but that’s a bit too … genitally focused.’ He stared into the distance, frowning intently. Suddenly his eyes lit up. ‘Gaia’s Bastards. That’s it! That’s perfect! Ecology with an edge. Nature breaking all the rules, walking on the wild side to keep the Earth in balance! It’s got best-seller written all over it!’
In the morning Prabir met Grant, and they walked down to the marina where her boat was docked. It was a twenty-metre magnetohydrodynamic craft, with a single large cabin sunk partly below deck. Most of the cabin space was taken up with equipment; Grant showed him the bunk where he’d be sleeping, in a narrow slot behind a row of storage lockers. ‘You won’t have much privacy, I’m afraid. You can see why I didn’t want six deckhands and a cook on board.’
‘Yeah. I was expecting to travel in crowded conditions, though. This is one step up from my wildest dreams of luxury.’ He turned away from his ‘quarters’ and eyed a rack full of spectrometers and chromatographs; there was a whole analytical chemistry lab packed on to half a dozen chips here. ‘I have no idea what a freelance biologist does, but it must pay well.’
Grant made an amused choking sound. ‘I don’t own any of this; it’s all on loan from my sponsor.’
‘Can I ask who that is?’
‘A pharmaceuticals company.’
‘And what do they get out of it?’
‘That remains to be seen. But there’s no such thing as a useless discovery in molecular biology. At the very least they can always play pass-the-patents, so someone else is left holding them when it finally becomes obvious that they have no commercial value whatsoever.’
They sat on the deck and talked for a while, looking out across the harbour. It was humid, but still quite cool; the fishing boats had all left long ago, and the marina was almost deserted. When Grant asked about his childhood Prabir spoke of the family’s rare trips to Ambon, and tried to create the impression, without actually lying, that they’d travelled all over the region. But when she came right out and asked him what his parents had done, he said they’d been involved in seafood exports.
‘So they made a fortune and retired to Toronto?’
‘No. They both died here.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She quickly changed the subject. ‘Do you have anything you want to ask me? Before you decide to trust me not to run us into the nearest reef?’
Prabir hesitated, wary of offending her. ‘Do you use alcohol much?’
Grant was scandalised. ‘Not at sea!’
Prabir smiled. ‘No, of course not. How could I forget the long nautical tradition of sobriety?’
‘There is one, actually. Dating back to the Industrial Health and Safety Laws of nineteen … something-or-other.’ She was treating it as a joke, but she did seem slightly wounded. ‘Was I very drunk yesterday?’
Prabir replied diplomatically, ‘You were a lot more lucid than anyone else in the bar.’
Grant stood up abruptly, stretching her shoulders. ‘Well, you have a deal, if you’re still interested. And if you’re willing to do the cooking, you can forget about paying for food.’
‘That sounds fair.’ He rose to his feet beside her.
‘When would you be able to leave?’
‘Whenever you like. I just have to get my things and check out of the hotel.’
‘If you can be back in an hour, we can go this morning.’
‘An hour?’ Prabir was taken aback, but he had no reason to object. ‘OK. I’d better get moving then.’ He raised a hand in farewell and headed for the pier.
Grant called after him, ‘See you soon.’
Replaying parts of their conversation in his head as he walked along the marina, Prabir felt a belated sense of panic. If he’d hitched a ride on a crowded fishing boat, he could have sat in a corner and disappeared amidst the bustle, wrapped in the shield of his imperfect Indonesian. He and Grant could be stuck with each other’s company for weeks, and there’d be no easy way to retreat into silence.
But this was the best opportunity he’d have of reaching Madhusree. And Grant would have far more important things to do than probe his story every waking moment. They’d probably get on well enough, but he could still keep her at arm’s length. He’d worked harmoniously for nearly ten years with people at the bank to whom he’d never said a word about the war, or his parents, or the island. He really had nothing to fear.
Before checking out of the hotel, Prabir sat on his bed and called Felix. It was eight p.m. in Toronto, but he decided to leave a message rather than talking live. He’d promised to keep Felix informed of his plans, but the prospect of exchanging small talk held no attraction for him. They were twenty thousand kilometres apart, he was on his own, and he didn’t want to forget that for a second.
Back at the marina, Grant was in high spirits, eager to depart after being delayed for so long. Prabir threw his backpack under his bunk and watched over her shoulder as she programmed the boat.
Ambon Harbour was as automated as any airport. Grant lodged a request for a southbound route into the Banda Sea, and the Harbour Master’s software fed it to the autopilot. The engines started up, with a sound like water flowing through plumbing, and they began backing out of the dock immediately. There were several large cargo ships moored further along the wharves, but there was no traffic in sight other than the tiny water taxis and a few pleasure craft.
It was ten kilometres to the harbour entrance, and the speed limit made it a leisurely trip. Grant had pointed out the visible parts of the boat’s machinery earlier, but at Prabir’s request she summoned up schematics on the console and had the software deliver its full technospiel.
The boat’s fuel cells doubled as batteries which could be charged either by solar electricity, from the deck and cabin roof, or by pouring in methanol which was split into water and carbon dioxide. A single elaborate polymer contained both catalytic sites which ‘burnt’ the methanol, and embedded vanadium ions which stored and released the energy by toggling between oxidation states. All the chemicals involved were bound firmly in place; the water emerged pure enough to drink.
The engines were polymer too, corrosion-resistant electrodes and superconducting coils that accelerated sea water through any of the six channels that ran through a streamlined hub on the underside of the hull. With no moving parts, the only routine problem the engines could suffer was seaweed fouling the sieve-like filters guarding the channels, and even that was usually cleared automatically with a few pulses of reverse thrust.
Prabir said, ‘This is elegant. This is how a boat should be.’
Grant appeared noncommittal. ‘You don’t long for the romance of sail?’
‘Ha. Did you ever long to spend your time fighting ropes and canvas in the middle of a storm on the North Sea?’
Grant smiled. ‘No, but—’ She gestured at the cloudless blue sky. ‘As a boy, you must have been on prahus all the time.’
He shook his head. ‘Everything was diesel. We never lived in the kind of small villages where people built their own traditional fishing boats.’ He wasn’t even lying, but as soon as he began talking about the past he could feel muscles in his face growing tense from the effort of concealment.
‘Well, MHD certainly outclasses diesel,’ Grant conceded. ‘Though I wouldn’t use the word “elegant” myself. On that score, an eel leaves a boat like this for dead.’ She leant back against the bench beside the console; she was teasing him, but Prabir couldn’t resist the bait.
He said, ‘That’s professional bias talking. An eel isn’t optimised for swimming, just because it’s done no better for the past few million years. It fritters away half its energy on just being alive: every cell in its body needs to be fed, whether or not it’s working. Like the crew you didn’t want to hire. Evolution does a lot of things very nicely: shark skin minimises turbulence, crustacean shells are strong for their weight. But we can always do better by copying those tricks and refining them, single-mindedly. For a living creature, everything like that is just a means to an end. Show me an eel without gonads, and then I’ll concede that nature builds the perfect swimming machine.’
Grant laughed, but she admitted begrudgingly, ‘You’re right, in a sense: it costs us a lot of energy to build each new boat, but it’s still convenient to segregate that from ordinary fuel use. I wouldn’t want to travel in a pregnant ship, let alone one that had to prove itself to prospective mates in a ramming contest. And even marine engineers can get by without children; they just need good designs that will propagate memetically. But none of this is truly divorced from biology, is it? Someone, somewhere has to survive and have offspring, or who inherits the designs, and improves upon them, and builds the next boat?’
‘Obviously. All I’m saying is, technology can potentially do better than nature because of the very fact that it’s not always a matter of life or death. If an organism has been fine-tuned to maximise its overall reproductive success, that’s not the same thing as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. Evolution appears inventive to us because it’s had time to try so many possibilities, but it has no margin at all for real risks, let alone anything truly whimsical. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them.’
Grant gave him a curious look, as if she was wondering what kind of nerve she might have touched. She said, ‘I don’t think we really disagree. I suppose I’m just ready to take beauty where I can find it. The average mammalian genome would make the ink-stained notebooks of a syphilitic eighteenth-century poet look positively coherent in comparison: all the layers of recycled genes, and redundant genes, and duplicated genes that have gone divergent ways. But when I see how it manages to work in spite of that — every convoluted regulatory pathway fitting together seamlessly — it still makes hair stand up on the back of my neck.’
Prabir protested, ‘But if the pathways didn’t fit together, they wouldn’t be there for you to study, would they? Would you marvel the same way at the botched job in the thirty per cent of human embryos that have too much chromosomal damage even to implant in the uterine wall? Every survivor has a complicated history that makes it look miraculous. My idea of beauty has nothing to do with survival: of all the things evolution has created, the ones I value most are the ones it could just as easily crush out of existence the next time it rolls over in its sleep. If I see something I admire in nature, I want to take it and run: copy it, improve upon it, make it my own. Because I’m the one who values it for its own sake. Nature doesn’t give a fuck.’
Grant said reasonably, ‘Evolution takes a long time to roll over in its sleep. I’m a lot more worried that the things I admire are going to get crushed out of existence by people who don’t give a fuck.’
‘Yeah.’ There was no arguing with that. Prabir felt foolish; he’d let himself rant. He said, ‘I could make lunch now, if you’re as hungry as I am. What do you think?’
The sight of the open sea made Prabir feel strangely calm. It wasn’t that it brought back fewer, or less painful memories than Darwin or Ambon; quite the reverse. But there was something almost reassuring about finally making literal the state he’d imagined himself in for so long. He’d never reached the destination he’d promised Madhusree: the island where their parents were waiting. After eighteen years he still hadn’t struck land.
Grant joined him on the deck, beaming madly. She must have caught a trace of bemusement on his face; she said, ‘I know, but I can’t help it. A sky like this makes my poor heart sing. Sunlight deprivation as a child, I suppose; when I finally get a good dose of it, my brain just wants to condition me to come back for more.’
Prabir said, ‘Don’t apologise for being happy.’ He hesitated, then added obliquely, ‘Everyone else I met in Ambon who’d arrived from temperate regions seemed to have suffered rather less beneficial effects.’
Grant feigned puzzlement. ‘I can’t think who you could mean. Mind you, some people really do go a bit psychotic when they hit the tropics for the first time. That’s the down side. But you must have encountered that before, surely?’
‘The British Raj was a bit before my time.’
Grant smiled, then closed her eyes and raised her face to the sky. Prabir glanced back towards Ambon, but the grey smudge on the horizon had vanished. He’d have happily stood in silence like this for hours, but that was too much to hope for; what he really needed was a topic of conversation that wouldn’t keep leading them back to his supposedly boundless familiarity with everything in sight. Grant was hardly going to throw him overboard if she caught him out on some minor inconsistency, but if the whole mess of half-truths unravelled and he was forced to confess just how limited and rusty his grasp of the region’s language, custom and geography really was, he wouldn’t put it past her to abandon him on the nearest inhabited island.
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.
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?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So they’ve all reverted to the appearance of an ancestral species that needed camouflage to hide from some ferocious predator? And presumably they’ve not only lost their flashy plumage, they’ve lost the need for their mates to have it as a prerequisite for sex, or they would have all died out by now?’
‘Presumably, yes.’
‘And when a tree frog or a bat does the same thing with its DNA, the result is different, but still useful, because they’re getting back something that was useful a few million years ago to some frog or bat then?’
‘Yes. That’s the theory.’
Prabir ran a hand over his face; he’d forgotten how tired he was, but after nine hours of slogging through the plantation his brain had turned to mush. ‘That much I follow. Now explain the next part to me, slowly: why is this happening in all these different species? And how?’
Grant hesitated, as if she was about to draw the line here, but then she must have decided that she had nothing more to lose. She said, ‘The only reason I can think of for an innate capacity to do this would be as a response to genetic damage. No one’s ever seen a repair mechanism that operates like this before, but it’s been known for years that functioning genes are vulnerable to certain kinds of damage that leave other parts of the chromosome untouched. Cleaning up old sequences that have fallen into disuse could be a repair strategy of last resort, because even the random copying errors they’ve suffered over time might have done less harm than whatever’s afflicting the modern genes.’
Prabir didn’t dare say it, but this sounded so much like restoring a computer in extremis from mothballed backups that it was uncanny. It also sounded so far beyond any conventional notion of how genomes were organised that Grant’s initial refusal to discuss her hypothesis, which he’d taken as verging on paranoia, now looked like mere self-preservation.
‘And that might be handy in somatic cells, to stop certain kinds of cancer?’ he suggested. ‘If some growth regulator gene has been damaged in a cell in my intestine, say, the cell might reactivate a copy of the gene that was duplicated accidentally thousands of generations ago, and fell into disuse?’
‘Exactly. So normally there’d be no visible effects: if an adult starts producing an archaic protein in a few intestinal cells, or skin cells, that’s not going to change its gross anatomy. And even if the process was activated in an early embryo, it would generally produce just one altered individual who’d bear perfectly normal offspring. To produce heritable changes, it has to be turned on in the germ cells; that must be what’s happening here, but don’t ask me why, because I have no idea yet.’
‘OK. But if this is a response to genetic damage, what’s triggering it? Doesn’t there still need to be some kind of powerful mutagen, even if what we’re seeing is the result of the animals conquering it, rather than succumbing to it?’
‘Maybe. Unless it’s being triggered inappropriately; unless they’re overreacting to some other kind of stress.’ Grant lifted her notepad off the bench and thumbed through the sequence of codons. ‘I don’t have all the answers; I’m not even close. The only way to understand this will be to unravel the whole mechanism: identify the genes that are being switched on in every affected species, then see what proteins they encode, what functions they perform, and what activates them in the first place.’
Prabir groaned. ‘ “Every affected species” Why don’t I like the sound of that part?’
Grant regarded him with sergeant-majorly contempt. ‘A bit more field work isn’t going to kill you. You’ve got nothing to complain about; just wait until you get to my age.’
‘You wait until you’ve spent ten years behind a desk.’
She shuddered. ‘All the more reason to want to be here instead. Besides, these are the creatures you grew up with, aren’t they? Think of it as a chance to be reunited with all your old childhood friends.’
‘ “Childhood friends’” Prabir climbed off the stool and limped across the cabin to the galley. ‘Do you mean Bambi and Godzilla? Or their mutual great-great-grandparents?’