by Greg Egan
‘But I thought they were back.’ Prabir blinked at him, confused. He’d had nine hours’ sleep in Darwin, and woken at dawn feeling perfectly normal, but now jet-lag was catching up with him again. ‘I thought you said you were—’
‘You thought I was one of them? God, no!’ The older man seated opposite glanced up from his work. Lowe said, ‘Hunt, this is Prabir Suresh: he’s chasing the biologists, for some unfathomable reason. Hunter J. Cole, Georgetown University. And this is Mike Carpenter, one of his postdocs.’
Prabir leant across the table and shook hands with them. The desk clerk hadn’t been mistaken; the bar was full of foreign academics. But if the biologists hadn’t returned, who were these people?
‘You’re here to observe the Efflorescence?’ Cole wore a fixed, slightly self-effacing smile, as if he knew from long experience that it was only a matter of time before he said something devastatingly clever, and he was already basking graciously in Prabir’s anticipated response.
‘I suppose so. Though I hadn’t heard it called that before.’
‘My own terminology,’ Cole confessed, raising one hand dismissively as he spoke. ‘My Taxonomy of Eucatastrophe has not been widely read. And still less widely understood.’
Prabir was feeling increasingly disorientated. The title sounded as if it should have made sense to him – something to do with population ecology, maybe? – but the actual meaning eluded him completely.
‘Whatever terminology we choose to deploy,’ Lowe responded earnestly, ‘what we’re witnessing here is a classic manifestation of the Trickster archetype, taking gleeful pleasure in confounding the narrow expectations of evolutionary reductionism. After biding its time for almost two centuries, indigenous mythology has finally given rise to the ideal means of undermining the appropriations of Wallace. This meshes perfectly with my over-arching model of nature as “The Unruly Woman”: disruptively fecund; mischievously, subversively bountiful.’
Cole smiled contentedly. ‘That’s an interesting framework, Martin, but I find many aspects of it deeply problematic. The only safe assumption we can make at this point is that we’re moving into a Suspensive Zone, where normal logics and causalities are held in abeyance. To reify the disruptive impulse is to presuppose that every teleological trajectory implies an agent, and ultimately to misunderstand the entire dynamic of Wrongness.’
Prabir was experiencing severe déjà vu: Keith and Amita had had arguments like this, all Big Dumb Neologisms and thesaurus-driven bluster. It was like listening to two badly written computer programs trying to convince each other that they were sentient. He glanced hopefully at Cole’s student, Carpenter; surely his generation had regained some mild interest in reality, if only for the sake of rebelling against half a century of content-free gibberish.
Carpenter tipped his head admiringly towards his mentor. ‘What he said.’
The rest of the courtyard had fallen silent. Prabir looked around to see what had caught their attention. A huge black bird, fifty or sixty centimetres tall, had landed on one of the unused tables, and was sitting with its back to him, preening its feathers. Though it was dark as a raven, it was unmistakably a species of cockatoo, with a slender, almost thread-like crest. He’d seen them on the island now and then, but never in the metropolitan heart of Ambon. Maybe this was a sign that the city really had brought its pollution levels under control.
The bird turned its head to peck at its shoulder, revealing a row of sharp brown teeth embedded in the lip of its beak.
Prabir felt a small, hot trickle of urine flow across one leg. Mercifully, he’d emptied his bladder half an hour ago; there was almost nothing to soil his clothes. He glanced at Lowe, who was staring at the creature with a glazed expression. No one in the courtyard was moving or speaking. The bird emitted a brief raucous cry, then began grooming under one wing.
‘You’re a fine boy, aren’t you? You’re my beautiful boy!’ A woman had risen from one of the tables; she approached the bird slowly, crooning to it softly, circling around it to get a better view. Prabir watched her, horrified at first, then impressed by her presence of mind. The thing was still a cockatoo, after all, not some taloned bird of prey. As a child he’d been entirely unafraid of its equally imposing cousins, and the teeth scarcely added to the kind of damage its beak could have inflicted anyway.
The woman announced, to no one in particular, ‘I can see no sign of reversal of normal fusion in the vertebrae of the pygostyle. No vestigial claws on the wing tips. Naive to look for these things, I suppose, but whose instincts wouldn’t tell them to cherchez la theropod?’ Prabir found it hard to judge whether her speech was slurred – she spoke with a strong Welsh accent for which his ear was not well calibrated – but her movements seemed a bit uncoordinated.
She made a grab for the bird’s legs. It squawked and ascended half a metre, then came down on the table again, lunging at her. Prabir rose to his feet, but he was too far away to help. The bird sank its teeth into the woman’s forearm, shook its head vigorously to and fro half a dozen times, then opened its jaws and flew away.
‘Fuck. Fuck!’ She stared after it angrily, then glanced down at her wound. ‘Buccal fauna. Food residues. Saliva!’ She tipped her head back and laughed with delight, then dashed from the courtyard.
Prabir caught up with her outside the hotel. ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry. Can I talk to you for a second?’
The woman scowled at him. ‘What’s your problem? I’m in a hurry.’
‘I understand. I won’t slow you down; I can explain while we walk.’
She didn’t look too happy with this, but she nodded reluctantly. ‘It’s too crowded for me to run, and I don’t want to raise a sweat.’ Prabir thought it unwise to point out that this was a lost cause, unless she planned to conjure up an air-conditioned limousine in the next thirty seconds.
He said, ‘I’m hoping to get in touch with someone on the expedition. Do you think you’d be able to let me have a copy of the itinerary?’ She must have arrived late in Ambon, or succumbed to a temporary illness when the others were leaving. Since she hadn’t given up and gone home, she was presumably in the process of arranging to rejoin her colleagues. If he offered to split the cost, she might even let him hitch a ride.
She took a few seconds to make sense of his question. ‘You mean the university biologists? I’ve only been here six days; they left weeks ago.’
‘You’re not with them?’
‘Hardly. I’m freelance.’
‘You’ve had no contact with them at all?’
‘No.’ She turned to face Prabir, without slowing her pace. ‘Can’t you just call whoever it is? There’s no reason for them to be having reception problems.’
‘It’s my sister. And no, I can’t call her.’ He added defensively, ‘It’s complicated.’
The woman shrugged; this was none of her business. ‘I’m sorry. But I really don’t know where they’ve gone.’
Prabir was bitterly disappointed, but he struggled to regain some perspective. Before he’d checked into the hotel he hadn’t expected to learn anything useful for days.
He said, ‘Well, good luck with the saliva. I can’t think what possessed you to walk into a bar without a sequencer on you.’
She laughed. ‘There’s no excuse, is there? I carry a camera about the same size, and I didn’t even think to use it. The sequencer would have been a thousand times more valuable … but no, I had to leave it on the boat.’
Prabir didn’t bother to conceal his amazement. ‘You have a boat? And you’re still here after six days?’
‘Don’t get me started.’ She regarded him darkly. ‘I gave myself three days to buy provisions and hire a guide. But everyone I speak to wants to drag all their friends and family into the deal: no guide without hiring a whole crew.’
‘You have a crew already?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘It’s a brand-new MHD craft, not a prahu with sails and masts and rigging. There’d be nothing for a crew to do, except fis
h and sunbathe at my expense. I brought it here from Sulawesi; I can handle it perfectly on my own. I put myself through a doctorate in Aberdeen working part-time on a North Sea fishing trawler. This whole place looks like a millpond to me.’
Prabir wondered if it had occurred to her that not everyone in Ambon necessarily doubted her seacraft, or was intent on ripping her off. Most men here would consider it inappropriate to be alone on a boat with a foreign woman, and not many women would be willing to take on the job at all. The simplest thing to do would be to reconcile herself to the need to hire as many hangers-on as decorum required.
There was one cheaper alternative, though.
He said, ‘If you could cope with the North Sea, I’d trust you here any day. And I grew up in these islands.’
‘You did?’
He nodded calmly, planning to lie by omission only. ‘I was born in Calcutta, but my family moved here when I was six. I live in Canada now, but I still think of this as—’ He trailed off, unable to say it, though a few more honest alternatives came to mind.
They were almost at the harbour. She stopped walking, and offered him her hand.
‘I’m Martha Grant.’
‘Prabir Suresh.’
She held up her forearm and inspected the wound, then announced glumly, ‘I’m sweating like a pig. I won’t find a thing; it’ll all be washed away or degraded by now.’
A vivid red weal had spread along her arm. Prabir said, ‘Forget about DNA. Drown the whole area in disinfectant, and take whatever antibiotics you can get your hands on. You should have seen what happened to my mother’s leg once from an insect bite. You don’t want to take any chances.’
‘Yeah.’ Grant rubbed her eyes, and smiled at him ruefully. ‘What a farce. That bird just flew down to me, like a gift, and I didn’t even get an image of it.’
Prabir gave up on the idea of waiting to be asked. He said, ‘If you want a guide, I’ll do it for nothing. I’ll even pay for my own food. The only down side is, I might have to leave you at some point to meet up with my sister. But you’ve got maps, you’ve got translation software. It’s not as if you’d be lost without me.’ It was hard saying the last part with a straight face; he’d be relying on maps and software himself. But he wasn’t seeking money under false pretences, or endangering this woman’s life. She was the one whose skills would have the most bearing on their safety.
Grant regarded him with a mixture of sympathy and scepticism. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to call your sister? I can’t guarantee that we’ll even get close to the expedition.’
That was true. But though Madhusree had promised him that she wouldn’t disclose anything about their parents’ work, Prabir had no doubt that she’d still do her best to steer the expedition in the right direction. If he could do the same, not only would that lead him to Madhusree, but he’d end up being far more use to Grant than the most experienced guide Ambon had to offer.
He shrugged. ‘I’m willing to take that risk. I mean, it’s not as if I have much hope of reaching her any other way.’
Grant still seemed to be uneasy about something. Prabir said, ‘You don’t have to decide right away. Think it over. Sleep on it.’ He reached for his notepad to give her his number.
She said, ‘Can you tell me why your sister doesn’t want you to find her?’
Prabir gave her a long, hard look, trying to decide how to take this. What exactly did you have in mind, memsahib? You think I’ve come to drag her off to an arranged marriage? Doing my bit for the international conspiracy to throw all women into purdah? That was unfair, though. Grant didn’t know the first thing about him; she didn’t need to be a racist to have qualms about helping him pursue an unwilling quarry.
He tried to think of a way to put her at ease. ‘Do you have any children?’
‘Yes. I have a son.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘At home with his father, in Cardiff.’
‘Suppose he was camping out in the countryside with friends, and you saw the weather changing, but you knew he wouldn’t understand what that meant in the same way you did. How do you think he’d react if you called him up and suggested that you join him at the campsite, just to keep an eye on things? Just to give him the benefit of your experience?’
Grant said gently, ‘OK, I get the point. But why do you think the weather’s changing? Why are you so afraid for her?’
‘I don’t know,’ Prabir confessed. ‘I’m probably wrong. I’m probably mistaken. But that doesn’t change the way I feel.’
Grant did not appear entirely reassured by this answer. But there was no obvious next question, no simple way to pursue the matter. Finally she said, ‘All right, I’ll stop prying. Meet me here tomorrow at eight, and I’ll show you the boat.’
8
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.