by Greg Egan
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 fru
it 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.’