Teranesia

by Greg Egan

  He said, ‘Look, how many snakes that size can there be in this area? I’ll be fine. You might as well start working on the samples. I just want to be alone here for a few minutes.’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Is that too much to ask?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve given you everything you wanted. Can’t you show some respect for my feelings?’

  Grant bowed her head, chastened. ‘All right. I’m sorry. I’ll see you back there.’ She turned and headed across the kampung.

  Prabir made his way around to what he thought was the storage hut. But he didn’t trust his memory, he had to be sure. The door had fallen away; he squeezed through the vines. When his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, he saw the two life jackets hanging on the wall.

  He walked out of the hut and headed for the garden.

  Suddenly the device on his belt started chanting, ‘Mine at seventeen metres! Mine at seventeen metres!’ He stared down at the machine: a red arrow was flashing on its upper surface, pointing to the hazard. He flicked the ON switch back and forth; it had no effect whatsoever. You couldn’t turn the fucking thing off. All he’d done was stop it wasting power by showing its usual reassuring green light.

  He heard Grant call his name from a distance.

  Prabir backed away until the detector fell silent, then he shouted in a tone of light-hearted exasperation, ‘It’s all right! I knew there’d be mines here! The detector’s working, and I’ll stay well clear of them! I’ll be fine!’

  There was a long pause, then she shouted back reluctantly, ‘OK. I’ll see you on the boat.’

  He waited a couple of minutes to be sure that Grant was gone, then he unclipped the detector and tossed it away towards the centre of the kampung. He’d noted the direction the arrow had pointed. He was very tired, but there was nothing left to do now. He turned and started walking.

  Something sharp pierced his right shoulder. He felt the skin turn cold, then numb. He reached back and pulled it out. It was a tranquilliser dart.

  He didn’t know whether to laugh or to weep with frustration. He looked around for Grant, but he couldn’t see her. He called out, ‘I weigh seventy kilograms. Do the arithmetic. You don’t have enough.’

  She shouted back, ‘I can blow a hole in your knee if I have to.’

  ‘And what would that achieve? I’d probably bleed to death.’

  Grant showed herself. She was at least twenty metres away. Even if she was capable of tackling him to the ground, she wouldn’t stop him with anything but a bullet before he could reach the mine.

  She said, ‘Maybe I’ll risk that.’

  He pleaded irritably, ‘Go back to the boat!’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  Prabir rubbed his eyes. Wasn’t it obvious? Wasn’t the evidence all around them?

  He said, ‘I killed them. I killed my parents.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. How?’

  He stared at her despairingly; he was ready to confess everything, but it would be a slow torture to explain. ‘I sent a message to someone. A woman in New York, a historian I met on the net. But I was pretending to be my father, and what I said made him sound like an ABRMS supporter. The Indonesians must have read it. That’s why they flew over and dropped the mines.’

  Grant absorbed this. ‘Why did you pretend to be your father?’

  ‘He wouldn’t let me tell anyone my real age. He was paranoid about it – maybe something happened to him as a child. But I didn’t know how to pretend to be anyone else, and I didn’t know how to say nothing at all.’

  ‘OK. But you don’t know that the message was intercepted, do you? They might have dropped the mines anyway. It might have all been down to aerial surveillance, rebel activity in the area, deliberate misinformation from someone. It might have had nothing to do with you!’

  Prabir shook his head. ‘Even if that’s true: I heard the plane come over, and I didn’t warn them. And it was my job to weed the garden, but I went swimming instead. If I didn’t kill them three times, I killed them twice.’

  Grant said, ‘You were nine years old! You might have done something foolish, but it was the army who killed them. Do you really imagine that they’d blame you?’

  ‘I was nine years old, but I wasn’t stupid. After I’d sent the message, I knew what I’d done. But I was too afraid to tell them. I was so full of guilt I went and poisoned one of the butterflies, to try to fool myself. To make myself believe that was why I felt so bad.’

  Grant hesitated, searching for some escape route. But she had to see that there was none.

  She said, ‘However much it hurts, if you’ve lived with this for eighteen years, you can keep on doing it.’

  He laughed. ‘Why? What’s the point? Madhusree doesn’t need me any more. You know why I came after her? You know why I followed her here? I was afraid she’d work it out. I was afraid she’d find something here that would tell her what I’d done. I wasn’t trying to protect her. I just wanted to keep her from discovering the truth.’

  ‘So how am I going to explain your death to her?’

  ‘As an accident.’

  ‘I’m not going to perjure myself. There’ll be an official inquiry, it’ll all come out.’

  ‘Are you blackmailing me now?’

  Grant shook her head calmly. ‘I’m telling you what will happen. That’s not a threat, it’s just the way it will be.’

  Prabir covered his face with his arms. The prospect seemed unbearable, but maybe it would help Madhusree put his death behind her if she understood that she owed him nothing. He hadn’t acted out of love for her, or some sense of duty towards their parents. He hadn’t even been protecting their shared genes. Everything he’d ever done for her had been to conceal his own crime.

  He turned and started walking towards the minefield. Grant shouted something, but he ignored her. A rain of darts hit his upper back; he lost all feeling after the fourth or fifth, he could no longer count them. He began to feel slightly giddy, but it didn’t slow him down. Grant still had no chance of catching up with him.

  He felt a sting on the side of his right leg, like a hot sharp blade passing over the skin. He lost his footing, more from surprise than from the force of the bullet, and toppled sideways into the undergrowth. With his shoulders paralysed he had no strength in his arms: he couldn’t right himself, he couldn’t even crawl.

  A minute later, Grant knelt beside him and plucked out the darts, then helped him to his feet. He was bleeding almost as much from the barbed-wire shrubs as from the grazing wound she’d made in his leg.

  She asked, ‘Are you coming back to the boat now?’

  Prabir met her eyes. He wasn’t angry with her, or grateful. But she’d robbed him of all momentum, and complicated things to the point where it would have been farcical to keep opposing her.

  Farcical, and monumentally selfish.

  He was silent for a while, trying to come to terms with this. Then he said, ‘There’s something I want to do here, if you’re willing. But we’ll need some tools, and I’ll have to wait until this shit wears off.’

  *

  They returned to the kampung in the afternoon, with a chainsaw and a mallet. Grant cut branches into metre lengths and Prabir drove them into the ground, making a small fence all the way around the mined garden. He nailed warning signs to each side, in six languages, using his notepad to translate the message. There wasn’t much chance of fishermen coming this far into the jungle, but when the next biologists arrived it would be one small extra safeguard.

  Grant said, ‘Do you want to put up a plaque?’

  Prabir shook his head. ‘No shrines. They’d have hated that.’

  Grant left him, trusting him now. Prabir stood by the fence and tried to picture them, arm in arm, middle-aged, with another half-century ahead of them. In love to the end, working to the end, living to see their great-great-grandchildren.

  That was what he’d destroyed.

  Grant had kept insisting: They wouldn’t have blamed you!
But what did that mean? The dead blamed no one. What if his mother had survived, crippled by grief, knowing he was responsible? She might have tried to shield him at first, when he was still a child. But now? And for the rest of his life?

  And his father—

  He had no right to test them like this, asking them to choose between rejection and forgiveness. And whatever excuses they might have made for him, however much compassion they might have shown, it made no difference in the end. He didn’t want their imaginary blessing, he didn’t want any kind of plausible solace. He only wanted the impossible: he wanted them back.

  He sat on the ground and wept.

  Prabir made his way back to the beach, before the light failed. He’d lost the will to die, to anaesthetise himself out of existence.

  But to live, he’d have to live with the pain of what he’d done, not the hope that it could be extinguished. That would never happen. He’d have to find another reason to go on.

  PART SIX

  13

  Grant spent the next morning extracting tissue from the preserved butterflies, then sequencing their DNA. Even with the São Paulo protein scrambling parts of the genome, it was possible to construct a plausible family tree from genetic markers, using the serial numbers as a guide to chronology.

  Prabir had guessed one thing correctly: the São Paulo gene had changed. Its own protein had gradually rewritten it, though the twenty-year-old protein seemed to have made much subtler changes from generation to generation than the modern version. This added a new twist to the convergence process: at least in the butterflies, the transformation itself had been subject to successive refinements. Whatever SPP did to produce its strangely beneficent mutations, over time the mutations it had wrought in its own gene had enabled it to perform the whole process more efficiently.

  Grant posted the historical data on the net, giving credit to Radha and Rajendra Suresh. Then she set to work on the dormant adults, taking samples for RNA transcript analysis. They weren’t in any danger of running out of specimens: apart from the six Prabir had plucked from the trees, all their captive adults had now entered the same state.

  Prabir sat and watched her work, helping where he could. Maybe it was just the realisation of what she’d done for him in the kampung finally sinking in, but her face seemed kinder to him now, her whole demeanour warmer. It was as if he’d finally learnt to read the dialect of her body language, in the same way as he’d adjusted to her unfamiliar accent.

  In the evening, after they’d eaten, they sat on the deck, facing out to sea, listening to music and planning the voyage’s end. Unless news from São Paulo or Lausanne reached them by morning to suggest otherwise, they’d conclude that they’d gathered all the data needed to fuel research into the mutants for the foreseeable future. They’d rejoin the expedition for a day or two, to compare notes face to face, then Grant would sail back to Sulawesi to return her hired boat. Prabir wasn’t sure yet whether he’d hitch a ride with her to Ambon. It would depend on the reception he got from Madhusree.

  ‘What are you going to say to her?’ Grant asked.

  Prabir shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell her the things I told you. I’m not going to poison her life with that. But I don’t want to lie to her any more. I don’t want to feed her some line about coming here to spare her from the trauma.’

  Grant shot him an exasperated look. ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that that could still be true? You can have more than one reason for doing something.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  She cut him off. ‘Don’t let this blight everything. Don’t let it rob you of the things you have a right to be proud of. Do you honestly believe that you’ve never once tried to protect her just because she’s your sister?’

  Prabir replied fiercely, ‘If I haven’t, then at least I’m not a slave to my genes.’

  Grant’s eyes narrowed. ‘And that matters more to you?’ For a moment Prabir thought he’d lost her, that his words were unforgivable, but then she added drily, ‘At least in a bad enough movie you could turn out to be adopted.’

  He said, ‘If that’s your idea of a bad movie, you’ve had a very sheltered life.’

  He reached over and stroked her face with the back of his hand. She kept her eyes on his, but said nothing. He’d acted on a barely conscious sense of rightness, half expecting to have his instinct proved utterly mistaken, but she neither encouraged nor rebuffed him. He remembered her watching him, the night they’d arrived; at the time he’d doubted it meant anything at all, but now he felt as if scales had fallen from his eyes.

  He bent down and kissed her; they were sitting propped up against the wall of the cabin, it was hard to face her squarely. For a moment she was perfectly still, but then she began to respond. He ran a hand along her arm. The scent of her skin was extraordinary; inhaling it sent warmth flooding through his body. The Canadian girls in high school had smelt as bland and sexless as infants.

  He slipped his hand under the back of her shirt and stroked the base of her spine, pulling her towards him, aligning their bodies. He already had an erection; he could feel his pulse where it pressed against her leg. He moved his hand to her breast. He had to fight away any image of where they were heading; he was afraid that if he pictured it he’d come at once. But he didn’t have to think, he didn’t have to plan this: they’d be carried forward by the internal logic of the act.

  Grant pulled away suddenly, disentangling herself. ‘This is a bad idea. You know that.’

  Prabir was confused. ‘I thought it was what you wanted!’

  She opened her mouth as if to deny it, then stopped herself. She said, ‘It doesn’t work like that. I’ve been faithful to Michael for sixteen years. I’ll sit up all night and talk if you want, but I’m not going to fuck you just to make you feel better.’

  Prabir stared down at the deck, his face burning with shame. What had he just done? Had it been some clumsy attempt at gratitude, which he’d imagined she’d accept without the slightest scruple?

  She said gently, ‘Look, I’m not angry with you. I should have stopped you sooner. Can we just forget about it?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure.’

  He looked up. Grant smiled ruefully and implored him, ‘Don’t make a big deal out of this. We’ve been fine until now, and we can still be fine.’ She rose to her feet. ‘But I think we could both do with some rest.’ She reached down and squeezed his shoulder, then walked into the cabin.

  After the lights had gone out, Prabir knelt at the edge of the deck and ejaculated into the water. He rested his head on the guard rail, suddenly cold in the breeze coming in off the sea. The images of her body faded instantly; it was obvious now that he’d never really wanted her. It had been nothing but a temporary confusion between the friendship she’d shown him in the kampung, and the fact that he hadn’t touched Felix for what seemed like a lifetime. It had never occurred to him that he might have lost the knack for celibacy, that after nine years it could take any effort at all to get through a mere three or four weeks.

  When he returned to his sleeping bag and closed his eyes, he saw Felix lying beside him, smiling and sated, dark stubble on the golden skin of his throat. When had it become conceivable to betray him? But instead of agonising over one stupid, aberrant attempt at infidelity, better to think of the changes he could make back in Toronto to put an end to all the far greater risks he’d been courting ever since they’d met. Felix had been patient beyond belief, but that couldn’t last forever. The simplest thing would be to let Madhusree have the apartment to herself; he’d keep paying the rent until she graduated. He’d move in with Felix, they’d have a life of their own, a mutual commitment without reservations.

  It was not unimaginable any more. Even if he’d had the power to imitate his father in every respect, it would not have brought Radha and Rajendra back to life. And he no longer cared that he couldn’t read between the lines and extract some kind of unspoken blessing from his parents. There had to be an end to what
they would have wanted and what they would have done.

  He had to take what he believed was good, and run.

  An hour after they’d left Teranesia behind, Grant emerged from the cabin looking bemused.

  She said, ‘Strange news from São Paulo.’

  Prabir grimaced; it sounded like the title of one of Keith’s Country Dada albums. ‘Please tell me we’re not turning back.’

  ‘We’re not.’ Grant ran her hand through her hair distractedly. ‘I’d say the last thing they need is more data. We seem to have given them rather more than they can cope with.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She handed him her notepad. ‘Joaquim Furtado, one of the physicists on the modelling team, has just posted a theory about the protein’s function. The rest of the team have refused to endorse it. I’d be interested to hear what you think.’

  Prabir suspected that she was merely being polite, but he skimmed down the page. Furtado’s analysis began with a statement no one could dispute: the discrepancies between the computer model and the test tube experiments proved that there were crucial aspects of the molecule’s behaviour that the simulation was failing to capture. Various refinements to the model had been tried, but so far they’d all failed to improve the situation.

  One of the many approximations made by the modellers involved the quantum state of the protein, which was described mathematically in terms of eigenstates for the bonds between atoms: quantum states that possessed definite values for such things as the position of the bond and its vibrational energy. A completely accurate description of the protein would have allowed each of its bonds to exist in a complex superposition of several different eigenstates at once, a state that possessed no definite angles and energies, but only probabilities for a spectrum of different values. Ultimately, the protein as a whole would be seen as a superposition of many possible versions, each with a different shape and a different set of vibrational modes. However, to do this for a molecule with more than ten thousand atoms would have meant keeping track of an astronomical number of combinations of eigenstates, far beyond the capacity of any existing hardware to store, let alone manipulate. So it was routine practice for the most probable eigenstate for each bond to be computed, and from then on taken to be the only one worth considering.