Грег Иган - Teranesia

Prabir was caught off balance. ‘Don’t be so fucking patronising.’ The compliment pleased him, but this wasn’t the time to admit that.

Felix said, ‘This is a good thing for both of you, any way you look at it. And if you think it’s dangerous for Madhusree to go traipsing through the jungle for a couple of weeks, you can’t have much idea of what most nineteen-year-olds get up to.’

‘Oh, so now you’re the expert on that too?’

‘No, but I can still remember what it was like.’

Prabir had no reply. He’d always imagined that was how he understood Madhusree; by being young enough to remember. But nothing about his own life at nineteen resembled hers. It wasn’t just the fact that he’d had a child to look after; he’d also had any adolescent attraction to risk knocked out of him, well in advance. His entire adulthood had been devoid of excitement. Why should Madhusree have to pay the same price? The whole point had been to make things better for her, to try to give her something like a normal life.

No, the whole point was to keep her safe.

Prabir stopped dead. There was a dusty display case full of tropical butterflies hanging on the wall, with fading labels that looked like they’d been produced on a manual typewriter. It had probably been hanging there since some era when this corridor lay on a route between public exhibits, long before the latest round of rebuilding.

He said, ‘Getting her away from there was the one good thing I’ve done in my life. And now everyone expects me to pack her bags and buy her a ticket. It’s surreal. Why don’t you just ask me to blow my brains out while you’re at it? I’m not going to do it.’

Felix backtracked, and saw what he was looking at. ‘What you did was get her away from the war. She wouldn’t be going back to that.’

Prabir had lost interest in trying to justify himself. He said flatly, ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know anything about it.’

Felix wasn’t that easily intimidated. ‘No, but I’ll listen to whatever you want to tell me. It’d be a fucking lonely world if that never worked.’

Prabir aimed lower. ‘Doesn’t it ever cross your mind that there are things I don’t want you to understand?’

Prabir worked late, to keep his mind blank for as long as possible. He tinkered for five hours with a perfectly good class definition template for tellers, trying to improve its eye contact and shave a few milliseconds off its response times. In the end he gave up, discarding everything he’d done, trawling through the automatic backups and erasing them all manually — the closest he could get to the physical experience of screwing up a sheaf of paper.

As he walked out of the building he felt a kind of defiant pride, in place of the usual sense of regret at his stupidity. It wasn’t as if he had better things to do. He didn’t want to be with Felix or Madhusree. He didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts. Numbing himself with a few hours of vacuous make-work every night until he was safely asleep on his feet was infinitely preferable to taking up alcohol.

Sitting in the bus, he ached all over. He was shivering too, though he’d felt the usual blast of warm air as he’d stepped on board. With a shock he realised that he probably had some kind of mild viral infection. Despite the change of climate he hadn’t suffered so much as a cold since arriving in Toronto; the immigration authorities had inoculated him against everything in sight. But he hadn’t kept up to date with booster shots, and it looked as if some new strain had finally broken through his defences.

When he entered the apartment, Madhusree’s door was open, but her room was in darkness. Even from a distance, as Prabir’s eyes adjusted he could see that her desk had been tidied, everything cleared away or straightened into neat piles.

There was a note taped to the fridge. She’d never told him exactly when the expedition was leaving, but he’d been half expecting something like this for days.

He read the note several times, compulsively, as if he might have missed something. Madhusree explained that she’d raised part of the money working in a café, and borrowed the rest from friends. She apologised for doing everything behind his back, but pointed out that this had made it easier for both of them. She promised to reveal nothing about their parents’ work until she returned and they’d had a chance to discuss the matter properly; in the meantime, the expedition would have to rely on its own discoveries. She’d be back within three months. She’d be careful.

Prabir sat in the kitchen with tears streaming down his cheeks. He’d never felt happier for her, or more proud of her. She’d overcome everything now. Even him. She’d refused to let him smother her with his paranoia and insecurity.

He suddenly recalled the night they’d resolved to leave Amita. At the start of the week, Madhusree had announced that her class had begun studying the civil rights movement. Then, at dinner on Friday, she’d informed Keith and Amita that she finally understood what their work at the university was all about.

Keith had flashed Prabir a victorious smirk, and Amita had cooed, ‘Aren’t you clever? Why don’t you tell us what you’ve learnt.’

Madhusree had expounded with her usual nine-year-old’s volubility. ‘In the nineteen sixties and seventies, there were people in all the democratic countries who didn’t have any real power, and they started going to the people who did have all the power and saying, “All these principles of equality you’ve been talking about since the French Revolution are very nice, but you don’t seem to be taking them very seriously. You’re all hypocrites, actually. So we’re going to make you take those principles seriously.” And they held demonstrations and bus rides, and occupied buildings, and it was very embarrassing for the people in power, because the other people had such a good argument, and anyone who listened seriously had to agree with them.

‘Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and all the other social justice movements were getting more and more support. So , in the nineteen eighties, the CIA—’ she turned to Keith and explained cheerfully, ‘this is where X-Files Theory comes into it — hired some really clever linguists to invent a secret weapon: an incredibly complicated way of talking about politics that didn’t actually make any sense, but which spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded so impressive. And at first, the people who talked like this just hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless. But then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out the driver.

‘So instead of going to the people in power and saying, “How about upholding the universal principles you claim to believe in?” the people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like “My truth narrative is in competition with your truth narrative!” And the people in power replied, “Woe is me! You’ve thrown me in the briar patch!” And everyone else said, “Who are these idiots? Why should we trust them, when they can’t even speak properly?” And the CIA were happy. And the people in power were happy. And the secret weapon lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone who’d played a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit what they’d done.’

After a long silence, Amita had suggested in a strained voice, ‘You might not have understood that lesson properly, Maddy. These are difficult ideas, and you’re still quite young.’

Madhusree had replied confidently, ‘Oh no, Amita. I understood. It was very clear.’