Грег Иган - Teranesia

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 fish 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.’

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.’