Грег Иган - Teranesia

Suddenly he heard a loud, rhythmic splashing noise. It wasn’t the snake turning hyperactive: someone was beating the water with a heavy object. The timbre gradually changed, as if the water was being struck in successively shallower locations. Then there was a resounding thwack, wood against wood.

The snake’s muscles slackened perceptibly. Prabir fought to raise his head. He caught a shallow breath, and then a glimpse of the lower half of someone standing on the shore. Not Grant: a woman with bare dark legs. The snake twitched back to life and jerked him down again. The beating sound resumed, ten, fifteen powerful blows.

As he struggled to snatch another mouthful of air, Prabir heard the woman slip into the water. He didn’t question his sanity: he knew he wasn’t hallucinating. As he turned the strange miracle over in his head, he felt no fear for her. Everything would be all right, now that they’d been reunited.

The woman said urgently, in bad Indonesian, ‘You need to work, you need to help me! It’s only stunned. And I can’t pull you out on my own.’ Prabir forced himself upright, fighting the passive weight of the snake. The woman wasn’t Madhusree.

She helped him loosen the coils enough for him to climb up on to her back. He didn’t seem to have any broken bones, but he was even weaker from the ordeal than he’d realised; she carried him like a child to the water’s edge, then manoeuvred him on to the ground before she clambered out of the water herself. She picked up the heavy branch she’d used to bash the python senseless, then reached down and hauled him to his feet. ‘Come on. Back from the water before we rest. It won’t be out cold much longer.’

Prabir staggered after her, still holding her hand. His teeth were chattering. He said in English, ‘You’re a biologist, aren’t you? You’re with the expedition?’

She frowned at him, and replied in English. ‘You’re not Moluccan? I knew there were no villages here, but — are you a scientist?’

Prabir laughed. ‘I must be, mustn’t I?’ Stick to the cover story . His legs collapsed.

She crouched beside him. ‘OK. We’ll rest for a bit, then I’ll get you back to base camp.’

‘What were you doing here?’

She nodded towards the snake; its head was still lying exposed on the mangrove roots where she’d cornered it, but it was showing signs of regaining consciousness. ‘Observing them, amongst other things. Though I prefer not to get quite as close as you did.’ She smiled uncertainly, then added, ‘You’re lucky; given that it already had prey secured, I wasn’t sure that even the most frantic imitation of an animal in distress would catch its attention. There’s a paper in there somewhere, on supernormal stimuli versus inhibition signals.’

The snake slid drunkenly off the mangroves, its body rising to the surface in a horizontal sine wave as it swam away. It had to be at least twenty metres long.

Prabir asked numbly, ‘What do they live off? There can’t be that many tourists.’

‘I think they eat wild pigs, mostly. But I’ve seen one take a salt-water crocodile.’

He blinked at her, then jumped to his feet. ‘There are crocodiles? My friend’s back there!’ He started running frantically towards the shore. ‘Martha? Martha!’

Grant appeared suddenly out of the jungle behind him. She seemed about to berate him jokingly for his tardiness, then she saw his rescuer. She hesitated, as if waiting for introductions, then made her own. ‘I’m Martha Grant. I’m with Prabir, we got separated.’

‘Seli Ojany.’ They walked up to each other and shook hands. Grant turned to Prabir expectantly, clearly aware that she was missing something significant, but he didn’t know how to begin. If the python hadn’t fled, he would have just pointed at it and mimed the rest.

Ojany was staring at him too, with an expression of disbelief. ‘You’re not Prabir Suresh? Madhusree’s brother?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You followed her here, all the way from Toronto?’

‘Yes.’

Ojany broke into a wide, delighted grin.

She said, ‘You’re in trouble!’

The expedition’s ship was anchored outside the reef; the biologists had landed in small boats and set up camp in half a dozen tents on a grassy plain not far from the beach. It was mid-afternoon, and the camp was almost deserted; nearly everyone was still out in the field. But one of the expedition members taking a day off was a woman with medical training; she examined Prabir to confirm that he had no broken bones, and gave him glucose and a sedative.

The three of them were covered in swamp matter; they washed themselves in the ocean, and Ojany found them clean clothes. Prabir was still shaky; he was being led through everything like an infant. Ojany said, ‘Come on, champ, you can use my bed for now, and we’ll organise something later for tonight.’

Prabir lay down on the rectangle of foam and stared up at the roof of the tent. He had a sudden, vivid memory of lying exhausted in his hammock, the day he’d walked halfway up Teranesia’s dead volcano to try to measure the distance to the nearest island. There was nothing especially poignant about the memory itself, but the sharpness of the recollection was enough to make him want to bash his head against the ground. He was tired of having to think about that idiot child, tired of having been him, but every attempt to get rid of him was like trying to slough off dead skin, only to find that it was still full of living nerves and blood vessels.

Grant shook him gently. It was dusk. She said, ‘Everyone’s eating now. Do you want to come join us?’

At least thirty people were gathered in the space between the tents. There were hurricane lamps set up, and a man was serving food from a butane stove. Grant said, ‘This isn’t just the expedition. A fishing boat turned up while you were asleep. Word seems to have leaked back to Ambon; a few people hitched a ride down.’

Prabir followed her into the serving line, looking around for Madhusree. He spotted several of the barflies from Ambon; Cole was wandering about delivering Delphic pronouncements to anyone who’d listen, his eyes glistening in the lamplight. ‘I have pursued the black sun across the salt flats of millennium, into the heart of the primeval calenture!’ Grant whispered to Prabir, ‘For God’s sake, someone give that man an antipyretic.’

When his turn came, Prabir gratefully accepted a steaming plate of stew, though he was unable to determine its exact nature even after he’d taken a mouthful. He walked to the edge of the gathering to eat; he could see Grant talking shop with Ojany, but he wasn’t in the mood to join in. As some of the diners began to improvise seats out of packing crates or rolled-up sleeping bags, he saw Madhusree standing with two other women, talking and laughing as they ate. She saw him watching her, and stared back for a moment with an utterly neutral expression, neither welcoming nor angry, before rejoining the conversation. Someone would have broken the news of his arrival to her as soon as she’d returned to the camp, but perhaps she still hadn’t decided whether or not to forgive him.

Cole’s student, Mike Carpenter, wandered over from the serving line. He stood beside Prabir, eating in silence for a while, then said, ‘You know Sandra Lamont?’

‘Not personally.’

‘I saw her once, in real life,’ Carpenter boasted. ‘She’s got terrible skin. Pores, wrinkles. They just smooth it all out with software.’

‘Gosh. How scandalous. Would you excuse me?’

Prabir made his way across the camp. A man with a Philippines accent in a Hawaiian shirt and a Stetson was saying to a similarly attired companion, ‘… welcomed by an animatronic dinosaur! Full marina facilities! And the hook-line is, “ Earth is the alien planet!” ’ Two biologists were arguing heatedly about transposons; one of them seemed to have independently reached an idea similar to Grant’s: ‘… shuffles back in the sequence for a complete functional protein domain that was cut out and shelved aeons ago … ’