Грег Иган - Teranesia

When he’d finished, Prabir was unable to speak. How could anyone lose so much, and emerge with so little bitterness? Religion had nothing to do with it; pela did not derive from either Islam or Christianity, it was a conscious strategy developed to detoxify the unavoidable mixture of the two. But some combination of personal resilience and an accommodating culture had pulled this man out of the conflagration of his childhood, apparently intact.

Prabir felt a need to reciprocate, to relate some of his own history. He asked Subhi if he knew of an island with a dead volcano, seventy kilometres south-west.

Subhi’s face became grim. ‘That’s not a good place, there are spirits there.’ He looked at Prabir anew. ‘Are you the son of the Indian scientists who went there before the war?’

‘Yes.’ Prabir was amazed to be identified this way, but then he remembered the labourers from the Kai Islands who’d helped his parents set up the kampung. If Teranesia had since gained a supernatural reputation, its whole recent history might have become widely known.

He said, ‘What kind of spirits? Spirits in the form of animals?’ Any advance intelligence about the modified fauna could help them prepare.

Subhi nodded uneasily. ‘There are many kinds of spirits there, released as punishment for the crimes of the war. Visible and invisible. Possessing animals, and men.’

‘Possessing men?’ Prabir wondered if this was merely a formulaic recitation of metaphysical possibilities. ‘Who? No one lives there now, do they?’

‘No.’ Subhi looked at the ground, discomforted.

‘So who did the spirits harm? Did a boat stop there?’

He nodded.

‘When?’

‘Three months ago. To make repairs.’

‘And the men on board became sick?’

‘Sick? In a way,’ Subhi agreed reluctantly.

‘Did they eat something on the island? Did they catch some of the animals? How were they sick?’

Subhi shook his head, pained. ‘It’s not respectful to talk about this.’

Prabir didn’t want to offend him, but if there was any evidence of effects on human DNA, nothing could be more important than tracking it down. ‘Could I meet these men? If I went to their village?’

‘That’s not possible.’ Subhi rose to his feet abruptly, brushing sand from his clothes. ‘It’s time I joined my friends.’ He reached down and shook Prabir’s hand, then started walking away along the beach.

Prabir called after him, ‘The men who visited the island? Are they alive, or dead?’

There was a long silence, then Subhi replied without turning. ‘God willing, they’re at peace.’

Grant arrived at twenty past six. Prabir said, ‘I’d almost given up on you. Have you decided?’

She held up her notepad. Prabir took out his own and cloned the page she was displaying, then reread it independently via a randomly chosen proxy, to verify that it really was publicly available.

He flipped through the sequence data; there was no way he could tell whether or not it was correct, he’d simply have to trust her. Then he noticed the sponsorship logo: Borromean rings built of rotating plasmids. The logo detected his gaze and said proudly, ‘This information is brought to you by PharmoNucleic, as a service to the scientific community.’

He looked up at Grant, amazed. ‘You’re rubbing their face in it? Isn’t that begging to be sued?’

Grant said matter-of-factly, ‘They’re not going to sue anyone. I told them the choice you’d offered me, and they agreed to release all the data. They don’t see any serious patent prospects, given that the expedition has collected so much data of its own. Instead of wasting all the money they’ve invested so far, they’d rather have some good PR. Oh, and an eighty per cent share of any media rights.’

Prabir was delighted. ‘You’re a genius! Why didn’t I think of that?’

‘Misdirected hostility towards authority?’

‘Ha! You’re the one who told me how much you hated being gagged. I thought you’d be dying for an excuse to bite their hand off.’

Grant said drily, ‘I’m the one who still has a family to support.’

Prabir hefted his backpack. He was still aching all over, but the oppressive mood he’d felt at dawn had lifted. Even if Madhusree’s colleagues took her belated revelations seriously, the expedition would be saddled with enough logistical inertia to keep them from doing anything about it immediately. If he and Grant could return in a day or two with samples from the island — and all their findings were in the public domain — there’d be no urgent need for a second visit. Maybe their results would merit a comprehensive follow-up, eventually, but the expedition had a finite budget and a limited timetable. Madhusree would be back in Toronto long before anyone went near Teranesia again.

He said, ‘Are you ready?’

‘Yeah. Are you sure you’re up to this?’

‘I’m up to anything that doesn’t involve mangroves.’

Grant put an arm across his shoulders and said solemnly, ‘I shouldn’t have left you behind. It was a stupid thing to do, and I’m truly sorry. We won’t get separated again.’

The route back along the coast was infinitely less arduous than the jungle. They swam past the inlet to the mangrove swamp through crystalline water at the reef’s inner edge, where at least they’d have a chance to see any predators approaching. But they made the crossing unmolested; despite the multitude of fish, the swamp and the forest were apparently considered better hunting grounds.

As they trudged along the beach again, Prabir told Grant about Subhi’s story of the fishermen.

She said, ‘That could mean anything. They might have cooked a plant they were accustomed to eating safely, and it turned out to have acquired some extra protective toxins.’

‘Yeah.’ That did sound like the simplest explanation, and if the men had died badly, psychotic and hallucinating, it would have been enough to confirm the presence of spirits. Prabir wished he could have questioned someone else about the incident, but they didn’t have time to go off to the Kai Islands to hunt for reliable witnesses to an event nobody wanted to talk about.

Grant said, ‘Tell me about your parents’ work.’

Prabir sketched the sequence of events that had led Radha and Rajendra to the island. It was a long time since he’d discussed this with anyone but Madhusree, and as he listened to himself betraying her — handing over the family history to this stranger, to keep Madhusree from making use of it herself — he felt far worse than he’d anticipated. But Grant had kept her side of the deal, and he had no reason to believe that his parents would have wanted him to keep any of this secret.

‘Can you describe the butterflies?’

‘They were green and black. Emerald green. There was a pattern, a sort of concentric striping; not quite eye spots, but a bit like that. They were pretty large; each wing was about the size of an adult’s hand. There was something about the veins in the wings, and the position of the genitals, that my parents made a big deal about. But I’ve forgotten the details.’

‘Would you recognise the other stages? The eggs, the larvae, the pupae?’

Prabir pictured the sequence laid out in front of him. He’d been inside the butterfly hut, just once: at night, in the dark . In his memory, though, he could see the contents of all the cages. Spiked, hissing larvae. Orange and green pupae like rotten fruit.

‘I’m not sure.’ The words came out like an angry denial.

Grant turned to look at him, surprised by his tone. ‘They might be easier to collect than the adults, that’s all. But if you can’t remember, it’s not the end of the world.’