Грег Иган - Teranesia

They reached the boat just after noon. Prabir unpacked the samples he’d collected before entering the swamp; the python had crushed half his tubes of gelled blood, but even so, the morning hadn’t been a complete loss.

Grant had no trouble finding the island on her chart from his description, but she asked Prabir to confirm it. He ran his finger over the bland set of contour lines on the screen, some satellite’s radar echo blindly cranked through a billion computations to spit out a shape that would have taken a human surveyor a month of hardship to map.

He said, ‘That’s it. That’s Teranesia.’

Grant smiled. ‘Is that really what you called it?’

‘Yeah. Well, it was the name I came up with, and my parents went along with it. But it was nothing to do with the butterflies; after about a week I was bored to tears with them. I didn’t pay much attention to any of the real animals; I used to make up my own. Child-eating monsters that chased us around the island, but never quite caught up.’

‘Ah, everyone has those.’

‘Do they? I never had them in Calcutta. There was no room.’

Grant said, ‘I packed a pretty good bestiary into the stairwell of a twelve-storey block of flats. Not that I didn’t have competition: one of my idiot brothers tried to give the whole building a kind of layered metaphysical structure — full of ethereal beings on different spiritual levels, like some lame cosmology out of Doris Lessing or C.S. Lewis — but even when his friends went along with it, I knew it was crap. All his little demons and angels had endless wars and political intrigues, but apparently no time for either food or sex.’

‘You had trouble attracting as many believers to a world of rutting carnivores?’

She nodded forlornly. ‘I even had hermaphroditic dung beetles, but no one cared. It was so unfair.’

Grant programmed the autopilot, and the engines started up smoothly. The boat circled around to face the reef, then retraced the safe path it had found on arrival.

As they rounded the coast and headed out to sea, Prabir stood on deck near the bow, waiting for the tip of the volcano to appear on the horizon. It was still too far away, though, too small to stand out from the haze.

Grant joined him. ‘So who do you want to play your character in the movie?’

Prabir cringed. ‘Did I really suggest going for the movie rights? I thought I must have dreamt that part. Can’t you just bring out a cologne, like the physicists do?’

‘Only because they have nothing worth filming. And I think they make more from donor gametes.’ She eyed him appraisingly. ‘One of the Kapoor brothers might just be dashing enough.’

‘That’s very flattering, but I doubt that any of them would be willing to take the role.’

Grant laughed, baffled. ‘Why on Earth not?’

‘Never mind. What about you?’

‘Oh, Lara Croft, definitely.’

She’d brought a pair of binoculars; she lifted them to the horizon. After a few seconds she announced, ‘I can see it now. Do you want a look?’

Prabir’s throat filled with acid. He still wasn’t ready . But everyone went back: to battlefields, to death camps, to places ten thousand times worse than this. Subhi to his lost village, no doubt. Every piece of land, every stretch of sea, was a graveyard to someone. He wasn’t special.

He took the binoculars and turned his head until the red azimuth needle was centred; the autopilot was providing the correct bearing. At first the image was nothing but a dark triangular smudge, blurred by turbulence. Then the processing chip recalibrated its atmospheric model and the scene leapt into focus: a cone of black igneous rock rising above the forest canopy. The distortion of the lowest light paths was impossible to correct; the image broke down into blobs of grey and green before the sea blocked the view completely.

He said, ‘That’s the place.’

We’re going to the island of butterflies .

Prabir was hoping that they’d find a previously undetected passage through the reef, but as they inched their way around the island watching the sonar display, the chance of that diminished, then vanished altogether. The old southern approach was narrow, and twenty years before no one would have attempted to pass through it in such a large craft, but the autopilot confidently declared that there was sufficient clearance.

They dropped anchor just inside the reef. It was too late to go ashore, with less than an hour of light remaining. The beach appeared smaller than Prabir remembered it, though whether the jungle had encroached, a storm had gouged sand away, or he was just misjudging the tide it was impossible to say. There were still coconut palms standing at the edge of the sand, but he could see the strange thorned shrubs choking out everything else in the undergrowth. There was no sign at all of the path that had once led from the beach to the kampung.

After they’d eaten, Grant made her nightly call home. Prabir sat out on deck, stupefied by the heat. He couldn’t call Felix; he didn’t want to be forced to justify what he’d done to Madhusree, let alone risk some kind of mediated confrontation if the two of them had been in contact.

He lay down and tried to sleep.

Just after midnight, he heard Grant come out on deck. She stood beside him. ‘Prabir? Are you still awake?’

As he rolled over, he saw her gazing down at him with the kind of unguarded fascination that he’d learnt never to betray on his own face by the time he was about fifteen. But then her eyes shifted to a neutral point behind his shoulder, and he doubted the significance of whatever he’d seen.

‘I just thought you ought to know that your extortion has borne its first fruit.’ She handed him her notepad. He glanced at the banner at the top of the page, then sat up cross-legged on his sleeping bag and read through the whole thing.

A molecular modelling team in São Paulo had examined the sequence data from the two expeditions, and identified a novel gene common to all the altered organisms; they’d sent Grant a copy of their results, as well as submitting them to a refereed netzine. Preliminary models of the protein the gene encoded suggested that it would bind to DNA.

Prabir said, ‘You think this is it? Your mythical gene-repair-and-resurrection machine?’

‘Maybe.’ Grant seemed pleased, but she was a long way from claiming victory. ‘Part of what they’ve found makes sense: this gene has a promoter that causes it to be switched on in meiosis — germ cell formation — which explains why there’s no need for a mutagen to activate it in these organisms. But there’s no evidence of a similar gene in any of the original genomes, let alone one that would only be switched on when it was needed to repair mutations.’

Prabir thought it over. ‘Could we be seeing the gene that the original version resurrected in place of itself? Once it went hyperactive, it not only substituted old versions of other genes, it substituted a completely unrecognisable version of itself?’

Grant laughed, through gritted teeth. ‘That’s possible, and it would make things very tricky. These modelling people might be able to determine the current protein’s function, but I wouldn’t count on them to be able to work backwards and determine the structure of an unknown protein that changed its own sequence into the current one. What we really need is DNA from two consecutive generations of the same organism, for comparison.’ She hesitated. ‘And if possible, DNA from two early consecutive generations of the butterflies.’

Prabir said, ‘You mean samples my parents took? They didn’t have your magic gelling agent. And I think the refrigeration would have failed by now.’