Грег Иган - Teranesia

Grant shook her head. ‘Not unless it’s gone even more awry than that. The males are all doing it too.’

Prabir held the guard rail and pushed against it, trying to unknot his shoulders. ‘If the gene didn’t start off as something every species has for mutation repair, we still have to account for its spread from the butterflies to everything else.’ He turned to Grant, smiling disarmingly, hoping she’d suffer a little more frivolous speculation. ‘Just for argument’s sake: if Furtado was right, maybe the São Paulo gene saw this as an easy way to get copies of itself into the fruit pigeons.’

Grant didn’t respond immediately; Prabir assumed she was thinking up a suitably withering reply.

‘I found something else in the RNA analysis,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Large amounts of an endonuclease — an enzyme for cutting and splicing DNA — being produced throughout the bodies of the dormant adults. I haven’t characterised it any further yet …’ She trailed off.

Prabir said, ‘But if it’s the right kind of endonuclease, it might be perfect for the job of splicing the São Paulo gene into the genome of the fruit pigeons?’

Grant nodded, and continued reluctantly. ‘The fraction of DNA and endonuclease that survived digestion and entered the bloodstream would always be tiny, though I suppose it could be packaged in something like liposomes to protect it, and help it get absorbed by the wall of the gut. There’s then another hurdle to get the gene into the ovaries or testes. This might be the transmission route, but the whole picture’s not clear, by any means.’

Prabir looked back across the water; he could still see Teranesia’s volcanic cone in the distance. ‘Everything else could be a throwback, couldn’t it? If mimcry was once used to get parasitic larvae into the fruit pigeons, then if the genes for that have been reactivated now, pointlessly, in egg-laying females, they might also have been reactivated in males — simply because the switch isn’t functioning properly.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And there are other uses for endonucleases, aren’t there? It might be a coincidence that the endonuclease gene is switched on at the same time as the others?’

‘It might.’

Prabir laughed suddenly. ‘Listen to me. We’ve been to Teranesia, we’ve been to the source, and I expect everything to fall into place in a day. I’ve gone twenty-one years without an answer. I can wait a little longer.’

He glanced down at the graphic of SPP in Furtado’s article, which was cycling through sixteen of the conformations it could adopt, binding to each of the four bases in the old strand while adding each of the four to the new. Between them, these sixteen simple transformations could generate every conceivable change: as the old strand was broken apart and the new one constructed, the potential existed for the organism to become anything at all.

And from that limitless sea of possibilities, what marvellous inventions did the São Paulo gene pluck?

Those that made as many copies of the São Paulo gene as possible.

They reached the island of the mangroves and made use of the same approach as before, then sailed around the coast inside the reef. As they drew nearer to the point where the expedition had set up camp, Prabir saw that the fishing boat was gone, but another vessel had taken its place alongside the research ship.

They dropped anchor and waded ashore. They were halfway to the camp when a young man appeared on the beach about fifty metres ahead of them, dressed in camouflage trousers, combat boots, and a Chicago Bulls T-shirt. He raised a rifle and aimed it at them, then barked out a series of commands in English.

‘Halt! Put your hands on your heads! Squat down!’

They complied. The man walked up to Prabir and held the rifle to his temple. ‘What are you doing here? Where have you come from?’ Prabir was too agitated to reply immediately, but as he struggled to relax his larynx sufficiently to speak he took some comfort from the realisation that the man was probably not a pirate. Only a soldier would be so interested in their movements, and whatever misunderstanding was provoking his hostility would surely be easy enough to resolve.

Grant explained calmly, ‘I’m a biologist, this is my assistant. I have a permit from the government in Ambon.’

The soldier’s reaction to this last phrase was not encouraging. ‘Pig-fucking ecumenical heretics!’ Prabir’s heart sank. The man was not a Moluccan soldier: he was with the Lord’s Army, West Papua’s born-again Christian militia. Officially, they weren’t even part of that country’s armed forces, though it was widely assumed that they received clandestine government support. They’d been making trouble in Aru for years. But Aru was almost three hundred kilometres east.

‘Where have you been?’ the man demanded.

Prabir said, ‘On the other side of the island.’ If Teranesia’s infamy had spread throughout the region, it might not be wise to admit to having visited the place.

‘You’re lying. Yesterday, there was no sign of your boat.’

‘You must have missed us. We were halfway into the mangroves.’

The man snorted with derision. ‘You’re lying. You come and see Colonel Aslan.’

As they walked through the camp, Prabir saw three more armed men lounging around looking bored, and several of the expedition members standing nervously at the entrances to their tents. The biologists weren’t exactly being guarded like hostages, but this was definitely not a guest/host relationship. There was no sign of Madhusree. Prabir kept telling himself that there was no reason for the soldiers to have harmed anyone, but nor was there any obvious reason for them to be here at all. Maybe there’d been a case that Aru should have joined West Papua at independence — even if that was now about as attractive a prospect as West Bengal being declared a part of Pakistan — but it was hard to imagine what kind of mileage the Lord’s Army expected to gain for the cause by bullying foreigners deep in RMS territory.

The Colonel had taken up office in one of the expedition’s supply tents; Prabir and Grant were made to stand and wait outside in the early-afternoon sun. After twenty minutes, the soldier guarding them muttered something irritably in his native language and went and sat in the shade of a tree, his rifle propped up on one knee to keep it pointing vaguely in their direction.

Prabir whispered, ‘You do know who we’re dealing with?’

‘Yeah, yeah. I’ll be on my best Sunday-school behaviour.’ Grant seemed more weary than afraid, as if this was just another tedious obstacle to get through, no different from slogging through the mangroves. But she’d travelled widely, so perhaps she’d grown accustomed to occasional periods of arbitrary detention.

‘ “Colonel Aslan”’ Do you think he’s a foreign mercenary? It sounds more like a name from central Asia than anything from around here.’

Grant smiled, somewhat condescendingly. ‘I believe it’s now a common choice upon conversion to Christianity all over the planet, at least when the evangelists get their hooks in early enough. Just don’t admit to a fondness for Turkish delight, and you should be OK.’

‘Turkish delight?’

‘Don’t worry. It would take too long to explain.’

A second young soldier emerged from the tent and shot a warning glance at their guard, who leapt to his feet. The two of them escorted Grant and Prabir into the tent, past drums of flour and boxes of toilet paper.

Colonel Aslan turned out to be a muscular Papuan man in his thirties, apparently devoted to the Dallas Cowboys. He was seated behind a desk improvised from crates. When Grant handed over her permit, he smiled graciously. ‘So you’re the famous Martha Grant! I’ve been following your work on the net. You’ve been to the heart of the contagion, and returned to tell the tale.’