Грег Иган - Teranesia

Grant replied warily, ‘There’s no evidence that the mutations are contagious.’

‘Yet these creatures turn up hundreds of kilometres away. How do you account for that?’

‘I can’t. It will take time to explain.’

Aslan nodded sympathetically. ‘Meanwhile, my country and my people remain at risk from these abominations. What am I expected to do about that?’

Grant hesitated. ‘The impact on agriculture and health of flora and fauna transported across national borders by inadvertent human actions, or acts of nature, is the subject of a number of treaties. There are international bodies where these issues can be discussed, and any appropriate response coordinated.’

‘That’s a very diplomatic answer. But there are boats weaving back and forth across the Banda Sea as we speak, without regard to anything some subcommittee of the World Health Organisation might have to say on the matter in five years’ time.’

Grant said neutrally, ‘I can’t advise you on this. It’s beyond my expertise.’

‘I understand.’ Aslan nodded at the soldier from the beach, who led Grant out of the tent. Then he turned to Prabir.

‘You accompanied her on this trip?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you fornicate with her, on the boat?’

Prabir was unsure for a moment that he’d heard correctly. Then he replied icily, ‘I’m not familiar with that dialect of English.’

Aslan was indulgent. ‘Did you have sexual intercourse?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

The soldier who’d remained took a step towards Prabir, holding up his rifle like a club.

Prabir stared down at the tent’s mud-spattered ground sheet. What was going on in these people’s heads? Were they looking for an excuse to brand Grant as promiscuous, so they could rape her with a clear conscience?

‘No. We didn’t have sex.’

There was a long silence, then Aslan said calmly, ‘Look at me.’

Prabir raised his eyes reluctantly.

‘Are you a Muslim?’

‘No.’

Aslan seemed disappointed; maybe he’d been hoping to demonstrate his sophistication in the presence of the enemy. ‘Then I won’t ask you to swear on the name of the Prophet. But you’re a healthy young man, and she is a very charming woman.’

‘She is a virtuous married woman .’

‘But you took advantage of her? You raped her?’

Prabir was about to offer an outraged denial, when he realised that there’d be no end to this until Aslan had an explanation for his discomfort at the line of questioning. He looked him in the eye and said, ‘Why would I want to? I’m homosexual.’

Aslan blinked bemusedly, and for a moment Prabir wondered if he only knew derogatory terms and Biblese. Then he spread his arms and proclaimed joyously, ‘Hallelujah! That can be cured!’

Prabir muttered, ‘Not half as easily as Christianity.’

The soldier beside him swung the rifle butt into his temple. Prabir reeled, and fought to keep his balance. But the blow hadn’t been heavy, he wasn’t even bleeding.

‘You can cut off a man’s cock,’ Aslan declaimed, ‘but you can’t cut out his soul.’

Prabir was sorely tempted to improvise a maximally offensive rejoinder involving kuru and communion wafers, but it didn’t seem worth the risk of discovering that this homily was actually a recipe for surgical intervention.

Aslan said mildly, ‘Get him out of here.’

*

Prabir was led to another tent, where the expedition member who’d examined him after the python attack — he thought he remembered Ojany calling her Lisa — took a blood sample from him. She was clearly acting under duress as much as he was, but he’d rather she stuck the hypodermic in his arm than have one of the Lord’s Army do it.

Another soldier, closer to Aslan’s age, took the sealed tube of blood from her and spiked it on to the input nozzle of a robust-looking machine that resembled nothing so much as a field radio in a World War II movie. Well, not quite: it had an LCD flatscreen in the lid, like an old laptop computer. The soldier hit some buttons, and the machine began to whir. Prabir glanced down at the markings on the case, and saw the acronyms NATO and PCR. NATO had been the US imperial force in Europe, PCR was Polymerase Chain Reaction. It was an old army surplus genetic analyser, presumably designed to detect traces of DNA from biological weapons. But its current owners could have cut and pasted any sequence they liked into the software, and it would have happily purred away and spat out the necessary primers and probes.

They were testing his blood for the São Paulo gene.

Prabir felt a surge of panic — what did they know that he didn’t? — then grew calm again almost immediately. A medical officer in the Lord’s Army could grab a sequence of codons off a web page as easily as anyone; it didn’t mean they’d found evidence of human effects. They were merely paranoid about contagion. And if passing this witchfinder’s test meant ceasing to be of interest to them, so be it. Grant would pass, he would pass. Everyone in the expedition had surely passed already.

Prabir was allowed to join Grant and a dozen of the expeditioners, who were eating lunch under an awning. Cole and Carpenter were with them, but the businessmen seemed to have left with the fishing boat. A soldier sitting on a fuel drum in the corner looked on listlessly; compared to burning Muslim villagers out of their homes in Aru, this could hardly be a stimulating tour of duty.

Prabir approached Seli Ojany, who was standing with a small group of people beside a crate covered in plates of sandwiches. He caught her eye and whispered, ‘Do you know where my sister is?’

Ojany put a finger to her lips, then pretended she’d been wiping off breadcrumbs. It occurred to Prabir belatedly that half the expedition could have been out in the field when the Lord’s Army arrived, and some of them would have had the opportunity to see what was happening and stay away. It wasn’t an entirely comforting thought; Madhusree would probably have been safer in the camp than in the jungle, unless there was some brutality going on here that he’d yet to observe.

Prabir glanced at the soldier, but he didn’t seem to be paying them much attention. ‘So what’s brought the Inquisition here?’ he asked. ‘Are there really that many animals turning up in West Papua?’

Ojany gestured at a colleague beside her. ‘Mayumi heard the story closer to first-hand.’

‘Not animals in West Papua,’ Mayumi said, ‘but there were some fishermen who went to Suresh Island.’ Prabir did his best to accept this casual use of his parents’ name; it seemed Madhusree had put them on the map forever, pinning their memories to the spot. ‘They came back to Kai and ran amok in their own village; most of them were captured, but one of them escaped and ended up on Aru. That seems to be why the LA got interested.’

‘What do you mean “ran amok”? What exactly did they do?’ Prabir was hoping for some solid evidence at last to write this off as the result of a psychotropic plant toxin.

Mayumi shrugged. ‘The Kai islanders who were here earlier wouldn’t tell me. And the LA aren’t exactly forthcoming either.’

Deborah, one of Madhusree’s friends whom Prabir had met earlier, responded impatiently, ‘Forget what the Lord’s Army think: we know from the fruit pigeons and the butterflies that the São Paulo gene can cross between species. We can’t assume that we’re immune to that possibility, so we have to stop taking risks. At the very least, we should quarantine Suresh Island. Maybe even sterilise it, if it comes to that. You wouldn’t need to use an atomic weapon: just enough herbicide to kill all the vegetation, so the whole food chain collapsed.’