Teranesia

Farcical, and monumentally selfish.

He was silent for a while, trying to come to terms with this. Then he said, ‘There’s something I want to do here, if you’re willing. But we’ll need some tools, and I’ll have to wait until this shit wears off.’

They returned to the kampung in the afternoon, with a chainsaw and a mallet. Grant cut branches into metre lengths and Prabir drove them into the ground, making a small fence all the way around the mined garden. He nailed warning signs to each side, in six languages, using his notepad to translate the message. There wasn’t much chance of fishermen coming this far into the jungle, but when the next biologists arrived it would be one small extra safeguard.

Grant said, ‘Do you want to put up a plaque?’

Prabir shook his head. ‘No shrines. They’d have hated that.’

Grant left him, trusting him now. Prabir stood by the fence and tried to picture them, arm in arm, middle-aged, with another half-century ahead of them. In love to the end, working to the end, living to see their great-great-grandchildren.

That was what he’d destroyed.

Grant had kept insisting: They wouldn’t have blamed you!But what did that mean? The dead blamed no one. What if his mother had survived, crippled by grief, knowing he was responsible? She might have tried to shield him at first, when he was still a child. But now? And for the rest of his life?

And his father—

He had no right to test them like this, asking them to choose between rejection and forgiveness. And whatever excuses they might have made for him, however much compassion they might have shown, it made no difference in the end. He didn’t want their imaginary blessing, he didn’t want any kind of plausible solace. He only wanted the impossible: he wanted them back.

He sat on the ground and wept.

Prabir made his way back to the beach, before the light failed. He’d lost the will to die, to anaesthetise himself out of existence.

But to live, he’d have to live with the pain of what he’d done, not the hope that it could be extinguished. That would never happen. He’d have to find another reason to go on.

PART SIX

13

Grant spent the next morning extracting tissue from the preserved butterflies, then sequencing their DNA. Even with the São Paulo protein scrambling parts of the genome, it was possible to construct a plausible family tree from genetic markers, using the serial numbers as a guide to chronology.

Prabir had guessed one thing correctly: the São Paulo gene had changed. Its own protein had gradually rewritten it, though the twenty-year-old protein seemed to have made much subtler changes from generation to generation than the modern version. This added a new twist to the convergence process: at least in the butterflies, the transformation itself had been subject to successive refinements. Whatever SPP did to produce its strangely beneficent mutations, over time the mutations it had wrought in its own gene had enabled it to perform the whole process more efficiently.

Grant posted the historical data on the net, giving credit to Radha and Rajendra Suresh. Then she set to work on the dormant adults, taking samples for RNA transcript analysis. They weren’t in any danger of ru

Prabir sat and watched her work, helping where he could. Maybe it was just the realisation of what she’d done for him in the kampung finally sinking in, but her face seemed kinder to him now, her whole demeanour warmer. It was as if he’d finally learnt to read the dialect of her body language, in the same way as he’d adjusted to her unfamiliar accent.

In the evening, after they’d eaten, they sat on the deck, facing out to sea, listening to music and pla

‘What are you going to say to her?’ Grant asked.

Prabir shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell her the things I told you. I’m not going to poison her life with that. But I don’t want to lie to her any more. I don’t want to feed her some line about coming here to spare her from the trauma.’

Grant shot him an exasperated look. ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that that could still be true? You can have more than one reason for doing something.’

‘I know, but—’

She cut him off. ‘Don’t let this blight everything. Don’t let it rob you of the things you have a right to be proud of. Do you honestly believe that you’ve never once tried to protect her just because she’s your sister?’

Prabir replied fiercely, ‘If I haven’t, then at least I’m not a slave to my genes.’

Grant’s eyes narrowed. ‘And that matters more to you?’ For a moment Prabir thought he’d lost her, that his words were unforgivable, but then she added drily, ‘At least in a bad enough movie you could turn out to be adopted.’

He said, ‘If that’s your idea of a bad movie, you’ve had a very sheltered life.’

He reached over and stroked her face with the back of his hand. She kept her eyes on his, but said nothing. He’d acted on a barely conscious sense of rightness, half expecting to have his instinct proved utterly mistaken, but she neither encouraged nor rebuffed him. He remembered her watching him, the night they’d arrived; at the time he’d doubted it meant anything at all, but now he felt as if scales had fallen from his eyes.

He bent down and kissed her; they were sitting propped up against the wall of the cabin, it was hard to face her squarely. For a moment she was perfectly still, but then she began to respond. He ran a hand along her arm. The scent of her skin was extraordinary; inhaling it sent warmth flooding through his body. The Canadian girls in high school had smelt as bland and sexless as infants.

He slipped his hand under the back of her shirt and stroked the base of her spine, pulling her towards him, aligning their bodies. He already had an erection; he could feel his pulse where it pressed against her leg. He moved his hand to her breast. He had to fight away any image of where they were heading; he was afraid that if he pictured it he’d come at once. But he didn’t have to think, he didn’t have to plan this: they’d be carried forward by the internal logic of the act.

Grant pulled away suddenly, disentangling herself. ‘This is a bad idea. You know that.’

Prabir was confused. ‘I thought it was what you wanted!’

She opened her mouth as if to deny it, then stopped herself. She said, ‘It doesn’t work like that. I’ve been faithful to Michael for sixteen years. I’ll sit up all night and talk if you want, but I’m not going to fuck you just to make you feel better.’

Prabir stared down at the deck, his face burning with shame. What had he just done?Had it been some clumsy attempt at gratitude, which he’d imagined she’d accept without the slightest scruple?

She said gently, ‘Look, I’m not angry with you. I should have stopped you sooner. Can we just forget about it?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’

He looked up. Grant smiled ruefully and implored him, ‘Don’t make a big deal out of this. We’ve been fine until now, and we can still be fine.’ She rose to her feet. ‘But I think we could both do with some rest.’ She reached down and squeezed his shoulder, then walked into the cabin.