Teranesia

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.’

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! Thatcan 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.