by Greg Egan
But Felix squeezed his shoulder and said, ‘I’m listening. Go on.’
Prabir kept his eyes on the floor. ‘I thought: maybe I should be glad. Evolution is senseless: the great dumb machine, grinding out microscopic improvements one end, spitting out a few billion corpses from the other. If I’d dragged just one good thing clear of it – if I’d found a way to be happy that cheated the machine – then that was a kind of victory. Like dragging Madhusree clear of the war.’ He looked up and asked hopefully, ‘Does that make any sense to you?’
‘It makes a lot of sense.’
‘But you don’t believe it’s true, do you? You don’t believe I’ve cheated the machine.’
Felix hesitated, then made an exasperated noise, as if he’d been trapped into a choice between arguing with him or humouring him.
He said, ‘I don’t believe it matters.’
Prabir was suddenly sick of talking. He’d bared his soul, and it had brought them no closer. He took Felix by the shoulders and drew him down on to the bed.
‘Ah, that’s what I like: less theory, more practice.’ Felix kissed him deeply, then ran a hand down the centre of his body. ‘You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’
Prabir said, ‘I’ll race you to the edge of the lake.’
‘I have a favour to ask you.’
Madhusree was washing the breakfast dishes; Prabir was drying. Felix had left, but they’d arranged to meet in the evening. Winter sunlight filled the kitchen, revealing every speck of dust and every imperfection on the room’s worn surfaces. Prabir felt utterly contented. He had no problems in his life, just invented complications. They were safe, they were happy. What more did he want?
He said, ‘Go ahead.’
‘I need some money.’
‘Sure. How much?’
Madhusree grimaced, bracing herself. ‘Five thousand dollars.’
‘Five thousand?’ Prabir laughed. ‘What are you planning to do? Start a business?’
Madhusree shook her head apologetically. ‘I know, it’s a lot to ask.’ She added, deadpan, ‘That’s why I was so glad when Felix showed up last night. I’ve been waiting all week to catch you in a good mood.’
Prabir flicked her on the arm with the tea towel. ‘Don’t be impertinent. And it makes no difference. I’m always in a good mood.’
‘Ha.’
‘So what’s the money for?’
‘I should be able to pay you back within a couple of years. Once I’ve graduated—’
Prabir groaned. ‘You don’t have to pay me back. Just tell me what you want it for.’ He scrutinised her face; she stared back at him with exaggerated nonchalance, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. She was actually nervous.
He was worried now. ‘If you’re in some kind of trouble, just tell me. I’m not going to be angry.’
Madhusree said, ‘I’ve been invited to go on a field trip. A joint expedition being mounted by several universities. It’s twenty-one people, mostly postdocs, but they’re taking two undergraduates. Only the funding doesn’t really cover us, so we have to pay our own way.’
‘But … that’s fantastic!’ Prabir’s anxiety gave way to relief, then pride. ‘Just two places for undergraduates, and they offered you one?’ He put down the plate he was drying and embraced her tightly, lifting her off the floor. ‘Of course you can have the money, you idiot! What did you think I’d say?’
When he drew away from her, Madhusree was blushing. Prabir berated himself silently; he hadn’t meant to go overboard and embarrass her.
‘So where’s the expedition going?’ he asked. ‘Not the Amazon, I hope. Apparently they’re so sick of naturalists there that they shoot them on sight.’
‘Not the Amazon. The South Moluccas.’
Prabir said, ‘That’s not funny.’ Neither was getting murdered in Brazil, actually, but he felt as if she’d responded to a playful jab by kicking him in the head.
‘It’s not meant to be.’ She met his gaze; she was more nervous than ever, but she wasn’t lying, or teasing him. ‘That’s where we’re going.’
‘Why?’ Prabir folded his arms awkwardly; he suddenly felt ungainly, his body strangely skewed. ‘Why there?’
‘Don’t get upset.’
‘I’m not upset. I just want to know.’
Madhusree led him to her room and picked up her notepad. ‘This screen’s too small. I’ll show you on the TV.’ They sat on the couch and she summoned up a succession of images from news reports and scientific papers.
The first discovery to attract the attention of the world’s biologists had been a fruit pigeon with strange coloration, a hitherto unseen mottled camouflage of green and brown. MRI scans and DNA analysis had yielded more radical differences; Prabir listened in a dreamlike state as Madhusree described structural anomalies in the bird’s internal organs, and a catalogue of useful mutations in key blood proteins. The Javanese zoologist who’d brought the specimen to light six months ago had only traced it as far as a bird dealer in Ambon, but after word had spread that anything unusual would fetch good money, two other genuine cases had emerged from a torrent of fakes and minor novelties. There was a dead tree frog with young that had apparently been maturing in a water-filled pouch. And there was a bat with the bones in its wings rearranged in an efficient, albeit unspectacular, fashion – thanks to a fully functioning gene for a protein controlling embryological development that did not exist in any other species on the planet. Both had been found on the island of Ceram, more than three hundred kilometres north of Teranesia.
Madhusree had to fight to contain her enthusiasm. ‘These are amazing discoveries – just like the butterflies, but who knows how many species are involved now? And there is no explanation. There’s no way of making sense of this. Whatever the cause turns out to be, it’s going to shake up biology like nothing since Wallace.’ Madhusree would have none of this Darwin nonsense; Alfred Wallace might have been too much of a doormat to take the credit he was due, but that wasn’t going to stop her putting the record straight.
Prabir was numb. ‘You didn’t tell anyone? About the butterflies?’ The reports made no mention of any earlier find; apparently neither his parents’ academic colleagues in Calcutta, nor their sponsor at Silk Rainbow had felt inclined to volunteer anecdotal evidence about their unpublished work.
Madhusree said, ‘I probably should have, but I was afraid they’d suspect I was making it up just to get in on the act.’ She smiled proudly. ‘But I’m on the team by merit alone. I even said “no” on the questionnaire when they asked about “jungle experience”.’ She mused, ‘Maybe the best thing would be for me to keep my mouth shut, and let the expedition stumble on the evidence. I mean, the huts should still be standing, and most of the equipment should be recognisable. There might even be some records intact.’
Prabir regarded her stonily. She took his hand and said, ‘Don’t you think they’d be glad if one of us went back? Now that it’s safe?’ Prabir felt a chill at the base of his spine: whether by choice or out of habit, she’d slipped into the hushed voice she’d used when they’d talked about their parents in his room at Amita’s.
He said, ‘It’s not safe. Why do you think it’s safe?’
Madhusree examined his face. ‘Because the war’s been over for almost eighteen years.’
Prabir pulled his hand free, irritated. ‘Yeah, and there are lunatics in government in West Papua—’
‘I’m not going to West Papua—’
‘Who want to claim half the islands—’
‘That’s nowhere near where we’re going!’
Prabir’s head was beginning to pound. If this wasn’t a dream, it was some kind of test. He’d brought her to safety, and now she was standing on the edge of the cliffs, babbling childish nonsense about diving back into the water.
He said, ‘There are still mines on those islands. Do you think someone’s gone through and de-mined them all?’
Madhusree rummaged through files, then waved her notepad
at the TV. ‘You strap this device to your belt. If there’s any chemical explosive within twenty metres, it tells you.’
The gadget was about as big as a matchbox. Prabir said, ‘I don’t believe you. Buried explosives? How? You know the Indonesians had NQR-aware mines? If you send out a radio pulse, they’ll triangulate your position and give you a gut full of shrapnel.’
‘It doesn’t use Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance; it’s entirely passive. There’s a radiation signature from the explosive: secondary particles emitted from the constituent atoms due to background and cosmic radiation.’
‘And … that thing’s sensitive enough to identify chemical composition from secondary radiation?’
Madhusree nodded earnestly.
Prabir stared at the screen, feeling like a doddering centenarian who’d blinked and missed a decade. ‘I’ve been in banking too long.’
‘Isn’t that a tautology?’
Prabir laughed, and felt something tearing inside. He could give in; it would be easy. He could shout, ‘Go! Go!’ and dance around the room with her, playing proud supportive big brother. Then she’d fly off to salvage her parents’ reputation and complete their work, like a fairy-tale princess returning from exile to right all wrongs and avenge all injustices.
He said, ‘I can’t afford it.’
‘I’m sorry?’
He turned to her. ‘Five thousand dollars? I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t even have that much in my account. And without collateral …’ He raised his hands apologetically.
Madhusree bit her lip and eyed him with frank disbelief, but Prabir was almost certain that she wouldn’t call his bluff. She might have argued all weekend about the risks the expedition would face, but she wouldn’t make a scene over money.
She said, ‘OK. I knew it was a lot. I’ll have to see about raising it some other way.’
‘Some other way? How long do you have?’
‘Two months.’
Prabir frowned sympathetically. ‘So what were you thinking of doing?’
Madhusree shrugged and said casually, ‘I’ve got some ideas. Don’t worry about it.’ She stood and left the room abruptly.
Prabir put his face in his hands. He hated lying to her, but he was certain now that he’d made the right decision. Even if there really was some revolutionary discovery waiting to be made on the island – and not just a very unpleasant mutagen that left a vast number of stillborn victims rotting in the jungle for every spectacular survivor – she could read about it like everyone else.
That would make her angry. But it wouldn’t kill her.
‘Are you sure it’s all right for me to be here?’ Felix’s work room looked like a biology lab in which an eclectic art thief had stashed a few million dollars’ worth of stolen goods. Prabir didn’t recognise any of the paintings awaiting assessment, hanging in a rack like posters in a shop, but the richness of the pigments and the skill of the execution was enough to make him nervous just being near them. ‘I don’t want to get you into trouble.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Felix was glued to a microscope, manually removing the last flakes of corrosion from an arrowhead after electrochemical treatment. ‘We have visitors back here all the time. You can’t steal anything; the building’s too smart. Try swallowing one of those coins and see how far you get.’
‘No, it’s the frog collection that’s starting to look tempting.’
Felix groaned. ‘I know, the booking’s for nine. I won’t be much longer.’
Prabir watched him working, envious and admiring. Anything involving fine visual detail was tricky for Felix, but with stationary objects he could build up a mental picture with higher resolution than the electrode sheet provided at any given moment, accumulating extra data as his eyes swept back and forth across the scene. Apparently the process had become partly instinctive, but it still required a certain amount of sheer doggedness, a constant mental effort to maintain the model in his head.
Prabir said, ‘I wish I’d met you nine years ago.’
Felix replied without looking up. ‘I was fifteen. You would have gone to prison.’
‘This is a hypothetical: we both get to be eighteen.’
‘That would have been even worse. You wouldn’t have wanted to know me then.’
Prabir laughed. ‘Why?’
‘Oh … I did a lot of stupid things.’
‘Like what?’
Felix didn’t respond immediately; Prabir wasn’t sure whether the question discomforted him, or whether he was merely concentrating on his work. ‘I used to go out with the sheet off, just to prove I didn’t need it. To convince myself that I could have lived a hundred years ago, and still got by.’
‘What’s so stupid about that?’
‘It wasn’t true. I’d grown up with it, I didn’t have the skills to cope without it. I knew that, but I kept pushing my luck.’ He laughed. ‘I met this guy in a club one night. He hung around talking to me for about three hours. There was a lot of touching: hands on shoulders, guiding me through the crowd. Nothing overtly sexual, but it was more than just polite. He was pretty evasive, but after a while I was almost certain that he was coming on to me—’
‘Three hours of this, and he wasn’t?’
‘I found out later that he had some complicated theory about picking up women. You know: outdoors you can walk a dog as a kind of character reference, but they don’t let you do that in nightclubs. It’s just a pity he didn’t tell me I was meant to be playing tragically disabled spaniel.’ Prabir was outraged, but Felix started laughing again. ‘I lured him out into an alley to see what he’d do with no one else around. I ended up spending a month in hospital.’
‘Shit.’ As Prabir’s anger subsided, a fierce core of protectiveness remained. But anything he said would have sounded melodramatic now that Felix had reached the point where he could laugh the whole thing off.
‘Madhusree told me about the expedition.’ Felix kept his eyes on the arrowhead. ‘She can’t understand why you’re so set against it.’
Prabir was about to deny this and stick to his claim of insufficient funds, but then it occurred to him that Felix would probably offer to help. He said, ‘It’s a dangerous place. There are still pirates all around those islands.’
Felix didn’t contradict him, directly. ‘The expedition’s being led by experienced local scientists; I’m sure they’ll take sensible precautions. And I can’t think of many places a biologist would want to go that aren’t potentially dangerous, one way or another.’
Prabir shifted awkwardly on the lab stool. It was easy to laugh off the sense of betrayal he felt, at the thought of Madhusree and Felix ganging up against him. But when he brushed aside his paranoia and told himself that Madhusree was entitled to seek other allies – it couldn’t always be the two of them against the world – that realisation still left him feeling almost unbearably lonely.
Felix looked up and said bluntly, ‘She was a lot younger than you when your parents died. If she’s not worried about going back, why can’t you just accept that?’ He seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘You’re the one who always wanted her to be proud of them. Now she wants to carry on their work! And even if there’d been no new discoveries … don’t you think she might have wanted to return eventually? Just to see where everything happened? However much you’ve told her, it’s not the same.’
Prabir said, ‘Can we get out of here? They’re going to give our table to someone else.’
‘Yeah, I’ve finished.’ Felix packed up quickly, then grabbed his jacket. ‘I’m sorry; I’m not going to harangue you all night. But I promised her I’d talk to you.’
‘And now you have.’
Felix led the way out of the work room, into a maze of corridors. ‘If you don’t want to talk to me, talk to her. Properly. You owe her that.’
‘I owe her? I’ve only given her eighteen years of my life!’
Felix snorted with amusement. ‘That’s one thing I love about you: you could have given
her a lung and a kidney, and you still wouldn’t be able to milk it for sympathy with any conviction.’
Prabir was caught off balance. ‘Don’t be so fucking patronising.’ The compliment pleased him, but this wasn’t the time to admit that.
Felix said, ‘This is a good thing for both of you, any way you look at it. And if you think it’s dangerous for Madhusree to go traipsing through the jungle for a couple of weeks, you can’t have much idea of what most nineteen-year-olds get up to.’
‘Oh, so now you’re the expert on that too?’
‘No, but I can still remember what it was like.’
Prabir had no reply. He’d always imagined that was how he understood Madhusree; by being young enough to remember. But nothing about his own life at nineteen resembled hers. It wasn’t just the fact that he’d had a child to look after; he’d also had any adolescent attraction to risk knocked out of him, well in advance. His entire adulthood had been devoid of excitement. Why should Madhusree have to pay the same price? The whole point had been to make things better for her, to try to give her something like a normal life.
No, the whole point was to keep her safe.
Prabir stopped dead. There was a dusty display case full of tropical butterflies hanging on the wall, with fading labels that looked like they’d been produced on a manual typewriter. It had probably been hanging there since some era when this corridor lay on a route between public exhibits, long before the latest round of rebuilding.
He said, ‘Getting her away from there was the one good thing I’ve done in my life. And now everyone expects me to pack her bags and buy her a ticket. It’s surreal. Why don’t you just ask me to blow my brains out while you’re at it? I’m not going to do it.’
Felix backtracked, and saw what he was looking at. ‘What you did was get her away from the war. She wouldn’t be going back to that.’
Prabir had lost interest in trying to justify himself. He said flatly, ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know anything about it.’
