Teranesia

by Greg Egan

  The flight to Ambon left the next morning. Prabir slung his backpack over his shoulders and started walking, ignoring the bus that was waiting to take passengers into the city centre. Once he checked into the hotel he’d probably fall asleep immediately, but if he could hold off until early evening he’d be able to start the next day refreshed and in synch. With six hours to kill and no interest in window shopping, the simplest method he could think of to stave off boredom would be to wander through the city on foot. His notepad had already acquired a local street map, so he was in no danger of getting lost.

  He headed north out of the airport precinct, past playing fields and a cemetery, into a stretch of calm green tropical suburbia. At first he felt self-conscious when he passed other pedestrians – the size of his backpack marked him clearly as a tourist – but no one gave him a second glance. It felt good to stretch his legs; the pack wasn’t heavy, and even the surreal heat was more of a novelty than a hardship.

  There was nothing on these serene, palm-lined streets to remind him of the detention camp two thousand kilometres away, but as he passed what looked like the grounds of a boarding school, he recalled his parents discussing the possibility of sending him to Darwin to study. If they’d had their way, he might have sat out the war here. So why hadn’t he? Had he dissuaded them somehow? Thrown some kind of tantrum? He couldn’t remember.

  The afternoon downpour began, but the trees along the verge gave plenty of cover and his pack was waterproof. He kept walking north, away from the hotel. The earthy smell of the air as it rained made him ache with a kind of frustrated nostalgia: he couldn’t decide whether the scent of the storm reminded him of Calcutta, the island, or just Darwin itself.

  The answer came a few minutes later, when the road ended at a hospital. He stood in the rain, staring at the entrance. He would never have recognised the building by sight alone, but he knew that he’d been here before.

  His mother had been in labour for eight or nine hours, starting late at night. He’d been put to bed somewhere far enough away from the delivery room that he couldn’t hear a sound, and he’d fallen asleep assuming – with a mixture of resentment and gratitude – that he’d miss out on everything. But in the morning his father had woken him and asked, ‘Do you want to see your sister being born?’

  While the violence of the birth itself had unnerved him, even his mother’s suffering hadn’t been able to distract him entirely from the strangest part of what he was witnessing. Two cells that might as easily have been shed from his parents’ bodies like flakes of skin had instead succeeded in growing into an entirely new human being. That they’d done this deep inside his mother was clearly of no small consequence to her, but what struck Prabir even more forcefully than the realisation that he’d emerged in the same dramatic fashion himself was the understanding that he too had been built from nothing but air and food and ancestry, just as this child had been built, month by month back on the island, right before his eyes.

  He’d long ago accepted his parents’ account of his own growth. He was not at all like a child-shaped balloon, merely swelling up with food; rather, he grew the way a city grew, with buildings and streets endlessly torn apart and reconstructed. A vast collection of templates inside him was used to assemble, from the smallest fragments of each digested meal, the molecules needed to repair and rebuild and extend every part of his body. Great fleets of microscopic couriers rode crystalline scaffolding, swam rivers thicker than treacle, and negotiated guarded portals to carry the new material to the places where it was needed.

  All of this was astonishing and unsettling enough, but he’d always shied away from pursuing it to its logical conclusion. Only once Madhusree had emerged, staring uncomprehendingly into a room full of faces and lights that he knew she’d never remember, had Prabir finally seen beyond the vanishing point of his own memories. The thing he knew first-hand about her was equally true of himself: he had once not existed at all. He’d been air and water, crops and fertiliser, a mist of anonymous atoms spread across India, across the whole planet. Even the genes that had been used to build him had been kept apart until the last moment, like the torn halves of a pirate’s map of an island yet to be created.

  While his mother cradled the child in her arms, his father had knelt by the bed, kissing them both, laughing and sobbing, delirious with happiness. Prabir had been relieved that his mother was no longer in agony, and quite smitten with his newborn sister, but that hadn’t stopped him from wondering what she’d actually done to deserve all this adoration. Nothing he hadn’t done himself. And that would always be true: however precocious she turned out to be, he’d had too much of a head start to be overtaken. His position was unassailable.

  Unless he was working from the wrong assumptions. He’d always imagined that he’d somehow earned his parents’ love, but what if his sister’s reception was proof that you began life not with a blank slate, devoid of either merit or blame, but with a kind of unblemished record that could only be marred? In that case, the best he could hope for would be to slip no further while he waited for her to fall as far.

  He’d felt ashamed of these thoughts immediately, and though that wasn’t enough to quash his jealousy, he’d resolved, there and then, never to take it out on Madhusree. If his parents continued to favour her – once the understandable fog of emotions brought on by the birth itself had cleared – then that would be their fault entirely. It was obvious that she’d played no part in it.

  Nineteen and a half years later, Prabir wasn’t sure that any of these thoughts really had run through his head in the delivery room. He didn’t trust memories of sudden revelations or resolutions; it seemed more likely that he’d reached the same conclusions over a period of months, then grafted them on to his memories of the birth. Still, it made him cringe to think that he could have been so calculating and smug, however absurd it was to judge himself in retrospect by adult standards. And in one sense he couldn’t even claim to have advanced much beyond that child’s perspective: he still couldn’t untangle the reasons for his parents’ love.

  On one level it seemed utterly unmysterious: caring for your children was as indispensable as every other drive for reproduction or survival. It might be a struggle to raise a family, the way it was a struggle to gather food or find a mate, but the end result was as unequivocally satisfying as eating or fucking, as self-evidently right as breathing.

  The only trouble was, this was bullshit. Even writing off as aberrations the vast number of parents who never came close to that ideal, no one’s love was unconditional. Children could gain or lose favour through their actions, just like any stranger. Had the possibility of rejection itself been fine-tuned by natural selection, to improve the child’s prospects of survival by instilling a suitably pragmatic moral code? Or was it all a thousand times subtler than that? Human parents weren’t bundles of twitching reflexes; they agonised over every decision. And yet, you could reflect and reason all you liked, mapping out an elaborate web of consequences that might not have occurred to you if you’d acted in haste, but in the end you still had to decide what was right, and the touchstone for that was as primal as it was for any gut feeling.

  Felix would have told him that none of this mattered – however fascinating it was, scientifically. In the end we were what we were, and it made no difference how we’d got there. But that wasn’t such an easy mantra to recite when you’d travelled halfway around the planet, with no clear idea why. Prabir had resigned himself to his inability to reason away the dread he felt at the thought of Madhusree setting foot on the island; whether or not it was out of all proportion to any real risk she faced, he couldn’t expect to shake off the past so lightly. But he wasn’t even sure what fear, or what drive, the fulcrum of Teranesia had rendered so powerful. Was he still trying to impress his dead parents with his dedication? He’d always relied on his memory of them for guidance – and their imagined approval had always been the one sure sign that he’d done something right – but he didn�
�t believe that he’d reduced Madhusree to a pawn in some game with the ghosts in his head. Still less could he accept that everything between them revolved around the obscure Mendelian fact that she was the only living person who could carry half his genes into the future. Madhusree wasn’t only his sister; she was his oldest friend and staunchest ally. Why wouldn’t he take a few weeks’ vacation from a job he hated to look out for her in a dangerous corner of the world?

  Prabir turned away from the hospital and started back towards the city. However much he might have loved, admired and respected her if they’d met for the first time under Amita’s roof – if she’d been adopted from some other family entirely, but still chosen to flee that madhouse with him at the first opportunity – he was almost certain that he would never have been willing to follow her all the way to Teranesia.

  Prabir had flown into Ambon once before, but he had no clear memory of the descent. This time, at least, it was startlingly apparent – as it had never been from sea level, approaching in the ferry – that the mist-shrouded island was actually a pair of distinct volcanic bodies, connected in geologically recent times by a narrow isthmus of silt. Ambon Harbour was the largest part of what had once been the strait between these two separate islands; if it had penetrated any deeper it would have come out the other side.

  Pattimura Airport lay on the north-west shore of the harbour; Ambon City was ten kilometres due east. Prabir watched one speedboat crossing the water, overloaded with people and luggage, and decided to take the long way round.

  Waiting on the highway for the bus, he felt self-conscious in a very different way than he had in Darwin; he was almost afraid that someone might recognise him and ask him to account for his long absence. That wasn’t very likely; the people they’d met here had been friendly enough, but with his broken Indonesian and the family’s infrequent visits, he’d never really had the chance to get to know anyone.

  The trip around the harbour took almost an hour. The water looked much cleaner than he remembered; there’d usually been a plume of oil and floating garbage stretching out to surround the ferry before it had even entered the harbour.

  He alighted in the city and set out for the hotel. The streets were cobblestone, recently refurbished, lined with tall palm trees at regular intervals; the whining scooters he remembered being everywhere had apparently been banished from the city centre. There were no billboards, and no intrusively modern signs on the shops; an almost uniform row of white stone façades shone in the sun. The whole thing was probably a calculated attempt to re-create the style of the Dutch colonial period for the tourists, most traces of the real thing having been comprehensively bombed into dust during World War II.

  He’d never learnt his way around Ambon as a child, relying on his parents to shepherd him. He recognised none of the buildings he passed, and he had no real sense of where he was in relation to the shops and markets where they’d bought provisions. But the angle of the light, the scent of the air, were enough to evoke a discomforting sense of reconnection. He didn’t need to see the past re-created brick by brick to feel the tug of it inside him.

  A small group of people in brightly coloured, formal-looking clothes stood at the edge of the main square, arms outstretched at their sides, eyes half closed, perspiring heavily, singing. Behind them, a sagging cardboard sign bore a few dozen words in Indonesian. Prabir was too tired to dredge his memory for an uncertain translation, and when he saw a citation at the bottom – book, chapter and verse – he decided not to bother fishing out his notepad for help.

  Hordes of evangelical Christians from the US had descended on the region in the wake of the civil war, but they’d had far more success in West Papua, where even the current President had been converted to born-again psychosis. Prabir wasn’t sure why the Moluccans had proved so resistant this time round; they’d been a pushover for Spanish Catholicism, then chucked it all in for Dutch Protestantism – though that must have been at least partly a matter of trying to get along with whoever held the guns to their heads from year to year. Maybe the Americans hadn’t tried hard enough to conceal their phobia of Islam, which would not have gone down too well here. Relations between Christians and Muslims on Ambon had suffered almost irreparable damage in the early years of the post-Suharto chaos, with provocateur-led riots claiming hundreds of lives. A decade later, entire villages had been wiped out under cover of war. With independence, the government of the Republik Maluku Selatan had set about reviving a five-hundred-year-old tradition of alliances between Christian and Muslim villages; these pela alliances had once been famously successful at defusing inter-religious tensions, and still ran so deep on some outlying islands that Christians built mosques for their neighbours, Muslims built churches. The return of pela, with the opportunity it provided to write off the years of violence as an aberration, was probably the main reason the RMS hadn’t torn itself apart in an endless cycle of revenge killing.

  Prabir was about to move on when he noticed the exhibit at the singers’ feet, largely obscured by the pedestrians passing in front of it. Some kind of animal had been inexpertly dissected, and the parts laid out on a stained canvas sheet. Reluctantly, he moved closer. The viscera and the separated bones meant nothing to him; the intended audience had probably had more experience with butchering animals, and would at least know what was meant to impress them. The skull looked like a small marsupial’s, a tree kangaroo or a cuscus. Some pieces of the hide were thickly furred; others were covered in shiny brown scales. But if the creature really had been some kind of astonishing chimera, why lessen the impact by cutting it up?

  One of the evangelists opened her eyes and beamed at him. His clothes and backpack must have given him away as a foreigner; the woman addressed him in halting English. ‘End times, brother! End times upon us!’

  Prabir replied apologetically, in Bengali, that he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

  The desk clerk at the Amboina Hotel was far too polite to laugh when Prabir asked where he might hire a boat as cheaply as possible. The response – couched in the most diplomatic language – was that he could forget about the ‘cheap’ part and join the queue. Everyone who’d arrived in town for the last two months had been looking for a boat; it was a seller’s market.

  This was a dispiriting start, but Prabir fought down the urge to retreat into pessimism. ‘There was a group of about twenty people who would have passed through Ambon three weeks ago. Scientists, on an expedition being mounted by some foreign universities. Have you heard anything about that?’ There were half a dozen other places they could have stayed, but he had nothing to lose by asking.

  ‘No. But we have many guests here from foreign universities.’

  ‘You mean, in general? Or in the hotel right now?’

  The man glanced at his watch. ‘Mostly in the bar, right now.’

  Prabir couldn’t believe his luck. They must have completed the first stage of their work and returned to base to recuperate. They could hardly have been stranded here all this time; they would have organised transport well in advance.

  He sat in his room for forty minutes, trying to decide exactly what he’d say to Madhusree. How he’d explain his presence, what he’d propose they do. If he’d picked up his notepad and called her from Toronto, she would have talked him into staying there, but this was scarcely any better. He’d imagined tracking her down somewhere so remote that she couldn’t simply order him home, but here there was nothing to stop her. The next flight out of Ambon was never more than a day away.

  He wouldn’t push his luck: he wouldn’t ask to be allowed to tag along with the expedition. He’d suggest that he stayed on in the hotel, so he could see her each time she came back into town. That wouldn’t embarrass her too much, surely?

  The longer he thought about it, the more nervous he became. But it was no use trying to rehearse the whole encounter, writing scripts for both of them in his head. He’d go downstairs and face her, see how she reacted, and play it by e
ar.

  The bar opened into a shaded courtyard; all the customers were out there catching the afternoon breeze. Prabir bought a syrupy fruit concoction whose contents defied translation; the bartender assured him that it was non-alcoholic, but that seemed to be based on the dubious assumption that the whole thing wouldn’t spontaneously ferment before his eyes, like an overripe mango. Prabir took one sip and changed his mind; the sugar concentration was high enough to kill any micro-organisms by sheer osmosis. He steeled himself and walked out into the courtyard.

  He scanned the tables, but he couldn’t see Madhusree anywhere. There were only about thirty people in the courtyard; it didn’t take him long to convince himself that she was not among them.

  Someone stretched a hand out to him. ‘Martin Lowe, Melbourne University.’ Prabir turned. Lowe was a middle-aged man, visibly sunburnt – not surprising if he’d been at sea for the past three weeks. There were two other men seated at the same table, intent on some kind of printout. He shook Lowe’s hand distractedly and introduced himself.

  Lowe asked amiably, ‘Are you looking for someone?’

  Prabir hesitated; he couldn’t announce his intentions baldly to one of Madhusree’s colleagues, before he’d even spoken to her. ‘Is the whole expedition staying here? In this hotel?’

  ‘Expedition? Ah. I think you’d better have a seat.’

  Prabir complied. Lowe said, ‘You mean the biologists, don’t you? I’m afraid you’ve missed them; they left weeks ago. They took a boat and headed south.’