by Greg Egan
Before checking out of the hotel, Prabir sat on his bed and called Felix. It was eight p.m. in Toronto, but he decided to leave a message rather than talking live. He’d promised to keep Felix informed of his plans, but the prospect of exchanging small talk held no attraction for him. They were twenty thousand kilometres apart, he was on his own, and he didn’t want to forget that for a second.
Back at the marina, Grant was in high spirits, eager to depart after being delayed for so long. Prabir threw his backpack under his bunk and watched over her shoulder as she programmed the boat.
Ambon Harbour was as automated as any airport. Grant lodged a request for a southbound route into the Banda Sea, and the Harbour Master’s software fed it to the autopilot. The engines started up, with a sound like water flowing through plumbing, and they began backing out of the dock immediately. There were several large cargo ships moored further along the wharves, but there was no traffic in sight other than the tiny water taxis and a few pleasure craft.
It was ten kilometres to the harbour entrance, and the speed limit made it a leisurely trip. Grant had pointed out the visible parts of the boat’s machinery earlier, but at Prabir’s request she summoned up schematics on the console and had the software deliver its full technospiel.
The boat’s fuel cells doubled as batteries which could be charged either by solar electricity, from the deck and cabin roof, or by pouring in methanol which was split into water and carbon dioxide. A single elaborate polymer contained both catalytic sites which ‘burnt’ the methanol, and embedded vanadium ions which stored and released the energy by toggling between oxidation states. All the chemicals involved were bound firmly in place; the water emerged pure enough to drink.
The engines were polymer too, corrosion-resistant electrodes and superconducting coils that accelerated sea water through any of the six channels that ran through a streamlined hub on the underside of the hull. With no moving parts, the only routine problem the engines could suffer was seaweed fouling the sieve-like filters guarding the channels, and even that was usually cleared automatically with a few pulses of reverse thrust.
Prabir said, ‘This is elegant. This is how a boat should be.’
Grant appeared noncommittal. ‘You don’t long for the romance of sail?’
‘Ha. Did you ever long to spend your time fighting ropes and canvas in the middle of a storm on the North Sea?’
Grant smiled. ‘No, but—’ She gestured at the cloudless blue sky. ‘As a boy, you must have been on prahus all the time.’
He shook his head. ‘Everything was diesel. We never lived in the kind of small villages where people built their own traditional fishing boats.’ He wasn’t even lying, but as soon as he began talking about the past he could feel muscles in his face growing tense from the effort of concealment.
‘Well, MHD certainly outclasses diesel,’ Grant conceded. ‘Though I wouldn’t use the word “elegant” myself. On that score, an eel leaves a boat like this for dead.’ She leant back against the bench beside the console; she was teasing him, but Prabir couldn’t resist the bait.
He said, ‘That’s professional bias talking. An eel isn’t optimised for swimming, just because it’s done no better for the past few million years. It fritters away half its energy on just being alive: every cell in its body needs to be fed, whether or not it’s working. Like the crew you didn’t want to hire. Evolution does a lot of things very nicely: shark skin minimises turbulence, crustacean shells are strong for their weight. But we can always do better by copying those tricks and refining them, single-mindedly. For a living creature, everything like that is just a means to an end. Show me an eel without gonads, and then I’ll concede that nature builds the perfect swimming machine.’
Grant laughed, but she admitted begrudgingly, ‘You’re right, in a sense: it costs us a lot of energy to build each new boat, but it’s still convenient to segregate that from ordinary fuel use. I wouldn’t want to travel in a pregnant ship, let alone one that had to prove itself to prospective mates in a ramming contest. And even marine engineers can get by without children; they just need good designs that will propagate memetically. But none of this is truly divorced from biology, is it? Someone, somewhere has to survive and have offspring, or who inherits the designs, and improves upon them, and builds the next boat?’
‘Obviously. All I’m saying is, technology can potentially do better than nature because of the very fact that it’s not always a matter of life or death. If an organism has been fine-tuned to maximise its overall reproductive success, that’s not the same thing as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. Evolution appears inventive to us because it’s had time to try so many possibilities, but it has no margin at all for real risks, let alone anything truly whimsical. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them.’
Grant gave him a curious look, as if she was wondering what kind of nerve she might have touched. She said, ‘I don’t think we really disagree. I suppose I’m just ready to take beauty where I can find it. The average mammalian genome would make the ink-stained notebooks of a syphilitic eighteenth-century poet look positively coherent in comparison: all the layers of recycled genes, and redundant genes, and duplicated genes that have gone divergent ways. But when I see how it manages to work in spite of that – every convoluted regulatory pathway fitting together seamlessly – it still makes hair stand up on the back of my neck.’
Prabir protested, ‘But if the pathways didn’t fit together, they wouldn’t be there for you to study, would they? Would you marvel the same way at the botched job in the thirty per cent of human embryos that have too much chromosomal damage even to implant in the uterine wall? Every survivor has a complicated history that makes it look miraculous. My idea of beauty has nothing to do with survival: of all the things evolution has created, the ones I value most are the ones it could just as easily crush out of existence the next time it rolls over in its sleep. If I see something I admire in nature, I want to take it and run: copy it, improve upon it, make it my own. Because I’m the one who values it for its own sake. Nature doesn’t give a fuck.’
Grant said reasonably, ‘Evolution takes a long time to roll over in its sleep. I’m a lot more worried that the things I admire are going to get crushed out of existence by people who don’t give a fuck.’
‘Yeah.’ There was no arguing with that. Prabir felt foolish; he’d let himself rant. He said, ‘I could make lunch now, if you’re as hungry as I am. What do you think?’
The sight of the open sea made Prabir feel strangely calm. It wasn’t that it brought back fewer, or less painful memories than Darwin or Ambon; quite the reverse. But there was something almost reassuring about finally making literal the state he’d imagined himself in for so long. He’d never reached the destination he’d promised Madhusree: the island where their parents were waiting. After eighteen years he still hadn’t struck land.
Grant joined him on the deck, beaming madly. She must have caught a trace of bemusement on his face; she said, ‘I know, but I can’t help it. A sky like this makes my poor heart sing. Sunlight deprivation as a child, I suppose; when I finally get a good dose of it, my brain just wants to condition me to come back for more.’
Prabir said, ‘Don’t apologise for being happy.’ He hesitated, then added obliquely, ‘Everyone else I met in Ambon who’d arrived from temperate regions seemed to have suffered rather less beneficial effects.’
Grant feigned puzzlement. ‘I can’t think who you could mean. Mind you, some people really do go a bit psychotic when they hit the tropics for the first time. That’s the down side. But you must have encountered that before, surely?’
‘The British Raj was a bit before my time.’
Grant smiled, then closed her eyes and raised her face to the sky. Prabir glanced back towards Ambon, but the grey smudge on the horizon had vanished. He’d have happily stood in silence like this for hours, but that was too much to hope for; what he
really needed was a topic of conversation that wouldn’t keep leading them back to his supposedly boundless familiarity with everything in sight. Grant was hardly going to throw him overboard if she caught him out on some minor inconsistency, but if the whole mess of half-truths unravelled and he was forced to confess just how limited and rusty his grasp of the region’s language, custom and geography really was, he wouldn’t put it past her to abandon him on the nearest inhabited island.
He said, ‘What do you think’s going on here? With the animals?’
‘I have absolutely no idea.’
Prabir laughed. ‘That’s refreshing.’
‘I do have a few vague hypotheses,’ Grant admitted, opening her eyes. ‘But nothing I’d reveal except under extreme duress.’
‘Oh, come on! You’re not talking to a fellow biologist here. I’m much too ill informed to recognise heresy, and my opinion has no bearing on your reputation anyway. What have you got to lose?’
Grant smiled and leant on the railing. ‘You might blab to your sister, and then where would I be?’
Prabir was affronted. ‘Madhusree can keep a secret.’
‘Ha! Her, not you! That shows how far I can trust you.’
Prabir said, ‘What if some kind of toxin, some kind of mutagenic poison had been dumped on one of the uninhabited islands here, decades ago? A few dozen drums of industrial waste, chemically related to the kind of stuff they use to induce mutations in fruit flies?’ It seemed far-fetched that anyone would go to the trouble of doing that, rather than just dumping it at sea, but it wasn’t impossible. He wouldn’t necessarily have stumbled across the site; he hadn’t explored every last crevice on the island. The shift from the butterflies to all the other species could be due to a dramatic change in exposure levels: the drums might have split open after a few more years of weathering, or the land where they were buried might have subsided in a storm. Or maybe the poison had simply worked its way up the food chain. ‘The successful mutants thrive and breed, and some of the healthiest ones manage to cross to other islands. The only reason we’re not seeing any unfavourable mutations is because the afflicted animals are dying on the spot.’
Grant regarded him with undisguised irritation; she seemed genuinely reluctant to be drawn on the subject. But she wasn’t prepared to let this scenario go unchallenged. ‘Maybe you could explain the sheer number of genetic changes with a strong enough chemical mutagen, but the pattern still doesn’t make sense. Given everything else we’ve seen, some proportion of the animals who escaped from this hypothetical island should have had at least a couple of neutral alterations: changes to their anatomy or biochemistry that wouldn’t kill them or significantly disadvantage them, but which served no useful function at all. So far no one’s seen anything of the kind.’
‘Yes, but even the most “insignificant” disadvantage could be serious dead weight if you have to travel hundreds of kilometres just to be noticed. Maybe we’re only seeing mutants with changes that have been positively beneficial. I mean, you’d have to be pretty fit to fly all the way to Ambon from any of the remote islands in the south.’
Grant gave him an odd look. ‘They found a mutant tree frog in Ceram. That couldn’t have come from too far south – assuming it wasn’t hatched on the spot, which it might well have been.’ Ceram was a large island just ten kilometres north of Ambon. It was heavily populated around the coast, and parts of the interior had been logged and mined, but a considerable amount of rainforest remained intact. If Grant got it into her head to veer north and start traipsing through the jungles of Ceram, he’d never get anywhere near Madhusree’s expedition.
‘There are ferries running between the major islands,’ Prabir reminded her. ‘Something like a tree frog could have hidden in a crate of fruit, or even got on board a plane. Human transport can always complicate things to some degree.’
‘That’s true. But what makes you so sure that these animals have travelled at all?’
Prabir thought carefully before replying. Even if he’d known nothing about Teranesia, wouldn’t it be reasonable to suppose that there was an epicentre somewhere? He said, ‘If they haven’t, their parents or grandparents must have. If you follow the mutations back to their source, every animal must have had at least one ancestor exposed to the same mutagen at some point. I mean, whatever the cause, isn’t it stretching things to think that the same conditions could be repeated in half a dozen different locations?’
Grant shrugged. ‘You’re probably right.’ But she didn’t sound as if she meant it.
Prabir tried to read her face. If the animals weren’t travelling, what was? Any chemical spill severe enough to retain its potency across thousands of square kilometres could hardly have gone undetected this long. A hushed-up nuclear accident was even less plausible.
He said, ‘You think it’s a virus? But if it’s spreading all over the Moluccas, doesn’t that make it a thousand times harder to explain why we’re not seeing any unhealthy mutants? And isn’t it a bit far-fetched to think that it could infect so many different species?’
Grant gave him her sphinx impression. Prabir folded his arms and glowered at her. He wasn’t just killing time now: he was genuinely curious. He’d kept pushing the question aside as a distraction, but what Felix had called his cover story wasn’t entirely false: this was Radha and Rajendra’s life’s work, and part of him really did want to know what they would have discovered if they’d had the chance to complete it.
He said, ‘Unless the two mysteries are one and the same? Unless whatever makes the animals so impossibly successful makes the virus successful too?’
Grant said firmly, ‘We’ll gather some data, and we’ll see what we find. End of discussion. OK?’
Prabir lay on his bunk with his notepad’s headset on, brushing up on his Indonesian vocabulary. It was after midnight, but Grant was apparently still awake and busy. Most of the cabin was hidden from view by the row of lockers alongside the bunk, and the faint glow that diffused around them might have come from nothing but the phosphorescent exit sign, but whenever he took a break from his lessons he could hear the distinctive metallic squeaks of the ‘captain’s chair’. He had no idea what she was doing; with the collision avoidance radar and sonar switched on there was no pressing need for anyone to keep watch.
His concentration was faltering. He froze the audio and took off the headset. The humidity had become almost unbearable; the sleeping bag he was using as a mattress was soaked, and the air was so heavy that it felt as if he was drawing every breath through a straw. Maybe he’d be better off sleeping on deck, now that they were far enough out to sea not to worry about insects. The genetic quirk that had required him to be a walking mosquito killer as a child had no effect on the modern vaccine – another triumph for biotechnology, though when they reached some of the islands with undrained swamps he’d probably wish he still sweated repellent.
He rolled up his sleeping bag and headed for the cabin door. Grant was seated at the console, examining a chart of the Banda Sea stretching all the way down to Timor. Prabir explained what he was doing. ‘Is that OK with you?’
‘Yeah, of course. Go ahead.’ She turned back to the chart. Prabir wondered belatedly if he was eroding her privacy; the cabin windows had no blinds, so the two of them would no longer be as manifestly out of each other’s sight as when he’d been tucked away behind the lockers. But she hadn’t raised any objection, and once she switched off the console she’d be all but invisible anyway.
As he unrolled his sleeping bag on the deck, he tried to decide whether or not he owed it to Grant to tell her he was gay. On one level it seemed like an insult to both of them to suggest that it mattered; unless he’d misread her completely, she was the kind of person who’d start from the assumption that he wouldn’t try to exploit their situation, and she’d certainly shown no sign of wanting to exploit it herself. But he knew that his judgements were sometimes skewed; he was so accustomed to ruling out by fiat the whole idea of sex that he
forgot that other people weren’t necessarily viewing him through the same filter. A few years after he’d started at the bank, he’d been assigned two graduate trainees to supervise while they were on a month’s rotation in his department: a man and a woman, both about his own age. He’d done his best to put them at ease, remembering how nervous he’d been in his own first weeks on the job, and as far as he could tell he’d been equally hospitable to both of them. But after they’d moved on, the news had got back to him that the woman had found his behaviour positively oppressive. He’d been too nice. He must have wanted something.
There was a gentle breeze moving across the water; for a minute or two Prabir was almost chilly, until his skin reached a kind of clammy equilibrium. The boat was pitching slightly as it crossed the waves, but that bothered him even less than it had in the confined space of the cabin.
He’d brought his notepad with him, but he was too tired to continue with the language lessons. He stared up at the equatorial sky, the sky he’d seen from the kampung at night: obsidian black, with stars between the stars. He could fix his eyes on one spot and try to map it, but his mind stopped taking in information long before he hit the limits of vision.
A few hours before he’d almost welcomed being back on the Banda Sea, but the connection seemed a thousand times more immediate now, the details of his memory sharper by starlight. He could feel the years melting away in the face of the accumulating evidence: the musical sound of the half-familiar language ringing in his ears, the struggle to sleep on a humid night. That was how memory worked, after all: placing like moments side by side. There was no linear tape inside his head, no date stamp on every mental image. It didn’t matter what had happened since. Nothing could stop the days and nights of eighteen years before becoming like yesterday.
