Teranesia

by Greg Egan

  Prabir was still catching up. ‘You’re saying that all these different species of pigeon have found a way to resurrect fossil genes buried in their DNA, and because they have so much old baggage in common, the same traits have emerged in all of them?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So they’ve all reverted to the appearance of an ancestral species that needed camouflage to hide from some ferocious predator? And presumably they’ve not only lost their flashy plumage, they’ve lost the need for their mates to have it as a prerequisite for sex, or they would have all died out by now?’

  ‘Presumably, yes.’

  ‘And when a tree frog or a bat does the same thing with its DNA, the result is different, but still useful, because they’re getting back something that was useful a few million years ago to some frog or bat then?’

  ‘Yes. That’s the theory.’

  Prabir ran a hand over his face; he’d forgotten how tired he was, but after nine hours of slogging through the plantation his brain had turned to mush. ‘That much I follow. Now explain the next part to me, slowly: why is this happening in all these different species? And how?’

  Grant hesitated, as if she was about to draw the line here, but then she must have decided that she had nothing more to lose. She said, ‘The only reason I can think of for an innate capacity to do this would be as a response to genetic damage. No one’s ever seen a repair mechanism that operates like this before, but it’s been known for years that functioning genes are vulnerable to certain kinds of damage that leave other parts of the chromosome untouched. Cleaning up old sequences that have fallen into disuse could be a repair strategy of last resort, because even the random copying errors they’ve suffered over time might have done less harm than whatever’s afflicting the modern genes.’

  Prabir didn’t dare say it, but this sounded so much like restoring a computer in extremis from mothballed backups that it was uncanny. It also sounded so far beyond any conventional notion of how genomes were organised that Grant’s initial refusal to discuss her hypothesis, which he’d taken as verging on paranoia, now looked like mere self-preservation.

  ‘And that might be handy in somatic cells, to stop certain kinds of cancer?’ he suggested. ‘If some growth regulator gene has been damaged in a cell in my intestine, say, the cell might reactivate a copy of the gene that was duplicated accidentally thousands of generations ago, and fell into disuse?’

  ‘Exactly. So normally there’d be no visible effects: if an adult starts producing an archaic protein in a few intestinal cells, or skin cells, that’s not going to change its gross anatomy. And even if the process was activated in an early embryo, it would generally produce just one altered individual who’d bear perfectly normal offspring. To produce heritable changes, it has to be turned on in the germ cells; that must be what’s happening here, but don’t ask me why, because I have no idea yet.’

  ‘OK. But if this is a response to genetic damage, what’s triggering it? Doesn’t there still need to be some kind of powerful mutagen, even if what we’re seeing is the result of the animals conquering it, rather than succumbing to it?’

  ‘Maybe. Unless it’s being triggered inappropriately; unless they’re overreacting to some other kind of stress.’ Grant lifted her notepad off the bench and thumbed through the sequence of codons. ‘I don’t have all the answers; I’m not even close. The only way to understand this will be to unravel the whole mechanism: identify the genes that are being switched on in every affected species, then see what proteins they encode, what functions they perform, and what activates them in the first place.’

  Prabir groaned. ‘ “Every affected species” Why don’t I like the sound of that part?’

  Grant regarded him with sergeant-majorly contempt. ‘A bit more field work isn’t going to kill you. You’ve got nothing to complain about; just wait until you get to my age.’

  ‘You wait until you’ve spent ten years behind a desk.’

  She shuddered. ‘All the more reason to want to be here instead. Besides, these are the creatures you grew up with, aren’t they? Think of it as a chance to be reunited with all your old childhood friends.’

  ‘ “Childhood friends’” Prabir climbed off the stool and limped across the cabin to the galley. ‘Do you mean Bambi and Godzilla? Or their mutual great-great-grandparents?’

  9

  Prabir slept on deck again, untroubled by insomnia. He woke at first light, aching all over, but unaccountably happier than he’d felt in months.

  He dived into the harbour and swam slow laps to a navigation buoy and back, just to loosen the muscles in his shoulders. People heading out in rickety fishing boats shouted greetings, and in the water the close heat of dawn didn’t feel oppressive at all. He’d taken up swimming in Toronto for a while, doing laps before work in a pool full of fanatics with scalp-to-toe anti-turbulence depilation and sports watches with faux-AI plug-ins to coach them on their stroke. But it had made him feel twice as tense as doing nothing, so he’d given it away.

  Thinking back on the evening’s revelations, his sunny mood seemed less of a mystery. Even if Grant’s theory turned out to be misguided, one way or another the data they collected would help shed light on what was happening. That wasn’t exactly what had brought him here, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like the key to all his anxieties. Ever since Madhusree had told him about the expedition, he’d been treating the spread of the mutations as some kind of vague malevolent force, reaching out from Teranesia to drag her back into its clutches, mocking the very idea that they’d ever escaped. That was every bit as deranged as anything the cranks in Ambon had spouted, but the clearer the real, molecular basis for the effect became, the harder it would be to sustain that kind of delusion. A complete answer might be decades away, but playing some small part in getting there would make him feel less helpless, less overwhelmed. That was what his parents had spent their lives fighting for: not just explaining the butterflies, but puncturing the whole deeply corrupting illusion that nature – or some surrogate deity – ever had designs on anyone, malevolent or otherwise.

  Halfway through his fifth lap, he spotted Grant approaching. She called out to him jokingly, ‘I thought you’d been kidnapped.’

  ‘Sorry. I got carried away.’

  ‘I don’t blame you. It’s unbelievable.’ They trod water over an outcrop of branched red coral, festooned with anemones and swarming with tiny bright fish – all at least six metres below them, but the details were so sharp that they might have been looking down through air.

  Prabir felt a sudden urge to come clean with her; whatever the significance of the butterflies turned out to be, he was tired of having the deception between them. He’d proved himself useful to have around, even if it was more as ad hoc technical assistant and general dogsbody than cultural liaison. And surely she’d understand his reluctance to reveal the whole family history to a stranger.

  He struggled to find a place to start. ‘Were your family excited by the news last night?’ He hadn’t eavesdropped; she’d been talking to her son right in front of him as he’d gone out on to the deck to sleep.

  Grant frowned. ‘News? You mean the pigeon sequences? I couldn’t tell them about that; there’s a confidentiality clause in my contract.’

  Prabir was shocked. ‘But you—’

  ‘And you mustn’t mention it to anyone, either. Especially not your sister.’

  Prabir was about to retort that he wasn’t bound by any contract, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to drive home the point that she’d been unwise to confide in him.

  He said, ‘Whatever happened to scientists sharing data?’

  ‘Welcome to the real world.’

  ‘And you’re happy with this?’

  ‘Delirious. I love being gagged.’ Grant plucked irritably at something crawling up the arm of her T-shirt.

  ‘Then why did you do it? Why did you sign the contract? Couldn’t you have joined the university expedition instead
?’

  ‘I’m not an academic. Everyone on that boat is being paid a salary from somewhere – student slave labour like your sister excepted. In the unlikely event that they’d let me on at all, I would have had to pay them for the privilege. I enjoy what I do, but I’m not in it for charity. I have a family to support.’

  Prabir wasn’t about to do a post-mortem on anyone’s career choices. ‘How long does it apply? The gag?’

  ‘That depends. Some things might be cleared for publication by the lawyers in a couple of months. Others might take years.’

  It came to him suddenly that his parents had published nothing in all their years on the island. They’d taken money from Silk Rainbow. They must have made the same kind of deal.

  Grant frowned. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Just a stitch.’

  ‘You’re not planning to quit on me in disgust?’

  ‘Hardly.’ It shouldn’t have stung so much. They’d made one small compromise in order to do something that otherwise would not have been done at all. When had he started thinking of them as flawless, immaculate?

  Grant started back towards the boat. Prabir called after her, ‘New rules, though. First one out of the water cooks breakfast.’

  Grant had chosen six small islands from which to gather samples, lying in an arc that ran south-east from the Bandas to the Kai Islands. All were uninhabited, unless they had settlements so small that they’d escaped the notice of the official cartographers. The third was just seventy kilometres north-east of Teranesia, slightly closer than the Tanimbar Islands to the south; if it had been on the maps when Prabir was a child, he and Madhusree might have ended up stranded there.

  When he’d joined Grant in Ambon, he’d imagined himself somehow ‘steering’ her towards the source of the mutations; fat chance of that, but the route she’d picked would already take them about as close as he wanted to get. He could only hope that whatever the biologists’ expedition had discovered was drawing them in the same direction; it seemed naive now to think that Madhusree – lowest of the low in the academic pecking order – could have swayed a boatload full of experts with their own theories and agendas.

  They sailed out of Banda Harbour early in the afternoon, and it was close to sunset when they arrived at the first of the islands. They dropped anchor a hundred metres from shore and spent the evening recuperating, drawing entertainment off the net. To Prabir’s amazement, Grant turned out to like Madagascan music as much as he did, and she knew all the esoterica better. After a while he stopped trying to compete with her at naming performers and recordings, and just let her dazzle him with her erudition.

  Grant winced suddenly. ‘Quarter to ten! I promised Michael I’d call him in his lunch hour.’

  Prabir went out on deck to give her some privacy. He sat perched on the guard rail at the stern of the boat, swaying slightly to keep himself upright, the sound of the valiha still playing in his head.

  If he agonised over it, he knew he’d never do it. He pulled out his notepad and hit three buttons in rapid succession.

  Felix grinned up at him from the screen. ‘How’s it going?’

  Prabir shrugged. ‘It was strange being back at first, but I’m getting used to it. How’s work?’

  ‘Dull beyond words. I’m disgusted that you’d even ask. Any sign of Madhusree?’

  ‘Not yet. I think we’re both heading in the same direction, but it’s going to be a matter of luck whether I catch up with her or not.’

  Felix said tentatively, ‘I could always call her and tell her you’re on your way. It’s not as if she could really pressure you into turning back now, even if she wanted to. And she might take the whole thing better if she was forewarned.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

  ‘Compared to what? Arriving unannounced?’

  Prabir thought seriously about the suggestion. But why risk alienating her, when there was still no guarantee that their paths would actually cross? He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. If we meet, we’ll sort it out. If we don’t, I’ll confess everything once we’re back in Toronto, and she’ll just laugh and forgive me on the spot.’

  He recounted as much as he could about the Bandanese pigeons; Felix seemed neither surprised nor offended that he couldn’t be let in on the sequencing results. They talked for almost half an hour, until Felix had to go and refill his pipetting robot’s reagent tanks.

  When the window closed and Prabir looked up, his eyes still adapted to the brightness of the screen, he felt unspeakably strange. It wasn’t just a pang of loneliness; he wasn’t sure that it had much to do with Felix at all. It was the connection breaking, the image fading, the whole illusion collapsing in front of him, leaving him with nothing but darkness and the mechanical rocking of the sea.

  He sat on the railing, watching Grant smiling and laughing in the cabin, and waited for the feeling to pass.

  They circumnavigated the island, probing its fringing reef with sonar until they found a safe approach to a small sandy beach. Grant anchored the boat in a metre of water, and they waded ashore. Prabir looked down at the fine, bone-white sand with a jolt of recognition, but he let the feeling wash over him, neither fighting it nor pursuing it to its source.

  He found some shade and sat to pull his boots on, squinting back at the sunlit water. Silver on turquoise, the view was indistinguishable from one he’d seen a thousand times before. The memory went deeper than vision: as he tightened his laces he grew aware of a disconcerting ease in his limbs, an assured and unselfconscious physicality beneath the fading ache from the plantation. A few laps in Banda Harbour could hardly have restored him to childlike resilience, but on some level his body still carried a trace of what it had once felt like to swim in this sea every day.

  Grant said, ‘Are you ready?’ She gestured at the mine detector clipped to her belt. Prabir hit the self-test button on his own device; it chimed reassuringly and flashed a green light, whatever that was worth.

  The whole island was low jungle, with soil trapped by dead coral that must have grown on a submerged volcanic peak. They’d barely passed the first palm tree when a cloud of small flies descended on them, biting them relentlessly.

  They retreated to the beach. Grant shielded her eyes with one hand as Prabir circled her with the insect repellent. She seemed tense out of all proportion to the inconvenience; he couldn’t even smell the stuff. ‘You’re not allergic to this, are you?’ He checked the can for warnings; if she went into shock he’d have to dash for the medicine cabinet.

  ‘No. It’s just cold.’

  They swapped places, and Prabir quickly discovered that she wasn’t joking; the solvent evaporated so quickly that it was like being doused with a fine spray of ice. He mused, ‘If we engineered ourselves to sweat isopropyl alcohol, humidity would have no effect on the efficiency of the process. What do you think?’ Come the revolution. But the revolution was taking its time.

  ‘I think you’re completely unhinged.’

  They tried the jungle again. The insects retreated, but the undergrowth was even more impenetrable than Bandanaira’s, with a dense, thorned shrub that Prabir had never seen before crammed into the gaps between the familiar ferns. He tore off a spiked, leathery branch and held it up to Grant. ‘What are the thorns for? I know there are plenty of birds that eat fresh shoots, but what is there here that would try to eat something this old and tough?’

  Grant frowned. ‘Beats me. As far as I know, all the lizards here are insectivores. You can find deer this far east, but only where they’ve been introduced by humans. If you want to hang on to that I’ll try and identify it later.’

  Prabir dropped it in his backpack. ‘You think plants could be affected, too?’

  ‘It probably just blew in on the wind from somewhere.’ Suddenly she grabbed his shoulder. ‘Look!’

  Ten metres away, a jet-black cockatoo exactly like the one they’d seen in Ambon sat perched on a branch, watching them.

  Prabir said, �
�That’s one for the migration theory.’

  Grant was conceding nothing. ‘If four different species on Bandanaira can converge to the point of being indistinguishable, I don’t see why the same thing can’t happen independently here and on Ambon.’

  Prabir scrutinised the bird uneasily. The teeth embedded in the bill not only meshed with uncanny precision, they were limited to the sides of the jaw, where the upper and lower halves met; the great curved hook in the centre had none. Even if they offered no particular advantage, they certainly weren’t present at any point where they’d be utterly useless, for want of a matching surface to cut or grind against. But the specialised bill shape that suited the diet of an ordinary black cockatoo would have evolved long after its ancestors had given up on the whole idea of teeth, so how had the ancient reptilian genes supposedly responsible for their reappearance come to be switched on and off in exactly the right places? Why should two sets of genes that had never been expressed in the same animal before turn out to interact so harmoniously?

  Grant took aim with the tranquilliser gun. The dart hit its target and stuck, but didn’t take effect as rapidly as it had with the much lighter pigeons. The cockatoo rose from its perch with an outraged squawk, featherless red cheeks flushing blue, and swooped straight towards them, almost reaching them before it fell.

  Prabir pushed forward to try to find it in the undergrowth while the arc of its descent was still fresh in his mind. Grant joined him. They combed through the shrubs together for five minutes without success; the bird must have been heavy enough to sink through the vegetation right to the ground.

  Grant swore suddenly.

  Prabir looked up. ‘What?’

  She was forcing branches and leaves aside with both arms; maybe she was annoyed because she couldn’t pick up what she’d found. She said, ‘Come and have a look at this.’