Teranesia

by Greg Egan

  Prabir hefted his backpack. He was still aching all over, but the oppressive mood he’d felt at dawn had lifted. Even if Madhusree’s colleagues took her belated revelations seriously, the expedition would be saddled with enough logistical inertia to keep them from doing anything about it immediately. If he and Grant could return in a day or two with samples from the island – and all their findings were in the public domain – there’d be no urgent need for a second visit. Maybe their results would merit a comprehensive follow-up, eventually, but the expedition had a finite budget and a limited timetable. Madhusree would be back in Toronto long before anyone went near Teranesia again.

  He said, ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Yeah. Are you sure you’re up to this?’

  ‘I’m up to anything that doesn’t involve mangroves.’

  Grant put an arm across his shoulders and said solemnly, ‘I shouldn’t have left you behind. It was a stupid thing to do, and I’m truly sorry. We won’t get separated again.’

  The route back along the coast was infinitely less arduous than the jungle. They swam past the inlet to the mangrove swamp through crystalline water at the reef’s inner edge, where at least they’d have a chance to see any predators approaching. But they made the crossing unmolested; despite the multitude of fish, the swamp and the forest were apparently considered better hunting grounds.

  As they trudged along the beach again, Prabir told Grant about Subhi’s story of the fishermen.

  She said, ‘That could mean anything. They might have cooked a plant they were accustomed to eating safely, and it turned out to have acquired some extra protective toxins.’

  ‘Yeah.’ That did sound like the simplest explanation, and if the men had died badly, psychotic and hallucinating, it would have been enough to confirm the presence of spirits. Prabir wished he could have questioned someone else about the incident, but they didn’t have time to go off to the Kai Islands to hunt for reliable witnesses to an event nobody wanted to talk about.

  Grant said, ‘Tell me about your parents’ work.’

  Prabir sketched the sequence of events that had led Radha and Rajendra to the island. It was a long time since he’d discussed this with anyone but Madhusree, and as he listened to himself betraying her – handing over the family history to this stranger, to keep Madhusree from making use of it herself – he felt far worse than he’d anticipated. But Grant had kept her side of the deal, and he had no reason to believe that his parents would have wanted him to keep any of this secret.

  ‘Can you describe the butterflies?’

  ‘They were green and black. Emerald green. There was a pattern, a sort of concentric striping; not quite eye spots, but a bit like that. They were pretty large; each wing was about the size of an adult’s hand. There was something about the veins in the wings, and the position of the genitals, that my parents made a big deal about. But I’ve forgotten the details.’

  ‘Would you recognise the other stages? The eggs, the larvae, the pupae?’

  Prabir pictured the sequence laid out in front of him. He’d been inside the butterfly hut, just once: at night, in the dark. In his memory, though, he could see the contents of all the cages. Spiked, hissing larvae. Orange and green pupae like rotten fruit.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ The words came out like an angry denial.

  Grant turned to look at him, surprised by his tone. ‘They might be easier to collect than the adults, that’s all. But if you can’t remember, it’s not the end of the world.’

  They reached the boat just after noon. Prabir unpacked the samples he’d collected before entering the swamp; the python had crushed half his tubes of gelled blood, but even so, the morning hadn’t been a complete loss.

  Grant had no trouble finding the island on her chart from his description, but she asked Prabir to confirm it. He ran his finger over the bland set of contour lines on the screen, some satellite’s radar echo blindly cranked through a billion computations to spit out a shape that would have taken a human surveyor a month of hardship to map.

  He said, ‘That’s it. That’s Teranesia.’

  Grant smiled. ‘Is that really what you called it?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, it was the name I came up with, and my parents went along with it. But it was nothing to do with the butterflies; after about a week I was bored to tears with them. I didn’t pay much attention to any of the real animals; I used to make up my own. Child-eating monsters that chased us around the island, but never quite caught up.’

  ‘Ah, everyone has those.’

  ‘Do they? I never had them in Calcutta. There was no room.’

  Grant said, ‘I packed a pretty good bestiary into the stairwell of a twelve-storey block of flats. Not that I didn’t have competition: one of my idiot brothers tried to give the whole building a kind of layered metaphysical structure – full of ethereal beings on different spiritual levels, like some lame cosmology out of Doris Lessing or C.S. Lewis – but even when his friends went along with it, I knew it was crap. All his little demons and angels had endless wars and political intrigues, but apparently no time for either food or sex.’

  ‘You had trouble attracting as many believers to a world of rutting carnivores?’

  She nodded forlornly. ‘I even had hermaphroditic dung beetles, but no one cared. It was so unfair.’

  Grant programmed the autopilot, and the engines started up smoothly. The boat circled around to face the reef, then retraced the safe path it had found on arrival.

  As they rounded the coast and headed out to sea, Prabir stood on deck near the bow, waiting for the tip of the volcano to appear on the horizon. It was still too far away, though, too small to stand out from the haze.

  Grant joined him. ‘So who do you want to play your character in the movie?’

  Prabir cringed. ‘Did I really suggest going for the movie rights? I thought I must have dreamt that part. Can’t you just bring out a cologne, like the physicists do?’

  ‘Only because they have nothing worth filming. And I think they make more from donor gametes.’ She eyed him appraisingly. ‘One of the Kapoor brothers might just be dashing enough.’

  ‘That’s very flattering, but I doubt that any of them would be willing to take the role.’

  Grant laughed, baffled. ‘Why on Earth not?’

  ‘Never mind. What about you?’

  ‘Oh, Lara Croft, definitely.’

  She’d brought a pair of binoculars; she lifted them to the horizon. After a few seconds she announced, ‘I can see it now. Do you want a look?’

  Prabir’s throat filled with acid. He still wasn’t ready. But everyone went back: to battlefields, to death camps, to places ten thousand times worse than this. Subhi to his lost village, no doubt. Every piece of land, every stretch of sea, was a graveyard to someone. He wasn’t special.

  He took the binoculars and turned his head until the red azimuth needle was centred; the autopilot was providing the correct bearing. At first the image was nothing but a dark triangular smudge, blurred by turbulence. Then the processing chip recalibrated its atmospheric model and the scene leapt into focus: a cone of black igneous rock rising above the forest canopy. The distortion of the lowest light paths was impossible to correct; the image broke down into blobs of grey and green before the sea blocked the view completely.

  He said, ‘That’s the place.’

  We’re going to the island of butterflies.

  11

  Prabir was hoping that they’d find a previously undetected passage through the reef, but as they inched their way around the island watching the sonar display, the chance of that diminished, then vanished altogether. The old southern approach was narrow, and twenty years before no one would have attempted to pass through it in such a large craft, but the autopilot confidently declared that there was sufficient clearance.

  They dropped anchor just inside the reef. It was too late to go ashore, with less than an hour of light remaining. The beach appeared smaller than Prabir remembered it, though
whether the jungle had encroached, a storm had gouged sand away, or he was just misjudging the tide it was impossible to say. There were still coconut palms standing at the edge of the sand, but he could see the strange thorned shrubs choking out everything else in the undergrowth. There was no sign at all of the path that had once led from the beach to the kampung.

  After they’d eaten, Grant made her nightly call home. Prabir sat out on deck, stupefied by the heat. He couldn’t call Felix; he didn’t want to be forced to justify what he’d done to Madhusree, let alone risk some kind of mediated confrontation if the two of them had been in contact.

  He lay down and tried to sleep.

  Just after midnight, he heard Grant come out on deck. She stood beside him. ‘Prabir? Are you still awake?’

  As he rolled over, he saw her gazing down at him with the kind of unguarded fascination that he’d learnt never to betray on his own face by the time he was about fifteen. But then her eyes shifted to a neutral point behind his shoulder, and he doubted the significance of whatever he’d seen.

  ‘I just thought you ought to know that your extortion has borne its first fruit.’ She handed him her notepad. He glanced at the banner at the top of the page, then sat up cross-legged on his sleeping bag and read through the whole thing.

  A molecular modelling team in São Paulo had examined the sequence data from the two expeditions, and identified a novel gene common to all the altered organisms; they’d sent Grant a copy of their results, as well as submitting them to a refereed netzine. Preliminary models of the protein the gene encoded suggested that it would bind to DNA.

  Prabir said, ‘You think this is it? Your mythical gene-repair-and-resurrection machine?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Grant seemed pleased, but she was a long way from claiming victory. ‘Part of what they’ve found makes sense: this gene has a promoter that causes it to be switched on in meiosis – germ cell formation – which explains why there’s no need for a mutagen to activate it in these organisms. But there’s no evidence of a similar gene in any of the original genomes, let alone one that would only be switched on when it was needed to repair mutations.’

  Prabir thought it over. ‘Could we be seeing the gene that the original version resurrected in place of itself? Once it went hyperactive, it not only substituted old versions of other genes, it substituted a completely unrecognisable version of itself?’

  Grant laughed, through gritted teeth. ‘That’s possible, and it would make things very tricky. These modelling people might be able to determine the current protein’s function, but I wouldn’t count on them to be able to work backwards and determine the structure of an unknown protein that changed its own sequence into the current one. What we really need is DNA from two consecutive generations of the same organism, for comparison.’ She hesitated. ‘And if possible, DNA from two early consecutive generations of the butterflies.’

  Prabir said, ‘You mean samples my parents took? They didn’t have your magic gelling agent. And I think the refrigeration would have failed by now.’

  Grant looked uncomfortable, unsure whether to pursue the matter.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind talking about this.’ They’d come here for the butterflies; he couldn’t afford to clam up every time the subject was raised.

  She said, ‘They might have preserved whole specimens for storage under tropical conditions; there were treatments available twenty years ago that would have protected against bacteria and mould, without damaging the DNA. You said they bred the butterflies in captivity. One or two well-documented samples could tell us a lot.’

  ‘I appreciate that. But don’t get your hopes up. With all the vegetation changed and the old paths gone, I’m not even sure that I could find my way back to the kampung. And if I can, who knows what state the buildings would be in?’

  Grant nodded. ‘Yeah. It was just a thought. We’ll go ashore tomorrow, and we’ll find what we find.’ She stood up. ‘And we’d both better get some sleep now.’

  Prabir woke badly, to another Tanimbar dawn. When he opened his eyes there was a message in the sunlight: His parents were dead. Everyone alive would follow them. The world he’d once seen as safe and solid – a vast, intricately beautiful maze that he could explore from end to end, without risk, without punishment – had proved itself to be a sheer cliff face, to which he’d cling for a moment before falling.

  He rose from the deck and stood by the guard rail, shielding his eyes. He was tired of the pendulum swings, tired of finding that all the carefully reasoned arguments and deliberate optimism that shored him up well enough, on the good days, could still count for nothing when he needed it the most.

  But this could be the last cycle, the downswing deep enough to carry him through to the other side. Wasn’t this the day he’d step ashore and demonstrate once and for all that Teranesia was powerless to harm him, like an IRA debunker striding triumphantly across a bed of hot coals? He might yet return to Toronto at peace, as infuriatingly tranquil as Felix, free of his parents, free of Madhusree, every useless fear banished, every obligation to his past, real or imagined, finally discharged.

  And he’d told Grant not to set her hopes too high.

  They brought the boat closer to shore, then waded on to the beach. Grant was carrying a rifle now, as well as the tranquilliser gun. They went through the rituals of the insect repellent and the mine detector tests. As Prabir sat pulling his boots on, looking back at the reef, he pictured a water man rising from the waves, angry and ravenous, teeth shining like glassy steel. Then he punctured the illusion, scattering the figure into random spray. That was the trouble with the demons dreamed up by children and religions: you made the rules, and they obeyed them. It wasn’t much of a rehearsal for life. Once you started believing that any real danger in the world worked that way, you were lost.

  They penetrated the jungle slowly; the thorned shrubs were even denser and more tangled than the species they’d seen before, with long, narrow involuted branches like coils of barbed wire. Prabir cut off a sample, tearing his thumb on a barely visible down of tiny hooks that coated the vines between the large thorns. He sucked the ragged wound. ‘Nice as it would be to solve the mystery, I’m beginning to hope we don’t stumble across a herbivore that needs this much discouragement.’

  ‘It’d probably be no worse than a rhinoceros or a hippo,’ Grant suggested. ‘But apparently it has no descendants here, to give birth to something similar.’

  Prabir fished in his backpack for a band aid. ‘OK, I can accept that: seeds get blown about, continents drift, animal lineages die out locally. But why is it always the most extreme trait that gets resurrected? Why couldn’t these shrubs just grow something mildly inappropriate, like flowers optimised for a long-vanished pollinating insect?’

  Grant mused, ‘There’s no evidence of the São Paulo protein ever having been used for mutation repair. So maybe that was never the case; maybe I’ve been clinging to that idea too stubbornly. It could be that the protein’s role has always been to reactivate old traits, to bring old inventions back into the gene pool from a dormant state.’

  Prabir considered this. ‘A bit like a natural version of those conservation programmes where they cross endangered animals with frozen sperm from twenty years ago, to reinvigorate the species when the population becomes too inbred?’

  ‘Yeah. And sometimes they use a closely related species, not the thing itself. If this protein manages a kind of “frozen gene bank”, it would be even less purist about it: it wouldn’t have any qualms about creating a hybrid with a distant ancestor.’

  To Prabir this sounded both simpler and far more radical than the mutation repair hypothesis: shifting the mechanism from an esoteric emergency response to a major factor in genetic change. Most of the same problems remained, though.

  He said, ‘That still doesn’t explain how particular traits get frozen and thawed. Are you saying that this plant’s ancestors knew that they’d evolved a spectacularly effective set of
defences, and deliberately tucked away a copy of the genes for the next aeon when they’d come in handy?’

  Grant smiled, refusing to be provoked. ‘More likely it’s just a matter of the genes that persist the longest having the greatest chance of being duplicated at some point, which then increases their chance of surviving in an inactive form.’

  ‘And the mimicry? The symbiosis? How does something like that get synchronised?’

  ‘That, I don’t know.’

  They pressed on. Prabir kept waiting for a flash of recognition, for the sight of an old gnarled tree or an outcrop of rock to awaken memories more strongly than the beach. He’d explored this side of the island completely; every step he was taking here was one he must have taken before. But too much had changed. Though the trees themselves appeared unaltered, there were no ferns, there were no small flowers on the ground, just the carnivorous orchids they’d seen on the other islands, and the ubiquitous barbed-wire shrubs. Even the scent of the forest was alien to him. It was like returning to a city to find it repaved and repainted, emptied of its old inhabitants and repopulated by strangers with new customs and new cooking smells. Ambon with its nouveau-colonial refurbishment had seemed more familiar than this.

  The black cockatoos were here, too. Prabir stood and watched one for half an hour, waiting for Grant to finish dissecting an orchid.

  The bird was sitting in a kanari tree. Using its teeth, it chewed straight through a slender branch that sprouted twigs bearing half a dozen white blossoms swollen with fruit. The cluster of twigs and fruit fell at the bird’s feet, landing on the large, solid branch where it was perched. It proceeded to attack one of the fruits, chewing through the leathery hull, which had not quite ripened to the point where it would split open and spill the seeds, the almonds, on to the ground.

  Grant came over to see what he was looking at. Prabir described what he’d observed so far. The bird had extracted one of the almonds from the fruit, and was performing an even more elaborate routine to penetrate the hard shell.

  She said, ‘This part’s old hat: its a famous case of specialisation for a food source.’ The bird had broken away part of the shell, and was now holding the nut with one foot while it used the sharp, hooked part of its upper beak to tear out fragments of the kernel; a tongue like a long-handled pink-and-black rubber stamp darted out to pick up the pieces and take them into the bird’s mouth. ‘Going for the unripe fruit is new, though.’