Teranesia

to the ideal means of undermining the appropriations of Wallace. This meshes perfectly with my over-arching model of nature as “The Unruly Woman”: disruptively fecund; mischievously, subversively bountiful.’

Cole smiled contentedly. ‘That’s an interesting framework, Martin, but I find many aspects of it deeply problematic. The only safe assumption we can make at this point is that we’re moving into a Suspensive Zone, where normal logics and causalities are held in abeyance. To reify the disruptive impulse is to presuppose that every teleological trajectory implies an agent, and ultimately to misunderstand the entire dynamic of Wrongness.’

Prabir was experiencing severe deja vu: Keith and Amita had had arguments like this, all Big Dumb Neologisms and thesaurus-driven bluster. It was like listening to two badly written computer programs trying to convince each other that they were sentient. He glanced hopefully at Cole’s student, Carpenter; surely his generation had regained some mild interest in reality, if only for the sake of rebelling against half a century of content-free gibberish.

Carpenter tipped his head admiringly towards his mentor. ‘What he said.’

The rest of the courtyard had fallen silent. Prabir looked around to see what had caught their attention. A huge black bird, fifty or sixty centimetres tall, had landed on one of the unused tables, and was sitting with its back to him, preening its feathers. Though it was dark as a raven, it was unmistakably a species of cockatoo, with a slender, almost thread-like crest. He’d seen them on the island now and then, but never in the metropolitan heart of Ambon. Maybe this was a sign that the city really had brought its pollution levels under control.

The bird turned its head to peck at its shoulder, revealing a row of sharp brown teeth embedded in the lip of its beak.

Prabir felt a small, hot trickle of urine flow across one leg. Mercifully, he’d emptied his bladder half an hour ago; there was almost nothing to soil his clothes. He glanced at Lowe, who was staring at the creature with a glazed expression. No one in the courtyard was moving or speaking. The bird emitted a brief raucous cry, then began grooming under one wing.

‘You’re a fine boy, aren’t you? You’re my beautiful boy!’ A woman had risen from one of the tables; she approached the bird slowly, crooning to it softly, circling around it to get a better view. Prabir watched her, horrified at first, then impressed by her presence of mind. The thing was still a cockatoo, after all, not some taloned bird of prey. As a child he’d been entirely unafraid of its equally imposing cousins, and the teeth scarcely added to the kind of damage its beak could have inflicted anyway.

The woman announced, to no one in particular, ‘I can see no sign of reversal of normal fusion in the vertebrae of the pygostyle. No vestigial claws on the wing tips. Naive to look for these things, I suppose, but whose instincts wouldn’t tell them to cherchez la theropod?’ Prabir found it hard to judge whether her speech was slurred—she spoke with a strong Welsh accent for which his ear was not well calibrated —but her movements seemed a bit uncoordinated.

She made a grab for the bird’s legs. It squawked and ascended half a metre, then came down on the table again, lunging at her. Prabir rose to his feet, but he was too far away to help. The bird sank its teeth into the woman’s forearm, shook its head vigorously to and fro half a dozen times, then opened its jaws and flew away.

‘Fuck. Fuck!’ She stared after it angrily, then glanced down at her wound. ‘Buccal fauna. Food residues. Saliva!’ She tipped her head back and laughed with delight, then dashed from the courtyard.

Prabir caught up with her outside the hotel. ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry. Can I talk to you for a second?’

The woman scowled at him. ‘What’s your problem? I’m in a hurry.’

‘I understand. I won’t slow you down; I can explain while we walk.’

She didn’t look too happy with this, but she nodded reluctantly. ‘It’s too crowded for me to run, and I don’t want to raise a sweat.’ Prabir thought it unwise to point out that this was a lost cause, unless she planned to conjure up an air-conditioned limousine in the next thirty seconds.

He said, ‘I’m hoping to get in touch with someone on the expedition. Do you think you’d be able to let me have a copy of the itinerary?’ She must have arrived late in Ambon, or succumbed to a temporary illness when the others were leaving. Since she hadn’t given up and gone home, she was presumably in the process of arranging to rejoin her colleagues. If he offered to split the cost, she might even let him hitch a ride.

She took a few seconds to make sense of his question. ‘You mean the university biologists? I’ve only been here six days; they left weeks ago.’

‘You’re not with them?’

‘Hardly. I’m freelance.’

‘You’ve had no contact with them at all?’

‘No.’ She turned to face Prabir, without slowing her pace. ‘Can’t you just call whoever it is? There’s no reason for them to be having reception problems.’

‘It’s my sister. And no, I can’t call her.’ He added defensively, ‘It’s complicated.’

The woman shrugged; this was none of her business. ‘I’m sorry. But I really don’t know where they’ve gone.’

Prabir was bitterly disappointed, but he struggled to regain some perspective. Before he’d checked into the hotel he hadn’t expected to learn anything useful for days.

He said, ‘Well, good luck with the saliva. I can’t think what possessed you to walk into a bar without a sequencer on you.’

She laughed. ‘There’s no excuse, is there? I carry a camera about the same size, and I didn’t even think to use it. The sequencer would have been a thousand times more valuable… but no, I had to leave it on the boat.’

Prabir didn’t bother to conceal his amazement. ‘You have a boat? And you’re still here after six days?’

‘Don’t get me started.’ She regarded him darkly. ‘I gave myself three days to buy provisions and hire a guide. But everyone I speak to wants to drag all their friends and family into the deal: no guide without hiring a whole crew.’

‘You have a crew already?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘It’s a brand-new MHD craft, not a prahu with sails and masts and rigging. There’d be nothing for a crew to do, except fish and sunbathe at my expense. I brought it here from Sulawesi; I can handle it perfectly on my own. I put myself through a doctorate in Aberdeen working part-time on a North Sea fishing trawler. This whole place looks like a millpond to me.’

Prabir wondered if it had occurred to her that not everyone in Ambon necessarily doubted her seacraft, or was intent on ripping her off. Most men here would consider it inappropriate to be alone on a boat with a foreign woman, and not many women would be willing to take on the job at all. The simplest thing to do would be to reconcile herself to the need to hire as many hangers-on as decorum required.

There was one cheaper alternative, though.

He said, ‘If you could cope with the North Sea, I’d trust you here any day. And I grew up in these islands.’

‘You did?’

He nodded calmly, planning to lie by omission only. ‘I was born in Calcutta, but my family moved here when I was six. I live in Canada now, but I still think of this as—’ He trailed off, unable to say it, though a few more honest alternatives came to mind.

They were almost at the harbour. She stopped walking, and offered him her hand.

‘I’m Martha Grant.’

‘Prabir Suresh.’

She held up her forearm and inspected the wound, then announced glumly, ‘I’m sweating like a pig. I won’t find a thing; it’ll all be washed away or degraded by now.’

A vivid red weal had spread along her arm. Prabir said, ‘Forget about DNA. Drown the whole area in disinfectant, and take whatever antibiotics you can get your hands on. You should have seen what happened to my mother’s leg once from an insect bite. You don’t want to take any chances.’

‘Yeah.’ Grant rubbed her eyes, and smiled at him ruefully. ‘What a farce. That bird just flew down to me, like a gift, and I didn’t even get an image of it.’