Teranesia

Prabir gave up on the idea of waiting to be asked. He said, ‘If you want a guide, I’ll do it for nothing. I’ll even pay for my own food. The only down side is, I might have to leave you at some point to meet up with my sister. But you’ve got maps, you’ve got translation software. It’s not as if you’d be lost without me.’ It was hard saying the last part with a straight face; he’d be relying on maps and software himself. But he wasn’t seeking money under false pretences, or endangering this woman’s life. She was the one whose skills would have the most bearing on their safety.

Grant regarded him with a mixture of sympathy and scepticism. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to call your sister? I can’t guarantee that we’ll even get close to the expedition.’

That was true. But though Madhusree had promised him that she wouldn’t disclose anything about their parents’ work, Prabir had no doubt that she’d still do her best to steer the expedition in the right direction. If he could do the same, not only would that lead him to Madhusree, but he’d end up being far more use to Grant than the most experienced guide Ambon had to offer.

He shrugged. ‘I’m willing to take that risk. I mean, it’s not as if I have much hope of reaching her any other way.’

Grant still seemed to be uneasy about something. Prabir said, ‘You don’t have to decide right away. Think it over. Sleep on it.’ He reached for his notepad to give her his number.

She said, ‘Can you tell me why your sister doesn’t want you to find her?’

Prabir gave her a long, hard look, trying to decide how to take this. What exactly did you have in mind, memsahib? You think I’ve come to drag her off to an arranged marriage? Doing my bit for the international conspiracy to throw all women into purdah? That was unfair, though. Grant didn’t know the first thing about him; she didn’t need to be a racist to have qualms about helping him pursue an unwilling quarry.

He tried to think of a way to put her at ease. ‘Do you have any children?’

‘Yes. I have a son.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘At home with his father, in Cardiff.’

‘Suppose he was camping out in the countryside with friends, and you saw the weather changing, but you knew he wouldn’t understand what that meant in the same way you did. How do you think he’d react if you called him up and suggested that you join him at the campsite, just to keep an eye on things? Just to give him the benefit of your experience?’

Grant said gently, ‘OK, I get the point. But why do you think the weather’s changing? Why are you so afraid for her?’

‘I don’t know,’ Prabir confessed. ‘I’m probably wrong. I’m probably mistaken. But that doesn’t change the way I feel.’

Grant did not appear entirely reassured by this answer. But there was no obvious next question, no simple way to pursue the matter. Finally she said, ‘All right, I’ll stop prying. Meet me here tomorrow at eight, and I’ll show you the boat.’

8

At dinner, Prabir managed to avoid Lowe and company, but he found himself sharing a table with Paul Sutton, an English science journalist who’d come to write a book about the Moluccan mutants. These were proof, Sutton insisted, of a ‘cosmic imperative for biodiversity built into the laws of physics’ which was compensating for the loss of species caused by human activities. The distinctly non-random nature of the mutations showed that ‘the nineteenth-century science of entropy’ had finally been overtaken by ‘the twenty-first-century science of ecotropy’.

‘I just can’t decide on the title,’ he fretted. ‘It’s the title that will sell it. Which do you think sounds best: The Genesis Gene, The Eighth Day of Creation, or The Seventh Miracle?’

Prabir mulled it over. ‘How about God’s Third Testicle?’ That summed up the book’s three themes concisely: religiosity, superabundance, and enormous bollocks.

Sutton seemed quite taken by this, but then he shook his head regretfully. ‘I want to evoke a separate act of creation, but that’s a bit too… genitally focused.’ He stared into the distance, frowning intently. Suddenly his eyes lit up. ‘Gaia’s Bastards. That’s it! That’s perfect! Ecology with an edge. Nature breaking all the rules, walking on the wild side to keep the Earth in balance! It’s got best-seller written all over it!’

In the morning Prabir met Grant, and they walked down to the marina where her boat was docked. It was a twenty-metre magnetohydrodynamic craft, with a single large cabin sunk partly below deck. Most of the cabin space was taken up with equipment; Grant showed him the bunk where he’d be sleeping, in a narrow slot behind a row of storage lockers. ‘You won’t have much privacy, I’m afraid. You can see why I didn’t want six deckhands and a cook on board.’

‘Yeah. I was expecting to travel in crowded conditions, though. This is one step up from my wildest dreams of luxury.’ He turned away from his ‘quarters’ and eyed a rack full of spectrometers and chromatographs; there was a whole analytical chemistry lab packed on to half a dozen chips here. ‘I have no idea what a freelance biologist does, but it must pay well.’

Grant made an amused choking sound. ‘I don’t own any of this; it’s all on loan from my sponsor.’

‘Can I ask who that is?’

‘A pharmaceuticals company.’

‘And what do they get out of it?’

‘That remains to be seen. But there’s no such thing as a useless discovery in molecular biology. At the very least they can always play pass-the-patents, so someone else is left holding them when it finally becomes obvious that they have no commercial value whatsoever.’

They sat on the deck and talked for a while, looking out across the harbour. It was humid, but still quite cool; the fishing boats had all left long ago, and the marina was almost deserted. When Grant asked about his childhood Prabir spoke of the family’s rare trips to Ambon, and tried to create the impression, without actually lying, that they’d travelled all over the region. But when she came right out and asked him what his parents had done, he said they’d been involved in seafood exports.

‘So they made a fortune and retired to Toronto?’

‘No. They both died here.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She quickly changed the subject. ‘Do you have anything you want to ask me? Before you decide to trust me not to run us into the nearest reef?’

Prabir hesitated, wary of offending her. ‘Do you use alcohol much?’

Grant was scandalised. ‘Not at sea!’

Prabir smiled. ‘No, of course not. How could I forget the long nautical tradition of sobriety?’

‘There is one, actually. Dating back to the Industrial Health and Safety Laws of nineteen… something-or- other.’ She was treating it as a joke, but she did seem slightly wounded. ‘Was I very drunk yesterday?’

Prabir replied diplomatically, ‘You were a lot more lucid than anyone else in the bar.’

Grant stood up abruptly, stretching her shoulders. ‘Well, you have a deal, if you’re still interested. And if you’re willing to do the cooking, you can forget about paying for food.’

‘That sounds fair.’ He rose to his feet beside her.

‘When would you be able to leave?’

‘Whenever you like. I just have to get my things and check out of the hotel.’

‘If you can be back in an hour, we can go this morning.’

‘An hour?’ Prabir was taken aback, but he had no reason to object. ‘OK. I’d better get moving then.’ He raised a hand in farewell and headed for the pier.

Grant called after him, ‘See you soon.’

Replaying parts of their conversation in his head as he walked along the marina, Prabir felt a belated sense of panic. If he’d hitched a ride on a crowded fishing boat, he could have sat in a corner and disappeared amidst the