Teranesia

them. Do you really imagine that they’d blame you?’

‘I was nine years old, but I wasn’t stupid. After I’d sent the message, I knew what I’d done. But I was too afraid to tell them. I was so full of guilt I went and poisoned one of the butterflies, to try to fool myself. To make myself believe that was why I felt so bad.’

Grant hesitated, searching for some escape route. But she had to see that there was none.

She said, ‘However much it hurts, if you’ve lived with this for eighteen years, you can keep on doing it.’

He laughed. ‘Why? What’s the point? Madhusree doesn’t need me any more. You know why I came after her? You know why I followed her here? I was afraid she’d work it out. I was afraid she’d find something here that would tell her what I’d done. I wasn’t trying to protect her. I just wanted to keep her from discovering the truth.’

‘So how am I going to explain your death to her?’

‘As an accident.’

‘I’m not going to perjure myself. There’ll be an official inquiry, it’ll all come out.’

‘Are you blackmailing me now?’

Grant shook her head calmly. ‘I’m telling you what will happen. That’s not a threat, it’s just the way it will be.’

Prabir covered his face with his arms. The prospect seemed unbearable, but maybe it would help Madhusree put his death behind her if she understood that she owed him nothing. He hadn’t acted out of love for her, or some sense of duty towards their parents. He hadn’t even been protecting their shared genes. Everything he’d ever done for her had been to conceal his own crime.

He turned and started walking towards the minefield. Grant shouted something, but he ignored her. A rain of darts hit his upper back; he lost all feeling after the fourth or fifth, he could no longer count them. He began to feel slightly giddy, but it didn’t slow him down. Grant still had no chance of catching up with him.

He felt a sting on the side of his right leg, like a hot sharp blade passing over the skin. He lost his footing, more from surprise than from the force of the bullet, and toppled sideways into the undergrowth. With his shoulders paralysed he had no strength in his arms: he couldn’t right himself, he couldn’t even crawl.

A minute later, Grant knelt beside him and plucked out the darts, then helped him to his feet. He was bleeding almost as much from the barbed-wire shrubs as from the grazing wound she’d made in his leg.

She asked, ‘Are you coming back to the boat now?’

Prabir met her eyes. He wasn’t angry with her, or grateful. But she’d robbed him of all momentum, and complicated things to the point where it would have been farcical to keep opposing her.

Farcical, and monumentally selfish.

He was silent for a while, trying to come to terms with this. Then he said, ‘There’s something I want to do here, if you’re willing. But we’ll need some tools, and I’ll have to wait until this shit wears off.’

* * *

They returned to the kampung in the afternoon, with a chainsaw and a mallet. Grant cut branches into metre lengths and Prabir drove them into the ground, making a small fence all the way around the mined garden. He nailed warning signs to each side, in six languages, using his notepad to translate the message. There wasn’t much chance of fishermen coming this far into the jungle, but when the next biologists arrived it would be one small extra safeguard.

Grant said, ‘Do you want to put up a plaque?’

Prabir shook his head. ‘No shrines. They’d have hated that.’

Grant left him, trusting him now. Prabir stood by the fence and tried to picture them, arm in arm, middle- aged, with another half-century ahead of them. In love to the end, working to the end, living to see their great- great-grandchildren.

That was what he’d destroyed.

Grant had kept insisting: They wouldn’t have blamed you! But what did that mean? The dead blamed no one. What if his mother had survived, crippled by grief, knowing he was responsible? She might have tried to shield him at first, when he was still a child. But now? And for the rest of his life?

And his father—

He had no right to test them like this, asking them to choose between rejection and forgiveness. And whatever excuses they might have made for him, however much compassion they might have shown, it made no difference in the end. He didn’t want their imaginary blessing, he didn’t want any kind of plausible solace. He only wanted the impossible: he wanted them back.

He sat on the ground and wept.

Prabir made his way back to the beach, before the light failed. He’d lost the will to die, to anaesthetise himself out of existence.

But to live, he’d have to live with the pain of what he’d done, not the hope that it could be extinguished. That would never happen. He’d have to find another reason to go on.

PART SIX

13

Grant spent the next morning extracting tissue from the preserved butterflies, then sequencing their DNA. Even with the Sao Paulo protein scrambling parts of the genome, it was possible to construct a plausible family tree from genetic markers, using the serial numbers as a guide to chronology.

Prabir had guessed one thing correctly: the Sao Paulo gene had changed. Its own protein had gradually rewritten it, though the twenty-year-old protein seemed to have made much subtler changes from generation to generation than the modern version. This added a new twist to the convergence process: at least in the butterflies, the transformation itself had been subject to successive refinements. Whatever SPP did to produce its strangely beneficent mutations, over time the mutations it had wrought in its own gene had enabled it to perform the whole process more efficiently.

Grant posted the historical data on the net, giving credit to Radha and Rajendra Suresh. Then she set to work on the dormant adults, taking samples for RNA transcript analysis. They weren’t in any danger of running out of specimens: apart from the six Prabir had plucked from the trees, all their captive adults had now entered the same state.

Prabir sat and watched her work, helping where he could. Maybe it was just the realisation of what she’d done for him in the kampung finally sinking in, but her face seemed kinder to him now, her whole demeanour warmer. It was as if he’d finally learnt to read the dialect of her body language, in the same way as he’d adjusted to her unfamiliar accent.

In the evening, after they’d eaten, they sat on the deck, facing out to sea, listening to music and planning the voyage’s end. Unless news from Sao Paulo or Lausanne reached them by morning to suggest otherwise, they’d conclude that they’d gathered all the data needed to fuel research into the mutants for the foreseeable future. They’d rejoin the expedition for a day or two, to compare notes face to face, then Grant would sail back to Sulawesi to return her hired boat. Prabir wasn’t sure yet whether he’d hitch a ride with her to Ambon. It would depend on the reception he got from Madhusree.

‘What are you going to say to her?’ Grant asked.

Prabir shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell her the things I told you. I’m not going to poison her life with that. But I don’t want to lie to her any more. I don’t want to feed her some line about coming here to spare her from the trauma.’

Grant shot him an exasperated look. ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that that could still be true? You can have more than one reason for doing something.’

‘I know, but—’