he’d bought in the markets; he’d been handed down the academic ranks until he’d reached Rajendra. The butterfly—a female, twenty centimetres across, with black and iridescent-green wings—clearly belonged to some species of swallowtail: the two hind wings were tipped with long, narrow ‘tails’ or ‘streamers’. But there were puzzling quirks in certain anatomical features, less obvious to the casual observer but of great taxonomic significance: the pattern of veins in the wings, and the position of the genital openings for insemination and oviposition. After a morning spent searching the handbooks, Rajendra had been unable to make a positive identification. He told the collector that the specimen was probably a mildly deformed individual, rather than a member of an unknown species. He could think of no better explanation, and he had no time to pursue the matter further.
A few weeks later—having successfully defended his doctoral thesis—Rajendra sought out the dealer who’d sold the specimen to the Swedish collector. After chatting for a while, the dealer produced another, identical butterfly. No fewer than six had arrived the month before, from a regular supplier in Indonesia. ‘Where, exactly, in Indonesia?’ Ambon, provincial capital of the Moluccas. Rajendra negotiated the price down to something affordable and took the second butterfly to the lab.
Dissection revealed more anomalies. Whole organs were displaced from their usual positions, and features conserved across the entire order Lepidoptera were missing, or subtly altered. If all of these changes were due to a barrage of random mutations, it was hard to imagine how the creature could have survived the larval stage, let alone ended up as such a beautifully formed, perfectly functioning adult. You could expose generations of insects to teratogens until half of them grew heads at both ends of their bodies, but nothing short of a few million years of separate evolution could have produced so many perfectly harmless—or, for all Rajendra knew, beneficial— alterations. But how could this one species of swallowtail have been isolated longer than any other butterfly in the world?
Radha carried out genetic tests. Attempts to determine the butterfly’s evolutionary genealogy with standard markers yielded nonsensical results—but old, degraded DNA couldn’t be trusted. Rajendra begged the dealer to try to obtain a living specimen, but nothing doing, that was too much trouble. However, he did reluctantly reveal the name of his supplier in Ambon. Rajendra wrote to the man, three times, to no avail.
By 2006, the couple had scraped together enough money for Rajendra to travel to Ambon in person, and he’d taught himself enough Bahasa Indonesian to speak to the supplier without an interpreter. No, the supplier couldn’t get him live specimens, or even more dead ones. The butterflies had been collected by shipwrecked fishermen, killing time waiting to be rescued. No one visited the island in question intentionally—there was no reason to—and the supplier couldn’t even point it out on a map.
‘Fishermen from where?’
‘Kai Besar.’
Rajendra phoned Radha. ‘Sell all my textbooks and wire me the money.’
With the help of the bemused fishermen, Rajendra collected dozens of pupae from the island; he had no idea what the chrysalis stage would look like, so he grabbed a few examples of every variation he could find. Back in Calcutta, fifteen of the pupae completed metamorphosis, and three yielded the mysterious swallowtail.
Fresh DNA only confirmed the old puzzles, and added new ones. Structural differences in the genes for neotenin and ecdysone, two crucial developmental hormones, suggested that the butterfly’s ancestors had parted company from other insects three hundred million years ago—roughly forty million years before the emergence of Lepidoptera. This conclusion was obvious nonsense, and other genes told a far more believable story, but the discrepancy itself was remarkable.
Radha and Rajendra co-authored a paper describing their discoveries, but every journal to which they submitted it declined publication. Their observations were absurd, and they could offer no explanation for them. Most of their peers reviewing the work for the journals must have decided that they were simply incompetent.
One referee who’d read the paper for
Prabir had pieced together most of this story long after the events had taken place—even when he’d been old enough to understand the fuss over the butterfly, he hadn’t been paying much attention—but he could remember the day the message arrived from Tokyo, very clearly. His mother had grabbed his hands and danced around their tiny apartment, chanting, ‘We’re going to the island of butterflies.’
And Prabir had pictured the green-and-black insects by the millions, carpeting the ground in place of grass, nesting in the trees in place of leaves.
A month after the coup, Prabir received a message from Eleanor. He closed the door to his hut and lay on his hammock with his notepad beside him, turning down the volume until he was certain that no one outside could hear. The message was video, as usual, but this time Eleanor hadn’t roamed the city with the camera, or even prowled her own apartment cornering her irritated teenage children. She simply sat in her office and spoke. Prabir felt guilty that he’d never been able to repay her in kind for the tours of New York, but if he’d owned up to having a suitable camera at his disposal it would have been impossible to justify the pure text messages that concealed his true age.
Eleanor said, ‘Prabir, I’m worried about you. I understand that you don’t want to interrupt your work—and I know how difficult and expensive it would be to charter a boat now—but I still hope you’ll reconsider. Will you hear me out?
‘I’ve been looking at the latest State Department report on the crisis.’ A URL came through on the data track, and the software automatically attempted to open it, but the ground station in Sumatra through which Prabir was connected to the wider world was blocking the site. ‘Kopasus troops are being flown in to Ambon; I’m sure you know the kind of things they’ve been doing in Aceh and Irian Jaya. And you’re in a typical hiding place for an ABRMS base; I know you’re there with official permission, but if you’re relying on bureaucrats in Jakarta to dig up the relevant file and instruct the army to stay out of your way… I think that might be a bit too optimistic.’
Eleanor hunched towards the camera unhappily. ‘This isn’t going to blow over in a month or two; even if the President is restored to office, there’s almost nothing the government could do now to put things right. For the past sixty years, people in the provinces have tolerated rule from Jakarta so long as there was some token respect for the customary power structures, and some token spending on things like health and education in return for all the timber, fishing and mineral rights being handed over to the cartels. But after fifteen years of austerity programmes—with every spare rupiah going to subsidise the cost of living in the major cities, to stave off riots—the imbalance has become impossible to ignore. Forget religious and ethnic differences; the provinces have been bled dry, and they’re not going to put up with it any longer.’
There was more in the same vein. Prabir listened to it all with a mixture of unease and annoyance. His parents had decided that the safest thing to do was stay put, attract no attention, and ride out the storm. Teranesia had no strategic importance, so neither side had reason to come here. Who was Eleanor to think she knew better, from twenty thousand kilometres away?
Still, it was clear that she was genuinely worried about him, and Prabir didn’t like to see her upset. He’d send back a confident, up-beat reply that would put her mind at ease… without casting doubt on her conclusions, or questioning her expertise.
Prabir pressed one foot against the wall of the hut and rocked the hammock gently while he composed his reply. He began by mentioning the garden, and how well it was doing, though in truth it was full of starchy native tubers that would probably taste like cardboard. ‘Rajendra is weeding it diligently every day. He’s such a good boy!’ He dictated the words to the notepad and it converted them into text; he’d almost patched the software to add random typing errors, but then he’d decided that even the oldest, cheapest keyboard-driven notepad would have corrected them as they were made.
He added a few vaguely positive words about ‘my work’, but there was nothing new to report. His parents had gathered a wealth of data as they observed generation after generation of the butterfly in the setting that had, presumably, shaped its strange adaptations, but as far as Prabir could tell they were still no closer to an explanation. Nothing about Teranesia was wildly different from other islands in the region, and even eighty
