Prabir was allowed to join Grant and a dozen of the expeditioners, who were eating lunch under an awning. Cole and Carpenter were with them, but the businessmen seemed to have left with the fishing boat. A soldier sitting on a fuel drum in the corner looked on listlessly; compared to burning Muslim villagers out of their homes in Aru, this could hardly be a stimulating tour of duty.
Prabir approached Seli Ojany, who was standing with a small group of people beside a crate covered in plates of sandwiches. He caught her eye and whispered, ‘Do you know where my sister is?’
Ojany put a finger to her lips, then pretended she’d been wiping off breadcrumbs. It occurred to Prabir belatedly that half the expedition could have been out in the field when the Lord’s Army arrived, and some of them would have had the opportunity to see what was happening and stay away. It wasn’t an entirely comforting thought; Madhusree would probably have been safer in the camp than in the jungle, unless there was some brutality going on here that he’d yet to observe.
Prabir glanced at the soldier, but he didn’t seem to be paying them much attention. ‘So what’s brought the Inquisition here?’ he asked. ‘Are there really that many animals turning up in West Papua?’
Ojany gestured at a colleague beside her. ‘Mayumi heard the story closer to first-hand.’
‘Not animals in West Papua,’ Mayumi said, ‘but there were some fishermen who went to Suresh Island.’ Prabir did his best to accept this casual use of his parents’ name; it seemed Madhusree had put them on the map forever, pinning their memories to the spot. ‘They came back to Kai and ran amok in their own village; most of them were captured, but one of them escaped and ended up on Aru. That seems to be why the LA got interested.’
‘What do you mean “ran amok”? What exactly did they do?’ Prabir was hoping for some solid evidence at last to write this off as the result of a psychotropic plant toxin.
Mayumi shrugged. ‘The Kai islanders who were here earlier wouldn’t tell me. And the LA aren’t exactly forthcoming either.’
Deborah, one of Madhusree’s friends whom Prabir had met earlier, responded impatiently, ‘Forget what the Lord’s Army think: we know from the fruit pigeons and the butterflies that the São Paulo gene can cross between species. We can’t assume that we’re immune to that possibility, so we have to stop taking risks. At the very least, we should quarantine Suresh Island. Maybe even sterilise it, if it comes to that. You wouldn’t need to use an atomic weapon: just enough herbicide to kill all the vegetation, so the whole food chain collapsed.’
Ojany said, ‘But what if that increases selection pressure for a version that can cross into marine species?’
‘If Furtado is right—’ Mayumi began, at which point almost everyone in earshot groaned. ‘If Furtado is right,’ he persisted, ‘it would do a lot more than increase selection pressure. Any avoidable risk of extinction would only sharpen the contrast between favourable and unfavourable mutations: if every surviving counterfactual cousin would have moved into the sea, the strategy would become impossible to miss. It would be like herding the gene straight into a new ecosystem.’
Deborah glanced at her watch and predicted, ‘In less than twenty-four hours, we’ll be able to stop worrying about Furtado.’ Prabir looked at her enquiringly; she explained, ‘The Lausanne team have gone ahead and started the synthetic chromosome test themselves. The verdict will be out by about noon tomorrow, our time.’
Cole, who’d been hovering at the edge of the group, interjected urbanely, ‘All this fear of “contagion” would be put swiftly to rest if you took the trouble to consult my seminal text on ambivalence towards the natural world, M/Other. My analysis of the relevant cultural indices across a time span of several centuries reveals that the predominant passion changes cyclically, from deep filial affection to pure xenophobia and back. Pastoralism, industrialism, romanticism, modernism, environmentalism, transhumanism, and deep ecology are all products of the same dynamic. The anxiety in the midst of which we stand at this very moment is a stark validation of my thesis, whereby the nurturing, enfolding presence of the mother is radically reinterpreted, psychically transmuted into a threatening, disempowering, even alien force. But this perception will not endure. In due course, the pendulum will swing back again.’
Prabir had been watching Carpenter while Cole spoke; there’d been an encouragingly troubled expression building on his face. Some of the biologists followed Prabir’s gaze, until everyone in the group was looking at the student, waiting for his response.
Carpenter began tentatively, ‘If this gene does spread, wouldn’t it be neat, though? All the animals would evolve: they’d grow hands, and opposable thumbs, and we could talk to them. And if it happened to us too, we’d become telepathic. That’s the next level, right? And why keep it out of the ocean? What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you want the reefs to dream? The super-dolphins won’t stop us surfing. They’ll be our friends!’
Prabir detected movement in the corner of his vision; he turned to see the medical officer and two junior soldiers approaching.
The medical officer addressed him. ‘Come with me, please.’
‘Why?’ Prabir looked around for support. ‘You’ve taken a blood sample, what more do you want?’
‘This is for your own protection,’ the man insisted blandly.
‘What is for my own protection?’ Prabir caught sight of Grant, who was watching with an expression of alarm. But she gave him a reassuring glance, as if to say that she hadn’t abandoned him, that she’d be working to get him out of this.
The medical officer said, ‘You’re infected. You’re going into quarantine.’
14
Prabir had expected to be placed under guard in a tent at the edge of the camp, or perhaps imprisoned in a cage built from rough-hewn branches tied together with rattan—the kind of thing they always seemed to be able to construct at short notice in movies, whenever someone on a tropical island needed to be restrained. What the Lord’s Army did instead was trash the control console of Grant’s boat, dispose of all the pigeons, butterflies and blood samples in a bonfire on the beach, steal Grant’s rifle and tranquilliser gun, and lock Prabir in the cabin. They posted one sentry on deck and another on the beach.
Prabir sat in the captain’s chair in front of the ruined console, swinging the seat slowly back and forth. The ancient PCR machine might have malfunctioned. Or it might have amplified nothing but a fragment of plant DNA that had entered his bloodstream through a scratch from a barbed-wire shrub. A foreign cell in the process of being taken apart by his immune system wouldn’t even have been replicating, let alone creating germ cells through meiosis—the prerequisite for the São Paulo gene to be expressed. Whatever the powers of SPP in the right context, an inert copy of its gene was just another piece of junk to be scavenged, broken down and recycled.
The gene had found ways to cross between other species, though; he couldn’t pretend it was unthinkable that it had breached his body’s defences. He’d been cut, scratched, bitten, and glued by half a dozen kinds of Teranesian plants and animals, and handled dozens more with broken skin. The gene might not have created a transmission route specifically for humans, but having been exposed to so many different mechanisms tailored for other animals, he could have been infected with a viable copy by sheer bad luck.