Grant swore suddenly.
Prabir looked up. ‘What?’
She was forcing branches and leaves aside with both arms; maybe she was annoyed because she couldn’t pick up what she’d found. She said, ‘Come and have a look at this.’
Prabir complied. Tiny black ants were swarming over the motionless creature, which was more pink now than black. It was already half eaten.
‘Did that look like carrion to you when it hit the ground?’
‘Hardly.’ Prabir reached down gingerly; he didn’t particularly want to fight the ants for their meal, but it would be too much hard work to give up and go looking for another specimen every time something like this happened.
‘Be careful,’ Grant advised him redundantly.
He grabbed one bedraggled wing between thumb and forefinger and tried shaking the carcass clean. Ants swarmed on to his hand immediately; he dropped the dead bird and started swatting them. He crushed most of them in a matter of seconds, but the survivors continued doing something extremely painful—stinging or biting, they were too small for him to tell.
Grant fished out the repellent and sprayed his hand; they’d never thought before to be so thorough. The solvent itself smarted; his skin was broken in a hundred places.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ His hand was throbbing, but if he’d been stung he didn’t seem to be suffering any systemic reaction.
Grant sprayed her own right hand, and the carcass, then broke a branch off a shrub and used it as a hook. There wasn’t much flesh left on the bird, but it would be more than enough for DNA analysis.
‘At least they weren’t army ants,’ she joked. ‘We’d be lucky to have salvaged anything.’
Prabir eyed the ground nervously. ‘No, but I didn’t think we were in Guatemala.’ His old implant might have given him a rose-coloured view of Teranesia’s insects, but he was sure there’d been nothing as aggressive as this.
He said, ‘If this whole thing is a response to genetic damage, wouldn’t it have shown up in some experiment by now? They’ve been irradiating fruit flies for a hundred years, at every conceivable dosage.’
Grant was way ahead of him. ‘Maybe it has shown up. But one or two individual recovered traits wouldn’t necessarily stand out clearly from genuinely fortuitous mutations. It’s not as if the entire organism would regress to an archaic form that any competent palaeo-entomologist would recognise instantly. I think what’s happening with the displaced organs in some of the mutants is that part of the embryology has been modified out of step with the rest; the result isn’t harmful, because there’s so much conserved across the gap, but it leads to some detailed anatomy that’s neither modern norarchaic.’
‘Right.’ Prabir still couldn’t see how the cockatoo’s teeth had come to be placed so efficiently, but he didn’t know enough about the subject to argue the point with any confidence. ‘But when you look at the original DNA of the pigeons that used to live on Bandanaira, can you see where the recovered traits have come from? Can you pin down the sequences that have been cleaned up and switched on in the birds we saw?’
Grant shook her head. ‘But I don’t expect to be able to do that until I understand how the repair process works. The original sequence might be cut out and spliced into a new location, and even hunting through the whole genome for partial matches wouldn’t necessarily find it.’
Prabir thought this over. ‘So what you really need to do is catch it in the act? Instead of just seeing the “before” and “after” genomes, if we could find an animal where the process was still going on—’
‘Ideally, yes,’ Grant agreed. ‘Though I don’t know how we’d recognise it. I don’t know what we’d look for.’
Nor did he. But it might still be happening most often, and most visibly, on the island where it had happened first.
Any lingering fear of retribution from Grant was absurd; they were friends now, weren’t they? And however annoyed she might be that he’d lied to her, she was hardly going to abandon him here.
But Madhusree had promised to say nothing. How would she feel if he broke the silence first, without consulting her? And if Grant scooped the expedition with his help, the discovery wouldn’t become public knowledge, it would be the property of her sponsor.
He said, ‘So all we can do is gather as many samples as we can, and hope to get lucky?’
Grant squared her shoulders stoically. ‘That’s right. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, there’s no substitute for overkill.’
They stayed on the island for six days. Prabir didn’t exactly grow inured to the drudgery, but there was some consolation in being so tired every night that he could fall asleep the moment he was horizontal. They found twenty-three species of animals and plants that appeared to be novel, though Grant pointed out that the odds were good that one or two had simply failed to make it into the taxonomic databases.
The second island was another half-day’s sailing away. Within an hour of coming ashore, they’d seen what appeared to be the same thorny shrubs, the same flies, the same vicious ants.
They worked their way deeper into the jungle, staying within sight of each other but collecting samples independently. Prabir had rigged up software that took images from his notepad’s camera and searched the major databases for a visual match to any previously described species. Grant scorned this approach; she had no encyclopaedic knowledge of the region’s original wildlife, but she seemed to have acquired the knack of recognising subtle clues in body plan and coloration. At the end of the day, judged against the sequencing results, their hit rates had turned out to be virtually identical.
Prabir stopped beside a white orchid, a single bell-shaped flower almost half a metre wide. Its thick green stem wound around a tree trunk and ended in a skein of white roots that clung to the bark, wreathed in fungus but otherwise naked to the air. There was an insect sitting in the maw of the flower, a beetle with iridescent green wings. He crouched down for a closer look; he was almost certain that this was a species Grant had found on the previous island that had turned out to be modified. If so, it was worth taking for comparison.
He sprayed the beetle with insecticide and waited a few seconds. There was no death dance, none of the usual convulsions. He gripped it by the sides and tried to dislodge it, but it seemed to be anchored to the petal.
The flower began to close, the petals sliding smoothly together. Prabir drew his hand back, but the flower came with it; the sticky secretion that had trapped the beetle had also glued his fingers to its carapace. He laughed. ‘Feed me! Feed me!’ He grabbed hold of the stem of the orchid and tried to extricate himself by yanking his hands apart, but he wasn’t strong enough to break the adhesion, or tear the plant. It was like being superglued to a heavy-duty rope wound around the tree trunk.
The flower now loosely enclosed his forearm, and the reflex action hadn’t stopped. He tried to stay calm: pitcher plants and sundews took days or weeks to digest a few flies; he wasn’t likely to get doused in anything that would strip his flesh to the bone. He fumbled for his pocket knife and attacked the petal. It was tough and fibrous as a palm leaf, but once he’d punctured it he managed to saw through it easily enough, hacking out a piece around the beetle. The orchid began to unfurl immediately, maybe because he’d taken away the source of the attachment signal. But why hadn’t it closed on the beetle itself?
Grant must have seen him struggling; she approached with a look of concern that turned into an enquiring smile as she realised that he was uninjured.
Using the knife blade, he managed to lever one finger free of the beetle. Grant took his hand and peered at what was still glued to his thumb. ‘That’s extraordinary.’
‘Do you mind?’ Prabir pulled his hand back. ‘If you want to wait five seconds, you can have a proper look.’ He forced the tip of the blade between skin and carapace, and finally dislodged the beetle, with orchid fragment attached.