He watched her at the bow of their twin vessel, checking their position against her notepad’s GPS to be sure that the motor was running true, scouring the horizon with the binoculars for landmarks, validating everything three different ways. He was not going to tell her: You’re carrying your parents’ killer. You’re saving a life that should not have been saved. He couldn’t pretend to untangle his own shame and cowardice at the thought of her knowing, from his understanding of the effect the revelation would have had on her, but he didn’t need to. He was not going to rob her of this feat. He was not going to corrupt it.
The data from his ten o’clock sample worried Madhusree. ‘Another line of dermal cells with different growth factors has taken over; I’ll have to make new blockers. And there are traces…’ She trailed off.
Prabir said, ‘Traces of what? No more tantrums, I promise.’ He joked lamely, ‘It’s got me by the balls, how much worse can it get?’
‘Traces of everything,’ Madhusree admitted. ‘Every cell type in your body that can be found in your bloodstream now has a small proportion bearing the São Paulo gene.’
‘Could that just be spillage? Whatever kind of cells the packaging around the gene is tailored for, mightn’t it work inefficiently almost anywhere?’ He was afraid, but he wasn’t going to panic again. He was suffering from something like cancer. No one died of cancer in a day.
‘I don’t know.’ Madhusree’s confidence was fraying. She was a nineteen-year-old biology student, and there was no reference site, no expert pathologist, no repository anywhere in the world with any real knowledge of what was happening to him. ‘I could synthesise antisense DNA,’ she said tentatively. ‘To bind to the transcripts from the São Paulo gene, maybe stop it being expressed.’
Prabir’s spirits soared. ‘OK! Let’s try it!’
‘I’ll wrap it in lipids similar to the ones they use in gene therapy, but it won’t get into every cell type.’
‘Some cells will get a dose, some won’t. We’ll have controls. What more can you ask for?’
Madhusree regarded him nervously. ‘It might have no effect. Sometimes the cell just chops up the oligonucleotides—the pieces of DNA—before they can interfere.’
Prabir snorted, unimpressed. ‘They couldn’t manage that with the São Paulo gene, could they? Will this have agonising side effects?’
‘I doubt it. But I can’t be sure.’
‘No one can. This is all new.’
‘I’m out of my depth,’ she confessed.
He said, ‘It’s my decision. Let’s try it.’
Madhusree synthesised and packaged the antisense DNA. Prabir injected it, followed by a new set of growth factor blockers. Then he sat back in the dinghy and waited.
The sun was high now, the heat was surreal. The boats seesawed mechanically in the swell; it was like being strapped to some laboratory device for ensuring a thorough mixing of reagents. Prabir was amazed at the clarity of his senses, the sharpness to everything. It was the opposite of the suffocating blackness he’d felt when he’d willed himself towards death: in the bathtub in Toronto, in the swamp when he’d lost all hope against the snake, in the kampung as he’d strode towards the minefield. He thought savagely: I am not going to die in front of her. It’s not going to happen.
His skin had begun to itch and chafe, so he’d removed his jeans; he was wearing nothing but shorts and his life jacket. As he tried to move his legs to shift position, he discovered that he couldn’t. Where one ankle had rested on top of the other foot, the skin had glued itself together.
Prabir swore softly, and probed the weld with his hand. It seemed the plaques had broken through the skin above and merged, though he hadn’t felt a thing. He almost didn’t want to tell her, but he could hardly conceal it indefinitely. He called out, ‘Maddy!’ When she turned, he smiled and raised his conjoined feet for inspection. ‘One of us might finally have to wield a knife, or I’m going to need crutches on Yamdena.’
She leant across the gap for a better look. Then her face contorted suddenly and she started weeping.
Prabir said, ‘Hey!Ssssh! Stop that!’ He reached out a hand towards her face, not close enough to touch her, but the gesture alone made him feel as if they’d made contact.
He said, ‘You know what we’re doing next year, to get away from Toronto? Now that we’ve joined the jet-setting class?’
‘No.’
‘The IRA parade in Calcutta. You promised you’d help me pull the truck.’
Madhusree looked away. ‘I don’t remember that.’
‘You’re a bad liar.’
‘Your skin grafts won’t be healed.’
Prabir shook his head, laughing. ‘You’re not squirming out of this. I did the kebab skewer through my cheeks. You’re helping me pull the truck!’
Prabir was unable to take the noon blood sample. The second set of growth factor blockers hadn’t worked; the plaques had meshed and solidified across his shoulders, and though he could still bend his elbows, he didn’t have enough movement overall for the task. Madhusree put on surgical gloves, stepped across between the boats, and pushed an empty tube into the hypodermic’s receptacle.
She surveyed him unhappily. ‘It really doesn’t hurt? It’s beginning to look like acute psoriasis.’
‘It just itches a bit.’
‘Try to move as much as you can. I don’t want you getting pressure sores from lying on one spot.’
‘I’ll try. I don’t think this stuff could form ulcers, though.’
As she jumped back, Prabir said, ‘Hey! You know what we’re missing? Radio Lausanne. The Furtado verdict.’
Madhusree nodded unenthusiastically. She picked up her notepad and went to the Lausanne site.
Prabir couldn’t read the screen, so he watched her face. Finally she admitted, ‘The synthetic chromosome came through randomised, like the test sequences. Not conserved, like the real one from the pigeon. So the theory hasn’t been falsified.’ She regarded Prabir warily. ‘There might be something missing in the chemistry, though, something we can’t characterise about the natural DNA. It took a long time to understand methylation tags. There could be another modification, even subtler than that.’
Prabir said nothing, but he knew she was clutching at straws, the way he and Grant had when they’d first heard the theory and far too many things had fallen into place. Furtado was right: the gene could look sideways across a virtual family tree and quantify the usefulness of every potential change.
No treatment would ever destroy it. It couldn’t literally foresee Madhusree’s assault with the growth factor blockers and the antisense DNA, but it would always be prepared for whatever she injected, ready to make the best possible choice at the next replication.
It wouldn’t kill him, though. His condition could not be an accident, a random side effect of the gene’s naivety in the body of a man. It had done this to him because it would benefit, somehow.
‘How many tranquilliser darts do you have left?’ he asked.
Madhusree was alarmed. ‘Why? Are you in pain?’
Prabir almost lied, but he said, ‘No.’
He’d sworn he wouldn’t die on the boat. How could he ask her to kill him, knowing what it would do to her?
But this would be different in every way. She would do it by choice, out of love. Not through stupidity and cowardice.
He explained calmly, ‘It wants to change me, Maddy. It wants to take me apart and build something new.’