‘They’re hardly plantations any more. They’ve been abandoned for decades.’
‘Forests, plantations, call them what you like. We haven’t come here to negotiate a shipment of mace.’
Prabir couldn’t imagine what she was hoping to find; centuries of cultivation had left the islands with little in the way of wildlife. He’d assumed that they’d only dropped anchor here to ask the locals for news from travellers passing through from further south, or to scour the market for curiosities that might not have been shipped up to Ambon.
As they left the town behind, the dirt road became increasingly overgrown; they trudged through the heat, encountering no one. Grant had a licence from the government in Ambon to collect specimens for research purposes throughout the RMS, but Prabir suspected that they should still have asked for permission from the Bandanese themselves before heading out into the countryside. Under adat, customary law, all visitors to the island would be seen as guests of the raja—an honour that carried an obligation to inform him of their movements—but short of requesting an audience with His Whateverness, they might at least have checked with the nearest villagers that they wouldn’t be disturbing any ancestral shrines. The trouble was, if they went back into town so Prabir could sound people out about the correct protocol, Grant would soon realise that he was playing it by ear and start asking herself why she couldn’t have done the same without him.
The narrow, unkempt path that the road had become led them into the plantation, then abandoned them completely. They picked their way slowly through the undergrowth. Even at the height of the spice trade the plantations had never been a monoculture, and the tall, white-blossomed kanari almond trees interspersed with the nutmeg—planted to give shade to the saplings—seemed to have retained their share of the light long after the withdrawal of human intervention. It was the space between the trees that had reverted to jungle: rattan and lianas snaked from trunk to trunk, some of them unpleasantly spiked, and there were waist-high ferns everywhere. Prabir was glad he was in boots and jeans; he’d wandered Teranesia barefoot as a child, but his soft city feet wouldn’t have lasted five minutes here. Grant had gone so far as to wear a long-sleeved shirt, and after half an hour his own arms were so scratched that, despite the heat, he envied her.
He stopped to catch his breath. ‘If you tell me what you’re looking for, we might find it a little faster.’
‘Fruit pigeons,’ Grant replied curtly.
Prabir almost responded with an acerbic remark about the difficulty of doing field work with such limited powers of observation, but he stopped himself in time. Fruit pigeons might easily have been classed as vermin and hunted to extinction by the plantation owners, but they’d been spared for the sake of their convenient habit of shitting out the nutmeg seed, sowing it naturally. They weren’t exactly overwhelmed by competition or predators on any of the islands, but here they’d be in paradise.
So why hadn’t he seen one yet?
The pigeons he remembered had all been large, noisy and brightly coloured, but he knew there were smaller species too, some of them quite well camouflaged. They hardly needed to be silent and invisible, though, here of all places. And there had to be thousands of them.
He said, ‘Can we stop here for a while? Maybe we’re scaring them with all the noise.’
Grant nodded. ‘That’s worth a try.’
Prabir stood motionless for ten minutes, staring up into the branches. He could hear other birds in the distance, and a constant hum of insects, but nothing like the discordant clacking he remembered.
Grant couldn’t resist needling him. ‘So where are they, eagle-eyes? You have my advantage in both youth and experience; if you can’t see them, we might as well go back to the boat.’
‘Don’t tempt me.’ He had a better idea, though. ‘Have you got a camera on you?’
‘Yeah, of course.’
‘Can I borrow it?’
Grant hesitated, then handed it to him.
He examined it carefully. ‘How much did this cost?’
‘Five hundred euros. Which is well above my personal definition of “disposable”. Why? What are you planning to do with it?’
Prabir commanded her loftily, ‘Be patient.’ Five hundred euros meant that the lens would give a much sharper image than his notepad’s camera, and the stabiliser would be a laserring system, not a trashy micro-mechanical accelerometer.
Grant brushed the debris off a fallen trunk and sat down. Prabir set the camera to the widest possible angle, aimed it at a tree twenty metres away, and recorded sixty seconds of vision.Then he passed the data to his notepad through the infrared link.
The program he needed was three lines in Rembrandt, his favourite image-processing language. As he watched the result on the notepad’s screen, Grant saw the expression of delight on his face and came over to see what he’d found.
Outlined in fluorescent blue by the software, half a dozen small green-and-brown birds moved along the branches. Prabir glanced up from the screen to the tree, but even now that he knew exactly what to look for, he couldn’t see the birds for himself. The software was only identifying them in retrospect by comparing hundreds of consecutive frames, and even then it sometimes lost track of their edges against the pattern of leaves.
Grant complained indignantly, ‘You don’t know how galling this is. I grew up on smug biologists’ jokes about pathetic computerised attempts at vision.’
Prabir smiled. ‘Things change.’ Grant was probably only ten years old than he was, but the idea seemed as quaint to him as jokes about heavier-than-air flight.
‘Can you replay it?’
‘Sure.’
As she watched the scene again, she mused, ‘I’ve seen stick insects with that level of camouflage. And some predatory fish. But this is extraordinary.’ She laughed and swatted something on her neck. Prabir had expected her to be elated by their find, but the birds’ proficiency seemed to unnerve her.
He struggled to recall the images Madhusree had shown him back in Toronto. ‘You think this is the pigeon that turned up in Ambon nine months ago?’
Grant nodded. ‘We’ll need specimens to be sure, but it looks like it.’
‘But how did you know it would be here? I thought no one had traced it back from the bird dealer.’
‘They hadn’t, but this seemed the most likely spot. I can’t think why no one else looked here. Maybe it was just prejudice: the Bandas aren’t wild, they aren’t pristine, they aren’t havens of biodiversity. How could a new species possibly be born in a place that was so “barren”?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I will, when I know.’
Grant had brought a tranquilliser gun. Prabir improvised software to display the outlines with the minimum possible time lag, but it still took them three hours to hit their first target. As he picked the sleeping bird out of the undergrowth, he reflected uneasily on the possible source of its mutations. He still believed it was more than likely that he was looking at a recent descendant of a Teranesian migrant, but if it had brought along a mutagenic virus that could cross between species, tens of thousands of people were potentially at risk. The virus might have taken eighteen years to leap the biochemical gulf between butterflies and birds, but birds were notorious for harbouring potential human diseases. He wished he could get some straight answers out of Grant; it was one thing to avoid starting groundless rumours, but she owed him an informed opinion on whatever it was she thought they were dealing with.
They returned to the boat at dusk, grimy and exhausted, with blood from four pigeons. Prabir looked on as Grant prepared the samples for analysis; the preservative that had kept them stable in the heat had transformed them into blobs of puce jelly.
He said, ‘Do you know anything about the species that used to be here? I don’t mean prior to the Dutch; just ten or twenty years ago.’