‘And that might be handy in somatic cells, to stop certain kinds of cancer?’ he suggested. ‘If some growth regulator gene has been damaged in a cell in my intestine, say, the cell might reactivate a copy of the gene that was duplicated accidentally thousands of generations ago, and fell into disuse?’
‘Exactly. So normally there’d be no visible effects: if an adult starts producing an archaic protein in a few intestinal cells, or skin cells, that’s not going to change its gross anatomy. And even if the process was activated in an early embryo, it would generally produce just one altered individual who’d bear perfectly normal offspring. To produce heritable changes, it has to be turned on in the germ cells; that must be what’s happening here, but don’t ask me why, because I have no idea yet.’
‘OK. But if this is a response to genetic damage, what’s triggering it? Doesn’t there still need to be some kind of powerful mutagen, even if what we’re seeing is the result of the animals conquering it, rather than succumbing to it?’
‘Maybe. Unless it’s being triggered inappropriately; unless they’re overreacting to some other kind of stress.’ Grant lifted her notepad off the bench and thumbed through the sequence of codons. ‘I don’t have all the answers; I’m not even close. The only way to understand this will be to unravel the whole mechanism: identify the genes that are being switched on in every affected species, then see what proteins they encode, what functions they perform, and what activates them in the first place.’
Prabir groaned. ‘ “Every affected species” Why don’t I like the sound of that part?’
Grant regarded him with sergeant-majorly contempt. ‘A bit more field work isn’t going to kill you. You’ve got nothing to complain about; just wait until you get to my age.’
‘You wait until you’ve spent ten years behind a desk.’
She shuddered. ‘All the more reason to want to be here instead. Besides, these are the creatures you grew up with, aren’t they? Think of it as a chance to be reunited with all your old childhood friends.’
‘“Childhood friends’” Prabir climbed off the stool and limped across the cabin to the galley. ‘Do you mean Bambi and Godzilla? Or their mutual great-great-grandparents?’
9
Prabir slept on deck again, untroubled by insomnia. He woke at first light, aching all over, but unaccountably happier than he’d felt in months.
He dived into the harbour and swam slow laps to a navigation buoy and back, just to loosen the muscles in his shoulders. People heading out in rickety fishing boats shouted greetings, and in the water the close heat of dawn didn’t feel oppressive at all. He’d taken up swimming in Toronto for a while, doing laps before work in a pool full of fanatics with scalp-to-toe anti-turbulence depilation and sports watches with faux-AI plug-ins to coach them on their stroke. But it had made him feel twice as tense as doing nothing, so he’d given it away.
Thinking back on the evening’s revelations, his sunny mood seemed less of a mystery. Even if Grant’s theory turned out to be misguided, one way or another the data they collected would help shed light on what was happening. That wasn’t exactly what had brought him here, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like the key to all his anxieties. Ever since Madhusree had told him about the expedition, he’d been treating the spread of the mutations as some kind of vague malevolent force, reaching out from Teranesia to drag her back into its clutches, mocking the very idea that they’d ever escaped. That was every bit as deranged as anything the cranks in Ambon had spouted, but the clearer the real, molecular basis for the effect became, the harder it would be to sustain that kind of delusion. A complete answer might be decades away, but playing some small part in getting there would make him feel less helpless, less overwhelmed. That was what his parents had spent their lives fighting for: not just explaining the butterflies, but puncturing the whole deeply corrupting illusion that nature—or some surrogate deity—ever had designs on anyone, malevolent or otherwise.
Halfway through his fifth lap, he spotted Grant approaching. She called out to him jokingly, ‘I thought you’d been kidnapped.’
‘Sorry. I got carried away.’
‘I don’t blame you. It’s unbelievable.’ They trod water over an outcrop of branched red coral, festooned with anemones and swarming with tiny bright fish—all at least six metres below them, but the details were so sharp that they might have been looking down through air.
Prabir felt a sudden urge to come clean with her; whatever the significance of the butterflies turned out to be, he was tired of having the deception between them. He’d proved himself useful to have around, even if it was more as ad hoctechnical assistant and general dogsbody than cultural liaison. And surely she’d understand his reluctance to reveal the whole family history to a stranger.
He struggled to find a place to start. ‘Were your family excited by the news last night?’ He hadn’t eavesdropped; she’d been talking to her son right in front of him as he’d gone out on to the deck to sleep.
Grant frowned. ‘News? You mean the pigeon sequences? I couldn’t tell them about that; there’s a confidentiality clause in my contract.’
Prabir was shocked. ‘But you—’
‘And you mustn’t mention it to anyone, either. Especially not your sister.’
Prabir was about to retort that he wasn’t bound by any contract, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to drive home the point that she’d been unwise to confide in him.
He said, ‘Whatever happened to scientists sharing data?’
‘Welcome to the real world.’
‘And you’re happy with this?’
‘Delirious. I love being gagged.’ Grant plucked irritably at something crawling up the arm of her T-shirt.
‘Then why did you do it? Why did you sign the contract? Couldn’t you have joined the university expedition instead?’
‘I’m not an academic. Everyone on that boat is being paid a salary from somewhere—student slave labour like your sister excepted. In the unlikely event that they’d let me on at all, I would have had to pay them for the privilege. I enjoy what I do, but I’m not in it for charity. I have a family to support.’
Prabir wasn’t about to do a post-mortem on anyone’s career choices. ‘How long does it apply? The gag?’
‘That depends. Some things might be cleared for publication by the lawyers in a couple of months. Others might take years.’
It came to him suddenly that his parents had published nothing in all their years on the island. They’d taken money from Silk Rainbow. They must have made the same kind of deal.
Grant frowned. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Just a stitch.’
‘You’re not planning to quit on me in disgust?’
‘Hardly.’ It shouldn’t have stung so much. They’d made one small compromise in order to do something that otherwise would not have been done at all. When had he started thinking of them as flawless, immaculate?
Grant started back towards the boat. Prabir called after her, ‘New rules, though. First one out of the water cooks breakfast.’
Grant had chosen six small islands from which to gather samples, lying in an arc that ran south-east from the Bandas to the Kai Islands. All were uninhabited, unless they had settlements so small that they’d escaped the notice of the official cartographers. The third was just seventy kilometres north-east of Teranesia, slightly closer than the Tanimbar Islands to the south; if it had been on the maps when Prabir was a child, he and Madhusree might have ended up stranded there.
When he’d joined Grant in Ambon, he’d imagined himself somehow ‘steering’ her towards the source of the mutations; fat chance of that, but the route she’d picked would already take them about as close as he wanted to get. He could only hope that whatever the biologists’ expedition had discovered was drawing them in the same direction; it seemed naive now to think that Madhusree—lowest of the low in the academic pecking order—could have swayed a boatload full of experts with their own theories and agendas.