Teranesia

Prabir looked down at his arms and hands; they appeared perfectly normal. He lifted his shirt above his waist. There was a glossy patch on his abdomen, a shiny purplish-black region the size of a large coin. He touched it warily. The surface of his skin felt the same as ever, but when he applied enough pressure to sense what lay beneath, instead of the usual springiness of muscle he met resistance from an object as hard as bone.

‘It’s solid. It’s some kind of tumour.’ He was numb with revulsion. ‘Can you cut it out? Please?’

Madhusree said, ‘Stay calm.’

Prabir removed his life jacket and pulled off his shirt, almost dislodging the hypodermic in his haste; there were two more patches higher on his chest. He turned so Madhusree could see his back. ‘There are five,’ she announced. ‘About the same size.’

‘You could anaesthetise me with the tranquilliser gun,’ he implored her. ‘They’re not that deep. I won’t lose much blood.’ The gene would still be in his body, but he didn’t care. He wanted this visible, palpable sign of it removed.

‘Are they causing you any pain? Any burning sensation? They could be completely benign.’

‘Benign?’

Madhusree held her hands up, pleading with him for cool-headedness. ‘If there’s no pain or bleeding, they might only be replacing the normal dermis rather than invading other tissues. And if there’s no inflammation, at least they’re not provoking an autoimmune reaction.’

Prabir took several deep breaths. He’d handled a peppering with shrapnel better than this. He said, ‘There’s no pain, no inflammation.’

‘OK. I’ll synthesise growth factor blockers tailored to the receptors the cells are expressing. That should at least stabilise them.’

‘You can do that?’

‘Of course. It’s a second-year lab project: “Here’s a cultured organ with an unknown tumour. Characterise the tumour, and stop it growing.” ’ Madhusree regarded him tenderly across the narrow channel of water. ‘You’re going to be fine! We just have to be patient. We’ll get to Yamdena, we’ll get to Darwin, we’ll get to Toronto. And then we’ll fix you up for good.’

As Madhusree worked on the growth factor blockers, the hard, shiny plaques beneath his skin grew thicker and larger. New ones blossomed, on his arms and legs and buttocks. The sensation of their presence when he moved was strange, but only rarely painful, and Prabir took some comfort from their uselessness; the São Paulo gene was behaving as stupidly and randomly as a virus blundering into a brand-new host. Leprosy would have had about the same effect on his mating prospects. He’d hardly dared admit to the fear before, but as they’d left the island of the mangroves behind, he’d thought: It could have the power to do anything. It could have the power to make me rape my own sister.

It didn’t. If the fishermen had been affected in the same way as him, they’d probably been hounded for their disfigurement by a superstitious mob, and merely tried to defend themselves. What had happened with Grant had just happened; he was tired of probing it for significance.

He lay back between the fuel cans and watched the blue water around them sparkling in the morning sun.

Just before eight o’clock, Madhusree threw him a plastic tube with a clear, oily preparation, still warm from the machine; the synthesiser, on request, had welded the tube closed. When Prabir placed it in the hypodermic’s receptacle and hit the injection button, the various mating surfaces were sterilised by laser flash, then the tube was punctured at both ends and the contents driven into his vein.

He took another blood sample. Half an hour later, Madhusree had the results: the number of cells containing the gene had risen substantially, but that was hardly surprising given the visible evidence of his skin. If the blockers didn’t work there’d be no hiding his condition by the time they hit Yamdena, but he’d given Madhusree his account details, so even if he was crippled she could summon enough money from the net to compensate for any squeamishness people might have about giving him a ride.

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.