Teranesia

She waited to grow numb. Just for a few minutes, long enough to finish it. She hummed to herself. ‘You’ve gone into my head. You’ve gone into my memories.’

That wasn’t enough.

But it was more than the gene would leave of him.

She opened her eyes and stood up wearily. ‘OK. We’ll do this together.’ She looked down; she could still recognise his face beneath the plaques. There was a blister full of grey fluid where the diesel had splashed his chest, but there was no blood in it. No Prabir. She didn’t believe he’d felt any pain at all.

‘Why did you take him? What do you want from us?’

Nothing at all. It had no purpose for anyone, no destiny. No journey in mind, no endpoint. It wanted nothing but itself. More of the same.

It didn’t want him.

She’d been fighting it the wrong way.

She turned his frozen body over and searched his back. There had to be another blister, a boil, or a pustule, however tiny, in a place the fuel hadn’t touched. Nothing was perfect, nothing. Some tiny fraction of the infected cells must have made the kind of mistake that let his body drag them to the surface in the hope of disposing of them.

Why hadn’t the São Paulo gene hatched itself into a virus? Because a viral genome would be too remote to register as a cousin to any of its hosts, the changes required were too extreme. It thought it would lose by leaving his body; it thought it could only perish. All she had to do was prove otherwise – in a way that wouldn’t give it the power to spread.

There. In a patch of real skin, a tiny boil.

Madhusree turned and leapt to the front dinghy, picked up a fresh hypodermic and an empty culture flask, then jumped back. She squatted down and pierced the boil, then drew up a few millilitres of grey fluid. She squirted it into the culture flask, then leapt the gap again and filled the flask with growth medium.

‘If you learn to come, I’ll give you what you want. Just a couple of the right mutations, and you can surface like pus. My brother will do the work for you; you just have to surrender. I’ll give you more of the same than you’ve ever dreamt of.’

How much of his body weight did it actually have now? Five per cent? Three or four kilograms? She had enough medium to support about the same weight in tissue culture, for maybe half a day. Enough to distract it, enough to hold it in check.

If it was omniscient, she could never win: it would see beyond the lure and continue to reprogramme his body for the greater long-term gain of reproduction. But any offspring it could produce that way were still hundreds of cellular generations into the future, a distant peak in a desolate landscape of extinction. It could see far enough to know that a burst of somatic cell division would simply kill its host: it had no choice but to find a way to make that host go forth and multiply. But once she offered it a path into a sheltered environment where it could feed and reproduce, cell by cell, without facing the same limits, a new feature would appear on the landscape of possibilities. A new peak, not as tall, but far closer.

She’d have to make that new peak as high as she could. High enough to draw the gene away from the route to freedom. High enough to hide Prabir’s children.

She couldn’t hope to do that with the supplies she had on board. But by midnight, she’d reach Yamdena. She could synthesise all the exotic peptides for the medium herself, the growth factors, the cell adhesion modulators. What about the base, the matrix? What could she make do with? Gelatin? Agar? She’d kick down the door of every shop in town until she found what she needed.

As they approached Darwin harbour, Prabir opened his eyes. He took in the sight of Madhusree, the culture flasks and pickle jars and other scavenged glassware spread all around her on the deck of the trawler, the needle drawing pus from his arm.

She asked him, ‘Are you in there? Is it still you?’

She watched his face. The skin was sagging and full of lymphatic fluid, where the cells of the carapace had stretched it before deserting his body for an easier life, but she believed she could read his expression in the tightening of the muscles below.

He drooled, ‘Calcutta. Next year. You’re not getting out of it.’

Madhusree wrapped her arms around him, shaking from exhaustion. ‘Welcome back.’

She clung to him, selfish with joy, but she’d won back more than her brother. What had worked for him should work again, in the next infected human. They’d never be free of the gene, they could never hope to eradicate it. As long as they were made from DNA, as long as they were part of nature, they would remain vulnerable.

But they’d tricked it, this once.

They’d won the first battle.