Teranesia

Madhusree bit her lip and eyed him with frank disbelief, but Prabir was almost certain that she wouldn’t call his bluff. She might have argued all weekend about the risks the expedition would face, but she wouldn’t make a scene over money.

She said, ‘OK. I knew it was a lot. I’ll have to see about raising it some other way.’

‘Some other way? How long do you have?’

‘Two months.’

Prabir frowned sympathetically. ‘So what were you thinking of doing?’

Madhusree shrugged and said casually, ‘I’ve got some ideas. Don’t worry about it.’ She stood and left the room abruptly.

Prabir put his face in his hands. He hated lying to her, but he was certain now that he’d made the right decision. Even if there really was some revolutionary discovery waiting to be made on the island – and not just a very unpleasant mutagen that left a vast number of stillborn victims rotting in the jungle for every spectacular survivor – she could read about it like everyone else.

That would make her angry. But it wouldn’t kill her.

‘Are you sure it’s all right for me to be here?’ Felix’s work room looked like a biology lab in which an eclectic art thief had stashed a few million dollars’ worth of stolen goods. Prabir didn’t recognise any of the paintings awaiting assessment, hanging in a rack like posters in a shop, but the richness of the pigments and the skill of the execution was enough to make him nervous just being near them. ‘I don’t want to get you into trouble.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’ Felix was glued to a microscope, manually removing the last flakes of corrosion from an arrowhead after electrochemical treatment. ‘We have visitors back here all the time. You can’t steal anything; the building’s too smart. Try swallowing one of those coins and see how far you get.’

‘No, it’s the frog collection that’s starting to look tempting.’

Felix groaned. ‘I know, the booking’s for nine. I won’t be much longer.’

Prabir watched him working, envious and admiring. Anything involving fine visual detail was tricky for Felix, but with stationary objects he could build up a mental picture with higher resolution than the electrode sheet provided at any given moment, accumulating extra data as his eyes swept back and forth across the scene. Apparently the process had become partly instinctive, but it still required a certain amount of sheer doggedness, a constant mental effort to maintain the model in his head.

Prabir said, ‘I wish I’d met you nine years ago.’

Felix replied without looking up. ‘I was fifteen. You would have gone to prison.’

‘This is a hypothetical: we both get to be eighteen.’

‘That would have been even worse. You wouldn’t have wanted to know me then.’

Prabir laughed. ‘Why?’

‘Oh … I did a lot of stupid things.’

‘Like what?’

Felix didn’t respond immediately; Prabir wasn’t sure whether the question discomforted him, or whether he was merely concentrating on his work. ‘I used to go out with the sheet off, just to prove I didn’t need it. To convince myself that I could have lived a hundred years ago, and still got by.’

‘What’s so stupid about that?’

‘It wasn’t true. I’d grown up with it, I didn’t have the skills to cope without it. I knew that, but I kept pushing my luck.’ He laughed. ‘I met this guy in a club one night. He hung around talking to me for about three hours. There was a lot of touching: hands on shoulders, guiding me through the crowd. Nothing overtly sexual, but it was more than just polite. He was pretty evasive, but after a while I was almost certain that he was coming on to me—’

‘Three hours of this, and he wasn’t?’

‘I found out later that he had some complicated theory about picking up women. You know: outdoors you can walk a dog as a kind of character reference, but they don’t let you do that in nightclubs. It’s just a pity he didn’t tell me I was meant to be playing tragically disabled spaniel.’ Prabir was outraged, but Felix started laughing again. ‘I lured him out into an alley to see what he’d do with no one else around. I ended up spending a month in hospital.’

‘Shit.’ As Prabir’s anger subsided, a fierce core of protectiveness remained. But anything he said would have sounded melodramatic now that Felix had reached the point where he could laugh the whole thing off.

‘Madhusree told me about the expedition.’ Felix kept his eyes on the arrowhead. ‘She can’t understand why you’re so set against it.’

Prabir was about to deny this and stick to his claim of insufficient funds, but then it occurred to him that Felix would probably offer to help. He said, ‘It’s a dangerous place. There are still pirates all around those islands.’

Felix didn’t contradict him, directly. ‘The expedition’s being led by experienced local scientists; I’m sure they’ll take sensible precautions. And I can’t think of many places a biologist would want to go that aren’t potentially dangerous, one way or another.’