Teranesia

He said, ‘That’s professional bias talking. An eel isn’t optimised for swimming, just because it’s done no better for the past few million years. It fritters away half its energy on just being alive: every cell in its body needs to be fed, whether or not it’s working. Like the crew you didn’t want to hire. Evolution does a lot of things very nicely: shark skin minimises turbulence, crustacean shells are strong for their weight. But we can always do better by copying those tricks and refining them, single-mindedly. For a living creature, everything like that is just a means to an end. Show me an eel without gonads, and then I’ll concede that nature builds the perfect swimming machine.’

Grant laughed, but she admitted begrudgingly, ‘You’re right, in a sense: it costs us a lot of energy to build each new boat, but it’s still convenient to segregate that from ordinary fuel use. I wouldn’t want to travel in a pregnant ship, let alone one that had to prove itself to prospective mates in a ramming contest. And even marine engineers can get by without children; they just need good designs that will propagate memetically. But none of this is truly divorced from biology, is it? Someone, somewhere has to survive and have offspring, or who inherits the designs, and improves upon them, and builds the next boat?’

‘Obviously. All I’m saying is, technology can potentially do better than nature because of the very fact that it’s not always a matter of life or death. If an organism has been fine-tuned to maximise its overall reproductive success, that’s not the same thing as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. Evolution appears inventive to us because it’s had time to try so many possibilities, but it has no margin at all for real risks, let alone anything truly whimsical. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them.’

Grant gave him a curious look, as if she was wondering what kind of nerve she might have touched. She said, ‘I don’t think we really disagree. I suppose I’m just ready to take beauty where I can find it. The average mammalian genome would make the ink-stained notebooks of a syphilitic eighteenth-century poet look positively coherent in comparison: all the layers of recycled genes, and redundant genes, and duplicated genes that have gone divergent ways. But when I see how it manages to work in spite of that – every convoluted regulatory pathway fitting together seamlessly – it still makes hair stand up on the back of my neck.’

Prabir protested, ‘But if the pathways didn’t fit together, they wouldn’t be there for you to study, would they? Would you marvel the same way at the botched job in the thirty per cent of human embryos that have too much chromosomal damage even to implant in the uterine wall? Every survivor has a complicated history that makes it look miraculous. My idea of beauty has nothing to do with survival: of all the things evolution has created, the ones I value most are the ones it could just as easily crush out of existence the next time it rolls over in its sleep. If I see something I admire in nature, I want to take it and run: copy it, improve upon it, make it my own. Because I’m the one who values it for its own sake. Nature doesn’t give a fuck.’

Grant said reasonably, ‘Evolution takes a long time to roll over in its sleep. I’m a lot more worried that the things I admire are going to get crushed out of existence by people who don’t give a fuck.’

‘Yeah.’ There was no arguing with that. Prabir felt foolish; he’d let himself rant. He said, ‘I could make lunch now, if you’re as hungry as I am. What do you think?’

The sight of the open sea made Prabir feel strangely calm. It wasn’t that it brought back fewer, or less painful memories than Darwin or Ambon; quite the reverse. But there was something almost reassuring about finally making literal the state he’d imagined himself in for so long. He’d never reached the destination he’d promised Madhusree: the island where their parents were waiting. After eighteen years he still hadn’t struck land.

Grant joined him on the deck, beaming madly. She must have caught a trace of bemusement on his face; she said, ‘I know, but I can’t help it. A sky like this makes my poor heart sing. Sunlight deprivation as a child, I suppose; when I finally get a good dose of it, my brain just wants to condition me to come back for more.’

Prabir said, ‘Don’t apologise for being happy.’ He hesitated, then added obliquely, ‘Everyone else I met in Ambon who’d arrived from temperate regions seemed to have suffered rather less beneficial effects.’

Grant feigned puzzlement. ‘I can’t think who you could mean. Mind you, some people really do go a bit psychotic when they hit the tropics for the first time. That’s the down side. But you must have encountered that before, surely?’

‘The British Raj was a bit before my time.’