Teranesia

The third island was the largest of the six Grant had chosen, almost three kilometres across. Two weeks before, that had sounded like nothing to Prabir’s urbanised ear; he’d often walked that far and back across Toronto in his lunch hour. But the area was eight times greater than the total of the two islands they’d toiled on for six days each, and when he saw the dense jungle stretching back from the beach into low wooded hills, he finally felt the scale of it. It was a far more visceral reaction than anything he’d experienced flying over an ocean or a continent. Probably because Grant would want to gather samples from every last square metre.

They found a gap in the reef almost straight ahead as they approached. It was early afternoon, but Prabir begged for a full day off before they went ashore. They ended up spending three hours snorkelling along the reef, taking pictures but collecting no samples: Grant’s licence didn’t extend to the marine life, and so far there’d been no sign that the mutations did either.

Prabir couldn’t help feeling tranquil in the sunlit water; it was impossible to remain uncharmed by the colours of the reef fish, or the weird anatomy of the invertebrates clinging to the coral. Everything here was beautiful and alien, dazzling and remote. A thousand delicate, translucent fish larvae could die in front of him without evoking the slightest twinge of compassion, the kind of thing a chick or a rat pup in the beak of a hawk would have produced. It was this distance that made the spectacle seem so much purer than anything on land: the same vicious struggle looked like nothing but a metaphorical ballet. If his roots were here, he had no sense of it; his body had built its own tamed sea and escaped to another world, as surely as if it had ascended into interstellar space, too long ago to remember.

Sitting on the deck beside Grant in silence, the salt water drying on his skin, Prabir felt calm, lucid, hopeful. The past was not an immovable anchor. What evolution had done, design could do better. There would always be a chance to take what you needed, take what was good, then cut yourself free and move on.

The jungle was as lush as anything Prabir had seen, but without quantifying the impression with a count of species, it also struck him as impoverished. The thorned shrubs and the giant orchids were evident in abundance, but there was nothing at all in sight that merely resembled them. No close relatives, only the things themselves. Whatever else Grant’s theory had trouble explaining, you couldn’t wind the clock back on a set of surviving lineages and expect to maintain the diversity you started with, and here you could practically see the ancestral bottlenecks everywhere you looked.

Grant called him over. She’d found an orchid clamped shut around the corpse of a small bird, bright-blue tail feathers protruding.

Prabir said, ‘I wish you hadn’t shown me this.’

‘Forewarned is forearmed. What I really want to know is—’ Grant sank her knife into the white petals and tore the shroud open.

Ants poured from the gash. As she pulled the knife away, the skeleton of the bird sagged down from the flower, swarming with them.

She inhaled sharply. ‘OK. But is that just opportunism?’ She cut the flower again, then extended the incision down into the stem.

There was a hollow core, full of ants. Grant handed Prabir the camera, and he recorded everything as she continued the dissection, following the stem around the trunk five times until she’d laid the whole internal city bare. There were chambers full of foamy white eggs, and a bloated queen the size of a human thumb.

Prabir said, ‘What does the orchid get out of it?’

‘Maybe just food scraps and excrement; that could be more than enough. Or maybe the ants are feeding it something specific, some secretion tailor-made to keep it happy and fit.’ Grant was clearly elated, but then she added wistfully, ‘Someone’s going to spend a lifetime on this.’

‘Why not do it yourself?’

She shrugged. ‘Not my style. Begging to foundations for charity to do something beautiful and useless.’

Prabir felt like grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her; this sounded so defeatist. He said, ‘Maybe in a few years you’ll feel differently. Once you’re not facing the same financial pressures—’

Grant pulled a face. ‘Don’t organise me; I hate that. No wonder your sister ran away from home.’

Prabir crouched down beside the orchid. ‘First mimicry, now symbiosis. These gene-recovery enzymes of yours can hit a bull’s-eye at fifty million years.’

‘And don’t gloat, it doesn’t suit you. I admit it, freely: there’s something going on here that I don’t understand.’

Prabir said, ‘I still think your basic idea must be right. Functional genes take thousands of years to develop. If they appear overnight, the organism has to be cheating. “Here’s one I prepared earlier.” What else can it be?’