Teranesia

Cole’s student, Mike Carpenter, wandered over from the serving line. He stood beside Prabir, eating in silence for a while, then said, ‘You know Sandra Lamont?’

‘Not personally.’

‘I saw her once, in real life,’ Carpenter boasted. ‘She’s got terrible skin. Pores, wrinkles. They just smooth it all out with software.’

‘Gosh. How scandalous. Would you excuse me?’

Prabir made his way across the camp. A man with a Philippines accent in a Hawaiian shirt and a Stetson was saying to a similarly attired companion, ‘… welcomed by an animatronic dinosaur! Full marina facilities! And the hook-line is, “Earth is the alien planet!” ’ Two biologists were arguing heatedly about transposons; one of them seemed to have independently reached an idea similar to Grant’s: ‘… shuffles back in the sequence for a complete functional protein domain that was cut out and shelved aeons ago … ’

He walked up to Madhusree and touched her arm.

‘Hi Maddy.’

She turned to him, and smiled impassively. ‘Hi.’

Her friends smiled too, but they appeared distinctly uncomfortable. Madhusree said, ‘This is Deborah, and Laila. This is my brother Prabir, who narrowly avoided becoming one of Seli’s stomach content samples.’ Prabir nodded in acknowledgement; they were all holding plates, it was too awkward to try to shake hands.

He said, ‘How’s the work going?’

‘Good, good,’ Madhusree replied smoothly. ‘We’ve gathered lots of data: behavioural, anatomical, DNA. No conclusions yet, but we’ve started posting it all on the net, so everyone can take a look for themselves.’

‘Yeah? I should tell Felix about that.’

Madhusree frowned. ‘Don’t you think he’d already know that he could follow everything from back in Toronto? I would have thought it would be obvious to anyone, how easy and convenient that would be.’

Prabir was impressed by her self-control. The message wasn’t exactly subtle, but she hadn’t let the slightest hint of anger spoil her innocent delivery: there was no flash in her eyes, no tension in her voice. He said, ‘I’m not sure. I’ll have to ask him.’

Madhusree glanced at her watch. ‘You could do that right now. It would be the perfect time to catch him.’

‘Yeah. Thanks. That’s a good idea.’

He nodded again to her friends, and turned away. As he hunted for a place where he could stand and finish his meal alone, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. He’d done what he’d done, and she’d told him how she felt, and now that it was over it was insignificant. He’d no more seriously undermined her dignity than those embarrassing parents who’d turned up with forgotten boxed lunches and sent his sixth-grade classmates into paroxysms of humiliation. And unlike schoolchildren, most of her colleagues would surely sympathise with her, rather than ridicule her, for having to go through life with such a cross.

He could see now that she’d be safe here, his own close call notwithstanding; she had ten times as many people looking out for her. He’d leave in the morning with Grant; the sting of resentment would wear off in a day or two, and when they met again in Toronto she’d punch him in the shoulder and call him a shit and laugh without malice, and the whole thing would be transmuted into a joke forever.

‘Come out of the tent. I want to talk to you.’

Madhusree was standing over him in the darkness, prodding his chest with her foot.

Ojany shared the tent with two other postdocs, but they’d found some spare bedding, and agreed to let him stay for the night. The tents all had insect-proof groundsheets; though it was unbearably hot, Prabir wouldn’t have liked to have tried sleeping outside, tempting the ants.

‘What time is it?’ he whispered.

‘Just after two,’ she hissed. ‘Now come out of the tent.’

Prabir grinned up at her. ‘When they ask me back at work what I did on my vacation, do you think I should admit to having spent a night with three beautiful women on a tropical island?’

Madhusree was infuriated. ‘Don’t fuck me about! Just get up!’

‘All right. It might help if you take some of your weight off me.’

He followed her out, into the deserted centre of the camp.

She said, ‘How dare you! How dare you come here!’

Prabir had never seen her so enraged, but he was having trouble adjusting; in his mind it had all been resolved, she’d already punished him.

He said gently, ‘I’m sorry if I’ve embarrassed you. I just wanted to see for myself how you were. I wanted to see what it was really like here.’

Madhusree stared at him, almost weeping with frustration. ‘I don’t care if you embarrass me! Just how shallow do you think I am? What do you think I used to say to my friends at school? Do you think I renounced you every day? Do you think I made up pretend parents? I don’t give a fuck what anyone here thinks about either of us. If they don’t like my family, they can screw themselves.’

Prabir ran his hand through his hair, touched by her passionate declaration, but a great deal more afraid now.

He said haltingly, ‘What then? Treat me like an idiot. Spell it out.’