Teranesia

He heard a sound from further down the beach. One of the men from the fishing boat was performing salat al-fajr, the Muslim dawn prayers. Prabir’s skin crawled, but the sense of being haunted only lasted a split second; the fisherman was a young Melanesian who looked nothing like the soldier.

When he’d finished praying, the man approached and greeted Prabir amiably, introducing himself as Subhi and offering a hand-rolled cigarette. Prabir declined, but they sat together while he smoked. The tobacco was scented with cloves; the potential this recipe offered as a fumigant had definitely been underexploited.

It was a struggle making conversation; Indonesian was still being taught in schools throughout the RMS, but as far as Prabir could judge the two of them were equally bad at it. He gestured at Subhi’s prayer rug and asked, jokingly, if he was the only devout man on the boat.

This slur horrified Subhi. ‘The other men are all pious, but they’re Christians.’

‘I understand. Forgive me. I didn’t think of that possibility.’

Subhi generously conceded that it was an understandable mistake, and launched into a long account of the virtues of his fellow crew members. Prabir listened and nodded, only making sense of half of what he heard. It was several minutes into the story before he realised that he was being told something more. Subhi’s village in the Kai Islands had been destroyed during the war. His family had all been killed; he was the sole survivor out of more than two hundred people. The Christian village with pela obligations to his own had sheltered him and raised him, and he’d continued to live there, though when he wasn’t at sea he attended Friday prayers at the mosque in another village. This was a very satisfactory arrangement, at least until he married, because he could continue to uphold the faith of his parents without moving away from his friends.

When he’d finished, Prabir was unable to speak. How could anyone lose so much, and emerge with so little bitterness? Religion had nothing to do with it; pela did not derive from either Islam or Christianity, it was a conscious strategy developed to detoxify the unavoidable mixture of the two. But some combination of personal resilience and an accommodating culture had pulled this man out of the conflagration of his childhood, apparently intact.

Prabir felt a need to reciprocate, to relate some of his own history. He asked Subhi if he knew of an island with a dead volcano, seventy kilometres south-west.

Subhi’s face became grim. ‘That’s not a good place, there are spirits there.’ He looked at Prabir anew. ‘Are you the son of the Indian scientists who went there before the war?’

‘Yes.’ Prabir was amazed to be identified this way, but then he remembered the labourers from the Kai Islands who’d helped his parents set up the kampung. If Teranesia had since gained a supernatural reputation, its whole recent history might have become widely known.

He said, ‘What kind of spirits? Spirits in the form of animals?’ Any advance intelligence about the modified fauna could help them prepare.

Subhi nodded uneasily. ‘There are many kinds of spirits there, released as punishment for the crimes of the war. Visible and invisible. Possessing animals, and men.’

‘Possessing men?’ Prabir wondered if this was merely a formulaic recitation of metaphysical possibilities. ‘Who? No one lives there now, do they?’

‘No.’ Subhi looked at the ground, discomforted.

‘So who did the spirits harm? Did a boat stop there?’

He nodded.

‘When?’

‘Three months ago. To make repairs.’

‘And the men on board became sick?’

‘Sick? In a way,’ Subhi agreed reluctantly.

‘Did they eat something on the island? Did they catch some of the animals? How were they sick?’

Subhi shook his head, pained. ‘It’s not respectful to talk about this.’

Prabir didn’t want to offend him, but if there was any evidence of effects on human DNA, nothing could be more important than tracking it down. ‘Could I meet these men? If I went to their village?’

‘That’s not possible.’ Subhi rose to his feet abruptly, brushing sand from his clothes. ‘It’s time I joined my friends.’ He reached down and shook Prabir’s hand, then started walking away along the beach.

Prabir called after him, ‘The men who visited the island? Are they alive, or dead?’

There was a long silence, then Subhi replied without turning. ‘God willing, they’re at peace.’

Grant arrived at twenty past six. Prabir said, ‘I’d almost given up on you. Have you decided?’

She held up her notepad. Prabir took out his own and cloned the page she was displaying, then reread it independently via a randomly chosen proxy, to verify that it really was publicly available.