Teranesia

His father tipped his head towards the door. ‘Come on, you’d better wash up. And don’t tell your mother I upset you.’

‘You didn’t.’ Prabir climbed out of the hammock. ‘But where’s it all headed?’

‘What do you mean?’

Prabir hesitated. ‘Aceh. Kalimantan. Irian Jaya. Here.’ Over the years, as they’d listened to the news together, his father had explained some of the history of the region, and Prabir had begun to pursue the subject for himself on the net. Irian Jaya and the Moluccas had been annexed by Indonesia when the Dutch withdrew in the middle of the last century; both were Christian to some degree, and both had separatist movements determined to follow East Timor into independence. Aceh, at the north-west tip of Sumatra, was a different case altogether – the Muslim separatists there considered the government to be too secular by far – and Kalimantan was different again, with a long, complicated history of migrations and conquests. The government in Jakarta had been talking reassuringly about ‘limited autonomy’ for these outlying provinces, but the Minister for Internal Security had made headlines a few weeks before with a comment about the need to ‘eliminate separatists’. The President had told him to moderate his language, but apparently the army had decided that this was exactly the kind of language they liked.

His father squatted down beside him, and lowered his voice. ‘Do you want to know what I think?’

‘Yes.’ Prabir almost asked, Why are we whispering? But he knew why. They were stuck on the island for the foreseeable future, and he’d had to be told something of the reasons why, but his father had been instructed, above all else, not to risk frightening him.

‘I think the Javanese empire is coming to an end. And like the Dutch, and the Portuguese, and the British, they’re finally going to have to learn to live within their own borders. But it won’t come easily. There’s too much at stake: oil, fisheries, timber. Even if the government was willing to walk away from the more troublesome provinces, there are people making vast amounts of money from concessions that date back to the Suharto era. And that includes a lot of generals.’

‘Do you think there’ll be a war?’ Even as he spoke the word, Prabir felt his stomach turn icy, the way it did when he saw a python on a branch in front of him. Not out of any real fear for his own safety, but out of a horror at all the unseen deaths the creature’s mere existence implied.

His father said cautiously, ‘I think there’ll be changes. And they won’t come easily.’

Suddenly he scooped Prabir into his arms, then lifted him up, right over his head. ‘Oh, you’re too heavy!’ he groaned. ‘You’re going to crush me!’ He wasn’t entirely joking; Prabir could feel his arms trembling from the strain. But he backed out of the hut smoothly, crouching down to fit the two of them through the doorway, then spun around slowly as he carried Prabir laughing across the kampung, under the palm leaves and the wakening stars.

2

Prabir had stolen his father’s life, but it was his father’s fault, at least in part. And since no one had been deprived of the original, it wasn’t really an act of theft. More a matter of cloning.

When Prabir had begged permission to start using their satellite link to the net for more than schoolwork, his father had made him promise never to reveal his true age to even the most innocuous stranger. ‘There are people whose first thought upon meeting a child is to wish for things that should only happen between adults,’ he’d explained ominously. Prabir had decoded this euphemism immediately, though he still had trouble imagining what harm anyone could do to him from a distance of several thousand kilometres. He’d been tempted to retort that if he pretended to be an adult there’d be even more people who’d want to treat him like one, but he’d had a sudden intuition that this was not a subject on which his father would tolerate smart-arsed replies. In any case, he was perfectly happy to conceal his age; he didn’t want to be talked down to.

On his ninth birthday, when access was granted, Prabir joined discussion groups on mathematics, Indonesian history, and Madagascan music. He read or listened to other people’s contributions carefully before making his own, and no one seemed to find his remarks particularly childish. Some people signed their posts with photographs of themselves, some didn’t; his failure to do so gave nothing away. The groups were tightly focused on their chosen topics, and no one would have dreamt of straying into personal territory. The subject of his age, or what he did for a living, simply never came up.