Текст книги "Teranesia"

Автор книги: Грег Иган

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

The snake’s muscles slackened perceptibly. Prabir fought to raise his head. He caught a shallow breath, and then a glimpse of the lower half of someone standing on the shore. Not Grant: a woman with bare dark legs. The snake twitched back to life and jerked him down again. The beating sound resumed, ten, fifteen powerful blows.

As he struggled to snatch another mouthful of air, Prabir heard the woman slip into the water. He didn’t question his sanity: he knew he wasn’t hallucinating. As he turned the strange miracle over in his head, he felt no fear for her. Everything would be all right, now that they’d been reunited.

The woman said urgently, in bad Indonesian, ‘You need to work, you need to help me! It’s only stunned. And I can’t pull you out on my own.’ Prabir forced himself upright, fighting the passive weight of the snake. The woman wasn’t Madhusree.

She helped him loosen the coils enough for him to climb up on to her back. He didn’t seem to have any broken bones, but he was even weaker from the ordeal than he’d realised; she carried him like a child to the water’s edge, then manoeuvred him on to the ground before she clambered out of the water herself. She picked up the heavy branch she’d used to bash the python senseless, then reached down and hauled him to his feet. ‘Come on. Back from the water before we rest. It won’t be out cold much longer.’

Prabir staggered after her, still holding her hand. His teeth were chattering. He said in English, ‘You’re a biologist, aren’t you? You’re with the expedition?’

She frowned at him, and replied in English. ‘You’re not Moluccan? I knew there were no villages here, but—are you a scientist?’

Prabir laughed. ‘I must be, mustn’t I?’ Stick to the cover story. His legs collapsed.

She crouched beside him. ‘OK. We’ll rest for a bit, then I’ll get you back to base camp.’

‘What were you doing here?’

She nodded towards the snake; its head was still lying exposed on the mangrove roots where she’d cornered it, but it was showing signs of regaining consciousness. ‘Observing them, amongst other things. Though I prefer not to get quite as close as you did.’ She smiled uncertainly, then added, ‘You’re lucky; given that it already had prey secured, I wasn’t sure that even the most frantic imitation of an animal in distress would catch its attention. There’s a paper in there somewhere, on supernormal stimuli versus inhibition signals.’

The snake slid drunkenly off the mangroves, its body rising to the surface in a horizontal sine wave as it swam away. It had to be at least twenty metres long.

Prabir asked numbly, ‘What do they live off? There can’t be that many tourists.’

‘I think they eat wild pigs, mostly. But I’ve seen one take a salt-water crocodile.’

He blinked at her, then jumped to his feet. ‘There are crocodiles? My friend’s back there!’ He started running frantically towards the shore. ‘Martha? Martha!’

Grant appeared suddenly out of the jungle behind him. She seemed about to berate him jokingly for his tardiness, then she saw his rescuer. She hesitated, as if waiting for introductions, then made her own. ‘I’m Martha Grant. I’m with Prabir, we got separated.’

‘Seli Ojany.’ They walked up to each other and shook hands. Grant turned to Prabir expectantly, clearly aware that she was missing something significant, but he didn’t know how to begin. If the python hadn’t fled, he would have just pointed at it and mimed the rest.

Ojany was staring at him too, with an expression of disbelief. ‘You’re not Prabir Suresh? Madhusree’s brother?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You followed her here, all the way from Toronto?’

‘Yes.’

Ojany broke into a wide, delighted grin.

She said, ‘You’re in trouble!’

PART FIVE

10

The expedition’s ship was anchored outside the reef; the biologists had landed in small boats and set up camp in half a dozen tents on a grassy plain not far from the beach. It was mid-afternoon, and the camp was almost deserted; nearly everyone was still out in the field. But one of the expedition members taking a day off was a woman with medical training; she examined Prabir to confirm that he had no broken bones, and gave him glucose and a sedative.

The three of them were covered in swamp matter; they washed themselves in the ocean, and Ojany found them clean clothes. Prabir was still shaky; he was being led through everything like an infant. Ojany said, ‘Come on, champ, you can use my bed for now, and we’ll organise something later for tonight.’

Prabir lay down on the rectangle of foam and stared up at the roof of the tent. He had a sudden, vivid memory of lying exhausted in his hammock, the day he’d walked halfway up Teranesia’s dead volcano to try to measure the distance to the nearest island. There was nothing especially poignant about the memory itself, but the sharpness of the recollection was enough to make him want to bash his head against the ground. He was tired of having to think about that idiot child, tired of having been him, but every attempt to get rid of him was like trying to slough off dead skin, only to find that it was still full of living nerves and blood vessels.

Grant shook him gently. It was dusk. She said, ‘Everyone’s eating now. Do you want to come join us?’

At least thirty people were gathered in the space between the tents. There were hurricane lamps set up, and a man was serving food from a butane stove. Grant said, ‘This isn’t just the expedition. A fishing boat turned up while you were asleep. Word seems to have leaked back to Ambon; a few people hitched a ride down.’

Prabir followed her into the serving line, looking around for Madhusree. He spotted several of the barflies from Ambon; Cole was wandering about delivering Delphic pronouncements to anyone who’d listen, his eyes glistening in the lamplight. ‘I have pursued the black sun across the salt flats of millennium, into the heart of the primeval calenture!’ Grant whispered to Prabir, ‘For God’s sake, someone give that man an antipyretic.’

When his turn came, Prabir gratefully accepted a steaming plate of stew, though he was unable to determine its exact nature even after he’d taken a mouthful. He walked to the edge of the gathering to eat; he could see Grant talking shop with Ojany, but he wasn’t in the mood to join in. As some of the diners began to improvise seats out of packing crates or rolled-up sleeping bags, he saw Madhusree standing with two other women, talking and laughing as they ate. She saw him watching her, and stared back for a moment with an utterly neutral expression, neither welcoming nor angry, before rejoining the conversation. Someone would have broken the news of his arrival to her as soon as she’d returned to the camp, but perhaps she still hadn’t decided whether or not to forgive him.

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, “ Earthis 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 domainthat 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.’

She wiped her eyes angrily. ‘All right. How’s this for a start? You couldn’t trust me to make this one decision, and live with it. You couldn’t trust me to look into the risks myself: the mines, the border skirmishes, the diseases, the wildlife. They’re not trivial. I never saidthey were trivial. But I’m nineteen years old. I’m not retarded. I had access to people who could give me good advice. But you still couldn’t trust my judgement.’

Prabir protested, ‘I never stopped you doing anything in your life! What have I ever done, before this? Did I interrogate your doped-up boyfriends? Did I stop you going to nightclubs when you were fourteen years old? Name one thing I did that showed I didn’t trust you.’

She bit her lip, breathing hard. Finally she said, ‘That’s all true, but it’s not good enough. You didn’t treat me like a child then. Why do you have to treat me like one now?’

‘I’m not treating you like a child. And you know why this is different.’

Madhusree’s face contorted with pain. ‘That’s the worst part! That’s the worst insult! Different for you, but not for me? You think it isn’t hard for me too, coming back to where they died? Just because I don’t remember them the way you do?’

She started sobbing drily. Prabir wanted to embrace her, but he was afraid he’d only anger her. He looked around helplessly. ‘I know you miss them too. I know that.’

‘I’m sickof having to go through you to reach them!’

That was unfair. He’d told her every detail of their lives that he’d remembered, and a few he’d invented to fill in the gaps. But what else could he have done? Offered her a ouija board?

He said, ‘I never wanted it to be like that. But if that’s how it felt to you, then I’m sorry.’

Madhusree shook her head wearily; she wasn’t forgiving him, but she didn’t have the energy to resolve the matter now. Prabir could see her putting aside all her grief and anger, steeling herself for something more pressing.

‘I made a promise in that note I left you,’ she said. ‘And I’ve kept it: I haven’t told anyone about the butterflies. But tomorrow, I’m going to the head of the expedition and explaining everything. Our parents’ work was important. What they did was important. Everyone should know about it.’

Prabir bowed his head. ‘All right. I have no problem with that. Just promise me you won’t go to the island yourself. Leave it to someone else. There must be plenty of work to be done right here.’

‘I have to go. I’ll check the huts for records while the others are gathering samples. And if I can find the remains, I’ll have them taken back to Calcutta for the proper ceremonies.’

He looked up at her, stunned. ‘ “Proper ceremonies” What the fuck does thatmean?’

Madhusree said calmly, ‘Just because they weren’t religious, it doesn’t mean we have to leave them lying where they fell. Like animals.’

Prabir’s skin went cold. She was saying this just to wound him. The implication was that if he’d loved them enough, he would have done this himself long ago, instead of cowering on the other side of the world like a scared little boy for eighteen years. But it was all right now: an adult had come along, with the strength to do what needed to be done.

He turned away, unable to look at her.

She said, ‘It’s the right thing to do. You know that. I wanted to talk to you about it, but you just shut me out.’

Prabir said nothing. He knew that if he opened his mouth and spoke now, he’d pour out so much contempt for her that they’d never be reconciled.

‘You should be happy. We’ll finally put them to rest.’

He stared at the ground, refusing to reply, refusing to acknowledge her. She stood there for a while, repeating his name, pleading with him. Then she gave up and walked away.

Prabir found Grant in the third tent he entered; she woke instantly when he whispered her name, and followed him out without a word.

She must have sensed the seriousness of his purpose; once they were beyond earshot of anyone who might have been awake, she asked without a trace of irritation, ‘What’s going on?’

Prabir said, ‘I know where this all began. Do you want me to take you there?’

‘What are you talking about?’ But he could already see her reassessing their old conversations. ‘Are you telling me you saw something as a child? When you were travelling with your parents?’

‘Not travelling. My parents knew exactly where they wanted to go, long before we left Calcutta. We spent three years there. They were biologists, not seafood exporters. They came here to study the very first mutant, back in 2010.’

Grant didn’t waste time contesting this possibility; she just demanded, ‘What species? Where?’

Prabir shook his head. ‘Not yet. This is the deal: you post all the data you’ve gathered on the net, so everyone has access to it. Just like the expedition scientists. If you agree to that, I’ll take you there, and I’ll tell you everything I know.’

Grant smiled wearily. ‘Be reasonable. You know I can’t do that.’

‘Fine. It’s your loss.’ He turned and started walking away.

‘Hey!’ She grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘I could always ask your sister.’

He laughed. ‘My sister?You’re a complete stranger to her, a rival scientist and a data burier, and you think she’s going to give you a better deal?’

Grant scowled, more baffled than angry. ‘Why are you being such a prick? You might as well have kept me in the dark completely; at least I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. I can’t do what you’re asking. I’ve signed a contract; they’d cut my hands off.’

‘Would you go to prison?’

‘I doubt it, but that’s hardly—’

‘So it’s just money? They’d just need to be bought off?’

‘Yeah, that’s all. Is this the point where you reveal that you’re also Bill Gates’ love child?’

Prabir said, ‘If this is important enough, and you crack it wide open, do you really think there’ll be no opportunities to make money out of that fact? Face it: none of the real cash is likely to be in biotech applications anyway. Whatever’s happening here isn’t going to solve any medical problems—and even if your theory’s right, it’s not going to give people pet dinosaurs any more easily than standard genetic methods. But if you handle this properly, you can be a celebrity scientist with a nine-figure media deal for your story.’

Grant was amused. ‘That’s pure fantasy. Is that why you’re doing this? You think you’ll get an eight-figure deal as co-star?’

Prabir didn’t dignify that with an answer. ‘Maybe the rights wouldn’t be that much. But I don’t believe that you couldn’t find a way to make money from this, if you put your mind to it.’

‘I never realised you had such a high opinion of me.’

‘I could always lead the expedition there, instead. Madhusree’s decided not to tell them anything; she wants to leave our parents undisturbed. The only reason I’m even asking youis to avoid putting her through the ordeal of going back there.’

Grant hesitated, re-evaluating old clues again. ‘Your parents died there? In the war? And the two of you were left alone?’

‘Yes.’ Prabir hadn’t meant to reveal so much; he could see the sympathy it evoked eating away at Grant’s natural cynicism, and it made him feel much worse than when he’d merely lied to her. But he pushed the advantage for all it was worth. ‘They were gagged by their sponsor, just like you. That’s why nothing they did was ever published. I want what they began to be completed, properly, with everyone sharing the information. The way it should have been all along.’

Grant shook her head regretfully. ‘I can’t risk it. It could bankrupt me.’

‘So your sponsor will bury you in obscurity instead, just like Silk Rainbow buried my parents? You had the best theory, first. You’ve worked as hard as any of these people.’ He gestured at the tents around them. ‘If I lead them to the source, and some prat from Harvard beats you to the answer, you won’t even get a footnote.’

Prabir watched her uneasily, wondering if he’d put his case too bluntly. But if she couldn’t conform to the strictures of academic life, she’d also resent every curtailment of freedom her sponsor had forced upon her. If there was a way to shaft both sides and survive the experience—and a chance to emerge covered in glory—she’d have to be tempted.

She whispered angrily, ‘I can’t decide this now. I have to think about it, I have to talk to Michael—’

‘I’ll give you until dawn. I’ll wait for you down on the beach.’

Grant looked at her watch, horrified. ‘Three hours?’

‘That’s three times as long as you gave me in Ambon.’

‘That was time to pack! You weren’t gambling with your life.’

‘I didn’t think I was. But you didn’t mention anything then about leaving me behind as snake food.’

Grant opened her mouth to protest.

Prabir said, ‘I’m joking. I’m joking!It’s been a long day.’

Prabir lay unsleeping on his borrowed bed. He’d told his watch to wake him at a quarter to six, but by five o’clock he was too restless to stay in the tent. He dressed in his own clothes—he’d rinsed them in fresh water and hung them out to dry—and headed down to the beach.

He sat and watched the stars fade, listening to the first bird calls. Broken sleep had left a foul taste in his mouth, and there was a rawness to all his perceptions, as if his senses had been doused in paint-stripper; even the faint brightening of the sky hurt his eyes. He was aching all over, from something more than exertion; he could remember the pain in his calves as he’d trekked through the swamp, but now every muscle in his body seemed equally wrecked. It was the way he’d felt at dawn on the Tanimbar Islands, after the long boat ride. After the dying soldier had let him in on the big secret.

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 pelaobligations 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; peladid 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.

He flipped through the sequence data; there was no way he could tell whether or not it was correct, he’d simply have to trust her. Then he noticed the sponsorship logo: Borromean rings built of rotating plasmids. The logo detected his gaze and said proudly, ‘This information is brought to you by PharmoNucleic, as a service to the scientific community.’

He looked up at Grant, amazed. ‘You’re rubbing their face in it? Isn’t that begging to be sued?’

Grant said matter-of-factly, ‘They’re not going to sue anyone. I told them the choice you’d offered me, and they agreed to release all the data. They don’t see any serious patent prospects, given that the expedition has collected so much data of its own. Instead of wasting all the money they’ve invested so far, they’d rather have some good PR. Oh, and an eighty per cent share of any media rights.’

Prabir was delighted. ‘You’re a genius! Why didn’t I think of that?’

‘Misdirected hostility towards authority?’

‘Ha! You’re the one who told me how much you hated being gagged. I thought you’d be dying for an excuse to bite their hand off.’

Grant said drily, ‘I’m the one who still has a family to support.’

Prabir hefted his backpack. He was still aching all over, but the oppressive mood he’d felt at dawn had lifted. Even if Madhusree’s colleagues took her belated revelations seriously, the expedition would be saddled with enough logistical inertia to keep them from doing anything about it immediately. If he and Grant could return in a day or two with samples from the island—and all their findings were in the public domain—there’d be no urgent need for a second visit. Maybe their results would merit a comprehensive follow-up, eventually, but the expedition had a finite budget and a limited timetable. Madhusree would be back in Toronto long before anyone went near Teranesia again.

He said, ‘Are you ready?’

‘Yeah. Are you sure you’re up to this?’

‘I’m up to anything that doesn’t involve mangroves.’

Grant put an arm across his shoulders and said solemnly, ‘I shouldn’t have left you behind. It was a stupid thing to do, and I’m truly sorry. We won’t get separated again.’

The route back along the coast was infinitely less arduous than the jungle. They swam past the inlet to the mangrove swamp through crystalline water at the reef’s inner edge, where at least they’d have a chance to see any predators approaching. But they made the crossing unmolested; despite the multitude of fish, the swamp and the forest were apparently considered better hunting grounds.

As they trudged along the beach again, Prabir told Grant about Subhi’s story of the fishermen.

She said, ‘That could mean anything. They might have cooked a plant they were accustomed to eating safely, and it turned out to have acquired some extra protective toxins.’

‘Yeah.’ That did sound like the simplest explanation, and if the men had died badly, psychotic and hallucinating, it would have been enough to confirm the presence of spirits. Prabir wished he could have questioned someone else about the incident, but they didn’t have time to go off to the Kai Islands to hunt for reliable witnesses to an event nobody wanted to talk about.

Grant said, ‘Tell me about your parents’ work.’

Prabir sketched the sequence of events that had led Radha and Rajendra to the island. It was a long time since he’d discussed this with anyone but Madhusree, and as he listened to himself betraying her—handing over the family history to this stranger, to keep Madhusree from making use of it herself—he felt far worse than he’d anticipated. But Grant had kept her side of the deal, and he had no reason to believe that his parents would have wanted him to keep any of this secret.

‘Can you describe the butterflies?’

‘They were green and black. Emerald green. There was a pattern, a sort of concentric striping; not quite eye spots, but a bit like that. They were pretty large; each wing was about the size of an adult’s hand. There was something about the veins in the wings, and the position of the genitals, that my parents made a big deal about. But I’ve forgotten the details.’