Текст книги "Teranesia"

Автор книги: Грег Иган

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

‘Would you recognise the other stages? The eggs, the larvae, the pupae?’

Prabir pictured the sequence laid out in front of him. He’d been inside the butterfly hut, just once: at night, in the dark. In his memory, though, he could see the contents of all the cages. Spiked, hissing larvae. Orange and green pupae like rotten fruit.

‘I’m not sure.’ The words came out like an angry denial.

Grant turned to look at him, surprised by his tone. ‘They might be easier to collect than the adults, that’s all. But if you can’t remember, it’s not the end of the world.’

They reached the boat just after noon. Prabir unpacked the samples he’d collected before entering the swamp; the python had crushed half his tubes of gelled blood, but even so, the morning hadn’t been a complete loss.

Grant had no trouble finding the island on her chart from his description, but she asked Prabir to confirm it. He ran his finger over the bland set of contour lines on the screen, some satellite’s radar echo blindly cranked through a billion computations to spit out a shape that would have taken a human surveyor a month of hardship to map.

He said, ‘That’s it. That’s Teranesia.’

Grant smiled. ‘Is that really what you called it?’

‘Yeah. Well, it was the name I came up with, and my parents went along with it. But it was nothing to do with the butterflies; after about a week I was bored to tears with them. I didn’t pay much attention to any of the real animals; I used to make up my own. Child-eating monsters that chased us around the island, but never quite caught up.’

‘Ah, everyone has those.’

‘Do they? I never had them in Calcutta. There was no room.’

Grant said, ‘I packed a pretty good bestiary into the stairwell of a twelve-storey block of flats. Not that I didn’t have competition: one of my idiot brothers tried to give the whole building a kind of layered metaphysical structure—full of ethereal beings on different spiritual levels, like some lame cosmology out of Doris Lessing or C.S. Lewis—but even when his friends went along with it, I knew it was crap. All his little demons and angels had endless wars and political intrigues, but apparently no time for either food or sex.’

‘You had trouble attracting as many believers to a world of rutting carnivores?’

She nodded forlornly. ‘I even had hermaphroditic dung beetles, but no one cared. It was so unfair.’

Grant programmed the autopilot, and the engines started up smoothly. The boat circled around to face the reef, then retraced the safe path it had found on arrival.

As they rounded the coast and headed out to sea, Prabir stood on deck near the bow, waiting for the tip of the volcano to appear on the horizon. It was still too far away, though, too small to stand out from the haze.

Grant joined him. ‘So who do you want to play your character in the movie?’

Prabir cringed. ‘Did I really suggest going for the movie rights? I thought I must have dreamt that part. Can’t you just bring out a cologne, like the physicists do?’

‘Only because they have nothing worth filming. And I think they make more from donor gametes.’ She eyed him appraisingly. ‘One of the Kapoor brothers might just be dashing enough.’

‘That’s very flattering, but I doubt that any of them would be willing to take the role.’

Grant laughed, baffled. ‘Why on Earth not?’

‘Never mind. What about you?’

‘Oh, Lara Croft, definitely.’

She’d brought a pair of binoculars; she lifted them to the horizon. After a few seconds she announced, ‘I can see it now. Do you want a look?’

Prabir’s throat filled with acid. He still wasn’t ready. But everyone went back: to battlefields, to death camps, to places ten thousand times worse than this. Subhi to his lost village, no doubt. Every piece of land, every stretch of sea, was a graveyard to someone. He wasn’t special.

He took the binoculars and turned his head until the red azimuth needle was centred; the autopilot was providing the correct bearing. At first the image was nothing but a dark triangular smudge, blurred by turbulence. Then the processing chip recalibrated its atmospheric model and the scene leapt into focus: a cone of black igneous rock rising above the forest canopy. The distortion of the lowest light paths was impossible to correct; the image broke down into blobs of grey and green before the sea blocked the view completely.

He said, ‘That’s the place.’

We’re going to the island of butterflies.

11

Prabir was hoping that they’d find a previously undetected passage through the reef, but as they inched their way around the island watching the sonar display, the chance of that diminished, then vanished altogether. The old southern approach was narrow, and twenty years before no one would have attempted to pass through it in such a large craft, but the autopilot confidently declared that there was sufficient clearance.

They dropped anchor just inside the reef. It was too late to go ashore, with less than an hour of light remaining. The beach appeared smaller than Prabir remembered it, though whether the jungle had encroached, a storm had gouged sand away, or he was just misjudging the tide it was impossible to say. There were still coconut palms standing at the edge of the sand, but he could see the strange thorned shrubs choking out everything else in the undergrowth. There was no sign at all of the path that had once led from the beach to the kampung.

After they’d eaten, Grant made her nightly call home. Prabir sat out on deck, stupefied by the heat. He couldn’t call Felix; he didn’t want to be forced to justify what he’d done to Madhusree, let alone risk some kind of mediated confrontation if the two of them had been in contact.

He lay down and tried to sleep.

Just after midnight, he heard Grant come out on deck. She stood beside him. ‘Prabir? Are you still awake?’

As he rolled over, he saw her gazing down at him with the kind of unguarded fascination that he’d learnt never to betray on his own face by the time he was about fifteen. But then her eyes shifted to a neutral point behind his shoulder, and he doubted the significance of whatever he’d seen.

‘I just thought you ought to know that your extortion has borne its first fruit.’ She handed him her notepad. He glanced at the banner at the top of the page, then sat up cross-legged on his sleeping bag and read through the whole thing.

A molecular modelling team in São Paulo had examined the sequence data from the two expeditions, and identified a novel gene common to all the altered organisms; they’d sent Grant a copy of their results, as well as submitting them to a refereed netzine. Preliminary models of the protein the gene encoded suggested that it would bind to DNA.

Prabir said, ‘You think this is it? Your mythical gene-repair-and-resurrection machine?’

‘Maybe.’ Grant seemed pleased, but she was a long way from claiming victory. ‘Part of what they’ve found makes sense: this gene has a promoter that causes it to be switched on in meiosis—germ cell formation—which explains why there’s no need for a mutagen to activate it in these organisms. But there’s no evidence of a similar gene in any of the original genomes, let alone one that would only be switched on when it was needed to repair mutations.’

Prabir thought it over. ‘Could we be seeing the gene that the original version resurrected in place of itself? Once it went hyperactive, it not only substituted old versions of other genes, it substituted a completely unrecognisable version of itself?’

Grant laughed, through gritted teeth. ‘That’s possible, and it would make things very tricky. These modelling people might be able to determine the current protein’s function, but I wouldn’t count on them to be able to work backwards and determine the structure of an unknown protein that changed its own sequence into the current one. What we really need is DNA from two consecutive generations of the same organism, for comparison.’ She hesitated. ‘And if possible, DNA from two early consecutive generations of the butterflies.’

Prabir said, ‘You mean samples my parents took? They didn’t have your magic gelling agent. And I think the refrigeration would have failed by now.’

Grant looked uncomfortable, unsure whether to pursue the matter.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind talking about this.’ They’d come here for the butterflies; he couldn’t afford to clam up every time the subject was raised.

She said, ‘They might have preserved whole specimens for storage under tropical conditions; there were treatments available twenty years ago that would have protected against bacteria and mould, without damaging the DNA. You said they bred the butterflies in captivity. One or two well-documented samples could tell us a lot.’

‘I appreciate that. But don’t get your hopes up. With all the vegetation changed and the old paths gone, I’m not even sure that I could find my way back to the kampung. And if I can, who knows what state the buildings would be in?’

Grant nodded. ‘Yeah. It was just a thought. We’ll go ashore tomorrow, and we’ll find what we find.’ She stood up. ‘And we’d both better get some sleep now.’

Prabir woke badly, to another Tanimbar dawn. When he opened his eyes there was a message in the sunlight: His parents were dead. Everyone alive would follow them. The world he’d once seen as safe and solid—a vast, intricately beautiful maze that he could explore from end to end, without risk, without punishment—had proved itself to be a sheer cliff face, to which he’d cling for a moment before falling.

He rose from the deck and stood by the guard rail, shielding his eyes. He was tired of the pendulum swings, tired of finding that all the carefully reasoned arguments and deliberate optimism that shored him up well enough, on the good days, could still count for nothing when he needed it the most.

But this could be the last cycle, the downswing deep enough to carry him through to the other side. Wasn’t this the day he’d step ashore and demonstrate once and for all that Teranesia was powerless to harm him, like an IRA debunker striding triumphantly across a bed of hot coals? He might yet return to Toronto at peace, as infuriatingly tranquil as Felix, free of his parents, free of Madhusree, every useless fear banished, every obligation to his past, real or imagined, finally discharged.

And he’d told Grant not to set her hopes too high.

They brought the boat closer to shore, then waded on to the beach. Grant was carrying a rifle now, as well as the tranquilliser gun. They went through the rituals of the insect repellent and the mine detector tests. As Prabir sat pulling his boots on, looking back at the reef, he pictured a water man rising from the waves, angry and ravenous, teeth shining like glassy steel. Then he punctured the illusion, scattering the figure into random spray. That was the trouble with the demons dreamed up by children and religions: you made the rules, and they obeyed them. It wasn’t much of a rehearsal for life. Once you started believing that any real danger in the world worked that way, you were lost.

They penetrated the jungle slowly; the thorned shrubs were even denser and more tangled than the species they’d seen before, with long, narrow involuted branches like coils of barbed wire. Prabir cut off a sample, tearing his thumb on a barely visible down of tiny hooks that coated the vines between the large thorns. He sucked the ragged wound. ‘Nice as it would be to solve the mystery, I’m beginning to hope we don’t stumble across a herbivore that needs this much discouragement.’

‘It’d probably be no worse than a rhinoceros or a hippo,’ Grant suggested. ‘But apparently it has no descendants here, to give birth to something similar.’

Prabir fished in his backpack for a band aid. ‘OK, I can accept that: seeds get blown about, continents drift, animal lineages die out locally. But why is it always the most extreme trait that gets resurrected? Why couldn’t these shrubs just grow something mildlyinappropriate, like flowers optimised for a long-vanished pollinating insect?’

Grant mused, ‘There’s no evidence of the São Paulo protein ever having been used for mutation repair. So maybe that was never the case; maybe I’ve been clinging to that idea too stubbornly. It could be that the protein’s role has alwaysbeen to reactivate old traits, to bring old inventions back into the gene pool from a dormant state.’

Prabir considered this. ‘A bit like a natural version of those conservation programmes where they cross endangered animals with frozen sperm from twenty years ago, to reinvigorate the species when the population becomes too inbred?’

‘Yeah. And sometimes they use a closely related species, not the thing itself. If this protein manages a kind of “frozen gene bank”, it would be even less purist about it: it wouldn’t have any qualms about creating a hybrid with a distant ancestor.’

To Prabir this sounded both simpler and far more radical than the mutation repair hypothesis: shifting the mechanism from an esoteric emergency response to a major factor in genetic change. Most of the same problems remained, though.

He said, ‘That still doesn’t explain how particular traits get frozen and thawed. Are you saying that this plant’s ancestors knewthat they’d evolved a spectacularly effective set of defences, and deliberately tucked away a copy of the genes for the next aeon when they’d come in handy?’

Grant smiled, refusing to be provoked. ‘More likely it’s just a matter of the genes that persist the longest having the greatest chance of being duplicated at some point, which then increases their chance of surviving in an inactive form.’

‘And the mimicry? The symbiosis? How does something like that get synchronised?’

‘That, I don’t know.’

They pressed on. Prabir kept waiting for a flash of recognition, for the sight of an old gnarled tree or an outcrop of rock to awaken memories more strongly than the beach. He’d explored this side of the island completely; every step he was taking here was one he must have taken before. But too much had changed. Though the trees themselves appeared unaltered, there were no ferns, there were no small flowers on the ground, just the carnivorous orchids they’d seen on the other islands, and the ubiquitous barbed-wire shrubs. Even the scent of the forest was alien to him. It was like returning to a city to find it repaved and repainted, emptied of its old inhabitants and repopulated by strangers with new customs and new cooking smells. Ambon with its nouveau-colonial refurbishment had seemed more familiar than this.

The black cockatoos were here, too. Prabir stood and watched one for half an hour, waiting for Grant to finish dissecting an orchid.

The bird was sitting in a kanari tree. Using its teeth, it chewed straight through a slender branch that sprouted twigs bearing half a dozen white blossoms swollen with fruit. The cluster of twigs and fruit fell at the bird’s feet, landing on the large, solid branch where it was perched. It proceeded to attack one of the fruits, chewing through the leathery hull, which had not quite ripened to the point where it would split open and spill the seeds, the almonds, on to the ground.

Grant came over to see what he was looking at. Prabir described what he’d observed so far. The bird had extracted one of the almonds from the fruit, and was performing an even more elaborate routine to penetrate the hard shell.

She said, ‘This part’s old hat: its a famous case of specialisation for a food source.’ The bird had broken away part of the shell, and was now holding the nut with one foot while it used the sharp, hooked part of its upper beak to tear out fragments of the kernel; a tongue like a long-handled pink-and-black rubber stamp darted out to pick up the pieces and take them into the bird’s mouth. ‘Going for the unripe fruit is new, though.’

‘So it doesn’t have to wait for the nuts to fall. Which means the teeth are there to help it stay off the ground?’

‘I suppose so,’ Grant conceded. ‘But there might have been any number of reasons in the past why that was a good idea. It doesn’t require co-evolution with the ants.’

Prabir turned to her. ‘If you’d come to this island knowing nothing about its history, nothing about the ordinary fauna of the region—if you’d dropped in out of the sky in a state of complete ignorance about this entire hemisphere—what would you think was going on here?’

‘That’s a stupid question.’

‘Humour me.’

‘Why? What point is there in ignoring the facts?’

Prabir shook his head earnestly. ‘I’m not asking you to do that. I just want you to look at this afresh. If you’d just arrived from the insular British Isles with an immaculate, theoretical training in evolutionary biology, but no contact for a thousand years with anyone east of Calais, what would you conclude about the plants and animals here?’

Grant folded her arms.

Prabir said, ‘I’m withdrawing my labour until you answer me. Forgetting all the history you know, what does this really look like to you?’

She replied irritably, ‘It looks to me as if the affected species originally shared territory with all the others, then became isolated on some remote island and co-evolved separately for a few million years—and now they’re being progressively reintroduced. OK? That’s what it looks like. But on what island is this meant to have happened?’ She spread her arms. ‘It didn’t happen here: you can vouch for that yourself. There’s no island in the whole archipelago sufficiently isolated, and sufficiently unexplored.’

‘Probably not.’

‘Certainly not.’

Prabir laughed. ‘OK. There’s no such island! All I’m saying is, when the account you’ve just given sounds so muchsimpler than a hundred separate genes in a hundred separate species marching back from the past in perfect lock-step—I have a lot of trouble seeing how it can’t be telling us somethingabout the truth.’

Grant’s expression softened, her curiosity getting the better of her defensiveness. ‘Such as what?’

‘That, I don’t know.’

Prabir had rewritten the image-processing software to run directly on Grant’s camera. In the afternoon, she found the camouflaged fruit pigeons all around them.

Fluttering across the viewfinder between the pigeons were the butterflies. The wing patterns had changed dramatically—the dappled imitation of foliage and shadows they’d acquired was far less striking, far less symmetric, and far more variable from insect to insect than the old concentric bands of green and black—but when Grant finally captured one and Prabir saw the body, he knew they were the descendants of the insect he’d first seen pinned to a board in his father’s office at the university.

The tranquilliser darts were useless for insects, but Grant had a spray based on wasp venom that could temporarily paralyse the butterflies without killing them. Using a net to keep their victims from falling to the ants, they managed to collect half a dozen live specimens of both the pigeons and the butterflies.

Back on the boat, Grant killed and dissected one of the male pigeons, removing the testes and then working under a microscope to extract stem cells and various stages of maturing spermatocytes. She was hoping to catch the São Paulo protein in the act, though given the uniformity of the pigeons it seemed unlikely that it was still producing radical changes in their genome.

Prabir left her to it and stood out on the deck, staring back into the harmless shadows of the jungle, numb with relief as he realised how painlessly the day had passed. Between the distracting riddle of the altered species and the sheer physical effort of gathering samples, he’d had little time or reason to dwell on the significance of the place. And that was how it should be. He’d already mourned his parents, in the camp, in Toronto, and he’d recounted their triumphs a thousand times for Madhusree. There was nothing to be done here, nothing to be remembered, nothing to be learnt but the secret of the butterflies. He refused to imagine them trapped on the island. In the only sense that they survived at all, they’d left in the very same boat as he had.

And though Teranesia had proved to be no more dangerous than the other islands, he was still glad that he’d kept Madhusree away. She might resent his intervention for years to come. She might accuse him of standing between her and the memory of her parents. But the alien jungle would have meant even less to her than it did to him, and he’d spared her the pointless anguish of digging through the ruins of the kampung. His mother had told him, ‘Take her away! She mustn’t see!’He’d completed what he’d begun when they’d set out on the boat. It had been a long trip, but now it was over.

Grant emerged from the cabin frowning, carrying her notepad.

‘More news from São Paulo,’ she said. ‘They’ve refined their model.’

‘And?’

She propped the notepad on the guard rail in front of Prabir; it was displaying a graphic of a couple of large molecules bound to strands of DNA. ‘I don’t know what to make of this. I was hoping they’d find evidence that some part of the protein resembled a transcription factor, and recognised disabled promoters—’

Prabir stopped her. ‘I used to know all these terms when I was a kid, but I’m pretty hazy now. Can you—?’

Grant nodded apologetically. ‘Promoters are sequences of DNA that sit next to the coding region of a gene, which is the part that actually describes the protein. Transcription factors bind to promoters to initiate the copying of the gene into RNA, which is then used to make the protein: to “express the gene”.

‘If a gene is accidentally duplicated, mutations that build up in the promoter of one copy might eventually stop that copy from being expressed. To identify a gene that’s become inactive like that, you’d need something that was capable of binding to a damaged promoter—something roughly the same shape as a transcription factor, but a little less fussy. And then to reactivate the gene, there’d be a number of possible strategies, either working base by base to repair point mutations in the promoter, or snipping the whole thing out and splicing in an intact version.’

Prabir said, ‘OK, that all makes sense. Now what have the modellers found?’

Grant hit a button on the notepad and animated the graphic. ‘Thisbloody thing just crawls along causing havoc during DNA replication. What normally happens is: the double helix unwinds, the two strands separate, and DNA polymerase comes along and stitches together a new complementary strand for each of them, from free-floating bases. What the São Paulo protein does is slide along each single strand, cutting it up into individual bases, while splicing together a whole new strand of DNA to take its place. Then DNA polymerase comes along and duplicates that.’

Prabir took the notepad from her and slowed down the animation so he could follow the steps. ‘But what’s the relationship between the old sequence and the new sequence?’

‘Basically, the new one is the old one, plus noise. SPP changes shape as it binds to each base of the original strand—it assumes a different conformation depending on whether it’s cutting out adenine, guanine, cytosine, or thymine—and that in turn determines the base it adds to the new strand. But the correlation isn’t perfect; there are some random errors introduced.’

Prabir laughed, disbelieving. ‘So it’s just an elaborate, self-inflicted mutagen? These creatures might as well be bathing their gonads in radiation or pesticide?’

Grant replied dejectedly, ‘That’s what they’re claiming.’

He replayed the animation. ‘No. This is crazy. If you wanted to add a few extra random errors to your offspring’s DNA, would you take the easy way out and just alter your DNA polymerase slightly, so it made occasional mistakes—or would you invent a whole new system like this for making deliberately flawed single-strand copies?’

‘Well, exactly,’ Grant said. ‘And even if you had a good reason to take that approach, the whole protein’s vastly over-engineered. There are commercial enzymes that do something similar, and they’re about one-hundredth the molecular weight.’

‘Maybe there’s a bug in their software. Or maybe there’s some logic to the changes, some pattern that they simply haven’t noticed.’

Grant shrugged morosely. ‘They’ve synthesised some of the protein for real now; they’re doing test-tube experiments as we speak, to try to confirm all this.’

She seemed to be taking it all too much to heart. Prabir said, ‘You knowthat the things we’ve seen here can’t be explained by random mutations. Maybe there’s still some way this can be compatible with your theory. But whatever’s going on, at least we’re closing in on it.’

‘That’s true.’ She smiled. ‘They have synthesised protein in São Paulo, and I have cultured fruit pigeon spermatocytes. By morning they’ll know what happens in a test tube, and we’ll know what happens in a living cell.’

When Prabir woke, this prediction had been fulfilled. Grant had been up since three o’clock trying to make sense of the results.

The experiments in São Paulo had confirmed the computer model: fed a few hundred different test strands of DNA, the protein had chopped them up and synthesised new strands of exactly the same length, copying the original sequence but introducing random errors. Another group, in Lausanne, had repeated the work and found the same thing.

Grant had detected RNA transcripts for the São Paulo protein in the pigeon spermatocytes, which implied that the protein itself was being made in the cells; she had no direct test for it. But when she compared sequence data for cells before and after meiosis, the error rate was about a thousand times less than for the two experiments in vitro.

She said, ‘There has to be a second protein, some kind of helper molecule that modifies the whole process.’

‘So they need to look harder at the sequence data?’ Prabir suggested. ‘The gene for it must be in there somewhere.’

‘They’re looking. SPP alone is a bit like a pantograph with a whole lot of superfluous hinges. So maybe this is something that binds to it and stabilises it—not enough to produce perfect copies, but enough to allow its internal state to reflect the last few dozen bases to which it was bound.’

Prabir opened his mouth to say, Turing machine, but he stopped himself. Most processes in molecular biology had analogies in computing, but it was rarely helpful to push them too far. ‘So it could recognise a sequence of something like a promoter, even though it only binds to one base at a time?’

‘Maybe,’ Grant agreed cautiously. ‘They’ve also got hold of samples from the Ambon fruit pigeon, and they’re going to see what pure, synthetic SPP does to an entire chromosome, in the presence of nothing but a supply of individual bases.’

As they waded ashore, Prabir looked down into the warm, clear water where he’d swum with Madhusree, then across the dazzling white beach where they’d played. He wasn’t just cheating her out of a role in the study of the butterflies, he was depriving her of the chance to demystify the island, to purge it of its horrors the way he was doing for himself.

But he could never have brought her back here. He could never have undone the one good thing.

Grant wanted to collect specimens of the butterfly’s other stages, so they spent the morning doing nothing but searching appropriately succulent leaves for the spiked larvae, and the branches of the same trees for pupae. The original versions would not have been hard to spot: both had been covered in bright-orange patches, warning colours to signal their toxicity. Grant found signs of leaf damage that looked promising, but there were no culprits nearby. If the larvae had switched strategy and opted for camouflage that was as efficient as the adults’, their movements would be far too subtle for the image-processing software to detect.

They stopped and ate lunch in the middle of the forest, in a rare spot where the ground was rocky enough to keep the shrubs at bay. Prabir still didn’t feel safe sitting down until he’d sprayed a cordon of insect repellent on the ground; the ants were never content to stay inside the orchids, waiting for easy prey. He wasn’t sure why they didn’t swarm up the trees and take nestlings; maybe they were lacking some crucial adaptation for the task, or maybe it just wasn’t worth the energy.

Grant said, ‘So your whole family was here for three years, from 2010? Was your sister born on the island?’

He laughed. ‘We weren’t quite that isolated. We went to Ambon on the ferry four times a year. And we flew down to Darwin for the birth.’

‘Still, it must have been a rough place to raise a young child.’ Grant added hastily, ‘I’m not criticising your parents. I’m just impressed that they could cope.’

Prabir shrugged. ‘I suppose I took that for granted. I mean, the people in small villages on the other islands had better access to transport, clinics they could get to, and so on. But we had a satellite link, which made it easy to forget the distance. I even had lessons from a school in Calcutta; they’d set up a net service for kids in remote villages, but I could join in just as easily.’

‘So at least you had some friends your own age through the net.’

‘Yeah.’ Prabir shifted his position on the rock, suddenly uncomfortable. ‘What about you? What were your school days like?’

‘Mine? Very ordinary.’ Grant fell silent for a while, then she took out her camera and began scanning the branches around them.

She said, ‘The butterflies spend a lot of their time quite high in the canopy. Maybe they lay their eggs there.’ She lowered the camera and asked casually, ‘What are you like at climbing trees?’

‘Seriously out of practice.’

‘It’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget.’

Prabir gave her a stony look. ‘You’re the field biologist, remember? I’m the desk zombie. And I don’t care how ancient you are: you’re twice as fit as I am.’

‘You put that so gallantly.’

Prabir said flatly, ‘I’m not doing it! The deal we made in Ambon—’

Grant nodded effusively. ‘OK, OK! I only asked because I’m not used to judging the strength of the branches of these species. I thought you might be more confident, since you must have climbed them as a kid. I’ll go back to the boat and get a rope—’