Текст книги "Teranesia"

Автор книги: Грег Иган

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Prabir glanced at the soldier, but he didn’t seem to be paying them much attention. ‘So what’s brought the Inquisition here?’ he asked. ‘Are there really that many animals turning up in West Papua?’

Ojany gestured at a colleague beside her. ‘Mayumi heard the story closer to first-hand.’

‘Not animals in West Papua,’ Mayumi said, ‘but there were some fishermen who went to Suresh Island.’ Prabir did his best to accept this casual use of his parents’ name; it seemed Madhusree had put them on the map forever, pinning their memories to the spot. ‘They came back to Kai and ran amok in their own village; most of them were captured, but one of them escaped and ended up on Aru. That seems to be why the LA got interested.’

‘What do you mean “ran amok”? What exactly did they do?’ Prabir was hoping for some solid evidence at last to write this off as the result of a psychotropic plant toxin.

Mayumi shrugged. ‘The Kai islanders who were here earlier wouldn’t tell me. And the LA aren’t exactly forthcoming either.’

Deborah, one of Madhusree’s friends whom Prabir had met earlier, responded impatiently, ‘Forget what the Lord’s Army think: we knowfrom the fruit pigeons and the butterflies that the São Paulo gene can cross between species. We can’t assume that we’re immune to that possibility, so we have to stop taking risks. At the very least, we should quarantine Suresh Island. Maybe even sterilise it, if it comes to that. You wouldn’t need to use an atomic weapon: just enough herbicide to kill all the vegetation, so the whole food chain collapsed.’

Ojany said, ‘But what if that increases selection pressure for a version that can cross into marine species?’

‘If Furtado is right—’ Mayumi began, at which point almost everyone in earshot groaned. ‘ If Furtado is right,’ he persisted, ‘it would do a lot more than increase selection pressure. Any avoidable risk of extinction would only sharpen the contrast between favourable and unfavourable mutations: if every surviving counterfactual cousin would have moved into the sea, the strategy would become impossible to miss. It would be like herding the gene straight into a new ecosystem.’

Deborah glanced at her watch and predicted, ‘In less than twenty-four hours, we’ll be able to stop worrying about Furtado.’ Prabir looked at her enquiringly; she explained, ‘The Lausanne team have gone ahead and started the synthetic chromosome test themselves. The verdict will be out by about noon tomorrow, our time.’

Cole, who’d been hovering at the edge of the group, interjected urbanely, ‘All this fear of “contagion” would be put swiftly to rest if you took the trouble to consult my seminal text on ambivalence towards the natural world, M/ Other. My analysis of the relevant cultural indices across a time span of several centuries reveals that the predominant passion changes cyclically, from deep filial affection to pure xenophobia and back. Pastoralism, industrialism, romanticism, modernism, environmentalism, transhumanism, and deep ecology are all products of the same dynamic. The anxiety in the midst of which we stand at this very moment is a stark validation of my thesis, whereby the nurturing, enfolding presence of the mother is radically reinterpreted, psychically transmuted into a threatening, disempowering, even alien force. But this perception will not endure. In due course, the pendulum will swing back again.’

Prabir had been watching Carpenter while Cole spoke; there’d been an encouragingly troubled expression building on his face. Some of the biologists followed Prabir’s gaze, until everyone in the group was looking at the student, waiting for his response.

Carpenter began tentatively, ‘If this gene doesspread, wouldn’t it be neat, though? All the animals would evolve: they’d grow hands, and opposable thumbs, and we could talk to them. And if it happened to us too, we’d become telepathic. That’s the next level, right? And why keep it out of the ocean? What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you want the reefs to dream? The super-dolphins won’t stop us surfing. They’ll be our friends!’

Prabir detected movement in the corner of his vision; he turned to see the medical officer and two junior soldiers approaching.

The medical officer addressed him. ‘Come with me, please.’

‘Why?’ Prabir looked around for support. ‘You’ve taken a blood sample, what more do you want?’

‘This is for your own protection,’ the man insisted blandly.

‘ Whatis for my own protection?’ Prabir caught sight of Grant, who was watching with an expression of alarm. But she gave him a reassuring glance, as if to say that she hadn’t abandoned him, that she’d be working to get him out of this.

The medical officer said, ‘You’re infected. You’re going into quarantine.’

14

Prabir had expected to be placed under guard in a tent at the edge of the camp, or perhaps imprisoned in a cage built from rough-hewn branches tied together with rattan—the kind of thing they always seemed to be able to construct at short notice in movies, whenever someone on a tropical island needed to be restrained. What the Lord’s Army did instead was trash the control console of Grant’s boat, dispose of all the pigeons, butterflies and blood samples in a bonfire on the beach, steal Grant’s rifle and tranquilliser gun, and lock Prabir in the cabin. They posted one sentry on deck and another on the beach.

Prabir sat in the captain’s chair in front of the ruined console, swinging the seat slowly back and forth. The ancient PCR machine might have malfunctioned. Or it might have amplified nothing but a fragment of plant DNA that had entered his bloodstream through a scratch from a barbed-wire shrub. A foreign cell in the process of being taken apart by his immune system wouldn’t even have been replicating, let alone creating germ cells through meiosis—the prerequisite for the São Paulo gene to be expressed. Whatever the powers of SPP in the right context, an inert copy of its gene was just another piece of junk to be scavenged, broken down and recycled.

The gene hadfound ways to cross between other species, though; he couldn’t pretend it was unthinkable that it had breached his body’s defences. He’d been cut, scratched, bitten, and glued by half a dozen kinds of Teranesian plants and animals, and handled dozens more with broken skin. The gene might not have created a transmission route specifically for humans, but having been exposed to so many different mechanisms tailored for other animals, he could have been infected with a viable copy by sheer bad luck.

What did it do when it succeeded? Headed for the place where germ cells were made, carrying an endonuclease to incorporate itself into the genome. What was the worst possible scenario, then? His sperm would all carry the São Paulo gene, their DNA would be rewritten by the protein. But if there was any risk of transmission through sex, he could always learn to use condoms—and if he ever wanted a genetic child, that could be done almost as easily with another cell type in place of sperm. If it was warranted, he could even have new testes grown for transplant from a single uninfected skin cell.

That was not the worst scenario. What had the fishermen done in their village? And why had Aslan been so ready to accuse him of rape? Could a gene that was switched on only in the stem cells that manufactured sperm influence sexual behaviour? Testosterone was made by other cells nearby; perhaps SPP could rewrite the genes of spermatocytes in such a way that they emitted chemical signals to enhance the secretion of testosterone by their neighbours. If the level in the blood had been cranked up sufficiently, could that alone have transformed the fishermen into rapists? It wasn’t completely far-fetched; body-builders had once gone psychotic from injecting similar hormones. The progression would not be inevitable, though: there were drugs that blocked testosterone. And again, in the longer term a transplant could dispose of the affected cells entirely.

Still not the worst. Why had he tried to make love to Martha? Because she’d saved his life, and he’d imagined she’d welcome it? Because he’d wanted to be comforted any way he could, after facing the kampung? Because a surge of testosterone and a lack of alternatives had been enough to overwhelm both his nature and his judgement?

He had no end of rationalisations, no end of excuses. But the worst scenario was that none of them had really been enough. If the gene could gauge the reproductive consequences of everything it did, it might ‘sense’ the fact that it was in a cul-de-sac, and find a way to change that. If Furtado was right, once the gene was active, whatever it was physically capable of doing to his brain or body that would lead to it counting more copies of itself would be done.

At dusk, they brought him a meal. The sentry ordered him to the far side of the cabin then left the plate inside the door. Prabir tried to think lustful thoughts as he ate, but the situation was not conducive. What was he hoping to do: assay his sexuality by introspection, hour by hour, like a diabetic monitoring blood sugar? What had happened with Grant proved nothing, except that strong emotions could breach a barrier that he’d come to think of as inviolable.

It did not prove that the São Paulo gene was in the process of tearing it down.

Later in the evening, as the sentries were changed, Colonel Aslan appeared on the moonlit beach. Prabir stood by the cabin window watching him. They both wanted the same thing: for the São Paulo gene to be contained, for the risks to humans to be minimised even if the gene itself could not be eliminated. The only problem was, Prabir was still hoping to fall on the right side of the line when the abominations were incinerated, but the Colonel might have some trouble with his criterion for judging that.

‘We are praying for you,’ Aslan announced. ‘If you repent, you will be forgiven. You will be healed.’

‘Repent of what?’ Prabir demanded angrily.

Aslan seemed to take pleasure in refuting the assumption that he had a one-track mind. ‘All your sins.’

Skin crawled on Prabir’s arms. What would it be like, to believe in a God as corrupt as that? But if his parents had been floating in fairy-floss heaven, there would have been a whole lot less to forgive. Lying about death was the only way these elaborate pathologies remained viable; all the milksop Christian sects that diverged from the dominant strain and embraced mortality with a modicum of honesty soon withered and vanished.

He called back, ‘What happened to the fishermen? Were they forgiven? Were they healed?’

Aslan replied, ‘That is between them, and God.’

‘I want to know what their crimes were, and how they died. I want to know what’s in store for me. You owe me that much.’

Aslan was silent, and too far away for Prabir to read anything from his face. After a moment, he turned and walked away along the beach.

Prabir shouted after him, ‘You can stop praying: I can already feel the power of the creator inside me! That’s who you’re fighting, you idiot! After four billion years, the old donkey’s finally woken up, and he’s not going to keep on carrying any of us the way he used to!’

By two a.m., Prabir felt tired enough to sleep. He had nothing to gain from vigilance, and he knew that if he didn’t grab at least a couple of hours he’d lose whatever judgement he had left. He lay down on Grant’s bunk; the air moved far more freely out in the cabin than in his allotted corner. He could still smell her sweat on the sheets, though, and the scent conjured up images of her, vivid memories of the night before.

He rolled off the bunk and stood in the darkness. He was becoming paranoid. He’d never been repelled by the thought of sex with women, merely indifferent, and despite all his failed, dutiful attempts in adolescence, he might yet simply be bisexual. Either way: he loved Felix, and nothing would change that. Their history together, brief as it was, had to count for something. He was not a tabula rasa, he was not an embryo.

If his brain could be melted and rewired, though, anything could change. It wasn’t just his sexuality at stake: the human species was riddled with far stranger compromises, any of which the São Paulo gene might find superfluous. Most of evolution had been down to luck; apart from the first few hundred thousand years of simple chemical replicators, there’d never been an opportunity for every physically possible variation to compete. At every step, chance and imperfection had created organisms with outlandish traits that would not have been favoured by a comprehensive exploration of the alternatives. Complexity had ridden on the back of success, but if the efficiency of the process had been tightened a few more notches, single-celled organisms—still the most successful creatures on the planet—would never have bothered to become anything else. The São Paulo gene wasn’t that far-sighted, it hadn’t dissolved every bird and butterfly into a swarm of free-living bacteria. But if it was allowed to reshape the evolutionary landscape for humans, many more things would vanish than the oxbow lakes.

Prabir heard a dull thud outside the cabin. He peered out on to the deck. The soldier had slumped to his knees; as Prabir watched, he keeled over on to his side.

The sentry on the beach was still standing, facing the jungle, oblivious to his comrade’s fate. Prabir searched the moonlit water, but the cabin was so low that the deck hid most of the view near the boat. The sentry reached back as if to slap away an insect, then staggered. Prabir couldn’t see the dart in his neck, but it could not have been a bullet. Grant must have borrowed a tranquilliser gun, but what had she loaded it with to have such an effect? Strychnine?

The man collapsed face-down in the sand. Grant would probably search him—and it seemed unwise to shout out to warn her not to bother—but neither sentry had the key to the boat: Prabir had seen it passed from hand to hand when his meal had been delivered, it had been brought from the camp and taken back again. There was no point both of them wasting time; he tried his strength against the door of the cabin, but neither the lock nor the hinges gave any sign of yielding. He picked up a stool and bounced it repeatedly against a window, hoping to flex the pane enough to snap the rivets that held it to the frame; the assault was gratifyingly silent, but completely ineffectual.

Someone tapped a staccato rhythm on the window on the other side of the cabin. He put down the stool and turned. Madhusree called out softly, ‘I’m told you can slide this one open from the inside.’

Prabir approached her. She was dripping wet, her hair tied back, long bare limbs catching the moonlight. She hadn’t seemed so beautiful to him since the day she was born, and all the reasons were reversed now: her vulnerability, her ungainliness, her bewilderment, had all been replaced by their opposites. His parents should have seen this transformation, not him, but he savoured the sweet kick in the chest, unearned or not.

He said, ‘I don’t want to infect you. You’d better get off the boat.’

Madhusree sighed. ‘Are you sneezing? Are you covered in pustules? What’s it going to do, launch missiles? It’s a molecule, not a voodoo curse. If you want to be careful you can stand away from me, but I need to come into the cabin and check out the equipment.’

Prabir was mystified. ‘Why?’

‘So I don’t waste time bringing things from the other boat.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Madhusree grimaced with impatience. ‘I don’t know what we’ll need. Martha said I could take whatever’s working from here, so it will help if I know what that is. Now open the window.’

Prabir complied, then retreated to the far corner as she climbed into the cabin and began inspecting the rack of biochemical instruments. The soldiers had attacked the autopilot with a crowbar, and taken away everything organic to be burned, but they seemed to have left these machines untouched.

‘You’ve spoken with Martha?’

‘Yeah, through the wall of a tent. She couldn’t get away herself, but it’s not exactly maximum security back there. They’ve got poor Dr Sukardi tied up somewhere and guarded round the clock, but they seem to think that’s all that matters, as if he’s our own little tinpot colonel and we’re all helpless drones without him.’

Madhusree had a tranquilliser gun tucked into the back of her shorts. Prabir asked nervously, ‘What was in the darts?’

She replied almost absent-mindedly, ‘The normal sedative, but I added something to wreck the catalytic portion. It’s a self-degrading molecule, that’s why it’s safe to use on so many species: half of it forms an enzyme that lyses the whole thing into harmless junk in the presence of ATP, so it doesn’t require anything fancy in the organism to detoxify it. But it breaks itself down so quickly once it enters the bloodstream that if you disable the enzyme, it makes a huge difference: the potency goes up a thousandfold.’ She turned to him and added pointedly, as if she’d finally realised what he’d been fearing, ‘We have enzymes in the liver that can deal with it, though. It’s still not toxic to humans.’

She finished her inventory. ‘OK, this is great. You start unmounting these and stacking them on the deck. I’ll go and get the inflatables. I should be back in about ten minutes.’

Prabir said, ‘I must be slow, but I think I’m missing something. Where are we going with all this? What’s the plan?’

Madhusree smiled, proud and conspiratorial, as if Amita might walk in at any moment and ask why they were whispering.

‘What do you think? We’re heading south.’

Prabir followed his instructions while Madhusree swam out to the expedition’s ship. Then he checked the sentry curled up on the deck; the man was still breathing, slowly and deeply.

He stood and waited for Madhusree to return. Simply by travelling with her, he’d endanger her to some degree. But Grant had remained uninfected, after handling every Teranesian species he’d touched himself, after they’d kissed. With no one to keep him grounded he’d let his imagination run wild: the only hard facts were that a trace of the gene had been found in his bloodstream, and the fishermen had changed in some way that nobody wanted to talk about.

Madhusree appeared from behind the ship, rowing a bright-orange inflatable dinghy towards him, with a second one in tow, loaded with cargo. For one awful moment, Prabir wondered if she planned to get to safety under human power alone, but both dinghies had outboard motors, she was just minimising noise. He looked back towards the camp; the sentries had been changed around ten p.m., and it was now nearly twenty to three. In the moonlight, the orange polymer might as well have been fluorescent. Would they have until dawn, or just till the hour, to vanish over the horizon?

Madhusree brought the dinghies up against the boat. ‘Hand those down to me, one at a time.’

Prabir passed her the first of the machines. ‘What’s this all for?’ There were already half a dozen identical silver boxes in the second dinghy, as well as bottles of reagents, and four large fuel cans.

‘To monitor you, of course. And treat you, if necessary.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘I hope it won’t be necessary. I’m hoping nothing will happen before we reach Darwin.’

‘ Darwin? If the Australians get the slightest idea of what I’m carrying, they’ll lock me in a hut in the middle of the desert on top of their nuclear waste dump.’

‘No, they’ll deport you back to Canada in a military jet with biohazard containment facilities, then send you the bill. I can think of worse fates if we head in other directions.’

Prabir said, ‘What exactly is it you’re hoping won’t happen en route?’

‘If I knew that, we’d be travelling lighter.’ She slid the last machine into place between the others and tested the whole pile for stability. Then she tossed him a life jacket; she was already wearing one herself. ‘OK. Get in.’

‘I’ll ride in the back.’

‘You just don’t want to help me row.’

Prabir climbed over the guard rail and lowered himself into the second dinghy. He was afraid it would sink perilously low, but the air-filled walls gave it a lot of buoyancy and his weight barely made a difference. The tide was high, and Madhusree seemed to have crossed right over the submerged reef on her way in, without bothering to steer any special course.

She began rowing them laboriously towards the open sea. ‘Remember Orr, in Catch-22?’ she asked cheerfully. ‘He rowed a lifeboat all the way to Sweden.’

‘I remember.’ He’d given her the book for her eleventh birthday. ‘But I take it we’re going to stop at Yamdena and hitch a ride in something more seaworthy?’

‘That’s the plan. I wouldn’t want to cross the Arafura Sea in these things.’

Prabir was silent for a while, then he said, ‘Are you angry with me?’

Madhusree laughed. ‘How can I be angry? Not only do I have the first authenticated specimen of a Teranesian mammal, I have exclusive access to all his biochemical data. I’ll be able to spin this into a PhD, for sure.’ She turned to him without missing a stroke and said, ‘We should have done all of this differently. You should have come along as part of the expedition. We should have been open about everything from the start. But it doesn’t matter now. Their work’s been acknowledged, and someone will complete it. That’s good enough for me.’

They were well past the reef, but still in easy sight from the beach. Madhusree’s arms were trembling from fatigue; she’d swum several hundred metres before picking up the oars. Prabir said, ‘Swap places, I’ll do some rowing.’

‘OK.’

They swam between the dinghies; it was easier than trying to leap across the gap without landing on something. Prabir took the oars and settled into a rhythm. The emptiness ahead of them, the useless stars, the circle of moonlit water that followed the boat were all the same as they’d been eighteen years before.

He struggled to stay in the present. ‘How many people are hiding in the jungle?’

‘Ten, now.’

‘So what are they going to live on?’

‘It’s not that hard to smuggle out food. Anyway, we’ve already sent word up to Ambon; the situation should be resolved in a couple of days. I gather that it’s all a matter of diplomats calling in favours, until one of West Papua’s major aid donors agrees to apply some muscle. I know that sounds horribly convoluted, but it’s probably a lot safer than Ambon sending in a warship.’

‘Yeah. Can you see anything happening back on the beach?’

Madhusree had brought a pair of binoculars. ‘That guy’s still lying where he fell.’ She added teasingly, ‘Still glowing at body temperature.’

‘I never thought you’d killed them,’ Prabir protested.

‘You’re a bad liar.’

‘Martha might have. Not you.’

‘You don’t think I’m commando material?’ Madhusree sounded disappointed.

‘I certainly hope not.’ He glanced over his shoulder at her; she was grinning. She didn’t remember the soldier in the grass, bleeding slowly to death. He joked, ‘I knew I should have never let you take up muay thai. All that brutality. You’ve been scarred for life.’

After a while they swapped places again. Prabir looked back with the binoculars in IR mode, waiting not only for the prone soldier to vanish, but for the haze of distortion above the water to swallow the entire beach.

‘You can start the motor.’

Madhusree hit the ignition and her dinghy shot forward, pulling the connecting rope taut. The motor was running on diesel, but it was so quiet that Prabir almost wept. They could have fired it up half an hour ago; they’d been making more noise just by talking.

‘Do you think they’ll come after us?’ she asked. ‘It might not be hard to guess the right direction.’

Prabir said, ‘I don’t know if I’m worth the trouble to them. As long as I’m not heading for their country, I’m someone else’s problem now.’

The dinghy’s outboard motor had its own GPS, its own inertial navigation, its own autopilot. Madhusree zeroed in on their chosen destination on a map displayed on a small panel, confirmed the choice, then left the machine to steer. The only thing not automated was obstacle avoidance; they’d have to take over manually if they ran into shipping, and with any luck that would mean cutting the motor and waiting to be rescued, not swerving wildly to avoid getting mown down.

As dawn approached, she tossed Prabir a plastic-wrapped hypodermic. ‘If you’re going to be paranoid, you’ll have to take your own blood samples.’

‘Urgh. This should be fun.’ He tore open the packet; there was a disinfectant swab enclosed, like an airline’s miniature scented towel. He pulled off his belt and tightened it around his left arm. ‘I feel like a drug addict.’

Madhusree shook her head despairingly. ‘Junkies use sonics: transdermal acoustic delivery systems that make the skin permeable to small molecules like opiates. There’s no risk of infection, because viruses are too large to get through. How do you think hepatitis C got wiped out?’

‘I knew all that,’ he lied. He applied the swab then slid the needle carefully into the crook of his elbow, but the dinghy lurched just as he was applying pressure, and the needle transected the vein. ‘Fuck.’ He steeled himself, then tried again at a different point; this time the blood spurted satisfyingly into the low-pressure sample tube. ‘How often do we have to do this?’

‘Every couple of hours at first, just to see what’s going on.’

Prabir left the hypodermic in place and flung the tube of blood across to Madhusree. A valve had shut off the flow automatically, but it was awkward trying to stop the needle slipping out. ‘Have you got some tape or something? I might as well keep this in.’

‘Good idea. There’s an anticoagulant coating on the needle, so it won’t clog up. But you knew that, of course.’ She tossed him a packet of band aids.

‘What are you looking for? In the samples?’

‘Levels of the gene, tissue types affected.’ Madhusree tinkered with one of Grant’s silver boxes until it emitted an encouraging boot-up chime.

‘Tissue types?’

She fed the blood to the machine. ‘If the gene is being incorporated into various kinds of cells in your body, occasionally one will break free and end up in your bloodstream. If I sort the cells with flow cytometry before bursting them and probing the DNA, I can track what’s happening.’

Prabir said, ‘It should only be in my testes, though, shouldn’t it? I mean, it has a promoter that will only switch it on during meiosis, so why bother incorporating anywhere else?’

The machine began whirring. Madhusree looked up and said encouragingly, ‘I hope it hasn’t even got a hold there. We’ll probably never know how it got into your bloodstream, but it certainly hasn’t come to you via another mammal, so its past experience is of limited relevance. Nothing works the first time in a new environment.’

‘You don’t believe in Furtado’s theory, then?’

She laughed and said flatly, ‘No.’

Prabir didn’t challenge her to provide her own explanation; he didn’t want to derail her, he didn’t want to erode her confidence. She’d track the gene through his body, and they’d fight it. However it worked, whatever it did.

When the sun cleared the water there was no land in sight, though Prabir could see Teranesia’s peak to their west through the binoculars. Straight ahead he saw nothing but sea. They wouldn’t reach Yamdena till midnight.

Madhusree said, ‘First results. Are you ready?’

‘Yeah.’

‘The São Paulo gene’s been incorporated into spermatogenic stem cells, complete with the usual promoter.’

Prabir nodded acceptingly. He’d been prepared for that, and however tainted it made him feel, a transplant could still rid him of the gene completely.

‘But it’s also present in dermal stem cells. With a different promoter.’

‘In my skin?’ He stared at her, more baffled than alarmed. ‘Why?’

Madhusree shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

Prabir looked down at his arms and hands; they appeared perfectly normal. He lifted his shirt above his waist. There was a glossy patch on his abdomen, a shiny purplish-black region the size of a large coin. He touched it warily. The surface of his skin felt the same as ever, but when he applied enough pressure to sense what lay beneath, instead of the usual springiness of muscle he met resistance from an object as hard as bone.

‘It’s solid. It’s some kind of tumour.’ He was numb with revulsion. ‘Can you cut it out? Please?’

Madhusree said, ‘Stay calm.’

Prabir removed his life jacket and pulled off his shirt, almost dislodging the hypodermic in his haste; there were two more patches higher on his chest. He turned so Madhusree could see his back. ‘There are five,’ she announced. ‘About the same size.’

‘You could anaesthetise me with the tranquilliser gun,’ he implored her. ‘They’re not that deep. I won’t lose much blood.’ The gene would still be in his body, but he didn’t care. He wanted this visible, palpable sign of it removed.

‘Are they causing you any pain? Any burning sensation? They could be completely benign.’

‘ Benign?’

Madhusree held her hands up, pleading with him for cool-headedness. ‘If there’s no pain or bleeding, they might only be replacing the normal dermis rather than invading other tissues. And if there’s no inflammation, at least they’re not provoking an autoimmune reaction.’

Prabir took several deep breaths. He’d handled a peppering with shrapnel better than this. He said, ‘There’s no pain, no inflammation.’

‘OK. I’ll synthesise growth factor blockers tailored to the receptors the cells are expressing. That should at least stabilise them.’

‘You can do that?’

‘Of course. It’s a second-year lab project: “Here’s a cultured organ with an unknown tumour. Characterise the tumour, and stop it growing.” ’ Madhusree regarded him tenderly across the narrow channel of water. ‘You’re going to be fine! We just have to be patient. We’ll get to Yamdena, we’ll get to Darwin, we’ll get to Toronto. And then we’ll fix you up for good.’

As Madhusree worked on the growth factor blockers, the hard, shiny plaques beneath his skin grew thicker and larger. New ones blossomed, on his arms and legs and buttocks. The sensation of their presence when he moved was strange, but only rarely painful, and Prabir took some comfort from their uselessness; the São Paulo gene was behaving as stupidly and randomly as a virus blundering into a brand-new host. Leprosy would have had about the same effect on his mating prospects. He’d hardly dared admit to the fear before, but as they’d left the island of the mangroves behind, he’d thought: It could have the power to do anything. It could have the power to make me rape my own sister.