One of the evangelists opened her eyes and beamed at him. His clothes and backpack must have given him away as a foreigner; the woman addressed him in halting English. ‘End times, brother! End times upon us!’
Prabir replied apologetically, in Bengali, that he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.
The desk clerk at the Amboina Hotel was far too polite to laugh when Prabir asked where he might hire a boat as cheaply as possible. The response—couched in the most diplomatic language—was that he could forget about the ‘cheap’ part and join the queue. Everyone who’d arrived in town for the last two months had been looking for a boat; it was a seller’s market.
This was a dispiriting start, but Prabir fought down the urge to retreat into pessimism. ‘There was a group of about twenty people who would have passed through Ambon three weeks ago. Scientists, on an expedition being mounted by some foreign universities. Have you heard anything about that?’ There were half a dozen other places they could have stayed, but he had nothing to lose by asking.
‘No. But we have many guests here from foreign universities.’
‘You mean, in general? Or in the hotel right now?’
The man glanced at his watch. ‘Mostly in the bar, right now.’
Prabir couldn’t believe his luck. They must have completed the first stage of their work and returned to base to recuperate. They could hardly have been stranded here all this time; they would have organised transport well in advance.
He sat in his room for forty minutes, trying to decide exactly what he’d say to Madhusree. How he’d explain his presence, what he’d propose they do. If he’d picked up his notepad and called her from Toronto, she would have talked him into staying there, but this was scarcely any better. He’d imagined tracking her down somewhere so remote that she couldn’t simply order him home, but here there was nothing to stop her. The next flight out of Ambon was never more than a day away.
He wouldn’t push his luck: he wouldn’t ask to be allowed to tag along with the expedition. He’d suggest that he stayed on in the hotel, so he could see her each time she came back into town. That wouldn’t embarrass her too much, surely?
The longer he thought about it, the more nervous he became. But it was no use trying to rehearse the whole encounter, writing scripts for both of them in his head. He’d go downstairs and face her, see how she reacted, and play it by ear.
The bar opened into a shaded courtyard; all the customers were out there catching the afternoon breeze. Prabir bought a syrupy fruit concoction whose contents defied translation; the bartender assured him that it was non-alcoholic, but that seemed to be based on the dubious assumption that the whole thing wouldn’t spontaneously ferment before his eyes, like an overripe mango. Prabir took one sip and changed his mind; the sugar concentration was high enough to kill any micro-organisms by sheer osmosis. He steeled himself and walked out into the courtyard.
He scanned the tables, but he couldn’t see Madhusree anywhere. There were only about thirty people in the courtyard; it didn’t take him long to convince himself that she was not among them.
Someone stretched a hand out to him. ‘Martin Lowe, Melbourne University.’ Prabir turned. Lowe was a middle-aged man, visibly sunburnt—not surprising if he’d been at sea for the past three weeks. There were two other men seated at the same table, intent on some kind of printout. He shook Lowe’s hand distractedly and introduced himself.
Lowe asked amiably, ‘Are you looking for someone?’
Prabir hesitated; he couldn’t announce his intentions baldly to one of Madhusree’s colleagues, before he’d even spoken to her. ‘Is the whole expedition staying here? In this hotel?’
‘Expedition? Ah. I think you’d better have a seat.’
Prabir complied. Lowe said, ‘You mean the biologists, don’t you? I’m afraid you’ve missed them; they left weeks ago. They took a boat and headed south.’
‘But I thought they were back.’ Prabir blinked at him, confused. He’d had nine hours’ sleep in Darwin, and woken at dawn feeling perfectly normal, but now jet-lag was catching up with him again. ‘I thought you said you were—’
‘You thought I was one of them? God, no!’ The older man seated opposite glanced up from his work. Lowe said, ‘Hunt, this is Prabir Suresh: he’s chasing the biologists, for some unfathomable reason. Hunter J. Cole, Georgetown University. And this is Mike Carpenter, one of his postdocs.’
Prabir leant across the table and shook hands with them. The desk clerk hadn’t been mistaken; the bar was full of foreign academics. But if the biologists hadn’t returned, who were these people?
‘You’re here to observe the Efflorescence?’ Cole wore a fixed, slightly self-effacing smile, as if he knew from long experience that it was only a matter of time before he said something devastatingly clever, and he was already basking graciously in Prabir’s anticipated response.
‘I suppose so. Though I hadn’t heard it called that before.’
‘My own terminology,’ Cole confessed, raising one hand dismissively as he spoke. ‘My Taxonomy of Eucatastrophehas not been widely read. And still less widely understood.’
Prabir was feeling increasingly disorientated. The title sounded as if it should have made sense to him—something to do with population ecology, maybe?—but the actual meaning eluded him completely.
‘Whatever terminology we choose to deploy,’ Lowe responded earnestly, ‘what we’re witnessing here is a classic manifestation of the Trickster archetype, taking gleeful pleasure in confounding the narrow expectations of evolutionary reductionism. After biding its time for almost two centuries, indigenous mythology has finally given rise to the ideal means of undermining the appropriations of Wallace. This meshes perfectly with my over-arching model of nature as “The Unruly Woman”: disruptively fecund; mischievously, subversively bountiful.’
Cole smiled contentedly. ‘That’s an interesting framework, Martin, but I find many aspects of it deeply problematic. The only safe assumption we can make at this point is that we’re moving into a Suspensive Zone, where normal logics and causalities are held in abeyance. To reify the disruptive impulse is to presuppose that every teleological trajectory implies an agent, and ultimately to misunderstand the entire dynamic of Wrongness.’
Prabir was experiencing severe déjà vu:Keith and Amita had had arguments like this, all Big Dumb Neologisms and thesaurus-driven bluster. It was like listening to two badly written computer programs trying to convince each other that they were sentient. He glanced hopefully at Cole’s student, Carpenter; surely his generation had regained some mild interest in reality, if only for the sake of rebelling against half a century of content-free gibberish.
Carpenter tipped his head admiringly towards his mentor. ‘What he said.’
The rest of the courtyard had fallen silent. Prabir looked around to see what had caught their attention. A huge black bird, fifty or sixty centimetres tall, had landed on one of the unused tables, and was sitting with its back to him, preening its feathers. Though it was dark as a raven, it was unmistakably a species of cockatoo, with a slender, almost thread-like crest. He’d seen them on the island now and then, but never in the metropolitan heart of Ambon. Maybe this was a sign that the city really had brought its pollution levels under control.
The bird turned its head to peck at its shoulder, revealing a row of sharp brown teeth embedded in the lip of its beak.
Prabir felt a small, hot trickle of urine flow across one leg. Mercifully, he’d emptied his bladder half an hour ago; there was almost nothing to soil his clothes. He glanced at Lowe, who was staring at the creature with a glazed expression. No one in the courtyard was moving or speaking. The bird emitted a brief raucous cry, then began grooming under one wing.