The engines were polymer too, corrosion-resistant electrodes and superconducting coils that accelerated sea water through any of the six channels that ran through a streamlined hub on the underside of the hull. With no moving parts, the only routine problem the engines could suffer was seaweed fouling the sieve-like filters guarding the channels, and even that was usually cleared automatically with a few pulses of reverse thrust.
Prabir said, ‘This is elegant. This is how a boat should be.’
Grant appeared noncommittal. ‘You don’t long for the romance of sail?’
‘Ha. Did you ever long to spend your time fighting ropes and canvas in the middle of a storm on the North Sea?’
Grant smiled. ‘No, but—’ She gestured at the cloudless blue sky. ‘As a boy, you must have been on prahusall the time.’
He shook his head. ‘Everything was diesel. We never lived in the kind of small villages where people built their own traditional fishing boats.’ He wasn’t even lying, but as soon as he began talking about the past he could feel muscles in his face growing tense from the effort of concealment.
‘Well, MHD certainly outclasses diesel,’ Grant conceded. ‘Though I wouldn’t use the word “elegant” myself. On that score, an eel leaves a boat like this for dead.’ She leant back against the bench beside the console; she was teasing him, but Prabir couldn’t resist the bait.
He said, ‘That’s professional bias talking. An eel isn’t optimised for swimming, just because it’s done no better for the past few million years. It fritters away half its energy on just being alive: every cell in its body needs to be fed, whether or not it’s working. Like the crew you didn’t want to hire. Evolution does a lot of things very nicely: shark skin minimises turbulence, crustacean shells are strong for their weight. But we can always do better by copying those tricks and refining them, single-mindedly. For a living creature, everything like that is just a means to an end. Show me an eel without gonads, and thenI’ll concede that nature builds the perfect swimming machine.’
Grant laughed, but she admitted begrudgingly, ‘You’re right, in a sense: it costs us a lot of energy to build each new boat, but it’s still convenient to segregate that from ordinary fuel use. I wouldn’t want to travel in a pregnant ship, let alone one that had to prove itself to prospective mates in a ramming contest. And even marine engineers can get by without children; they just need good designs that will propagate memetically. But none of this is truly divorced from biology, is it? Someone, somewhere has to survive and have offspring, or who inherits the designs, and improves upon them, and builds the next boat?’
‘Obviously. All I’m saying is, technology can potentially do better than nature because of the very fact that it’s not always a matter of life or death. If an organism has been fine-tuned to maximise its overall reproductive success, that’s not the same thing as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. Evolution appears inventive to us because it’s had time to try so many possibilities, but it has no margin at all for real risks, let alone anything truly whimsical. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them.’
Grant gave him a curious look, as if she was wondering what kind of nerve she might have touched. She said, ‘I don’t think we really disagree. I suppose I’m just ready to take beauty where I can find it. The average mammalian genome would make the ink-stained notebooks of a syphilitic eighteenth-century poet look positively coherent in comparison: all the layers of recycled genes, and redundant genes, and duplicated genes that have gone divergent ways. But when I see how it manages to work in spite of that—every convoluted regulatory pathway fitting together seamlessly—it still makes hair stand up on the back of my neck.’
Prabir protested, ‘But if the pathways didn’t fit together, they wouldn’t be there for you to study, would they? Would you marvel the same way at the botched job in the thirty per cent of human embryos that have too much chromosomal damage even to implant in the uterine wall? Every survivor has a complicated history that makes it look miraculous. My idea of beauty has nothing to do with survival: of all the things evolution has created, the ones I value most are the ones it could just as easily crush out of existence the next time it rolls over in its sleep. If I see something I admire in nature, I want to take it and run: copy it, improve upon it, make it my own. Because I’m the one who values it for its own sake. Nature doesn’t give a fuck.’
Grant said reasonably, ‘Evolution takes a long time to roll over in its sleep. I’m a lot more worried that the things I admire are going to get crushed out of existence by people who don’t give a fuck.’
‘Yeah.’ There was no arguing with that. Prabir felt foolish; he’d let himself rant. He said, ‘I could make lunch now, if you’re as hungry as I am. What do you think?’
The sight of the open sea made Prabir feel strangely calm. It wasn’t that it brought back fewer, or less painful memories than Darwin or Ambon; quite the reverse. But there was something almost reassuring about finally making literal the state he’d imagined himself in for so long. He’d never reached the destination he’d promised Madhusree: the island where their parents were waiting. After eighteen years he still hadn’t struck land.
Grant joined him on the deck, beaming madly. She must have caught a trace of bemusement on his face; she said, ‘I know, but I can’t help it. A sky like this makes my poor heart sing. Sunlight deprivation as a child, I suppose; when I finally get a good dose of it, my brain just wants to condition me to come back for more.’
Prabir said, ‘Don’t apologise for being happy.’ He hesitated, then added obliquely, ‘Everyone else I met in Ambon who’d arrived from temperate regions seemed to have suffered rather less beneficial effects.’
Grant feigned puzzlement. ‘I can’t think who you could mean. Mind you, some people really do go a bit psychotic when they hit the tropics for the first time. That’s the down side. But you must have encountered that before, surely?’
‘The British Raj was a bit before my time.’
Grant smiled, then closed her eyes and raised her face to the sky. Prabir glanced back towards Ambon, but the grey smudge on the horizon had vanished. He’d have happily stood in silence like this for hours, but that was too much to hope for; what he really needed was a topic of conversation that wouldn’t keep leading them back to his supposedly boundless familiarity with everything in sight. Grant was hardly going to throw him overboard if she caught him out on some minor inconsistency, but if the whole mess of half-truths unravelled and he was forced to confess just how limited and rusty his grasp of the region’s language, custom and geography really was, he wouldn’t put it past her to abandon him on the nearest inhabited island.
He said, ‘What do you think’s going on here? With the animals?’
‘I have absolutely no idea.’
Prabir laughed. ‘That’s refreshing.’
‘I do have a few vague hypotheses,’ Grant admitted, opening her eyes. ‘But nothing I’d reveal except under extreme duress.’
‘Oh, come on! You’re not talking to a fellow biologist here. I’m much too ill informed to recognise heresy, and my opinion has no bearing on your reputation anyway. What have you got to lose?’
Grant smiled and leant on the railing. ‘You might blab to your sister, and then where would I be?’
Prabir was affronted. ‘Madhusree can keep a secret.’
‘Ha! Her, not you! That shows how far I can trust you.’
Prabir said, ‘What if some kind of toxin, some kind of mutagenic poison had been dumped on one of the uninhabited islands here, decades ago? A few dozen drums of industrial waste, chemically related to the kind of stuff they use to induce mutations in fruit flies?’ It seemed far-fetched that anyone would go to the trouble of doing that, rather than just dumping it at sea, but it wasn’t impossible. He wouldn’t necessarily have stumbled across the site; he hadn’t explored every last crevice on the island. The shift from the butterflies to all the other species could be due to a dramatic change in exposure levels: the drums might have split open after a few more years of weathering, or the land where they were buried might have subsided in a storm. Or maybe the poison had simply worked its way up the food chain. ‘The successful mutants thrive and breed, and some of the healthiest ones manage to cross to other islands. The only reason we’re not seeing any unfavourable mutations is because the afflicted animals are dying on the spot.’