Sitting on the deck beside Grant in silence, the salt water drying on his skin, Prabir felt calm, lucid, hopeful. The past was not an immovable anchor. What evolution had done, design could do better. There would always be a chance to take what you needed, take what was good, then cut yourself free and move on.
The jungle was as lush as anything Prabir had seen, but without quantifying the impression with a count of species, it also struck him as impoverished. The thorned shrubs and the giant orchids were evident in abundance, but there was nothing at all in sight that merely resembled them. No close relatives, only the things themselves. Whatever else Grant’s theory had trouble explaining, you couldn’t wind the clock back on a set of surviving lineages and expect to maintain the diversity you started with, and here you could practically see the ancestral bottlenecks everywhere you looked.
Grant called him over. She’d found an orchid clamped shut around the corpse of a small bird, bright-blue tail feathers protruding.
Prabir said, ‘I wish you hadn’t shown me this.’
‘Forewarned is forearmed. What I really want to know is—’ Grant sank her knife into the white petals and tore the shroud open.
Ants poured from the gash. As she pulled the knife away, the skeleton of the bird sagged down from the flower, swarming with them.
She inhaled sharply. ‘OK. But is that just opportunism?’ She cut the flower again, then extended the incision down into the stem.
There was a hollow core, full of ants. Grant handed Prabir the camera, and he recorded everything as she continued the dissection, following the stem around the trunk five times until she’d laid the whole internal city bare. There were chambers full of foamy white eggs, and a bloated queen the size of a human thumb.
Prabir said, ‘What does the orchid get out of it?’
‘Maybe just food scraps and excrement; that could be more than enough. Or maybe the ants are feeding it something specific, some secretion tailor-made to keep it happy and fit.’ Grant was clearly elated, but then she added wistfully, ‘Someone’s going to spend a lifetime on this.’
‘Why not do it yourself?’
She shrugged. ‘Not my style. Begging to foundations for charity to do something beautiful and useless.’
Prabir felt like grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her; this sounded so defeatist. He said, ‘Maybe in a few years you’ll feel differently. Once you’re not facing the same financial pressures—’
Grant pulled a face. ‘Don’t organise me; I hate that. No wonder your sister ran away from home.’
Prabir crouched down beside the orchid. ‘First mimicry, now symbiosis. These gene-recovery enzymes of yours can hit a bull’s-eye at fifty million years.’
‘And don’t gloat, it doesn’t suit you. I admit it, freely: there’s something going on here that I don’t understand.’
Prabir said, ‘I still think your basic idea must be right. Functional genes take thousands of years to develop. If they appear overnight, the organism has to be cheating. “Here’s one I prepared earlier.” What else can it be?’
Grant seemed ready to accept this, but then she shook her head. ‘I can’t answer that, but it’s starting to look as if I’m missing something fundamental. Perfectly camouflaged birds with no predators. Thorned plants with nothing even trying to munch on them. There are misses as well as bull’s-eyes. But even the misses are too precise.’
She squatted beside Prabir. The ants were methodically criss-crossing the tear in the stem, secreting a papier-mâché-like scaffolding a thousand times faster than any plant could have grown new tissue. She said, ‘Don’t you wish you could just ask them for the whole story? When did they get together and sort this all out? Why did they stop? Why did they start again? What is it we don’t understand?’
It was late morning on the second day when they reached the mangrove swamp. They were at least a kilometre inland, but there was a narrow valley running from the heart of the jungle to the coast, its floor a would-be river bed with too little runoff feeding it to prevent sea water flooding in at high tide. At low tide, the halophytic trees would stand naked in an expanse of salty mud, but that was still hours away; for now, the way ahead was inundated.
Grant peered into the tangle of branches and aerial roots. ‘It’s only a few hundred metres across. We should be able to wade through without too much trouble.’
‘And then time it so we can cross back at low tide?’
‘Yeah.’
Prabir found that part appealing; if they had to do this at all, he’d rather do it while he still had the energy.
He double-checked that all the sample tubes he was carrying were sealed; his watch and notepad were fully waterproof. There didn’t seem much point taking any of his clothes off; they’d get coated in slime however he carried them, and the more protection he had against scrapes and splinters from the roots, the better.
Grant waded in up to her knees. Prabir followed her, every step like an exaggerated mime of walking as his boots stuck afresh in the mud. The water was turbid with silt, almost opaque where it could be seen at all, but most of the surface was covered with a layer of algae and dead leaves. The odour of salt and decay was insistent—like breathing over a garden compost heap with seaweed added for effect—but not overpowering or stomach-turning. Other parts of the forest had smelt worse.
The protruding brown roots of the mangroves were dotted with snails, but Prabir spotted small brown crabs as well. Clouds of mites and mosquitoes approached them and then backed away; at least their repellent was holding out. The trees were twenty or thirty metres tall; it was eerie to look up into the branches, decorated with small white blossoms and tiny green fruit, then down into what was essentially dirty sea water, as if a forest had sprouted in the middle of the ocean.
The mud was annoying, but it wasn’t treacherous; the hidden mangrove roots were far more pernicious. Every time Prabir thought he’d learnt to judge where a clear stretch of ground might lie between two trunks, he walked into a root at shin height. The water was above his waist now, and the clues from the visible roots were getting harder to read. He’d started out following directly behind Grant, unashamedly letting her blaze the trail, but then his concentration had lapsed, and he’d skirted a submerged obstacle on his own to find that they’d been shunted to either side of it. Since then, they’d been moving further apart, following entirely separate paths through the drowned maze.
Grant called out to him, ‘Hey, watch out!’ Prabir looked around; a black snake about a metre long with narrow yellow stripes was swimming towards him. He scanned the tangle of litter around the nearest trunk, looking for a forked stick he could use to persuade the snake to keep its distance, but it veered away of its own accord, blinking elliptical green eyes like a cat’s.
The water grew deeper, reaching high on his chest; the trees thinned slightly, but not enough to compensate for the loss of visibility. Grant was a few centimetres shorter than he was, and she was submerged almost up to her chin. Prabir shouted, ‘Next time, we cheat and take the boat around the coast.’
‘Amen to that.’
‘I don’t want to come back this way, even when the tide’s out. We’d be better off walking along the beach, and swimming across the inlet if we have to.’
Grant swore suddenly; Prabir assumed she’d just been bruised twice in the same spot in rapid succession, which was particularly painful. She shouted, ‘This is ridiculous! I’m going to try swimming, here and now.’ She leant forward into the water and began a slow breast-stroke.
Prabir observed the experiment with interest. She was scooping aside some of the surface muck as she went, but it was still piling up around her face and shoulders. ‘What’s it like?’