Bright Air - Barry Maitland [104]
‘How could you study it, if it was supposed to be extinct?’ I objected.
‘There were a number of records from the time when they were plentiful on the island, up until the arrival of the rats. People were clearly fascinated by them. They believed that the females could reproduce by parthenogenesis, cloning themselves without the aid of males. And they wrote of their longevity, how a favourite phasmid living tamely in a family garden, almost as a pet, would survive from generation to generation.
‘I also got hold of phasmid remains. Harry had found some on his treks across the island and made them available to me. I carried out tests to establish their age, and found they were extraordinarily old. I could see a good evolutionary reason for this. Imagine you are a very well-adapted creature, living on a tiny island, remote from the rest of the world and with no predators. How should you reproduce? If you do it the normal way, frantically breeding every spring, you risk overpopulating and upsetting the balance of your habitat. One response would then be to evolve a shorter and shorter life cycle, so as to restrict your numbers by speeding up the natural process of death. Or you could go the other way—you could restrict your breeding to cover the minimal replacement of accidental deaths, and extend each individual’s life span almost indefinitely. That’s what the phasmids had done. Over the millennia, they had evolved their own immortality gene. As long as their habitat remained unchanged, they could live pretty well forever, but as soon as the black rats arrived, they were doomed. They simply couldn’t breed their way out of extinction.’
I said, ‘So your dealer wouldn’t have been able to breed them?’
‘Oh, that wasn’t the problem. I’m sure he could have created conditions favourable to faster breeding. No, the problem was what would happen when he discovered that he had the world’s sole supply of a creature with a built-in immortality gene. A rare insect is one thing, but this … Its value would have been beyond anything.
‘Did Luce not tell you about Arne Naess’s eight principles of deep ecology, the principles that must underlie any part that we may have in sustainable life on this planet?’
‘I think she did mention …’
He shook his head. Bad student. ‘The fifth principle states that the flourishing of both human and non-human life requires a substantial decrease of human population. As I said, we are a plague, and our population is out of control. And we don’t want to die. Imagine the discovery of the immortality gene, and its transfer to the human genome. It would be a catastrophe, unimaginable …’
He let that sink in for a moment, then he murmured, ‘That’s why the phasmids had to die.’ And then, almost a whisper, ‘That’s why Luce had to die.’
‘What?’
‘What if she killed the rats? What if she and the phasmids survived out there, and she was rescued? What if she came back and told the world? We simply couldn’t risk it.’
‘So …’ I hesitated, knowing that we’d finally reached the cusp, the moment of truth, and that the next seconds would change our lives forever. ‘So, what did you do?’
‘On the fifth day, when the search had moved far out to sea, I sent Damien and Curtis out to the Pyramid in a Zodiac from my friend’s yacht. Owen didn’t have the stomach for it. I must say I didn’t blame him. They found her eventually.’
‘She was alive?’
He nodded. ‘Weak, but alive.’
‘What did they do?’
He gazed sombrely at me. ‘I’m sorry, Josh.’
The room erupted in noise. Through a singing in my ears I heard Anna wailing, and another voice, my own, screaming, You bastards! You fucking bastards! She was pregnant! and Marcus’s startled face as I lunged for him and tried to smash my fist into his face. We tumbled and fell, struggling, in a heap on the floor. At some point the singing in my ears faded, and I found myself sitting astride Marcus, his terrified face staring up at me. I got off him and staggered to my feet. My right hand felt as if I’d broken a bone.
Anna went and crouched over