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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 Eucatastrophe has 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.’