Free The Fahrenheit Twins by Michel Faber

Miss Soedhono, ‘since you attended my last presentation.’ She gestures in the air, a soundless snap of the fingers, and a large video screen, nestled in an enclave in the wall behind her, switches itself on. A brilliant image of green coconuts clustered against a ribbed tree-bough appears, haloed by the miraculous Kodachrome blue of Sulawesi sky. The men’s eyes appraise it for an instant, then revert to the woman.
    ‘We have developed – created, if you will – a new variety of coconut,’ she says. ‘It produces fifty-five fruits per bunch, aggregating to six hundred and sixty nuts per palm per year. You will note that the size is small. Do not be deceived. The usable contents, once the epicarp, mesocarp and endocarp have been discarded, account for a greater proportion of the whole than in large-sized fruits. In particular, there is a great deal more …’ (she gestures again, and the picture dissolves into an extreme close-up of a whitish substance) ‘endosperm.’
    The men squirm collectively; there is an audible creaking of metal chairs.
    ‘This endosperm yields as much as fifty-one per cent copra, with hardly any husk,’ continues Miss Soedhono, her voice, on that last word, growing almost husky. ‘We have given the germ-plasm priority in our breeding programme, and are confident that we will soon evolve D x T hybrids, using a dwarf known as Kelapa Raja as the seed parent.’
    An image of the mighty Kelapa Raja, embraced by an adolescent Indonesian boy wrapped around the vertiginous upper reaches of its bough, comes on the screen.
    ‘But let us now examine, briefly, what happens to the root system in swampy soil.’ Miss Soedhono gestures again, and the screen is filled with pink rhizomes, a jostling crowd of them like starveling baby carrots. ‘When the tips of main roots come into contact with the permanent water table, they immediately begin to rot. Death, gentlemen, certain death. To compensate for this extinction, branch roots develop directly from the tip, below the rotting portion. New roots also spring out from the bole and the stem. These abundant rootlets ramify into a densely-woven mat within one metre from the bole. Also, closer to the bole, we see’ (another gesture, another dissolve) ‘super-abundant pneumatophores or respiratory organs.’
    A helplessly synchronised intake of breath passes through the audience. Miss Soedhono’s eyes narrow in contempt, and she glances over the ranks of blushing faces, as if searching for the worm who dared to gasp out of turn.
    ‘Also of prime importance,’ she hisses, ‘is the life span of the leaves. From the day a coconut leaf primordium distinguishes itself from the apical meristem, springing up from the throat of its immediate older leaf, a long period elapses before it is finally shed, exhausted and senile, from the crown. Illustrations of each phase of this metamorphosis from emergence to death are shown here. Please take a moment to study them.’
    The men take a moment only. The supreme object of their focus is Miss Soedhono, whose jaw, turned towards glowing images of leaves and wooden rulers, is perfection itself, and whose neck, were it not for the intervention of her jacket collar, would continue straight down to her breast, that exotic bosom whose precise nature the men can only guess at.
    ‘In each fertile palm, super-abundant female flowers bloom,’ she continues, her cheek catching reflected light from the screen’s latest offering. ‘A particularly prolific palm is capable of producing over a thousand female flowers, in each of several spadices.’
    The sharp odour of sweat is beginning to permeate the atmosphere; deodorants and perfumes with pointedly masculine names are no match for tropical heat, decrepit air conditioning and the combined temperature of sixty-six overdressed bodies arrayed shoulder-to-shoulder and thigh-to-thigh.
    ‘If you care to look,’ declares Miss Soedhono, ‘you will find trichomes on the abaxial