Seveneves - Страница 107

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They met in the Banana, sitting around the long conference table. To one side of it was death: the sick bay where Zeke, the last man alive, had given up the ghost a day and a half ago, after making a joke about what a shame it all was: being the only man alive, with eight women to choose from. They had scrubbed the place down with bleach and made the beds with clean sheets in the hopes that none of them would be occupied for a long time. To the other side was life: the series of compartments where Moira had been setting up her genetics lab.

The meeting would later be known as the Council of the Seven Eves. For, though eight women were present, one of them — Luisa — had already gone through menopause. Ivy opened with a report on their general situation. From a certain point of view, this was surprisingly good. They had grown so inured to terrible news that she had to emphasize this more than once. Few places in the solar system were as safe as the one where they had come to rest. No cosmic radiation could touch them here. From coronal mass ejections they were equally immune. Sunlight for energy and agriculture could be had a short distance above them, high on the walls of the crevasse, where the sun shone almost all the time.

In the meantime, their big reactor as well as four dozen arklet reactors were producing far more power than they could ever use, and would continue doing so for decades. Of water they still had a hundred tons left over. While melting and splitting the water they’d used for propellant, they had extracted from it many tons of phosphorus, carbon, ammonia, and other chemicals, left over from the dawn of the solar system, that had once cloaked Greg’s Skeleton in a reeking black carapace. That stuff, as Sean Probst had well known, would be priceless as nutrients to support agriculture.

They no longer had to worry, ever again, about the things that had been their obsessive concerns for the last five years: perigees, apogees, burns, propellant, movement of any kind. No bolide could touch them down here. Even if Cleft banged into an equally huge rock at some point, they would probably survive it.

The vitamins that had been packed into every arklet launched up into the Cloud Ark had been intended to support a population of thousands. Even though many of these had been lost, what remained was still more than enough to keep a small colony in aspirin and toothbrushes for a long time.

They were dependent, in many ways, on digital technology. They could not long survive without robots to do work for them and computerized control systems to keep the installation running. They had no ability to fabricate new computer chips to replace the old. But the Arkitects, anticipating this, had stocked them with a large surplus of spare parts that would last for hundreds of years if husbanded carefully. And they had plans for rebooting digital civilization later; they had tools for making tools for making tools, and instructions on how to use them when the time came.

With immediate needs accounted for, the discussion turned toward the obvious problem at hand. All heads turned toward Moira.

“My equipment made it through perfectly unscathed,” she said. “The last three years have been boring for me. I’ve been treated as a fragile flower. I have spent the time writing up everything I know about how to use that stuff. If I drop dead of something tomorrow, you’ll still be able to work it out.

“Obviously, we’re all women. Seven of us are still capable of having babies. Or, to be specific, of producing eggs. So, where can we get some sperm? Well, ninety-seven percent of what was sent up from Earth was destroyed in the disaster on the first day of the Hard Rain. What survived, survived because it had already been distributed among ten different arklets. All ten of those later ended up going off with the Swarm. None of that material, however, seems to have made its way here.”

Aïda interrupted. Staring across the table at Julia, she announced, “I was in the Swarm, as you know. I can tell you that this fact of the samples in the ten arklets was forgotten. Never discussed. If anyone even knew they were there, they forgot about it soon.”

Julia was construing this as an attack on her record. “We had eight hundred healthy young men and women from every ethnic group in the world.”

“Had,” Aïda repeated. “We had.”

“The amount of effort required to keep a few sample containers deep-frozen wasn’t worth the—”

“Stop,” Ivy said. “If we can start making babies, their great-grandchildren can pore over the records and make judgments and have debates about what should have been done. Now isn’t the time for recriminations.”

“I was in the meeting where Markus called bullshit on the Human Genetic Archive,” Dinah said. She was mildly amazed to hear herself backing Julia’s side of the argument.

“We can’t make the same mistake again,” Aïda said, “of fooling ourselves. Believing in shit that isn’t real.”

Ivy said, “Had we known that it was going to come down, so suddenly, to seven surviving fertile women, we would have had every healthy male masturbating into test tubes for the last three years. We’d have looked for ways to keep it all frozen. But we never imagined it would come to this.”

“It’s not clear what the quality of the results would have been,” Moira put in. “Given the amount of radiation exposure, I probably would have had to do a lot of manual repair on the genetic material in those samples.”

“Manual repair?” Julia asked.

“I should put that in scare quotes,” Moira said, reaching up with both hands and crooking her fingers. “Obviously I’m not literally using my hands. But with the equipment in there”—she tossed her head in the direction of the lab—“I can isolate a cell — a sperm or an ovum — and read its genome. I’m skipping over a lot of details, obviously. But the point is that I can get a digital record of its DNA. Once that’s in hand, it turns into a software exercise — the data can be evaluated and compared to huge databases that shipped up as part of the lab. It’s possible to identify places on a given chromosome where a bit of DNA got damaged by a cosmic ray or radiation from the reactor. It is then possible to repair those breaks by splicing in a reasonable guess as to what was there originally.”

“It sounds like a lot of work,” Camila said. “If there is anything I can do to ease your burdens and make myself useful, I am at your disposal.”

“Thank you. We will all be working at it for months,” Moira said, “before anything happens. We have very little else to do.”

“Excuse me, but what is the point of discussing this, since we have no sperm to work with?” Aïda asked.

“We don’t need sperm,” Moira said.

“We don’t need sperm to get pregnant! This is news to me,” Aïda said, with a sharp laugh.

Moira went on coolly. “There is a process known as parthenogenesis, literally virgin birth, by which a uniparental embryo can be created out of a normal egg. It’s been done with animals. The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got.”

“Can you do it here, Moira?” asked Luisa.

“It’s not fundamentally more difficult than the sorts of tricks I was just describing in the case of repairing damaged sperm. In some ways, it would actually be easier.”

“You can get us pregnant. . by ourselves,” Tekla said.

“Yes. Everyone except Luisa.”

“I can have a child of whom I am both the mother and the father,” Aïda said. The idea clearly fascinated her. Suddenly she was no longer the prickly, brittle Aïda but the warm and engaged girl who must have charmed the powers that be during the Casting of Lots.

“It will take some tricky work in the lab,” Moira said. “But that is the whole point of having brought the lab safely to this place.”

They all pondered it for a bit. Julia was the first to speak up. “Stepping into my traditional role as scientific ignoramus: Do you mean to say that you can clone us?”

Moira nodded — not to say yes, but to say I understand your question. “There are different ways to do it, Julia. One way would indeed produce clones — all offspring genetically identical to the mother. This isn’t what we want. For one thing, it would not solve our basic problem — the lack of males.”

Camila’s hand went up. Moira, clearly annoyed by the interruption, blinked once, then nodded at her. “Is it really a problem?” Camila asked. “As long as we have the lab and can go on making more clones, would it really be such a bad thing to have a society with no males? At least for several generations?”

Moira silenced her with a gentle pushing movement of one hand. “That’s a question for later. There is another problem with this version of parthenogenesis, which is, again, that all offspring are the same. Exact copies. To get some genetic diversity, we need to use something called automictic parthenogenesis. Look, it’s a long story, but the point is that in normal sexual reproduction there is crossing over of chromosomes during meiosis. It’s a form of natural recombination of DNA. It’s what causes your children to look sort of like you, but not exactly like you. In the form of parthenogenesis that I am proposing to use, there would be that crossing over. An element of randomness.”

“And both boys and girls?” Dinah asked.

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