While not immune to such temptations, Kath Two was at bottom a serious walker who did not like to stop once she had gotten going. She was thinking, reviewing in her mind the journey on the elevator, which had been largely uneventful. This, as she had gradually realized, was a part of its charm and of its exclusivity. It was possible to reach Cradle quickly, if you had enough money to charter, or authority to commandeer, the right vehicles. Most people used the elevator, though. Thus Cradle was separated from the rest of the human world not so much by distance as by time. Spending that much time was a sort of luxury, afforded only to a few. Of course, passengers worked en route—this explained all of those expensive restaurants and bars around the atrium, with their private meeting rooms. But Kath Two hadn’t had any real work to do. She had gone for long hours without talking to another human at all, and had done a lot of reading and watching of entertainment on screens. She had slept normally, confirming that any epigenetic shift that might have gotten started last week had been aborted.
All of this just made her want to reach the meeting place so that she could at least have an explanation from Doc, meet the missing Dinan and Aïdan, and get started on whatever it was the Seven was supposed to be doing.
She maintained a brisk pace to the top of the arch but there permitted herself a few minutes’ pause. At the apex, the walkway broadened into a scenic overlook affectionately known as Hurricane Heights. The wind was so powerful here that it made her eyes water. She turned her back to it and toddled carefully over to the eastern railing, on the lee side. She blinked her vision clear and allowed herself a few minutes’ gawking down into the compounds and the streets and the Vale. The sun was setting behind her. Since they were on the equator it would set quickly. The Vale was already in shadow, but the stone walls of the compounds and the fronts of the buildings were emanating a magical pink-gold glow. Lights were coming on in windows along purple-shaded streets.
It was a real place. Not like the artificial environments of the habitat ring. Some of the larger habitats came close to possessing this quality—the sense that you were in something close to a real planetary environment. But it was always dispelled as soon as you looked up and saw the opposite side of the habitat hanging a few kilometers above your head. Here, you could look up and see endless sky, the stars coming out, the gleaming necklace of the habitat ring rising perpendicularly from the eastern horizon. The thing that made it real was the air, the sheer quantity of it, the endless variety of its movements and its smells. She wished she had a glider so that she could go dancing in it.
ACCORDING TO A LEGEND THAT WAS ALMOST CERTAINLY INCORRECT, the overlook where Kath Two was standing—the center of the bridge—was the location where Eve Dinah’s demolition charge had exploded after she had made her choice and tossed it into space.
The compromise that Dinah had forced by placing that bomb against the window of the Banana had seemed elegant and straightforward for about as long as it had taken for the bomb to go off.
In one sense, the gaming of the system had begun even before it was thought of, when Eve Julia had pointed out that she would have few babies and Eve Aïda had prophesied that she would have many.
It had not taken long for the other Eves to make similar calculations. As Arkies, picked in the Casting of Lots, Camila and Aïda were younger than the others, with two to three decades of fertility ahead of them. If they decided to become baby factories, and if they were lucky, each of them could conceivably bear as many as twenty children before menopause. Dinah, Ivy, Moira, and Tekla, all in their early thirties, might bear a few each. Roughly speaking, therefore, those four had as much combined childbearing power, if you wanted to think about it that way, as the younger pair of Camila and Aïda.
Julia, as she had pointed out, would be lucky to bear one child before menopause. And she had not needed Doob to explain the exponential math. The Julians were going to be swamped. They were going to be mere curiosities. People in the distant future, coming home from work, would exclaim to their partners, “You’ll never guess what I saw today—an honest to god Julian!”
Those were the mathematical rudiments of the new Great Game, and the roots of much of what had happened since then. The preponderance of later historical scholarship suggested that most of the Eves didn’t know that they were playing a game until they were a few years into it. Aïda, based on what she had said in her Curse, might have been the exception to that rule. But decisions made about one’s children were the most personal decisions that one could make, and no mother of sound mind would have admitted to herself, at the time, that she was playing a sort of game vis-à-vis the other mothers.
In a way it would have been simpler had they gone about it more cold-bloodedly.
Consciously or not, the Seven Eves sorted themselves into Four, Two, and One. The Four were Dinah, Ivy, Tekla, and Moira. The Two were Camila and Aïda. Arithmetic suggested that the descendants of the Four would be about as numerous as those of the Two. Existing friendships and affinities already linked the Four and created an unspoken compact, not articulated until they were long dead, to the effect that their children would embody complementary qualities. Dinans, in a sense, did not have to be complete humans as long as Ivyns were around to do some of the things they weren’t as good at. This was a blunt way of saying it, which was why it went unsaid for a long time, but hundreds of years later the descendants of the Four could look back and see that it had always been so. By that time it was so deeply ingrained in their DNA and their cultures that there was no going back.
The Two, by contrast, had no natural affinity with each other, and no existing relationship. Camila and Aïda had not met until shortly before the Council of the Seven Eves. All that they shared—and it wasn’t much to go on—was an aversion to Julia. Both of them had, at one point or another, fallen under Julia’s spell only to be disappointed by her. In Camila’s case the seduction had happened during a White House dinner. For her part, Aïda had been talked by Julia into joining the Swarm, only to end up leading the rebel faction that had deposed and mutilated her. Given the way that had all turned out, it was of course unlikely that Camila, or anyone of sound mind, would consciously align herself with Aïda. And yet the mathematics of the Four and the Two created a kind of gravity, invisibly drawing her that way. The breach that had opened between Camila and Dinah during the Council of the Seven Eves would not be forgotten.
Considered more calmly, Camila’s words had a persuasive power that couldn’t be denied. It simply was the case that their descendants would be living bottled up in confined spaces for many generations to come. As Luisa had demonstrated through her research, and as the people of the Cloud Ark had just finished proving in spectacular fashion, it wasn’t a good way for normal, unaltered humans to live. If the survival of the human race depended on rewiring their brains to make them better at such a lifestyle, then perhaps they had best get on with it.
In a way, that decision had been taken out of their hands by Camila, who had made her choice clear, and only needed to work out the details with Moira. She had, in effect, made the first clear move in the great genetic game. And contrary to her own stated principles it was, in a way, the most aggressive move possible: she had let them know that her descendants—who were likely to be quite numerous—would get along just fine in the conditions they would all be facing for the first ten, twenty, or hundred generations. The other six were left to follow her lead or to react against it.
Dinah, Ivy, and Tekla in essence reacted against it, with Moira eventually making another choice; but the historical fact was that Moira’s descendants had, more often than not, been part of the bloc of the Four.
Aïda had played the game more overtly. This had basically consisted of waiting the others out to see what they would do, and then making countermoves. The other Eves decided early, and stuck with those decisions. All of Dinah’s children—she ended up having five of them—were recognizably of a type. The same was true of Ivy’s three, and Tekla’s six. J
ulia only got to choose once. Camila’s sixteen offspring varied from one to the next, as she tinkered with her decisions based on behaviors she was observing among her first children. But she had never wavered from the general template that she had laid out during the Council of the Seven Eves.
Aïda’s seven children, however, were all different. Exactly what she was thinking was known only to Moira, the Keeper of Secrets, the Mother of Races. For the other Eves told Moira what they wanted in confidence, and she took those confidences to her grave. But it was plain enough—and in any event, it became the accepted version of history—that the first five children of Aïda had been conceived as reactions to what other Eves—all except Moira—were doing.
Aïda’s stance toward the others had been well articulated in the Curse. She knew that the other six Eves would always loathe her personally and that this feeling would inevitably be transferred to her offspring. Human nature being what it was, Dinan children, thousands of years from now, would be throwing rocks at Aïdan children on playgrounds and making jokes about cannibalism. They would never be assimilated into the society descended from the Four. Therefore, to the extent that Dinah was making choices about the virtues that her offspring would embody, and thereby making a move in the game, Aïda sought a countermove. Which might consist of conceiving a child that would be like Dinah’s, except more so. Or of inventing an anti-Dinan, a type of human uniquely suited to exploiting the weaknesses in the Dinan type.
Thus the first five children of Aïda. She had, however, been unable to employ the same strategy vis-à-vis Moira, for the basic reason that Moira knew exactly what Aïda was doing, down to the specific DNA base pairs that had been altered in her ova. If this were a game, then Eve Moira always had the last move. The failures of her first eight pregnancies had only deepened the mystery. Since she had never articulated her choice, no one really knew what she had done, which made Moirans an enigmatic race, not only to the other races, but to themselves. But it was plainly the case that Moirans were the only race capable of “going epi.” Kath Two’s genome, like that of every other life-form, was fixed. A copy of it lived in every cell in her body. But which of those genes were being expressed at a given time, and which were lying dormant, was changeable to a degree far beyond what humans were normally capable of. It would have amounted to a kind of superpower, had there been a way to control it. But, certain hoary old legends to the contrary, there wasn’t. Kath Two never knew when she might fall asleep for a week and wake up a different person named Kath Three. Sometimes the results were brilliant. Rarely they were fatal. Sometimes they were inconvenient, or downright embarrassing. Most of the latter cases had something to do with what happened, like it or not, when a Moiran fell in love. In any case, this was the choice that Eve Moira had made and the gift she had conferred on her daughter, Cantabrigia. And it was assumed that she had done so because she believed that this degree of plasticity would somehow bring the world back into balance against the choices that Aïda had been making.
Julia, the One, looked to make the best of a bad situation by endowing her offspring with qualities that would make them useful and important in spite of much smaller numbers. She had already expressed, during the Council of the Seven Eves, the idea that there was real value in the ability to envision possible futures. And she had linked it to leadership, or, failing that, to the ability to give useful advice to leaders. When that trait ran out of control and sought dark paths it led to depression, paranoia, and other forms of mental illness. The challenge then was to find a way of combining that trait with a more positive mentality. Julia’s research—and she did a lot of research—therefore tended to center on the history of sages, seers, ecstatics, shamans, artists, depressives, and paranoiacs throughout history, and the extent to which those traits could be localized to specific base pairs in their genomes and fostered by acculturation.
Historians had come along much later and developed their own vocabulary for telling the story of the succeeding five thousand years. The first pregnancies were called Gestations. Not counting the numerous miscarriages, there had been thirty-nine of them, distributed among the Seven Eves, before Camila, the last to stop bearing children, had finally gone through menopause. From these, thirty-five viable girls had resulted. Thirty-two had gone on to have children of their own. By then, Eve Moira had figured out how to synthesize Y chromosomes, and so some of the second generation had been male. The result, therefore, had been thirty-two Strains. Each of the seven new races had embodied more than one Strain. The Strains were recognizably different and yet clearly classifiable as belonging to one race or another, somewhat as East Africans differed from West Africans but still looked like Africans to Europeans.
“Correction” was the name given to the phase that had begun after the first round of Gestations, when Eve Moira had fixed errors that had led to several nonviable infants. In a sense, Correction went on continuously all through the first round of Gestations and began to taper off as the daughters of the Eves began to produce second-generation children. It faded into a next stage, Stabilization, which lasted through the following ten generations or so as Y chromosomes were patched up, lingering genetic mistakes were fixed, and members of different Strains began to interbreed to produce hybrids within their own racial groups. During this time the lessons of the black-footed ferret were put to use as various techniques were employed to increase heterozygosity.
In truth a vast library of human genetic sequences was available in digital form, and once they had survived the first few generations in Cradle, and trained hundreds of bright young people to be genetic engineers, they could, in theory, have resequenced the original human race from scratch. This was the sort of thing Eve Moira had done by synthesizing the first artificial Y chromosome. But it was not what they collectively chose to do. That choice was altogether cultural, not scientific. Decisions had been made in the Council of the Seven Eves. Races had been founded that were, by then, several generations old. They had begun to develop their own distinctive cultures. To undo those decisions by reverting to the “rootstock” human race was viewed almost as a kind of auto-genocide. The competition that had developed among the different races rendered it unthinkable. So the genetic records of rootstock humanity were put to work adding a healthy degree of heterozygosity back into the existing races, rather than trying to go backward.
Thus Stabilization, which had continued until about the twelfth generation, by which point even the Julian race had grown large enough to go on propagating through normal means without the need for lab-based adjustments.
Stabilization had blended into Propagation, the next phase generally recognized by historians, which was fairly self-explanatory: the descendants of the Seven Eves had continued to have sex with each other and make more babies. This had occupied much of the first half of the First Millennium and led to a condition of overcrowding so severe that it had made obligatory the formation of separate colonies away from Cradle. For there were other places, perhaps not quite so favored as Cleft, but still well suited for the building of new habitats. They had reached the point, by then, of being able to construct new machines for moving about in space. It was time. Or so insisted the descendants of the Four, who sensed that conditions had become inimical to them in the crowded precincts of Cradle. Camila had been frank about her strategy of making new humans well suited to life in confined spaces. She had succeeded in doing so. And once the early habitats of Cradle had grown crowded, her strategy had begun to look like a good one. Whether it was purely an expression of their own racial mythologies or a biological necessity, the Four had reached out and pioneered new habitats, at first in other locations on Cleft, later on other fragments of Peach Pit. The descendants of Aïda had done likewise, sometimes cohabiting with the Four, more often going it alone.
It wasn’t so much that Aïda had done things that couldn’t be undone as that she had said things that couldn’t be unsaid. In that sense her Curse had real effect. An individual Aïdan of the S
econd Millennium was the product of a mixed-race culture that was more than a thousand years old. He or she had grown up with persons of all races, loving some and hating others, getting on well, perhaps, with certain Teklans and Moirans while getting into fights with certain Aïdans. In terms of his or her own personal experiences, there was no reason to stick together with others of the same race. But each race did have an ineradicable narrative, by now encoded into a culture that had become ancient. The narrative of the Aïdans was that their Eve had spawned not just one race but a “race of races,” a mosaic, as proof that her children could do all that those of the other Eves could, and more. And if you were a descendant of Aïda, clearly endowed with genetic markers that she had chosen for that purpose, then the inexorable force of that narrative would drive you toward colonies populated largely or purely by other Aïdans.
As the Aïdans were less numerous than the descendants of the Four, their Second Millennium colonies had tended to be smaller and more Spartan, leading to a symbiotic relationship with the Camites, who tended to thrive in such environments. Aïdans built colonies but Camites made them work.
In any case, the formation of new colonies and habitats during the Second Millennium had led to a phase that the historians called Isolation: the formation of racially “pure” populations. Isolation led to Caricaturization: selective breeding, pursued consciously in some cases and unconsciously in others, that had the effect over many generations of intensifying racial differences. The example cited most often was a gradual change in eye color among Moirans. Eve Moira’s eyes had been hazel: relatively light in color by the standards of black people, but not all that unusual. By the end of the Second Millennium, many Moirans had eyes so pale in color as to appear golden in strong light. On the walls of the Great Chain’s fashion stores, blown up to ten times life size, Moiran fashion models still gazed at you through shockingly yellow, catlike eyes. Because pale eyes had been a distinctive characteristic of Eve Moira, it had become thought of as beautiful and desirable, and Moirans with pale eyes had found it easier to mate and reproduce, intensifying the trait over time, to the point of caricature. Kath Two herself, no model, was frequently complimented on the lightness of her eyes, which were closer to green than yellow. But modern, appearance-conscious Moirans were frequently startled when they saw photographs of their Eve with her eyes that were merely greenish-brown.