Seveneves: A Novel (68 page)

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.

“That’s harder,” Moira admitted. “Synthesizing a Y chromosome is no joke. My prediction is that the first set of babies—perhaps the first few sets of them—will all be female. Because we simply need to get the population up. During that time I can be working on the Y chromosome problem. Later on, I hope that some little boys will result.”

“But these little girls—and later the boys—will still be made out of our own DNA?” Ivy asked.

“Yes.”

“So they’ll be quite similar to us genetically.”

“If I do nothing about it,” Moira said, “they’ll be like sisters. Perhaps even more similar than that implies. But there are a few tricks that I can use to create a wider range of genotypes out of the same source material. Perhaps they’ll be more like cousins. I don’t know, it’s never been tried.”

“Are we talking about the inbreeding problem? It sounds like it,” Dinah said.

“Loss of heterozygosity. Yes. I happen to know something about it. It’s why I was chosen as a member of the General Population.”

“Because of your work on black-footed ferrets and so on,” Ivy said.

“Yes. This is a closely analogous problem. But the point I would like you all to keep in mind is that we solved that problem in the case of the black-footed ferrets and we are going to solve it again.”

She said it with force and confidence that silenced the others for a few moments and left them looking at her for more.

Moira went on. “I think we all have at least an intuitive understanding of this, yes?”

That one was aimed at Julia, who looked mildly peeved, and bit off the following: “My daughter had Down syndrome. That is all I will say.”

Moira acknowledged it with a nod, then went on: “Everyone has some genetic defects. When you are breeding more or less randomly within a large population, there’s a tendency for those errors to be swamped by the law of averages. Everything sort of works out. But when two people sharing the same defect mate, their offspring is likely to have that defect as well, and over time we see the usual unpleasantness that we all associate in our minds with inbreeding.”

“So,” Luisa said, “if we follow the plan you have laid out, and begin, a few years down the road, with seven groups of what amount to siblings or cousins—”

“It’s not enough heterozygosity, to answer your question,” Moira said. “If you have a genetic predisposition to any disease, for example—”

“Alpha-thalassemia runs in my family,” Ivy said.

“That’s a fine example,” Moira returned. “As it happens, Old Earth compiled vast databases on such things before its destruction. All of which are in there now.” She gestured in the direction of her lab. “We have a very good idea which defects, on which chromosomes, are responsible for alpha-thalassemia. If you supply me with an ovum, I can find those defects and I can fix them before we begin parthenogenesis. Your offspring will be free of that defect. Barring some random future mutation, it’ll never return.”

Dinah raised her hand. “My brother was a carrier of cystic fibrosis. I haven’t been tested.”

Julia raised hers. “Three of my aunts died of the same form of breast cancer. I’ve been tested. I know I carry that defect as well.”

“The same answer applies in all of these cases,” Moira said. “If
there’s a genetic test for it, then it means, by definition, that we know which defects are responsible for it. And knowing that, we can perform a repair.”

A new voice joined the conversation. “How about bipolar disorder?”

Everyone looked at Aïda.

She would live out the rest of her life, and go to meet her maker, without having a friend, or even a friendly conversation. So, no one was in a receptive frame of mind about her question. But the mere fact that she’d asked it suggested a level of introspection they hadn’t seen from her before. Moira considered it.

“I would have to do some research. I think that it does run in families to some extent. To the extent that it can be traced to particular locations on particular chromosomes, it can be treated like any other disease,” Moira said.

“Do you believe it
should
be?” Aïda asked.

Everyone looked automatically at Luisa, who nodded. “We are long past the point of thinking of mental illnesses as somehow a lesser kind of disease than physical. Such disorders should, in my opinion, be addressed in just the same way.”

“Do you believe it
must
be?”

Luisa colored slightly. “What is the point of these questions, Aïda?”

“I have done research on it,” Aïda said. “Some say that bipolarity is a useful adaptation. When things are bad, you become depressed, retreat, conserve energy. When things are good, you spring into action with great energy.”

“And your point is . . .”

“Will you treat this condition in my offspring
against my will
? What if I
want
to have a lot of little bipolar kids?”

In the flustered silence that followed, Camila spoke. “What about aggression?”

Everyone turned to look at her, as if unsure they had heard her correctly.

“I’m serious,” she said. She looked toward Aïda. “I don’t mean to trivialize the suffering that your condition causes. But over the course of history, aggression has caused a far larger amount of pain and death than bipolar disorder or whatever. As long as we are fixing those aspects of the human psyche that lead to suffering, should we not eliminate the tendency to aggressive behavior?”

“That’s different,” Moira began. But she was interrupted by Dinah.

“Hold on a sec,” Dinah said. “I’m aggressive. I always have been. I was on track to be an Olympic soccer player! That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to amount to anything—by channeling my aggression into doing things.” She nodded across the table at Tekla. “Hell, look at her! How many times has she saved our asses by being aggressive?”

Tekla nodded. “Yes. Dinah saved me by taking aggressive action against rules of space station. Problem is not aggression. It is lack of discipline. A person can be aggressive”—she nodded at Dinah—“and still be constructive in society if she controls her passions.” And she threw a significant glare at Aïda, who let out a little snort and looked away.

“So you’re suggesting we breed people for discipline and self-control?” Ivy asked. “I’m not sure if I follow.”

“I believe that Camila was merely saying that certain personality types, taken to an unhealthy extreme, are as bad as diagnosable mental illnesses per se. If not worse,” Julia said.

“I don’t want you to speak for me,” Camila said. “Please do not speak for me anymore, Julia.”

“I am merely trying to be helpful,” Julia said. But where the old J.B.F. would have said it reproachfully, the new one merely seemed exhausted.

Dinah broke in. “Well, what I am trying to say is that I don’t appreciate being labeled as a genetic freak that needs to be eradicated from the human future.”

“No one would say that of you, Dinah,” Ivy said. “Camila’s talking about the knuckle draggers who tried to kill her for wanting an education.”

“And what is
your
opinion?” Tekla asked Ivy.

“Similar to yours. Aggression is fine. It needs to be controlled. Directed. But the way to do that is through intelligence. Rational thought.”