Part 24 (2/2)

”Whichever has more fat, yuck.”

”I could run an experiment, nurse him from just one side and then get in and see-” But they were laughing too hard for her to complete this scenario. ”It would work! Why are you laughing!”

They only laughed more. Frank was cracking up, looking blissed, blessed. These women friends trusted them. But Smith still felt set apart. He looked at their lane leader: a pink bespectacled G.o.ddess, serenely vague and unaware; the scientist as heroine; the first full human being.

But later when he tried to explain this feeling to Frank, or even just to describe it, Frank shook his head. ”It's a bad mistake to wors.h.i.+p women,” he warned. ”A category error. Women and men are so much the same it isn't worth discussing the difference. The genes are almost entirely identical, you know that. A couple hormonal expressions and that's it. So they're just like you and me.”

”More than a couple.”

”Not much more. We all start out female, right? So you're better off thinking that nothing major ever really changes that. p.e.n.i.s just an oversized c.l.i.toris. Men are women. Women are men. Two parts of a reproductive system, completely equivalent.”

Smith stared at him. ”You're kidding.”

”What do you mean?”

”Well-I've never seen a man swell up and give birth to a new human being, let me put it that way.”

”So what? It happens, it's a specialized function. You never see women e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. either. But we all go back to being the same afterward. Details of reproduction only matter a tiny fraction of the time. No, we're all the same. We're all in it together. There are no differences.”

Smith shook his head. It would be comforting to think so. But the data did not support the hypothesis. Ninety-five percent of all the murders in history had been committed by men. This was a difference.

He said as much, but Frank was not impressed. The murder ratio was becoming more nearly equal on Mars, he replied, and much less frequent for everybody, thus demonstrating very nicely that the matter was culturally conditioned, an artefact of Terran patriarchy no longer relevant on Mars. Nurture rather than nature. Although it was a false dichotomy. Nature could prove anything you wanted, Frank insisted. Female hyenas were vicious killers, male bon.o.bos and muriquis were gentle co-operators. It meant nothing, Frank said. It told them nothing.

But Frank had not hit a woman in the face without ever planning to.

Patterns in the fossil DNA data sets became clearer and clearer. Stochastic-resonance programs highlighted what had been preserved.

”Look here,” Smith said to Frank one afternoon when Frank leaned in to say good-bye for the day. He pointed at his computer screen. ”Here's a sequence from my boto, part of the GX three-oh-four, near the juncture, see?”

”You've got a female then?”

”I don't know. I think this here means I do. But look, see how it matches with this part of the human genome. It's in Hillis 8050...”

Frank came into his nook and stared at the screen. ”Comparing junk to junk... I don't know...”

”But it's a match for more than a hundred units in a row, see? Leading right into the gene for progesterone initiation.”

Frank squinted at the screen. ”Um, well.” He glanced quickly at Smith.

Smith said, ”I'm wondering if there's some really long-term persistence in junk DNA, all the way back to earlier mammal precursors to both these.”

”But dolphins are not our ancestors,” Frank said.

”There's a common ancestor back there somewhere.”

”Is there?” Frank straightened up. ”Well, whatever. I'm not so sure about the pattern congruence itself. It's sort of similar, but, you know.”

”What do you mean, don't you see that? Look right there!”

Frank glanced down at him, startled, then noncommittal. Seeing this Smith became inexplicably frightened.

”Sort of,” Frank said. ”Sort of. You should run hybridization tests, maybe, see how good the fit really is. Or check with Acheron about repeats in non-gene DNA.”

”But the congruence is perfect! It goes on for hundreds of pairs, how could that be a coincidence?”

Frank looked even more noncommittal than before. He glanced out of the door of the nook. Finally he said, ”I don't see it that congruent. Sorry, I just don't see it. Look, Andy. You've been working awfully hard for a long time. And you've been depressed too, right? Since Selena left?”

Smith nodded, feeling his stomach tighten. He had admitted as much a few months before. Frank was one of the very few people these days who would look him in the eye.

”Well, you know. Depression has chemical impacts in the brain, you know that. Sometimes it means you begin seeing patterns that others can't see as well. It doesn't mean they aren't there, no doubt they are there. But whether they mean anything significant, whether they're more than just a kind of a.n.a.logy, or similarity-” He looked down at Smith and stopped. ”Look, it's not my field. You should show this to Amos, or go up to Acheron and talk to the old man.”

”Uh huh. Thanks, Frank.”

”Oh no, no, no need. Sorry, Andy. I probably shouldn't have said anything. It's just, you know. You've been spending a h.e.l.l of a lot of time here.”

”Yeah.”

Frank left.

Sometimes he fell asleep at his desk. He got some of his work done in dreams. Sometimes he found he could sleep down on the beach, wrapped in a greatcoat on the fine sand, lulled by the sound of the waves rolling in. At work he stared at the lined dots and letters on the screens, constructing the schematics of the sequences, nucleotide by nucleotide. Most were completely unambiguous. The correlation between the two main schematics was excellent, far beyond the possibility of chance. X chromosomes in humans clearly exhibited non-gene DNA traces of a distant aquatic ancestor, a kind of dolphin. Y chromosomes in humans lacked these pa.s.sages, and they also matched with chimpanzees more completely than X chromosomes did. Y chromosomes were quite stable. Frank had appeared not to believe it, but there it was, right on the screen. But how could it be? What did it mean? Where did any of them get what they were? They had natures from birth. Just under five million years ago, chimps and humans separated out as two different species from a common ancestor, a woodland ape. The Inis geoffrensis Inis geoffrensis fossil Smith was working on had been precisely dated to about 5.1 million years old. About half of all orangutan s.e.xual encounters are rape. fossil Smith was working on had been precisely dated to about 5.1 million years old. About half of all orangutan s.e.xual encounters are rape.

One night after finis.h.i.+ng work alone in the lab, he took a tram in the wrong direction, downtown, without ever admitting to himself what he was doing, until he was standing outside Mark's apartment complex, under the steep rise of the dorsum ridge. Walking up a staircased alleyway ascending the ridge gave him a view right into Mark's windows. And there was Selena, was.h.i.+ng dishes at the kitchen window and looking back over her shoulder to talk with someone. The tendon in her neck stood out in the light. She laughed.

Smith walked home. It took an hour. Many trams pa.s.sed him.

He couldn't sleep that night. He went down to the beach and lay rolled in his greatcoat. Finally he fell asleep.

He had a dream. A small hairy bipedal primate, chimp-faced, walked like a hunchback down a beach in east Africa, in the late afternoon sun. The warm water of the shallows lay greenish and translucent. Dolphins rode inside the waves. The ape waded out into the shallows. Long powerful arms, evolved for hitting; a quick grab and he had one by the tail, by the dorsal fin. Surely it could escape, but it didn't try. Female; the ape turned her over, mated with her, released her. He left and came back to find the dolphin in the shallows, giving birth to twins-one male, one female. The ape's troop swarmed into the shallows, killed and ate them both. Farther offsh.o.r.e the dolphin birthed two more.

The dawn woke Smith. He stood and walked out into the shallows. He saw dolphins inside the transparent indigo waves. He waded out into the surf. The water was only a little colder than the workout pool. The dawn sun was low. The dolphins were only a little longer than he was, small and lithe. He bodysurfed with them. They were faster than him in the waves, but flowed around him when they had to. One leapt over him and splashed back into the curl of the wave ahead of him. Then one flashed under him, and on an impulse he grabbed at its dorsal fin and caught it, and was suddenly moving faster in the wave, as it rose with both of them inside it-by far the greatest bodysurfing ride of his life. He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

Discovering Life

The final approach to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a narrow road running up the flank of the ugly brown mountains overlooking Los Angeles, is an adequate road in ordinary circ.u.mstances, but when something newsworthy occurs it is inadequate to handle the influx of media visitors. On this morning the line of cars and trailers extended down from the security gate almost to the freeway off-ramp, and Bill Dawkins watched the temperature gauge of his old Ford Escort rise as he inched forward, all the vehicles adding to the smog already making the air a tangible gray mist. Eventually he pa.s.sed the security guards and drove up to the employee parking lot, then walked down past the guest parking lot, overflowing with TV trailers topped by satellite dishes. Surely every language and nation in the world was represented, all bringing their own equipment, of course.

Inside the entry building Bill turned right and looked in the press-conference room, also jammed to overflowing. A row of Bill's colleagues sat up on the stage behind a long table crowded with mikes, facing the cameras and lights and reporters. Bill's friend Mike Collinsworth was answering a question about contamination, trying to look like he was enjoying himself. But very few scientists like other scientists listening in on them when they are explaining things to nonscientists, because then there is someone there to witness just how gross their gross simplifications are; so an affair like this was in its very nature embarra.s.sing. And to complicate the situation this press corps was a very mixed crowd, ranging from experts who in some senses (social context, historical background) knew more than the scientists themselves, all the way to TV faces who could barely read their prompters. That plus the emotional load of the subject matter, amounting almost to hysteria, gave the event an excruciating quality that Bill found perversely fascinating to watch.

A telegenic young woman got the nod from John and took the radio mike being pa.s.sed around. ”What does this discovery mean to you?” she said. ”What do you think the meaning of this discovery will be?”

The seven men on stage looked at one another, and the crowd laughed. John said, ”Mike?” and Mike made a face that got another laugh. But John knew his crew; Mike was a smart a.s.s in real life, indeed Bill could imagine some of his characteristic answers scorching the air: It means I have to answer stupid questions in front of billions of people, it means I can stop working eighty-hour weeks and see what a real life is like again; but Mike was also good at the PR stuff, and with a straight face he answered the second of the questions, which Bill would have thought was the harder of the two.

”Well, the meaning of it depends, to some extent, on what the exobiologists find out when they investigate the organisms more fully. If the organisms follow the same biochemical principles as life on Earth, then it's possible they are a kind of cousin to Terran life, bounced on meteorites from Mars to here, or here to Mars. If that's the case, then it's possible that DNA a.n.a.lysis will even be able to determine about when the two families parted company, and which planet has the older population. We may find out that we're all Martians originally.”

He waited for the obligatory laugh. ”On the other hand, the investigation may show a completely alien biochemistry, indicating a separate origin. That's a very different scenario.” Now Mike paused, realizing he was at the edge of his soundbite envelope, also of deep waters. He decided to cut it short: ”Either way that turns out, we'll know that life is very adaptable, and that it can either cross s.p.a.ce between planets, or begin twice in the same solar system, so either way we'll be safer in a.s.suming that life is fairly widespread in the universe.”

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