Kim Stanley Robinson
Throughout his career, Robinson has been interested in politics, as is evident in his California trilogy of the 1980s (The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge), but it was in his Mars trilogy in the 1990s that Robinson was most overt in injecting large doses of political discussion into the text, but at the same time he was intensifying the overt science and expanding his portrayal of scientists at work, and (perhaps like Arthur C. Clarke) giving extensive descriptions of the natural landscape of his planetary setting in evocative language. Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) is an alternate history novel. The novel explores a history of the world in which the influence of European civilization ended in the fourteenth century. While not hard SF, it continues Robinson’s overt political engagement with his material.
“Sexual Dimorphism” is reprinted from The Martians (see Robinson note, above) While he was still working on the stories, he said in a Locus interview, “I’ve always called the collection A Martian Romance, which has to do with those early stories exploring fossil canyons, and ‘Green Mars,’ the novella of ’85. I’ll add one more … and then I’ll have three stories describing a relationship that lasts a really long time. That’s the Martian romance, but it’s also my romance with the planet, and also the idea of the early Martian Romances. I’m going to do some stories that will be more like folktales or fairytales—romances in the technical sense.”
This story is in that folktale mode, and is as much in the tradition of Brian Aldiss’s “A Kind of Artistry” and Roger Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” as it is firmly in the hard SF tradition of stories about the life and thought of working scientists.
The potential for hallucination in paleogenomics was high. There was not only the omnipresent role of instrumentation in the envisioning of the ultramicroscopic fossil material, but also the metamorphosis over time of the material itself, both the DNA and its matrices, so that the data were invariably incomplete, and often shattered. Thus the possibility of psychological projection of patterns onto the rorschacherie of what in the end might be purely mineral processes had to be admitted.
Dr. Andrew Smith was as aware of these possibilities as anyone. Indeed, it constituted one of the central problems of his field—convincingly to sort the traces of DNA in the fossil record, distinguishing them from an array of possible pseudofossils. Pseudofossils littered the history of the discipline, from the earliest false nautiloids to the famous Martian pseudo-nanobacteria. Nothing progressed in paleogenomics unless you could show that you really were talking about what you said you were talking about. So Dr. Smith did not get too excited, at first, about what he was finding in the junk DNA of an early dolphin fossil.
In any case there were quite a few distractions to his work at that time. He was living on the south shore of the Amazonian Sea, that deep southerly bay of the world-ringing ocean, east of Elysium, near the equator. In the summer, even the cool summers they had been having lately, the extensive inshore shallows of the sea grew as warm as blood, and dolphins—adapted from Terran river dolphins—like the baiji from China, or the boto from the Amazon, or the susu from the Ganges, or the bhulan from the Indus—sported just off the beach. Morning sunlight lanced through the waves and picked out their flashing silhouettes, sometimes groups of eight or ten of them, all playing in the same wave.
The marine laboratory he worked at, located on the seafront of the harbor town Eumenides Point, was associated with the Acheron labs, farther up the coast to the west. The work at Eumenides had mostly to do with the shifting ecologies of a sea that was getting saltier. Dr. Smith’s current project dealing with this issue involved investigating the various adaptations of extinct cetaceans who had lived when the Earth’s sea had exhibited different levels of salt. He had in his lab some fossil material, sent to the lab from Earth for study, as well as the voluminous literature on the subject, including the full genomes of all the living descendants of these creatures. The transfer of fossils from Earth introduced the matter of cosmic-ray contamination to all the other problems involved in the study of ancient DNA, but most people dismissed these effects as minor and inconsequential, which was why fossils were shipped across at all. And of course with the recent deployment of fusion-powered rapid vehicles, the amount of exposure to cosmic rays had been markedly reduced. Smith was therefore able to do research on mammal salt tolerance both ancient and modern, thus helping to illuminate the current situation on Mars, also joining the debates ongoing concerning the paleohalocycles of the two planets, now one of the hot research areas in comparative planetology and bioengineering.
Nevertheless, it was a field of research so arcane that if you were not involved in it, you tended not to believe in it. It was an offshoot, a mix of two difficult fields, its ultimate usefulness a long shot, especially compared to most of the inquiries being conducted at the Eumenides Point Labs. Smith found himself fighting a feeling of marginalization in the various lab meetings and informal gatherings, in coffee lounges, cocktail parties, beach luncheons, boating excursions. At all of these he was the odd man out, with only his colleague Frank Drumm, who worked on reproduction in the dolphins currently living offshore, expressing any great interest in his work and its applications. Worse yet, his work appeared to be becoming less and less important to his advisor and employer, Vlad Taneev, who as one of the First Hundred, and the co-founder of the Acheron labs, was ostensibly the most powerful scientific mentor one could have on Mars; but who in practice turned out to be nearly impossible of access, and rumored to be in failing health, so that it was like having no boss at all, and therefore no access to the lab’s technical staff and so forth. A bitter disappointment.
And then of course there was Selena, his—his partner, roommate, girlfriend, significant other, lover—there were many words for this relationship, though none were quite right. The woman with whom he lived, with whom he had gone through graduate school and two post-docs, with whom he had moved to Eumenides Point, taking a small apartment near the beach, near the terminus of the coastal tram, where when one looked back east the point itself just heaved over the horizon, like a dorsal fin seen far out to sea. Selena was making great progress in her own field, genetically engineering salt grasses; a subject of great importance here, where they were trying to stabilize a thousand-kilometer coastline of low dunes and quicksand swamps. Scientific and bioengineering progress; important achievements, relevant
to the situation; all things were coming to her professionally, including of course offers to team up in any number of exciting public/co-op collaborations.
And all things were coming to her privately as well. Smith had always thought her beautiful, and now he saw that with her success, other men were coming to the same realization. It took only a little attention to see it; an ability to look past shabby lab coats and a generally unkempt style to the sleekly curving body and the intense, almost ferocious intelligence. No—his Selena looked much like all the rest of the lab rats when in the lab, but in the summers when the group went down in the evening to the warm tawny beach to swim, she walked out the long expanse of the shallows like a goddess in a bathing suit, like Venus returning to the sea. Everyone in these parties pretended not to notice, but you couldn’t help it.
All very well; except that she was losing interest in him. This was a process that Smith feared was irreversible; or, to be more precise, that-if it had gotten to the point where he could notice it, it was too late to stop it. So now he watched her, furtive and helpless, as they went through their domestic routines; there was a goddess in his bathroom, showering, drying off, dressing, each moment like a dance.
But she didn’t chat anymore. She was absorbed in her thoughts, and tended to keep her back to him. No—it was all going away.
They had met in an adult swim club in Mangala, while they were both grad students at the university there. Now, as if to re-invoke that time, Smith took up Frank’s suggestion and joined him at an equivalent club in Eumenides Point, and began to swim regularly again. He went from the tram or the lab down to the big fifty-meter pool, set on a terrace overlooking the ocean, and swam so hard in the mornings that the whole rest of the day he buzzed along in a flow of beta endorphins, scarcely aware of his work problems or the situation at home. After work he took the tram home feeling his appetite kick in, and banged around the kitchen throwing together a meal and eating much of it as he cooked it, irritated (if she was there at all) with Selena’s poor cooking and her cheery talk about her work, irritated also probably just from hunger, and dread at the situation hanging over them; at this pretense that they were still in a normal life. But if he snapped at her during this fragile hour she would go silent the whole rest of the evening; it happened fairly often; so he tried to contain his temper and make the meal and quickly eat his part of it, to get his blood sugar level back up.
Either way she fell asleep abruptly around nine, and he was left to read into the timeslip, or even slip out and take a walk on the night beach a few hundred yards away from their apartment. One night, walking west, he saw Pseudo-phobos pop up into the sky like a distress flare down the coast, and when he came back into the apartment she was awake and talking happily on the phone; she was startled to see him, and cut the call short, thinking about what to say, and then said, “That was Mark, we’ve gotten tamarisk three fifty-nine to take repetitions of the third salt flusher gene!”
“That’s good,” he said, moving into the dark kitchen so she wouldn’t see his face.
This annoyed her. “You really don’t care how my work goes, do you?”
“Of course I do. That’s good, I said.”
She dismissed that with a noise.
Then one day he got home and Mark was there with her, in the living room, and at a single glance he could see they had been laughing about something; had been sitting
closer together than when he started opening the door. He ignored that and was as pleasant as he could be.
The next day as he swam at the morning workout, he watched the women swimming with him in his lane. All three of them had swum all their lives, their freestyle stroke perfected beyond the perfection of any dance move ever made on land, the millions of repetitions making their movement as unconscious as that of any fish in the sea. Under the surface he saw their bodies flowing forward, revealing their sleek lines—classic swimmer lines, like Selena’s—rangy shoulders tucking up against their ears one after the next, ribcages smoothed over by powerful lats, breasts flatly merged into big pecs or else bobbing left then right, as the case might be; bellies meeting high hipbones accentuated by the high cut of their swimsuits, backs curving up to bottoms rounded and compact, curving to powerful thighs then long calves, and feet outstretched like ballerinas’. Dance was a weak analogy for such beautiful movement. And it all went on for stroke after stroke, lap after lap, until he was mesmerized beyond further thought or observation; it was just one aspect of a sensually saturated environment.
Their current lane leader was pregnant, yet swimming stronger than any of the rest of them, not even huffing and puffing during their rest intervals, when Smith often had to suck air—instead she laughed and shook her head, exclaiming “Every time I do a flip turn he keeps kicking me!” She was seven months along, round in the middle like a little whale, but still she fired down the pool at a rate none of the other three in the lane could match. The strongest swimmers in the club were simply amazing. Soon after getting into the sport, Smith had worked hard to swim a hundred-meter freestyle in less than a minute, a goal appropriate to him, and finally he had done it once at a meet and been pleased; then later he heard about the local college women’s team’s workout, which consisted of a hundred hundred-meter freestyle swims all on a minute interval. He understood then that although all humans looked roughly the same, some were stupendously stronger than others. Their pregnant leader was in the lower echelon of these strong swimmers, and regarded the swim she was making today as a light stretching-out, though it was beyond anything her lane mates could do with their best effort. You couldn’t help watching her when passing by in the other direction, because despite her speed she was supremely smooth and effortless, she took fewer strokes per lap than the rest of them, and yet still made substantially better time. It was like magic. And that sweet blue curve of the new child carried inside.
Back at home things continued to degenerate. Selena often worked late, and talked to him less than ever.
“I love you,” he said. “Selena, I love you.”
“I know.”
He tried to throw himself into his work. They were at the same lab, they could go home late together. Talk like they used to about their work, which though not the same, was still genomics in both cases; how much closer could two sciences be? Surely it would help to bring them back together.
But genomics was a very big field. It was possible to occupy different parts of it, no doubt about that. They were proving it. Smith persevered, however, using a new and more powerful electron microscope, and he began to make some headway in unraveling the patterns in his fossilized DNA.
It looked like what had been preserved in the samples he had been given was almost entirely what used to be called the junk DNA of the creature. In times past
this would have been bad luck, but the Kohl labs in Acheron had recently been making great strides in unraveling the various purposes of junk DNA, which proved not to be useless after all, as might have been guessed, development being as complex as it was. Their breakthrough consisted in characterizing very short and scrambled repetitive sequences within junk DNA that could be shown to code instructions for higher hierarchical operations than they were used to seeing at the gene level—cell differentiation, information order sequencing, apoptosis, and the like.
Using this new understanding to unravel any clues in partially degraded fossil junk DNA would be hard, of course. But the nucleotide sequences were there in his EM images—or, to be more precise, the characteristic mineral replacements for the adenine=thymine and cytosine=guanine couplets, replacements well-established in the literature, were there to be clearly identified. Nanofossils, in effect; but legible to those who could read them. And once read, it was then possible to brew identical sequences of living nucleotides, matching the originals of the fossil creature. In theory one could re-create the creature itself, though in practice nothing like the entire genome was ever there, making it impossible. Not that there weren’t people trying anyway with simpler fossil organisms, either going for the whole thing or using hybrid DNA techniques to graft expressions they could decipher onto living templates, mostly descendants of the earlier creature.
With this particular ancient dolphin, almost certainly a fresh-water dolphin (though most of these were fairly salt tolerant, living in river-mouths as they did), complete resuscitation would be impossible. It wasn’t what Smith was trying to do anyway. What would be interesting would be to find fragments that did not seem to have a match in the living descendants’ genome, then hopefully synthesize living in vitro fragments, clip them into contemporary strands, and see how these experimental animals did in hybridization tests and in various environments. Look for differences in function.
He was also doing mitochondrial tests when he could, which if successful would permit tighter dating for the specie’s divergence from precursor species. He might be able to give it a specific slot on the marine mammal family tree, which during the early Pliocene was very complicated.
Both avenues of investigation were labor-intensive, time-consuming, almost thoughtless work—perfect, in other words. He worked for hours and hours every day, for weeks, then months. Sometimes he managed to go home on the tram with Selena; more often he didn’t. She was writing up her latest results with her collaborators, mostly with Mark. Her hours were irregular. When he was working he didn’t have to think about this; so he worked all the time. It was not a solution, not even a very good strategy—it even seemed to be making things worse—and he had to attempt it against an ever-growing sense of despair and loss; but he did it nevertheless.
“What do you think of this acheron work?” he asked Frank one day at work, pointing to the latest printout from the Kohl lab, lying heavily annotated on his desk.
“It’s very interesting! It makes it look like we’re finally getting past the genes to the whole instruction manual.”
“If there is such a thing.”
“Has to be, right? Though I’m not sure the Kohl lab’s values for the rate adaptive mutants will be fixed are high enough. Ohta and Kimura suggested ten percent as the upper limit, and that fits with what I’ve seen.”
Smith nodded, pleased. “They’re probably just being conservative.”
“No doubt, but you have to go with the data.”
“So—in that context—you think it makes sense for me to pursue this fossil junk DNA?”
“Well, sure. What do you mean? It’s sure to tell us interesting things.”
“It’s incredibly slow.”
“Why don’t you read off a long sequence, brew it up and venter it, and see what you get?”
Smith shrugged. Whole-genome shotgun sequencing struck him as slipshod, but it was certainly faster. Reading all bits of single-stranded DNA, called expressed sequence tags, had quickly identified most of the genes on the human genome; but it had missed some, and it ignored even the regulatory DNA sequences controlling the protein-coding portion of the genes, not to mention the so-called junk DNA itself, filling long stretches between the more clearly meaningful sequences.
Smith expressed these doubts to Frank, who nodded, but said, “It isn’t the same now that the mapping is so complete. You’ve got so many reference points you can’t get confused where your bits are on the big sequence. Just plug what you’ve got into the Lander-Waterman, then do the finishing with the Kohl variations, and even if there are massive repetitions, you’ll still be okay. And with the bits you’ve got, well they’re almost like ests anyway, they’re so degraded. So you might as well give it a try.”
Smith nodded.
That night he and Selena trammed home together. “What do you think of the possibility of shotgun sequencing in vitro copies of what I’ve got?” he asked her shyly.
“Sloppy,” she said. “Double jeopardy.”
A new schedule evolved. He worked, swam, took the tram home. Usually Selena wasn’t there. Often their answering machine held messages for her from Mark, talking about their work. Or messages from her to Smith, telling him that she would be home late. As was happening so often, he sometimes went out for dinner with Frank and other lane mates, after the evening workouts. One time at a beach restaurant they ordered several pitchers of beer, and then went out for a walk on the beach, and ended up running out into the shallows of the bay and swimming around in the warm dark water, so different from their pool, splashing each other and laughing hard. It was a good time.
But when he got home that night, there was another message on the answering machine from Selena, saying that she and Mark were working on their paper after getting a bite to eat, and that she would be home extra late.
She wasn’t kidding; at two o’clock in the morning she was still out. In the long minutes following the timeslip Smith realized that no one stayed out this late working on a paper without calling home. This was therefore a message of a different kind.
Pain and anger swept through him, first one then the other. The indirection of it struck him as cowardly. He deserved at least a revelation—a confession—a scene. As the long minutes passed he got angrier and angrier; then frightened for a moment, that she might have been hurt or something. But she hadn’t. She was out there somewhere fooling around. Suddenly he was furious.
He pulled cardboard boxes out of their closet and yanked open her drawers, and threw all her clothes in heaps in the boxes, crushing them in so they would all fit. But they gave off their characteristic scent of laundry soap and her, and smelling it
he groaned and sat down on the bed, knees weak. If he carried through with this he would never again see her putting on and taking off these clothes, and just as an animal he groaned at the thought.
But men are not animals. He finished throwing her things into boxes, took them outside the front door and dropped them there.
She came back at three. He heard her kick into the boxes and make some muffled exclamation.
He hurled open the door and stepped out.
“What’s this?” She had been startled out of whatever scenario- she had planned, and now was getting angry. Her, angry! It made him furious all over again.
“You know what it is.”
“What!”
“You and Mark.”
She eyed him.
“Now you notice,” she said at last. “A year after it started. And this is your first response.” Gesturing down at the boxes.
He hit her in the face.
Immediately he crouched at her side and helped her sit up, saying “Oh God Selena I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to,” he had only thought to slap her for her contempt, contempt that he had not noticed her betrayal earlier, “I can’t believe I—”
“Get away,” striking him off with wild blows, crying and shouting, “get away, get away,” frightened, “you bastard, you miserable bastard, what do you, don’t you dare hit me!” in a near shriek, though she kept her voice down too, aware still of the apartment complex around them. Hands held to her face.
“I’m sorry Selena. I’m very very sorry, I was angry at what you said but I know that isn’t, that doesn’t … I’m sorry.” Now he was as angry at himself as he had been at her—what could he have been thinking, why had he given her the moral high ground like this, it was she who had broken their bond, it was she who should be in the wrong! She who was now sobbing—turning away—suddenly walking off into the night. Lights went on in a couple of windows nearby. Smith stood staring down at the boxes of her lovely clothes, his right knuckles throbbing.
That life was over. He lived on alone in the apartment by the beach, and kept going in to work, but he was shunned there by the others, who all knew what had happened. Selena did not come in to work again until the bruises were gone, and after that she did not press charges, or speak to him about that night, but she did move in with Mark, and avoided him at work when she could. As who wouldn’t. Occasionally she dropped by his nook to ask in a neutral voice about some logistical aspect of their break-up. He could not meet her eye. Nor could he meet the eye of anyone else at work, not properly. It was strange how one could have a conversation with people and appear to be meeting their gaze during it, when all the time they were not really quite looking at you and you were not really quite looking at them. Primate subtleties, honed over millions of years on the savanna.
He lost appetite, lost energy. In the morning he would wake up and wonder why he should get out of bed. Then looking at the blank walls of the bedroom, where Selena’s prints had hung, he would sometimes get so angry at her that his pulse hammered uncomfortably in his neck and forehead. This got him out of bed, but then there was nowhere to go, except work. And there everyone knew he was a wife beater, a domestic abuser, an asshole. Martian society did not tolerate such people.
Shame or anger; anger or shame. Grief or humiliation. Resentment or regret. Lost love. Omnidirectional rage.
Mostly he didn’t swim anymore. The sight of the swimmer women was too painful now, though they were as friendly as always; they knew nothing of the lab except him and Frank, and Frank had not said anything to them about what had happened. It made no difference. He was cut off from them. He knew he ought to swim more, and he swam less. Whenever he resolved to turn things around he would swim two or three days in a row, then let it fall away again.
Once at the end of an early evening workout he had forced himself to attend—and now he felt better, as usual—while they were standing in the lane steaming, his three most constant lane mates made quick plans to go to a nearby trattoria after showering. One looked at him. “Pizza at Rico’s?”
He shook his head. “Hamburger at home,” he said sadly.
They laughed at this. “Ah, come on. It’ll keep another night.”
“Come on, Andy,” Frank said from the next lane. “I’ll go too, if that’s okay.”
“Sure,” the women said. Frank often swam in their lane too.
“Well …” Smith roused himself. “Okay.”
He sat with them and listened to their chatter around the restaurant table. They still seemed to be slightly steaming, their hair wet and wisping away from their foreheads. The three women were young. It was interesting; away from the pool they looked ordinary and undistinguished: skinny, mousy, plump, maladroit, whatever. With their clothes on you could not guess at their fantastically powerful shoulders and lats, their compact smooth musculatures. Like seals dressed up in clown suits, waddling around a stage.
“Are you okay?” one asked him when he had been silent too long.
“Oh yeah, yeah.” He hesitated, glanced at Frank. “Broke up with my girlfriend.”
“Ah ha! I knew it was something!” Hand to his arm (they all bumped into each other all the time in the pool): “You haven’t been your usual self lately.”
“No.” He smiled ruefully. “It’s been hard.”
He could never tell them about what had happened. And Frank wouldn’t either. But without that none of the rest of his story made any sense. So he couldn’t talk about any of it.
They sensed this and shifted in their seats, preparatory to changing the topic. “Oh well,” Frank said, helping them. “Lots more fish in the sea.”
“In the pool,” one of the women joked, elbowing him.
He nodded, tried to smile.
They looked at each other. One asked the waiter for the check, and another said to Smith and Frank, “Come with us over to my place, we’re going to get in the hot tub and soak our aches away.”
She rented a room in a little house with an enclosed courtyard, and all the rest of the residents were away. They followed her through the dark house into the courtyard, and took the cover off the hot tub and turned it on, then took their clothes off and got in the steaming water. Smith joined them, feeling shy. People on the beaches of Mars sunbathed without clothes all the time, it was no big deal really. Frank seemed not to notice, he was perfectly relaxed. But they didn’t swim at the pool like this.
They all sighed at the water’s heat. The woman from the house went inside and brought out some beer and cups. Light from the kitchen fell on her as she put down the dumpie and passed out the cups. Smith already knew her body perfectly well from their many hours together in the pool; nevertheless he was shocked seeing the whole of her. Frank ignored the sight, filling the cups from the dumpie.
They drank beer, talked small talk. Two were vets; their lane leader, the one who had been pregnant, was a bit older, a chemist in a pharmaceutical lab near the pool. Her baby was being watched by her co-op that night. They all looked up to her, Smith saw, even here. These days she brought the baby to the pool and swam just as powerfully as ever, parking the baby-carrier just beyond the splash line. Smith’s muscles melted in the hot water. He sipped his beer listening to them.
One of the women looked down at her breasts in the water and laughed. “They float like pull buoys.”
Smith had already noticed this.
“No wonder women swim better than men.”
“As long as they aren’t so big they interfere with the hydrodynamics.”
Their leader looked down through her fogged glasses, pink-faced, hair tied up, misted, demure. “I wonder if mine float less because I’m nursing.”
“But all that milk.”
“Yes, but the water in the milk is neutral density, it’s the fat that floats. It could be that empty breasts float even more than full ones.”
“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 goddess, 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 worship women,” he warned. “A category error. Women and men are so much the same it isn’t worth discussing the difference. The genes are identical almost entirely, 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. Penis just an oversized clitoris. 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 ejaculating 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 artifact 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 bonobos and muriquis were gentle cooperators. 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 INIA 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 mammals’ 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 non-committal. 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 nongene DNA.”
“But the congruence is perfect! It goes on for hundreds of pairs, how could that be a coincidence?”
Frank looked even more non-committal than before. He glanced out 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 analogy, 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 hell 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 nongene DNA traces of a distant aquatic ancestor, a kind of dolphin. Y chromosomes in humans lacked these passages, and they also matched with chimpanzees more completely than X chromosomes did. 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 fossil Smith was working on had been precisely dated to about 5.1 million years old. About half of all orangutan sexual encounters are rape.
One night after quitting 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, washing 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 passed 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 offshore 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 leaped 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.