Luminous

by Greg Egan

  Lena contemplated this thoughtfully, though she was clearly unsurprised by the verdict.

  She said, ‘It communicates nothing between separated atoms, but if you bring them together, instead, it can still tell you what they’ve done in the past. You do a control experiment, don’t you? You make the same measurements on atoms which were never paired?’

  ‘Yeah, of course.’ I pointed to the third and fourth columns of data on the screen; the process itself was going on silently as we spoke, inside an evacuated chamber in a small grey box concealed behind all the electronics. ‘The results are completely uncorrelated.’

  ‘So, basically, this machine can tell you whether or not two atoms have been bonded together?’

  ‘Not individually; any individual match could just be chance. But given enough atoms with a common history – yes.’

  Lena was smiling conspiratorially.

  I said, ‘What?’

  ‘Just … humour me for a moment. What’s the next stage? Heavier atoms?’

  ‘Yes, but there’s more. I’ll split a hydrogen molecule, let the two separate hydrogen atoms combine with two fluorine atoms – any old ones, not correlated – then split both hydrogen fluoride molecules and make measurements on the fluorine atoms to see if I can pick up an indirect correlation between them: a second-order effect inherited from the original hydrogen molecule.’

  The truth was, I had little hope of getting funded to take the work that far. The basic experimental facts of EPR had been settled now, so there wasn’t much of a case for pushing the measurement technology any further.

  ‘In theory,’ Lena asked innocently, ‘could you do the same with something much larger? Like … DNA?’

  I laughed. ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t mean: could you do it, here, a week from tomorrow? But if two strands of DNA had been bonded together, would there be any correlation at all?’

  I baulked at the idea, but confessed, ‘There might be. I can’t give you the answer off the top of my head; I’d have to borrow some software from the biochemists, and model the interaction precisely.’

  Lena nodded, satisfied. ‘I think you should do that.’

  ‘Why? I’ll never be able to try it, for real.’

  ‘Not with this junkyard-grade equipment.’

  I snorted. ‘So tell me who’s going to pay for something better?’

  Lena glanced around the grim basement, as if she wanted to record a mental snapshot of the low point of my career – before everything changed completely. ‘Who’d finance research into a means of detecting the quantum fingerprint of DNA bonding? Who’d pay for a chance of computing – not to the nearest few millennia, but to the nearest cell division – how long ago two mitochondrial plasmids were in contact?’

  I was scandalised. This was the idealist who believed that the Children of Eve were the last great hope for world peace?

  I said, ‘They’d never fall for it.’

  Lena stared at me blankly for a second, then shook her head, amused. ‘I’m not talking about pulling a confidence trick – begging for a research grant on false pretences.’

  ‘Well, good. But—?’

  ‘I’m talking about taking the money – and doing a job that has to be done. Sequencing technology has been pushed as far as it can go, but our opponents still keep finding things to quibble about: the mitochondrial mutation rate, the method of choosing branch points for the most probable tree, the details of lineage loss and survival. Even the palaeogeneticists who are on our side keep changing their minds about everything. Eve’s age goes up and down like the Hubble constant.’

  ‘It can’t be that bad, surely.’

  Lena seized my arm. Her excitement was electric; I felt it flow into me. Or maybe she’d just pinched a nerve. ‘This could transform the whole field. No more guesswork, no more conjecture, no more assumptions – just a single, indisputable family tree, stretching back 200,000 years.’

  ‘It may not even be possible—’

  ‘But you’ll find out? You’ll look into it?’

  I hesitated, but I couldn’t think of a single good reason to refuse. ‘Yes.’

  Lena smiled. ‘With quantum palaeogenetics … you’ll have the power to bring Eve to life for the world in a way that no one has ever done before.’

  * * *

  Six months later, the funds ran out for my work at the university: the research, the tutoring, everything. Lena offered to support me for three months while I put together a proposal to submit to the Children. We were already living together, already sharing expenses; somehow, that made it much easier to rationalise. And it was a bad time of year to be looking for work, I was going to be unemployed anyway …

  As it turned out, computer modelling suggested that a measurable correlation between segments of DNA could be picked out against the statistical noise – given enough plasmids to work with: more like a few litres of blood per person than a single drop. But I could already see that the technical problems would take years of work to assess properly, let alone overcome. Writing it all up was good practice for future corporategrant applications, but I never seriously expected anything to come of it.

  Lena came with me to the meeting with William Sachs, the Children’s West Pacific Research Director. He was in his late fifties, and very conservatively dressed, from the classic Benetton AIDS ISN’T NICE T-shirt to the Mambo World Peace surfing dove motif board shorts. A slightly younger version smiled down from a framed cover of Wired; he’d been guru of the month in April 2005.

  ‘The University physics department will be contracted to provide overall supervision,’ I explained nervously. ‘There’ll be independent audits of the scientific quality of the work every six months, so there’s no possibility of the research running off the rails.’

  ‘The EPR correlation,’ mused Sachs, ‘proves that all life is bound together holistically into a grand unified meta-organism, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No.’ Lena kicked me hard under the desk.

  But Sachs didn’t seem to have heard me. ‘You’ll be listening in to Gaia’s own theta rhythm. The secret harmony which underlies everything: synchronicity, morphic resonance, transmigration …’ He sighed dreamily. ‘I adore quantum mechanics. You know my Tai Chi master wrote a book about it? Schrödinger’s Lotus – you must have read it. What a mind-fuck! And he’s working on a sequel, Heisenberg’s Mandala—’

  Lena intervened before I could open my mouth again. ‘Maybe … later generations will be able to trace the correlation as far as other species. But in the foreseeable future, even reaching as far as Eve will be a major technical challenge.’

  Cousin William seemed to come back down to Earth. He picked up the printed copy of the application and turned to the budget details at the end, which were mostly Lena’s work.

  ‘Five million dollars is a lot of money.’

  ‘Over ten years,’ Lena said smoothly. ‘And don’t forget that there’s a 125 per cent tax deduction on R&D expenditure this financial year. By the time you factor in the notional patent rights—’

  ‘You really believe the spin-offs will be valued this highly?’

  ‘Just look at Teflon.’

  ‘I’ll have to take this to the board.’

  * * *

  When the good news came through by e-mail, a fortnight later, I was almost physically sick.

  I turned to Lena. ‘What have I done? What if I spend ten years on this, and it all comes to nothing?’

  She frowned, puzzled. ‘There are no guarantees of success, but you’ve made that clear, you haven’t been dishonest. Every great endeavour is plagued with uncertainties, but the Children have decided to accept the risks.’

  In fact, I hadn’t been agonising over the morality of relieving rich idiots with a global motherhood fixation of large sums of money – and quite possibly having nothing to give them in return. I was more worried about what it would mean for my career if the research turned out to be a cul-de-sac, and produced no results worth publis
hing.

  Lena said, ‘It’s all going to work out perfectly. I have faith in you, Paul.’

  And that was the worst of it. She did.

  We loved each other – and we were, both, using each other. But I was the one who kept on lying about what was soon to become the most important thing in our lives.

  * * *

  In the winter of 2010, Lena took three months off work to travel to Nigeria in the name of technology transfer. Her official role was to advise the new government on the modernisation of the communications infrastructure, but she was also training a few hundred local operators for the Children’s latest low-cost sequencer. My EPR technique was still in its infancy – barely able to distinguish identical twins from total strangers – but the original mitochondrial DNA analysers had become extremely small, rugged and cheap.

  Africa had proved highly resistant to the Children in the past, but it seemed that the movement had finally gained a foothold. Every time Lena called me from Lagos – her eyes shining with missionary zeal – I went and checked the Great Tree, trying to decide whether its scrambling of traditional notions of familial proximity would render the ex-combatants in the recent civil war more, or less, fraternal towards each other if the sequencing fad really took off. The factions were already so ethnically mixed, though, that it was impossible to come to a definite verdict; so far as I could tell, the war had been fought between alliances shaped as much by certain twenty-first-century acts of political patronage as by any invocation of ancient tribal loyalties.

  Near the end of her stay, Lena called me in the early hours of the morning (my time), so angry she was almost in tears. ‘I’m flying straight to London, Paul. I’ll be there in three hours.’

  I squinted at the bright screen, dazed by the tropical sunshine behind her. ‘Why? What’s happened?’ I had visions of the Children undermining the fragile cease-fire, igniting some unspeakable ethnic holocaust – then flying out to have their wounds tended by the best microsurgeons in the world, while the country descended into chaos behind them.

  Lena reached off-camera and hit a button, pasting a section of a news report into a corner of the transmission. The headline read: Y-CHROMOSOME ADAM STRIKES BACK! The picture below showed a near-naked, muscular, blond white man (curiously devoid of body hair – rather like Michelangelo’s David in a bison-skin loincloth) aiming a spear at the reader with suitably balletic grace.

  I groaned softly. It had only been a matter of time. In the cell divisions leading up to sperm production, most of the DNA of the Y chromosome underwent recombination with the X chromosome, but part of it remained aloof, unscrambled, passed down the purely paternal line with the same fidelity as mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to daughter. In fact, with more fidelity: mutations in nuclear DNA were much less frequent, which made it a much less useful molecular clock.

  ‘They claim they’ve found a single male ancestor for all northern Europeans – just 20,000 years ago! And they’re presenting this bullshit at a palaeogenetics conference in Cambridge tomorrow!’

  I scanned the article as Lena wailed. The news report was all tabloid hype; it was difficult to tell what the researchers were actually asserting. But a number of right-wing groups who’d long been opposed to the Children of Eve had embraced the results with obvious glee.

  I said, ‘So why do you have to be there?’

  ‘To defend Eve, of course! We can’t let them get away with this!’

  My head was throbbing. ‘If it’s bad science, let the experts refute it. It’s not your problem.’

  Lena was silent for a while, then protested bitterly, ‘You know male lineages are lost faster than female ones. Thanks to polygyny, a single paternal line can dominate a population in far fewer generations than a maternal line.’

  ‘So the claim might be right? There might have been a single, recent ‘‘northern European Adam’’?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Lena admitted begrudgingly. ‘But … so what? What’s that supposed to prove? They haven’t even tried to look for an Adam who’s a father to the whole species!’

  I wanted to reply: Of course it proves nothing, changes nothing. No sane person could possibly care. But … who made kinship such a big issue in the first place? Who did their best to propagate the notion that everything that matters depends on family ties?

  It was far too late, though. Turning against the Children would have been sheer hypocrisy; I’d taken their money, I’d played along.

  And I couldn’t abandon Lena. If my love for her went no further than the things we agreed on, then that wasn’t love at all.

  I said numbly, ‘I should make the three o’clock flight to London. I’ll meet you at the conference.’

  * * *

  The tenth annual World Palaeogenetics Forum was being held in a pyramid-shaped building in an astroturfed science park, far from the University campus. The placard-waving crowd made it easy to spot. HANDS OFF EVE! DIE, NAZI SCUM! NEANDERTHALS OUT! (What? ) As the taxi drove away, my jet-lag caught up with me and my knees almost buckled. My aim was to find Lena as rapidly as possible and get us both out of harm’s way. Eve could look after herself.

  She was there, of course, gazing with serene dignity from a dozen T-shirts and banners. But the Children – and their marketing consultants – had recently been ‘fine-tuning’ her image, and this was the first chance I’d had to see the results of all their focus groups and consumer-feedback workshops. The new Eve was slightly paler, her nose a little thinner, her eyes narrower. The changes were subtle, but they were clearly aimed at making her look more ‘pan-racial’ – more like some far-future common descendant, bearing traces of every modern human population, than a common ancestor who’d lived in one specific place: Africa.

  And in spite of all my cynicism, this redesign made me queasier than any of the other cheap stunts the Children had pulled. It was as if they’d decided, after all, that they couldn’t really imagine a world where everyone would accept an African Eve, but they were so committed to the idea that they were willing to keep bending the truth, for the sake of broadening her appeal, until … what? They gave her, not just a different name, but a different face in every country?

  I made it into the lobby, merely spat on by two or three picketers. Inside, things were much quieter, but the academic palaeogeneticists were darting about furtively, avoiding eye contact. One poor woman had been cornered by a news crew; as I passed, the interviewer was insisting heatedly, ‘But you must admit that violating the origin myths of indigenous Amazonians is a crime against humanity.’ The outer wall of the pyramid was tinted blue, but more or less transparent, and I could see another crowd of demonstrators pressed against one of the panels, peering in. Plain-clothes security guards whispered into their wrist-phones, clearly afraid for their Masarini suits.

  I’d tried to call Lena a dozen times since leaving the airport, but some bottleneck in the Cambridge footprint had kept me on hold. She’d pulled strings and got us both listed on the attendance database – the only reason I’d been allowed through the front door – but that only proved that being inside the building was no guarantee of non-partisanship.

  Suddenly, I heard shouting and grunting from near by, then a chorus of cheers and the sound of heavy sheet plastic popping out of its frame. News reports had mentioned both pro-Eve demonstrators and pro-Adam – the latter allegedly much more violent. I panicked and bolted down the nearest corridor, almost colliding with a wiry young man heading in the opposite direction. He was tall, white, blond, blue-eyed, radiating Teutonic menace … and part of me wanted to scream in outrage: I’d been reduced, against my will, to pure imbecilic racism.

  Still, he was carrying a pool cue.

  But as I backed away warily, his sleeveless T-shirt began flashing up the words: THE GODDESS IS AFOOT!

  ‘So what are you?’ he sneered. ‘A Son of Adam?’

  I shook my head slowly. What am I? I’m a Homo sapiens, you moron. Can’t you recognise your own species?

  I said,
‘I’m a researcher with the Children of Eve.’ At faculty cocktail parties, I was always ‘an independent palaeogenetics research physicist’, but this didn’t seem the time to split hairs.

  ‘Yeah?’ He grimaced with what I took at first to be disbelief, and advanced threateningly. ‘So you’re one of the fucking patriarchal, materialistic bastards who’s trying to reify the Archetype of the Earth Mother and rein in her boundless spiritual powers?’

  That left me too stupefied to see what was coming. He jabbed me hard in the solar plexus with the pool cue; I fell to my knees, gasping with pain. I could hear the sound of boots in the lobby, and hoarsely chanted slogans.

  The Goddess-worshipper grabbed me by one shoulder and wrenched me to my feet, grinning. ‘No hard feelings, though. We’re still on the same side, here – aren’t we? So let’s go beat up some Nazis!’

  I tried to pull free, but it was already too late; the Sons of Adam had found us.

  * * *

  Lena came to visit me in hospital. ‘I knew you should have stayed in Sydney.’

  My jaw was wired; I couldn’t answer back.

  ‘You have to look after yourself; your work’s more important than ever, now. Other groups will find their own Adams – and the whole unifying message of Eve will be swamped by the tribalism inherent in the idea of recent male ancestors. We can’t let a few promiscuous Cro-Magnon men ruin everything.’

  ‘Gmm mmm mmmn.’

  ‘We have mitochondrial sequencing … they have Y-chromosome sequencing. Sure, our molecular clock is already more accurate … but we need a spectacular advantage, something anyone can grasp. Mutation rates, mitotypes: it’s all too abstract for the person in the street. If we can construct exact family trees with EPR – starting with people’s known relatives, but extending that same sense of precise kinship across 10,000 generations, all the way back to Eve – then that will give us an immediacy, a credibility, that will leave the Sons of Adam for dead.’ She stroked my brow tenderly. ‘You can win the Ancestor Wars for us, Paul. I know you can.’