Kim Robinson - The Martians

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 oversize 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 eighty-fifty. . . .”

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 nongene 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 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, chimpfaced, 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 he 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.