"Greg Egan - Mitochondrial Eve" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

MITOCHONDRIAL EVE

by Greg Egan


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© Greg Egan, 1999

First published in /Interzone/ #92, February 1995

www.fictionwise.com


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Thanks to Caroline Oakley, Anthony Cheetham, John Douglas, Peter Robinson,
Kate Messenger, Philip Patterson, Tony Gardner, Russ Galen, David Pringle, Lee
Montgomerie, Gardner Dozois, Sheila Williams, and Bill Congreve.


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With hindsight, I can date the beginning of my involvement in the Ancestor
Wars precisely: /Saturday, June 2, 2007/. That was the night Lena dragged me
along to the Children of Eve to be mitotyped. We’d been out to dinner, it was
almost midnight, but the sequencing bureau was open 24 hours.

“Don’t you want to discover your place in the human family?” she asked, fixing
her green eyes on me, smiling but earnest. “Don’t you want to find out
exactly where you belong on the Great Tree?”

The honest answer would have been: /What sane person could possibly care?/
We’d only known each other for five or six weeks, though; I wasn’t yet
comfortable enough with our relationship to be so blunt.

“It’s very late,” I said cautiously. “And you know I have to work tomorrow.”
I was still fighting my way up through post-doctoral qualifications in
physics, supporting myself by tutoring undergraduates and doing all the
tedious menial tasks which tenured academics demanded of their slaves. Lena
was a communications engineer – and at 25, the same age as I was, she’d had
real paid jobs for almost four years.

“You always have to work. Come on, Paul! It’ll take fifteen minutes.”

Arguing the point would have taken twice as long. So I told myself that it
could do no harm, and I followed her north through the gleaming city streets.

It was a mild winter night; the rain had stopped, the air was still. The
Children owned a sleek, imposing building in the heart of Sydney, prime real