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

estate, an ostentatious display of the movement’s wealth. ONE WORLD, ONE
FAMILY proclaimed the luminous sign above the entrance. There were bureaus in
over a hundred cities (although Eve took on various ‘culturally appropriate’
names in different places, from Sakti in parts of India, to Ele’ele in Samoa)
and I’d heard that the Children were working on street-corner vending-machine
sequencers, to recruit members even more widely.

In the foyer, a holographic bust of Mitochondrial Eve herself, mounted on a
marble pedestal, gazed proudly over our heads. The artist had rendered our
hypothetical ten-thousand-times-great grandmother as a strikingly beautiful
woman. A subjective judgement, certainly – but her lean, symmetrical
features, her radiant health, her purposeful stare, didn’t really strike me as
amenable to subtleties of interpretation. The aesthetic buttons being pushed
were labelled, unmistakably: /warrior/, /queen/, /goddess/. And I had to
admit that I felt a certain bizarre, involuntary swelling of pride at the
sight of her… as if her regal bearing and fierce eyes somehow ‘ennobled’ me
and all her descendants… as if the ‘character’ of the entire species, our
potential for virtue, somehow depended on having at least one ancestor who
could have starred in a Leni Riefenstahl documentary.

This Eve was black, of course, having lived in sub-Saharan Africa some 200,000
years ago – but almost everything else about her was guesswork. I’d heard
palaeontologists quibble about the too-modern features, not really compatible
with any of the sparse fossil evidence for her contemporaries’ appearance.
Still, if the Children had chosen as their symbol of universal humanity a few
fissured brown skull fragments from the Omo River in Ethiopia, the movement
would surely have vanished without a trace. And perhaps it was simply
mean-spirited of me to think of their Eve’s beauty as a sign of fascism. The
Children had already persuaded over two million people to acknowledge,
explicitly, a common ancestry which transcended their own superficial
differences in appearance; this all-inclusive ethos seemed to undercut any
argument linking their obsession with /pedigree/ to anything unsavoury.

I turned to Lena. “You know the Mormons baptised her posthumously, last
year?”

She shrugged the appropriation off lightly. “Who cares? This Eve belongs to
everyone, equally. Every culture, every religion, every philosophy. Anyone
can claim her as their own; it doesn’t diminish her at all.” She regarded the
bust admiringly, almost reverently.

I thought: /She sat through four hours of Marx Brothers films with me last
week – bored witless, but uncomplaining. So I can do this for her, can’t I?/
It seemed like a simple matter of give and take – and it wasn’t as if I was
being pressured into an embarrassing haircut, or a tattoo.

We walked through into the sequencing lounge.

We were alone, but a disembodied voice broke through the ambience of
endangered amphibians and asked us to wait. The room was plushly carpeted,