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

slaughtered for belonging to the wrong kinship groups – but soon, /everyone/
will understand that there are older, deeper blood ties which confound all
their shallow historical prejudices.”

/You mean… like the Biblical Eve confounded all the prejudices of
fundamentalist Christians? Or like the image of the Earth from space put an
end to war and pollution?/ I tried diplomatic silence; Lena regarded me with
consternation, as if she couldn’t quite believe that I could harbour any
doubts after my own unexpected /blood ties/ had been revealed.

I said, “Do you remember the Rwandan massacres?”

“Of course.”

“Weren’t they more to do with a class system – which the Belgian colonists
exacerbated for the sake of administrative convenience – than anything you
could describe as enmity between /kinship groups/? And in the Balkans –”

Lena cut me off. “Look, sure, any incident you can point to will have a
convoluted history. I’m not denying that. But it doesn’t mean that the
solution has to be impossibly complicated, too. And if everyone involved had
known what we know, had /felt/ what we’ve felt –” she closed her eyes and
smiled radiantly, an expression of pure contentment and tranquillity “– that
deep sense of belonging, through Eve, to a single family which encompasses all
of humanity… do you honestly imagine that they could have turned on each other
like that?”

I should have protested, in tones of bewilderment: /What ‘deep sense of
belonging’? I felt nothing. And the only thing the Children of Eve are doing
is preaching to the converted./

What was the worst that could have happened? If we’d broken up, right there
and then, over /the political significance of palaeogenetics/, then the
relationship was obviously doomed from the start. And however much I hated
confrontation, it was a fine line between tact and dishonesty, between
accommodating our differences and concealing them.

And yet. The issue seemed far too arcane to be worth fighting over – and
though Lena clearly held some passionate views on it, I couldn’t really see
the topic arising again if I kept my big mouth shut, just this once.

I said, “Maybe you’re right.” I slipped an arm around her, and she turned and
kissed me. It began to rain again, heavily, the downpour strangely calm in
the still air. We ended up back at Lena’s flat, saying very little for the
rest of the night.

I was a coward and a fool, of course – but I had no way of knowing, then, just
how much it would cost me.

—