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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: At the request of his new girlfriend, Paul, a post-doctoral physics student, begrudgingly agrees to have a sample of his blood analyzed by the Children of Eve. The techno-cult claims their mitochondrial DNA sequencing has traced back 200,000 years to identify a sub-Saharan Homo Sapien as the single mother of the entire human species. Rival groups discount the claims, and the race is on to provide definitive proof. Paul's blood analysis shows the migration patterns of his ancestors, but the limited technology allows only approximations. Curiosity ... along with the cult's funding ... prompts Paul to take on a project that, if successful, will be able to exactly identify the ancestral placement of every human who ever lived ... and once and for all dispel the tragic notion that we are separated by race.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Interzone #92, 1995
Fictionwise Release Date: September 2001

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Words: 9203
Reading time: 26-36 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
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All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

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 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 judgment, certainly--but her lean, symmetrical features, her radiant health, her purposeful stare, didn't really strike me as amenable to subtleties of interpretation. The esthetic buttons being pushed were labeled, 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, with a circular sofa in the middle. Artwork from around the world decorated the walls, from an uncredited Arnhem Land dot painting to a Francis Bacon print. The explanatory text below was a worry: dire Jungian psychobabble about "universal primal imagery" and "the collective unconscious." I groaned aloud--but when Lena asked what was wrong, I just shook my head innocently.

A man in white trousers and a short white tunic emerged from a camouflaged door, wheeling a trolley packed with impressively minimalist equipment, reminiscent of expensive Scandinavian audio gear. He greeted us both as "cousin", and I struggled to keep a straight face. The badge on his tunic bore his name, Cousin André, a small reflection hologram of Eve, and a sequence of letters and numbers which identified his mitotype. Lena took charge, explaining that she was a member, and she'd brought me along to be sequenced.