“Sounds important to me,” Doob said. “What am I missing?”
“We have tens of thousands of human genomes recorded in digital form. From all different parts of the world.”
“So there’s your heterozygosity. That’s what you’re saying,” Doob prompted her. “That’s why”—he glanced at Markus—“the HGA wasn’t really needed.”
“Yes, but there’s a but,” Moira said.
“Okay, what’s the but?”
“The digitized sequences, as I’m sure you’ll understand, are only useful so long as we have the equipment needed to transcribe them into functional chromosomes in viable human cells. By contrast, to make use of a sperm sample, all we need is a turkey baster and some lube. But to make use of a DNA sequence stored on a thumb drive, we need—”
“All of the equipment in your lab,” Doob said.
Moira looked a bit impatient. “What you are referring to as my lab bears the same relationship to a proper lab as some ones and zeroes on a thumb drive does to a living human. It is a collection of crated equipment that cannot even be unpacked and used in zero gravity. And even if we set it all up and turned it all on, it would be useless without a staff of Ph.D.-level molecular biologists.”
“Really? Useless?” Markus asked.
Moira sighed. “For small-scale work, one sample at a time, well, that is easier. But to reconstruct a genetically diverse human population—”
“But, Moira,” Markus said, “we cannot do that anyway until so many other things are in place. A large population cannot live in arklets eating algae. We need to establish a viable and safe colony first. Then, we build your lab. Then, we create a more diverse ecosystem: better food, greater stability. Only then do we even begin to worry about the heterozygosity of the human population. Until that time, we have more than enough people to create healthy non-inbred children just by the usual process of fucking each other.”
“That is all true,” Moira said.
“And that is the basis of my statement that the HGA was bullshit,” Markus concluded.
“You’re saying,” Doob said, “that if we had all of the prerequisites in place—the colony, the ecosystem, the talent—needed to actually exploit the HGA—”
“—we would no longer need it, yes, this is my point!” Markus said. “Can we please stop wasting time on it now?”
“How would you prefer to be spending time, Markus?” Moira asked, giving Markus an amused, owlish look through her glasses.
“Talking about how to get there. How to realize that situation we were just talking of.”
“And how might I contribute to that, given that the HGA is ninety-seven percent destroyed and none of my equipment will be usable for a long time?”
“I want to talk of preserving that equipment,” Markus said, “preserving it against all hazards, and then getting it to a safe situation where we can one day construct this laboratory you speak of.”
“It’s about as safe as we can make it, isn’t that so?” Moira asked. “It was given a sort of privileged position off of Node X—quite close to Amalthea. It’s not living dangerously, the way we are at the moment.”
She was referring to the notion, frequently discussed by Arkitects, of the Cone of Protection that supposedly existed in the lee of Amalthea. To the extent that the paths of incoming bolides were predictable, Amalthea could be pointed into them and used as a sort of battering ram. The forward surface of the asteroid would take a beating—but a solid slug of ancient nickel and iron could survive quite a lot. Anything situated up against its aft surface would be sheltered against virtually all hazards. But the protected zone did not, of course, stretch back infinitely far. The farther you lagged behind Amalthea, the more likely you were to get hit by a bolide coming in from an off angle. The Mining Colony was in the safest position, since, by its nature, it had to be right up against the asteroid. Almost as safe was the cluster of modules connected to Node X, immediately aft of the SCRUM, which was where all of Moira’s gear had been stashed. Behind that, the protected zone narrowed, a long acute cone, finally disappearing altogether somewhere aft of the Caboose. When Moira joked about “living dangerously” she referred to the fact that T3, the third torus, in which they were sitting now, was rather wide and rather far aft, placing it close to the limits of that cone. Efforts had been made to beef up its shielding, but it was still at higher risk than many other parts of Izzy.
Markus nodded. “Your stuff is pretty safe. But it would be safer if we moved it inside of Amalthea. I have talked to Dinah about it. She says that they could mine out cavities and store things of great importance there.”
A silence while Doob and Moira pondered it.
On one level, Markus’s proposal was perfectly obvious. Of course anything would be safer inside of a huge metal asteroid.