“Manual repair?” Julia asked.
“I should put that in scare quotes,” Moira said, reaching up with both hands and crooking her fingers. “Obviously I’m not literally using my hands. But with the equipment in there”—she tossed her head in the direction of the lab—“I can isolate a cell—a sperm or an ovum—and read its genome. I’m skipping over a lot of details, obviously. But the point is that I can get a digital record of its DNA. Once that’s in hand, it turns into a software exercise—the data can be evaluated and compared to huge databases that shipped up as part of the lab. It’s possible to identify places on a given chromosome where a bit of DNA got damaged by a cosmic ray or radiation from the reactor. It is then possible to repair those breaks by splicing in a reasonable guess as to what was there originally.”
“It sounds like a lot of work,” Camila said. “If there is anything I can do to ease your burdens and make myself useful, I am at your disposal.”
“Thank you. We will all be working at it for months,” Moira said, “before anything happens. We have very little else to do.”
“Excuse me, but what is the point of discussing this, since we have no sperm to work with?” A?da asked.
“We don’t need sperm,” Moira said.
“We don’t need sperm to get pregnant! This is news to me,” A?da said, with a sharp laugh.
Moira went on coolly. “There is a process known as parthenogenesis, literally virgin birth, by which a uniparental embryo can be created out of a normal egg. It’s been done with animals. The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got.”
“Can you do it here, Moira?” asked Luisa.
“It’s not fundamentally more difficult than the sorts of tricks I was just describing in the case of repairing damaged sperm. In some ways, it would actually be easier.”
“You can get us pregnant . . . by ourselves,” Tekla said.
“Yes. Everyone except Luisa.”
“I can have a child of whom I am both the mother and the father,” A?da said. The idea clearly fascinated her. Suddenly she was no longer the prickly, brittle A?da but the warm and engaged girl who must have charmed the powers that be during the Casting of Lots.
“It will take some tricky work in the lab,” Moira said. “But that is the whole point of having brought the lab safely to this place.”
They all pondered it for a bit. Julia was the first to speak up. “Stepping into my traditional role as scientific ignoramus: Do you mean to say that you can clone us?”
Moira nodded—not to say yes, but to say I understand your question. “There are different ways to do it, Julia. One way would indeed produce clones—all offspring genetically identical to the mother. This isn’t what we want. For one thing, it would not solve our basic problem—the lack of males.”
Camila’s hand went up. Moira, clearly annoyed by the interruption, blinked once, then nodded at her. “Is it really a problem?” Camila asked. “As long as we have the lab and can go on making more clones, would it really be such a bad thing to have a society with no males? At least for several generations?”
Moira silenced her with a gentle pushing movement of one hand. “That’s a question for later. There is another problem with this version of parthenogenesis, which is, again, that all offspring are the same. Exact copies. To get some genetic diversity, we need to use something called automictic parthenogenesis. Look, it’s a long story, but the point is that in normal sexual reproduction there is crossing over of chromosomes during meiosis. It’s a form of natural recombination of DNA. It’s what causes your children to look sort of like you, but not exactly like you. In the form of parthenogenesis that I am proposing to use, there would be that crossing over. An element of randomness.”
“And both boys and girls?” Dinah asked.
“That’s harder,” Moira admitted. “Synthesizing a Y chromosome is no joke. My prediction is that the first set of babies—perhaps the first few sets of them—will all be female. Because we simply need to get the population up. During that time I can be working on the Y chromosome problem. Later on, I hope that some little boys will result.”
“But these little girls—and later the boys—will still be made out of our own DNA?” Ivy asked.
“Yes.”
“So they’ll be quite similar to us genetically.”
“If I do nothing about it,” Moira said, “they’ll be like sisters. Perhaps even more similar than that implies. But there are a few tricks that I can use to create a wider range of genotypes out of the same source material. Perhaps they’ll be more like cousins. I don’t know, it’s never been tried.”