It had not taken long for the other Eves to make similar calculations. As Arkies, picked in the Casting of Lots, Camila and A?da were younger than the others, with two to three decades of fertility ahead of them. If they decided to become baby factories, and if they were lucky, each of them could conceivably bear as many as twenty children before menopause. Dinah, Ivy, Moira, and Tekla, all in their early thirties, might bear a few each. Roughly speaking, therefore, those four had as much combined childbearing power, if you wanted to think about it that way, as the younger pair of Camila and A?da.
Julia, as she had pointed out, would be lucky to bear one child before menopause. And she had not needed Doob to explain the exponential math. The Julians were going to be swamped. They were going to be mere curiosities. People in the distant future, coming home from work, would exclaim to their partners, “You’ll never guess what I saw today—an honest to god Julian!”
Those were the mathematical rudiments of the new Great Game, and the roots of much of what had happened since then. The preponderance of later historical scholarship suggested that most of the Eves didn’t know that they were playing a game until they were a few years into it. A?da, based on what she had said in her Curse, might have been the exception to that rule. But decisions made about one’s children were the most personal decisions that one could make, and no mother of sound mind would have admitted to herself, at the time, that she was playing a sort of game vis-à-vis the other mothers.
In a way it would have been simpler had they gone about it more cold-bloodedly.
Consciously or not, the Seven Eves sorted themselves into Four, Two, and One. The Four were Dinah, Ivy, Tekla, and Moira. The Two were Camila and A?da. Arithmetic suggested that the descendants of the Four would be about as numerous as those of the Two. Existing friendships and affinities already linked the Four and created an unspoken compact, not articulated until they were long dead, to the effect that their children would embody complementary qualities. Dinans, in a sense, did not have to be complete humans as long as Ivyns were around to do some of the things they weren’t as good at. This was a blunt way of saying it, which was why it went unsaid for a long time, but hundreds of years later the descendants of the Four could look back and see that it had always been so. By that time it was so deeply ingrained in their DNA and their cultures that there was no going back.
The Two, by contrast, had no natural affinity with each other, and no existing relationship. Camila and A?da had not met until shortly before the Council of the Seven Eves. All that they shared—and it wasn’t much to go on—was an aversion to Julia. Both of them had, at one point or another, fallen under Julia’s spell only to be disappointed by her. In Camila’s case the seduction had happened during a White House dinner. For her part, A?da had been talked by Julia into joining the Swarm, only to end up leading the rebel faction that had deposed and mutilated her. Given the way that had all turned out, it was of course unlikely that Camila, or anyone of sound mind, would consciously align herself with A?da. And yet the mathematics of the Four and the Two created a kind of gravity, invisibly drawing her that way. The breach that had opened between Camila and Dinah during the Council of the Seven Eves would not be forgotten.
Considered more calmly, Camila’s words had a persuasive power that couldn’t be denied. It simply was the case that their descendants would be living bottled up in confined spaces for many generations to come. As Luisa had demonstrated through her research, and as the people of the Cloud Ark had just finished proving in spectacular fashion, it wasn’t a good way for normal, unaltered humans to live. If the survival of the human race depended on rewiring their brains to make them better at such a lifestyle, then perhaps they had best get on with it.
In a way, that decision had been taken out of their hands by Camila, who had made her choice clear, and only needed to work out the details with Moira. She had, in effect, made the first clear move in the great genetic game. And contrary to her own stated principles it was, in a way, the most aggressive move possible: she had let them know that her descendants—who were likely to be quite numerous—would get along just fine in the conditions they would all be facing for the first ten, twenty, or hundred generations. The other six were left to follow her lead or to react against it.
Dinah, Ivy, and Tekla in essence reacted against it, with Moira eventually making another choice; but the historical fact was that Moira’s descendants had, more often than not, been part of the bloc of the Four.