A?da had played the game more overtly. This had basically consisted of waiting the others out to see what they would do, and then making countermoves. The other Eves decided early, and stuck with those decisions. All of Dinah’s children—she ended up having five of them—were recognizably of a type. The same was true of Ivy’s three, and Tekla’s six. Julia only got to choose once. Camila’s sixteen offspring varied from one to the next, as she tinkered with her decisions based on behaviors she was observing among her first children. But she had never wavered from the general template that she had laid out during the Council of the Seven Eves.
A?da’s seven children, however, were all different. Exactly what she was thinking was known only to Moira, the Keeper of Secrets, the Mother of Races. For the other Eves told Moira what they wanted in confidence, and she took those confidences to her grave. But it was plain enough—and in any event, it became the accepted version of history—that the first five children of A?da had been conceived as reactions to what other Eves—all except Moira—were doing.
A?da’s stance toward the others had been well articulated in the Curse. She knew that the other six Eves would always loathe her personally and that this feeling would inevitably be transferred to her offspring. Human nature being what it was, Dinan children, thousands of years from now, would be throwing rocks at A?dan children on playgrounds and making jokes about cannibalism. They would never be assimilated into the society descended from the Four. Therefore, to the extent that Dinah was making choices about the virtues that her offspring would embody, and thereby making a move in the game, A?da sought a countermove. Which might consist of conceiving a child that would be like Dinah’s, except more so. Or of inventing an anti-Dinan, a type of human uniquely suited to exploiting the weaknesses in the Dinan type.
Thus the first five children of A?da. She had, however, been unable to employ the same strategy vis-à-vis Moira, for the basic reason that Moira knew exactly what A?da was doing, down to the specific DNA base pairs that had been altered in her ova. If this were a game, then Eve Moira always had the last move. The failures of her first eight pregnancies had only deepened the mystery. Since she had never articulated her choice, no one really knew what she had done, which made Moirans an enigmatic race, not only to the other races, but to themselves. But it was plainly the case that Moirans were the only race capable of “going epi.” Kath Two’s genome, like that of every other life-form, was fixed. A copy of it lived in every cell in her body. But which of those genes were being expressed at a given time, and which were lying dormant, was changeable to a degree far beyond what humans were normally capable of. It would have amounted to a kind of superpower, had there been a way to control it. But, certain hoary old legends to the contrary, there wasn’t. Kath Two never knew when she might fall asleep for a week and wake up a different person named Kath Three. Sometimes the results were brilliant. Rarely they were fatal. Sometimes they were inconvenient, or downright embarrassing. Most of the latter cases had something to do with what happened, like it or not, when a Moiran fell in love. In any case, this was the choice that Eve Moira had made and the gift she had conferred on her daughter, Cantabrigia. And it was assumed that she had done so because she believed that this degree of plasticity would somehow bring the world back into balance against the choices that A?da had been making.
Julia, the One, looked to make the best of a bad situation by endowing her offspring with qualities that would make them useful and important in spite of much smaller numbers. She had already expressed, during the Council of the Seven Eves, the idea that there was real value in the ability to envision possible futures. And she had linked it to leadership, or, failing that, to the ability to give useful advice to leaders. When that trait ran out of control and sought dark paths it led to depression, paranoia, and other forms of mental illness. The challenge then was to find a way of combining that trait with a more positive mentality. Julia’s research—and she did a lot of research—therefore tended to center on the history of sages, seers, ecstatics, shamans, artists, depressives, and paranoiacs throughout history, and the extent to which those traits could be localized to specific base pairs in their genomes and fostered by acculturation.