Kath Two followed Beled into the room and then collided with his backside, bouncing off him and taking a step back. He had come to a dead stop upon entering and dropped into a slight crouch, one foot ahead of the other and pointed straight ahead. Sidling around him, Kath Two followed his gaze, and his toe’s azimuth, across the room.
The Bolt Hole was a cozy little place with an oval table just big enough for seven. Doc was seated nearest the door, flanked by Memmie and by his robot. Across from him was Ariane Casablancova. Seated at the far end of the table, facing the door, was the man that Ty must have meant when he had spoken of “the big fella.” Because of his position behind the table, all that was visible were his head, shoulders, and arms. The arms seemed long and quite heavily constructed. What really drew attention, though, was the architecture of the big fella’s skull. His head looked like the head that a normal person’s head would develop into if they kept growing beyond adulthood into some more pronounced phase of development. Thick reddish-brown eyebrows did little to conceal a prominent ridge of bone above the eyes. When Kath Two first saw him he was draining a pint glass, which looked even smaller in his hand than it had in Beled’s; but when he set it down to expose the lower half of his clean-shaven face, she saw the set of his jaw, and the size of his teeth, and understood that the seventh member of the Seven was not just any A?dan but a Neoander.
EVE A?DA HAD FOUNDED SEVEN STRAINS OVER THE COURSE OF THIRTEEN separate pregnancies. The failure rate had been so high because the alterations she had demanded from Eve Moira had been so extreme. She had been willing to accept some unsuccessful pregnancies, given that she saw herself as having plenty of time until menopause compared to all the other Eves save Camila. And Camila she did not see as a competitor, given that Camila wanted to raise a race of people who were not inclined to compete with anyone.
The Eves, confined to a small volume of inhabitable space on Cleft for the remainder of their lives, were impoverished in many ways. Of information, however, they had an inexhaustible wealth. Essentially every document that had ever been digitized was available to them, at least until such time as the memory chips on which it was all archived began to fail: a decay that had begun on a small scale but that would take decades to have any serious effect.
A?da began to research human genetics. To the extent that her genome was the final expression of a long historical process—a dense and cryptic encoding of everything that her ancestors had learned by managing to survive long enough to reproduce—this meant learning about the history of human evolution as well. Her genome, like that of all the other Arkies, had been sequenced and evaluated before she had left Earth. A copy of the report had been provided to her. It contained information as to what parts of the world her ancestors had come from. Much of this was what you would expect for an Italian woman, but there were details she hadn’t known, such as some genetic connections to Northern African Jews, to an isolated tribe in the Caucasus, and to the Nordic peoples. Based on certain genetic markers it was also clear that, like many Europeans, she was part Neanderthal.