“Sure. But mostly we’re learning how to get what we want. You asked why we do what we do. I would have thought that was obvious. The meaning of life is to make new life. Nothing more. We just never understood the scale on which the drama was being played.”
“What do you mean?” Christopher asked, grabbing at Keith’s elbow.
Keith stopped and turned to face him. “You look at recent history and ask how we could do so many things that are anti-survival. Ocean pollution. Resource depletion. Ozone destruction. It isn’t just that we didn’t know. We kept right on after we did know. Because none of that matters. None of it. In the last hundred meters you give it everything. Because in this race, if you hold back, you die.”
“Are you answering the question I asked?”
“You still don’t see it?”
“No.”
Keith turned away and resumed walking, and Christopher hurried to keep up with him. “The Creator has a master plan, Christopher. And we’ve been following it for four billion years. It carried
“In the Church of Sociobiology, maybe. I’m not a believer.”
Nodding, Keith said, “That’s fine. But it’s a funny thing about Nature. She doesn’t give a high hoot what we believe. Everything goes on just the same.”
“Biology is destiny.”
“And purpose.”
“What happened to free will? What about our choice? Doesn’t it count? Doesn’t it exist?”
Keith stopped and gazed at Christopher, his head cocked at an angle. “Choice is noise on a picture with this scale,” he said. “I’ll gladly trade choice for destiny and purpose. Don’t you understand, Christopher?
Later, as they shared a bench and a bottle of Canadian wine outside the shuttered Field Museum of Natural History—the irony of that was not lost on Christopher—Keith explained himself in less metaphysical terms.
“Whatever it was in the beginning, we’re now talking about a three-gene complex. Pieces or variants of it have been found in thirty-one species, all but three of them chordates. There’s every reason to think that it’s found its highest, purest expression in us. I think of
“The name doesn’t mean anything, really. That’s what it was called when it was a very minor mystery in comparative biochemistry. But you won’t find anything about it in
“Three genes, A-B-C. Three messages. Direction—the where. Motivation—the why. And the activator, the little thirty-three codon sequence that says, ‘Go-go-go.’ ”
His initial objections having been beaten down into silence, if not surrender, Christopher had listened with the kind of stunned amazement seen on the faces of young children after their first magic show. It was not his credulity which was being tested, but the agility of his mind. He was being shown marvels, and they had power and poetry even if he did not believe they were real.
“It’s funny what happens when you only get one Chi gene expressed,” Keith was saying. “All the people through history who felt the call of the night sky. All the fanciful invention of heavens and wheels within wheels. They were pointed in the right direction, but never understood why.
“And the way life here has spread into every possible nook and crevice, obeying the second part of the code. B for babies. B for be fecund. Go forth and multiply. Fill the world with your progeny.
“And the activator, the trickiest of all, the one that flips the ambition switch to high. A-positives have to find their own directions, their own reasons. But the restlessness that sends them looking comes from inside. Hillary had it. Thor Heyerdahl. Earhart. You don’t need a microscope to make a list. But if we had a sample of their DNA, we’d find it, right there on the twenty-first chromosome. I don’t doubt it for a minute.”
“So the Chosen really do exist,” Christopher said.
“Not the way you mean it. Three genes gives eight permutations, not even considering mutations and unexpressed recessives. Nothing is ever as simple as a geneticist says it is,” Keith said, showing a smile. “But the triple actives—the pure Chi-positives—they’re the core of the Diaspora.”
“And the Chi-negatives? Are they the core of Homeworld?”
“Who knows?” Keith said, interrupting his answer for a swig from the bottle. “Homeworlders don’t tend to present themselves at the lab for testing. But if I were going to guess, I’d say that they’re mostly B-positives— they’re the most hidebound, the most sessile.”
“That makes it sound like the different combinations have recognizable personalities.”
“Not officially,” Keith said. “But of course they do. A gene that’s not expressed in structure or behavior wouldn’t be important. I’ve processed more than two thousand applicants. I can call them eight times out of ten. These aren’t just genotypes. They’re human archetypes. It’s affected how I deal with people, actually. When I meet someone for the first time, all I see is their Chi attribute.”
“What is it you see?”
“I told you part of it already,” Keith said. “Think of the A gene as ambition, the B as the breeding instinct, and C as the Call, and you can just about figure them out yourself.”
“A-positives are adventurers,” Christopher said slowly. “B-positives are nestmakers. C-positives—what, hear voices?”
“More or less. I call them the dreamers. Pure faith, pure reason, pure art. Priests, physicists, and philosophers.”
“Do the traits combine?”
“Of course. And there’s more variation in the combinations. BCs are the good citizens—workers and soldiers. The Call expresses itself as duty, allegiance. But put ambition and the Call together and you get a Creator—an artist or an inventor.”
“Loi. She’d be an AC-positive, then?”
“Probably.”
“And Jessie a nestmaker. What else is there?”
“Everyone’s favorite—the AB-positives. Ambition and nest-making builds kings and tycoons.”
“And the pure Chi-positives? ”
Another swallow. “Statesmen, saints, and avatars. And there are precious few of them.”
Christopher counted. “Seven. One more. You didn’t answer before. Who
“Can’t you figure it out?” Keith asked, coughing. “Why do you think there are so many meaningless lives? They’re the people whose bodies give them no direction, no purpose. They don’t burn. They don’t want. They just are—instant to instant, day to day, like some cruel joke of nature. The hollow-chested Tin Men. The empty people. The damned.”
The bottle was empty, and the sky overhead winter-black. They walked back in silence toward where the Avanti was parked, Christopher withdrawn, trying to absorb—or was it resist?—what he had heard. Keith’s steps and spirit seemed lighter, the difficult obligation discharged without disaster.
“I don’t know what to think,” Christopher said when they finally reached the car.
“Believe what you want,” Keith said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it? How many Chi-positives are going on
“I have no idea.”
“Ten thousand?”
“Oh, no,” Keith said, shaking his head vigorously. “Even if we could find that many. Chi-positives are difficult. It’s just the way they are. They’re the glue—but did you ever try building something from glue alone?
