The Martians(114)

They drank beer, talked small talk. Two were vets; their lane leader, the one who had been pregnant, was a bit older, a chemist in a pharmaceutical lab near the pool. Her baby was being watched by her co-op that night. They all looked up to her, Smith saw, even here. These days she brought the baby to the pool and swam just as powerfully as ever, parking the baby-carrier just beyond the splash line. Smith's muscles melted in the hot water, he sipped his beer while listening to them.

One of the women looked down at her breasts in the water and laughed. “They float like pull buoys.”

Smith had already noticed that.

“No wonder women swim better than men.”

“As long as they aren't so big they interfere with the hydrodynamics.”

Their leader looked down through her fogged glasses, pink-faced, hair tied up, misted, demure. “I wonder if mine float less because I'm nursing.”

“But all that milk.”

“Yes but the water in the milk is neutral density, it's the fat that floats. It could be that empty breasts float even more than full ones.”

“Whichever has more fat, yuck.”

“I could run an experiment, nurse him from just one side and then get in and see—” But they were laughing too hard for her to complete this scenario. “It would work! Why are you laughing!”

They only laughed more. Frank was cracking up, looking blissed, blessed. These women friends trusted them. But Smith still felt set apart. He looked at their lane leader: a pink bespectacled goddess, serenely vague and unaware; the scientist as heroine; the first full human being.


But later when he tried to explain this feeling to Frank, or even just to describe it, Frank shook his head. “It's a bad mistake to worship women,” he warned. “A category error. Women and men are so much the same it isn't worth discussing the difference. The genes are identical almost entirely, you know that. A couple hormonal expressions and that's it. So they're just like you and me."

“More than a couple.”

“Not much more. We all start out female, right? So you're better off thinking that nothing major ever really changes that. Penis just an oversize clitoris. Men are women. Women are men. Two parts of a reproductive system, completely equivalent.”

Smith stared at him. “You're kidding.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well—I've never seen a man swell up and give birth to a new human being, let me put it that way.”

“So what? It happens, it's a specialized function. You never see women ejaculating either. But we all go back to being the same afterward. Details of reproduction only matter a tiny fraction of the time. No, we're all the same. We're all in it together. There are no differences.”

Smith shook his head. It would be comforting to think so. But the data did not support the hypothesis. Ninety-five percent of all the murders in history had been committed by men. This was a difference.

He said as much, but Frank was not impressed. The murder ratio was becoming more nearly equal on Mars, he replied, and much less frequent for everybody, thus demonstrating very nicely that the matter was culturally conditioned, an artifact of Terran patriarchy no longer relevant on Mars. Nurture rather than nature. Although it was a false dichotomy. Nature could prove anything you wanted, Frank insisted. Female hyenas were vicious killers, male bonobos and muriquis were gentle cooperators. It meant nothing, Frank said. It told them nothing.

But Frank had not hit a woman in the face without ever planning to.


Patterns in the fossil Inia data sets became clearer and clearer. Stochastic-resonance programs highlighted what had been preserved.

“Look here,” Smith said to Frank one afternoon when Frank leaned in to say good-bye for the day. He pointed at his computer screen. “Here's a sequence from my boto, part of the GX three-oh-four, near the juncture, see?”

“You've got a female then?”

“I don't know. I think this here means I do. But look, see how it matches with this part of the human genome. It's in Hillis eighty-fifty. . . .”

Frank came into his nook and stared at the screen. “Comparing junk to junk . . . I don't know. . . .”

“But it's a match for more than a hundred units in a row, see? Leading right into the gene for progesterone initiation.”

Frank squinted at the screen. “Um, well.” He glanced quickly at Smith.

Smith said, “I'm wondering if there's some really long-term persistence in junk DNA, all the way back to earlier mammal precursors to both these.”

“But dolphins are not our ancestors,” Frank said.

“There's a common ancestor back there somewhere.”

“Is there?” Frank straightened up. “Well, whatever. I'm not so sure about the pattern congruence itself. It's sort of similar, but, you know.”