Alternation

Marit, whole

I have had six daughters and each of them is a lot I drew.

That is the plain way to say it. When a whole woman conceives, one of her eggs finishes its division and then, with the help the founders built into us, simply keeps going: no joining, no second parent. What grows is a girl with one copy of everything. Which copy she gets is settled by chance, gene by gene, in the hour the egg divides. I had no more say in it than in the weather.

So Perpetua is one way of halving me. Oda is another, Sunniva another, Åse another, and the two who did not live were two more.

Kari died at three of a thing I carry paired and have never felt. In me it is covered. In her there was nothing to cover it. The Registry has the gene’s name and I have never wanted it. I know the arithmetic instead, because the founders wrote the arithmetic into the charter and every whole girl learns it at eleven: eight hundred people, seven years of ship, more damage in us than any village could carry quietly. Left to ordinary breeding, the bad recessives would have stayed hidden for ten generations and then, as the cousins married, come out one funeral at a time for a thousand years. Exposed in halves, every gene alone and every gene tested, they come out in three. That was the trade. The wholes of the first generation agreed to it. The halves of the first generation paid for it, and the halves of the second, and Kari.

Nobody says this at the table. At the table we say a half is honest, because there is nothing in her that is not in use.

There were men among the founders. Their halves were made in borrowed eggs, with the egg’s own kernel taken out and the man’s put in. The Y did not survive that. A half made of nothing but Y does not implant, and there was nothing on it we needed. So there have been no men since. People who read the old books think that is the strange part. It is not the strange part.

The strange part is my sister Britt. She was born seven years after me, to the same two halves, and she is me. Not like me. Me, to the letter, less the hundred-odd letters that mutation wrote into each of us separately. A half makes her eggs by simple division, so they are all the same egg, and two halves who have two daughters have had the same daughter twice. Every pair of whole sisters on this world is a pair of twins born years apart. Britt is a chandler, cannot hold a tune, and has never once in her life been afraid of anything, and we are the same person. If you want to know how much of a woman is her genome, that is the experiment, and it has been running here for two hundred years, and the answer is: less than you would think and more than you would like.

Between them my four living daughters carry about seven parts in eight of me. No one of them carries more than half. I look at them across a room and I can see which halving got my mother’s hands, which got the temper, which got the thing in the ear that makes all of us tilt our heads to listen. They are four readings of one text. I would not know how to choose between them, and I have never been asked to.

Perpetua, half

My mother says a half is honest. What she means is that I have no spare.

A whole has two of everything, and for most of what she is, only one of the pair speaks. The other sits behind it. She can carry a broken gene her whole life and never know, because its partner does the work. I carry nothing quietly. Whatever I have, I use. If a gene of mine is broken, I am the one who finds out.

That is why the early halves died. Not from anything the wholes did to them; from what the wholes gave them and could not feel. By my cohort it was mostly over. The Registry says the founders’ line, the rate at which halves stop dying of things that wholes survive, was crossed in the year I was born. Three of my year died. In my grandmother’s year it was a third of them. So I am one of the first who was tested and passed cheaply, and I have never known what to do with that.

Wren is a half too. There is no other kind of partner for a half. We joined, which is the word for it: an egg from each of us, put together the way the founders built, and the child that came was Ione.

Here is what a whole cannot say and I can. Ione has all of me. Not half, chosen by lot the way I was chosen out of my mother. All. There is no gene I have that she lacks. There is no gene Wren has that she lacks. She is the whole of two people, laid side by side. My mother is in me by half. I am in Ione entire.

Wren wanted a second. I said, “It’ll be Ione again.”

She said, “I know. I want to see what a different year does to her.”

So Bel came, five years after Ione, out of two more eggs that were, letter for letter, the same two. My eggs are all me. I cannot give a child a different me. Whatever I am was decided once, in my mother’s body, in the division that made me, and I hand it on unchanged to everyone I will ever have. Wholes talk about that as if it were a lack. I have never felt it as one. I have never had to wonder which of me a child would get.

Ione, whole

Bel and I are the same person born in different years, and we have stopped arguing about it, because there is nobody to argue with. She is me. When she says a thing I would not say, I have learned that what I am hearing is the five years, or the different teachers, or the fact that she was second and I was first. It is a strange place to look for yourself, in the gaps between you and your twin.

What I want to write down is the thing about my mothers.

Perpetua and Wren never mixed. Not in me. I carry the whole of each, but as two separate copies, one from each of them. At every gene I have Perpetua’s version and Wren’s version, and they sit opposite each other and never touch. A whole is a union. Nothing in her is blended. I am one of only two places in the world where my mothers are both present, and in me they are two texts bound in one cover.

When I halve, it is different. When my egg divides to make a daughter, the two copies are shuffled first. Lengths of Perpetua’s chromosome are swapped for lengths of Wren’s, and then the egg keeps one of each pair and lets the other go. So my daughters are not halves of me so much as they are mixtures of my mothers. Each of them is Perpetua and Wren combined, in a proportion the lot decides, for the first time. Halla is one such combination. Her sisters are others. The place my mothers meet is not me. It is my children.

Wren died the winter before Halla was born. Perpetua came to the birth and held her and said, “Well. There she is,” and I did not ask which one she meant.

The rate has been under the founders’ line for forty years now, and the wholes of my generation have the choice the charter always promised. We could stop. A whole can be made from two wholes’ eggs directly; the founders left that door in us. Bel has gone through it. Her daughters are wholes, made of half of her and half of Tam, sorted by lot the way the old people were, so that neither Bel nor Tam is entire in any of them and no two of them are alike. She is pleased with them. I said, “They’re like the pictures.” She said, “They’re like everyone who ever lived before us.”

I halved. I don’t have a reason I could give at the table. It is something to do with wanting the mixing to happen, having sat unmixed my whole life.

Halla, half

I am the first place Perpetua and Wren touched.

That is how my mother puts it, and I have checked it against the Registry, and it is true as far as anything about me is true. Every stretch of me is one of them or the other, in runs, with a seam wherever the swap was made, and the Registry will show me the seams if I ask. I asked once. Chromosome seven is Wren from one end to a point two-thirds along, and Perpetua the rest of the way. Chromosome two is nearly all Perpetua. Nobody planned it. My grandmothers, one of whom I never met, were combined in me by a division that took about a day and did not consult anyone.

I have nothing hidden. Whatever I am doing with a gene, that is the only gene I have there. If I am well, it is because both of them were, at every place that matters. There were four of us in my year and all four are well. The Registry no longer keeps a column for it.

My eggs are all the same egg. Every half knows that by the time she can read. I will never surprise anyone with what I give a child. But whoever I give it to, she will have all of it. I will not be a lot she drew. I will be in her entire, next to whoever I choose, the two of us unmixed, waiting for her daughters.

Perpetua is old now. When she visits she looks at my hands, which she says are Wren’s. I have checked that too. The stretch she would have to be looking at is her own. She looks anyway. I let her.