Passage

P. 14,206

The working line divides every nineteen hours, and has kept roughly that pace since before my grandmother was born. By the time the stewardship came down to me it had lived through more cell generations than our species has managed lifetimes, all of them in my family’s keeping.

In the registry it is the Ansah Working Line, Culture 1. In the refectory it is ansah, lower case, a common noun: ansah and barley, ansah dumplings, smoked ansah strung from the rafters for Landing Day. Everything at Hollis with muscle in it comes out of the six reactors on Deck Nine, and everything in the reactors descends, by unbroken division, from twelve cubic centimetres of thigh muscle that Miriam Ansah gave the food programme in the colony’s first year, when she was thirty-one.

She was one of sixty donors. The number matters. The plan was redundancy — sixty banked lines in rotation, no single point of failure. But the early years were hungry, and hungry people cut corners. Lines were lost to mould, to a freezer that failed across a dark season, to a contamination event nobody would ever admit to. The Ansah line came through because it was the least trouble. It adapted to the defined medium when the serum ran out. It tolerated the reactors running two degrees cold. Where other cultures sulked and died, it divided. By year twenty it was the only line left, and people stopped saying the Ansah line and started saying the food.

At passage nine the engineers had given it telomerase and disabled the machinery by which a cell counts its own divisions. A human myoblast left to itself divides about forty times and then stops — doesn’t die, just stops, the way a person stops. The line has not stopped in a hundred and forty years.

Miriam lived long enough to see it become everything. She ate it for thirty years and said grace over it with the rest of the hall, which my family has always taken as settling the theological question. Her consent recording is two sentences long. “It’s meat, I’m not using it. Feed the children and don’t be precious.”

I am the fourth steward. My work, near enough, is a ledger of divisions.

P. 14,213

The centennial survey was Isak Brandt’s project, and it said nothing we didn’t half know. The line’s modal chromosome number is now sixty-seven. Miriam’s was forty-six. It carries some fourteen thousand substitutions that she never carried, and each reactor has drifted into its own clade — the cooks have claimed for years that Reactor Three browns differently, and it turns out they were right. No human genome in the archive, living or dead, matches the thing we eat. The medical office appended its usual note: every variant assessed, all benign, watchfulness ongoing.

It was the last section that started the trouble. Brandt proposed, formally, that the line be described as a new species. He had a precedent from Earth, six hundred years old: a cervical tumour line that outgrew every laboratory that housed it, for which a taxonomist had proposed the name Helacyton gartleri — a new genus, on the grounds that it was clonal, ecologically distinct, and no longer answered to the biology of the woman it came from. Nobody had accepted it then. Brandt suggested, mildly, that nobody then had been fed by it.

The colony split along a seam I could not have predicted. The people who had always been quietly squeamish — who had eaten ansah their whole lives while carefully not thinking about the genitive — were relieved. A species. A domesticate. Nothing stranger on the plate than a pig.

My grandmother Efua stopped eating it the day the paper posted.

“She fed us with her body,” she said. “That was the arrangement. That’s what the grace was for. If it’s an animal, then it’s just an animal — and she’s just dead.”

P. 4

The master bank holds two hundred and fourteen vials at passage three, frozen in year one, and the protocol requires a viability test every fifty years. My rotation fell due that winter. I will not pretend the timing was entirely the protocol’s.

Vial forty-one. You warm it fast and dilute it slow, and then you wait to see who’s home. They were slow to attach. They wanted coated flasks and coaxing and thirty-seven degrees exactly, and they doubled in forty-one hours, sulking the whole way. And when two of them touched, they stopped — both of them, politely, at the boundary. Contact inhibition. A courtesy the working line lost before my grandmother was born.

Karyotype: forty-six, XX. Genome: hers, exact to the screening record, letter for letter.

I sat with the flask a long time. Fourth steward of the line, and the first person in a century to look at cells that were, without qualification, Miriam.

The comparison runs came back that week. The working line differs from her at fourteen thousand sites; I differ from her at four million, the way any woman differs from her great-great-grandmother. By count of letters, the vats are close family and I am nearly a stranger. But my letters are carried on forty-six chromosomes, made the ordinary way, by a mother and a father; the vats’ are heaped on sixty-seven, made by nothing but error and staying on. And the vats will never stop, whereas the cells in vial forty-one had perhaps forty divisions left in them from the day she gave them.

I could culture Miriam. I could not keep her.

P. 23

The hearing was not a court; the council only wanted a recommendation, and Brandt is a decent man. I gave them the numbers, both sets, and declined the arithmetic of nearer and farther. Asked directly — is it still her — I said no. It is her descendant. So am I. Neither of us should be struck from the register for having changed.

Brandt offered the family the epithet, which was generous, since the alternative was Latin for vat. The description stands as Sarcocyton ansahae, holotype a cryopreserved sample of the Reactor One clade, and her name goes wherever her cells go, the same as mine goes with me.

The reactors never paused — nobody was going to starve over a point of taxonomy. But the bank was reclassified that day. Not seed stock. Human tissue: her remains, released to her family. Which is how, a hundred and three years after her death, Miriam Ansah came to have a funeral.

It was a strange service, mourning a woman survived by her own flesh. Nobody quite knew the tenses. The eldest of us had eaten her; the youngest never would; the difference between them turned out to be a paper and a name. Efua spoke last and shortest. At the wake there was smoked ansah, because there always is, and I watched my grandmother take some and eat.

“You’ve gone back to it,” I said.

“It’s not her,” she said. “It’s what she raised. I don’t mind being fed by the family.”

P. 44

Protocol says a viability culture is scored, logged and discarded. I logged it and kept it, which will surprise no steward who reads this.

This week the cells crossed their limit. They have grown broad and flat and still, and they will not divide again — not for better medium, not for growth factor, not for me. They have not died. Senescent cells don’t die on schedule; they only stop counting. I split nothing, I feed them, they sit in the warm and persist, which is as good a description of retirement as I know.

The line she consented to was mortal, and was made otherwise afterwards, and everything the survey measured — the extra chromosomes, the fourteen thousand changes, the whole long swerve away from her — sits downstream of that one repair. What we broke so she could feed us forever is the same thing that stopped her being the one who does.

This morning I ruled off the small ledger: P. 44, terminal, forty-one hours, no successors. Then I opened the day’s page of the great one. The working line stood at fourteen thousand, two hundred and sixty-one, and by tonight it will be further on, as it always is. There is no column anywhere in that book for last.