“I believe that Camila was merely saying that certain personality types, taken to an unhealthy extreme, are as bad as diagnosable mental illnesses per se. If not worse,” Julia said.
“I don’t want you to speak for me,” Camila said. “Please do not speak for me anymore, Julia.”
“I am merely trying to be helpful,” Julia said. But where the old J.B.F. would have said it reproachfully, the new one merely seemed exhausted.
Dinah broke in. “Well, what I am trying to say is that I don’t appreciate being labeled as a genetic freak that needs to be eradicated from the human future.”
“No one would say that of you, Dinah,” Ivy said. “Camila’s talking about the knuckle draggers who tried to kill her for wanting an education.”
“And what is your opinion?” Tekla asked Ivy.
“Similar to yours. Aggression is fine. It needs to be controlled. Directed. But the way to do that is through intelligence. Rational thought.”
That elicited a cackle from Aïda. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I was thinking about the Swarm. Eight hundred people all carefully hand-selected for intelligence and rational thought. In the end, all we could think about was how they tasted.”
“None of us ate each other,” Ivy said.
“But you thought about it,” Aïda said with a smile.
Dinah slammed her palm hard on the table. She sat still for a moment with her eyes closed tight, then stood up and walked out of the room.
“I guess she is not disciplined or intelligent enough to control her aggression!” Aïda cracked.
“It is a form of self-discipline,” Tekla said. “So that she would not kill you. You see, Aïda, thinking about doing such things and doing are different. This is why greater discipline is a requirement.”
“Sweetie, what do you mean when you speak of discipline?” Moira asked. “I’m just trying to cash that word out in terms of genetics. I can find a genetic marker for cystic fibrosis. I’m not sure if the same is true of discipline.”
“Some races are disciplined. Is fact,” Tekla said. “Japanese are more disciplined than. . Italians.”
She gave Aïda a stare that would have frozen most people to their chairs, but Aïda just threw her head back and laughed exultantly. “You are forgetting the Roman legions, but please go on.”
“Men are more disciplined than women. Is just fact. So there must be genes for it.”
This produced yet another silence, eventually broken by Luisa: “I’m seeing a side of you I didn’t know about, Tekla.”
“Call me bad, call me racist if you want. I know what you will say: That it is all training. It is all culture. I disagree. If you do not feel pain, you do not respond to pain. And hormones.”
“What about hormones, lover?” Moira asked. Her affection for Tekla was obvious, and took some of the tension out of the room.
“We all know that when hormones are a certain way, emotions have big impact. Other times, not so much. This is genetic.”
“Or maybe epigenetic. We really don’t know,” Moira said.
“Whatever,” Tekla said. “My point is that for people to live in tin cans for hundreds of years requires order and discipline. Not from above. From within. If there is a way to make this easier with your genetic lab, then we should do it.”
Luisa said, “We never explored Ivy’s point that intelligence was key.”
“Yes,” Ivy said, with a glance at Aïda. “I was interrupted.”
Aïda covered her mouth with her hand and sniggered theatrically.
Ivy went on: “If we are really going to open the door to genetic improvement of our offspring, then it seems obvious to me that we should look to the one quality that trumps all others. And that is clearly intelligence.”
“What do you mean it trumps all others?” Luisa asked.
“With intelligence, you can see the need to show discipline when the situation calls for it. Or to act aggressively. Or not. I would argue that the human mind is mutable enough that it can become all of the different types of people that Camila, Aïda, and Tekla have been describing. But that’s all driven by what separates us from the animals. Which is our brains.”
“There are many different types of intelligence,” Luisa said.
Ivy gave a little shake of her head. “I’ve seen all of that stuff about emotional intelligence and what have you. Okay. Fine. But you know exactly what I’m talking about. And you know it can be propagated genetically. Just look at the academic records, the test scores of the Ashkenazi Jews.”
“Speaking as a Sephardic Jew,” Luisa said, “you can imagine my mixed feelings.”
“We need brains, is the bottom line,” Ivy said. “We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.” She turned to look Aïda full in the face. “You ask for realism. Your complaint about her”—she nodded at Julia—“and the people around her was that they were holding out panaceas. Not facing facts. Fine. I’m giving you facts. We’re all nerds now. We might as well get good at it.”
Aïda shook her head in derision. “You completely leave out the human component. It’s why you are a bad leader. It’s why you were replaced by Markus, when wiser people than you were in control. And it’s why we are here.”
“Here, safe and sound,” Ivy said, “unlike the people who followed you. All of whom are dead.”
“So they are,” Aïda said, “and I am alive, and I can see how it’s going to be: you are going to keep me locked up in an arklet making genetic freak babies and taking them away from me.” And she broke down weeping.
“She has what I have, except worse,” Julia explained. “She sees many outcomes — most of which, given the circumstances, are dark — then acts upon them.”
“What an unusual degree of introspection from you, Julia,” Moira said.
“You have no concept of my level of introspection,” Julia shot back. “I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and I’d rather be miserable than stupid. I am what I am.”
“Depression is genetically based to some extent. Would you like me to erase it from your children’s genomes?” Moira asked.
“You heard what I said,” Julia answered. “You know, now, the decision I made. Which was to suffer for the greater good. Because society will go astray if there are not those who, like me, imagine many outcomes. Let those scenarios run rampant in their minds. Anticipate the worst that could happen. Take steps to prevent it. If the price of that — the price of having a head full of dark imaginings — is personal suffering, then so be it.”
“But would you wish that on your progeny?”
“Of course not,” Julia said. “If there were a way to have one without the other — the foresight without the misery — I would take it in a heartbeat.”
“We only need a few people of this mentality,” Tekla said. “Too many, and you get the Soviet Union.”
“I am forty-seven,” Julia said. “I have one baby in me, if I’m lucky. The rest of you can punch them out for twenty years. Do the math.”
“It amazes me that we have already gone over to the competitive angle!” Camila wailed. “I am so sorry that I brought this topic up.”
A sharp rapping noise brought the room to attention.