Arch-Conspirator(4)

The Trireme was a ship, but the ocean would never touch its hull. Instead it would leap into the stars that enfolded us—it would leap as high as it could go, and send out a signal that said, we are here, help us, to whoever might be listening. Our planet was a tomb, but hope still lived in the Trireme for the rock to be rolled away, for the grave to be unearthed.

It reflected the bright clouds back at me. I turned away and walked toward the Archive.

At the entrance, I removed my shoes with a sigh of relief and let them dangle from my fingertips by their straps. As I passed between the columns at the entrance, cool air washed over me and I sighed again.

It was dark—early superstition had said that too much light might compromise the samples, though we knew now that wasn’t the case. But where there was light, it was warm, almost orange, thanks to the color of the high stone walls. Rows and rows of shelves confronted me, narrow, and I thought of the photographs I had seen of grand libraries from other eras, housing books instead of gametes. There were still books, of course, but time had devoured them. They existed digitally, but accessing them was onerous—you had to find a port, pay for your time, and download what you wanted to your own device, which was likely finicky and prone to malfunction.

I counted the fourth row from the left and walked down the aisle, a few paces behind two women who walked with hands clasped, whispering to each other. The one on the left wore her hair loose over her shoulders; she threw it back and leaned into the one on the right, smiling. The one on the right glanced back at me and released her partner’s hand abruptly. It wasn’t uncommon for two women to come here under the guise of friendship to make a child together. They would explore the Archive together, and then one of them would meet with an Archivist alongside a man willing to play the part. The Archivist, none the wiser, would help them narrow down the kind of resurrection they wanted to facilitate.

I turned at the end of the row to give them privacy. I knew what it was to be something you were not permitted to be.

My existence, as well as my siblings’, was blasphemous. People didn’t resurrect their own genes—to do so was considered dangerous, for practical as well as mystical reasons. We were each of us born with a virus, passed on from mother to child, and there was no cure. It deteriorated our genetic code from the moment we were born, introducing abnormalities, aberrations. Genes therefore needed to be edited before they were passed on, so that every child could be born with a clean slate—so that they wouldn’t die young, as my siblings and I would.

But for the mystics, not the scientists, there was another crime in having a natural-born child. Each person’s ichor was like a tapestry containing the many threads of those who lived before. When combined with another person’s ichor, that tapestry grew richer and more complex. But ichor couldn’t convey the soul through the cells until a person’s death. Having a child of your own flesh, while you were still alive, meant having a child who wasn’t a part of that tapestry. It meant having a child who had no soul.

Like me.

In the gap between the shelves, I saw the couple stop near the end of the row. The woman on the right tugged the placard out of its place next to one of the samples, and they both crouched to read it, the woman on the left resting her chin on the other’s shoulder. I could have moved past them, but I lingered, watching them instead as they read the summary of a life they found on the little metal sheet.

They would choose two souls in the Archive that they found worthy of resurrection, and in doing so, at least in theory, they would choose their child’s story before they were born. I wondered what kind of story these two would want. A quiet life, maybe, unremarkable but peaceful, kind. Or perhaps—drama, a tragic end, a life of tumult and potential. In the Archive, you could read a person’s story and remake it. Combine it with another pattern, to heighten it or temper it. The possibilities were endless, overwhelming.

It didn’t matter if a person wanted a child or not. It didn’t matter if they changed the rest of their body, if they embraced a new name—if they were viable, the state considered them a woman, and they were required to carry a child, even though only half of them would survive it. Our species would die without this law, people were so fond of saying. And perhaps they were right about that. Every year, we were shrinking. Contracting. Receding.

Regardless, I didn’t see, in the women who walked beside me, separated by shelves of samples, any hesitation, any resentment. That their bodies were considered vessels for the continuation of the species rather than things that belonged solely to them did not appear to weigh on them. They looked caught up in this mystical alchemy, genes and ritual stirred together in the incense-and dust-saturated air of the Archive.

Or maybe I was just seeing what I expected to see. Pol often said that I saw the world in extremes. And I often reminded him that it was an extreme world.

The couple turned at the next throughway, and I continued ahead to the sealed records at the very back of the space, where the famous, the notorious, the prominent were kept. Their genes couldn’t be repurposed without express permission from the state. That was where my parents’ ichor resided.

Ichor, I heard my mother say, sneering, in the back of my mind. No one likes to use the technical terms for things, do they? Not enough romance in “egg” and “sperm” for them.

I was sure that Kreon would hold my parents’ ichor hostage, using the threat of their permanent destruction to control us. We couldn’t resurrect them, but as long as they were stored here, someone could. One day. And I had believed in resurrection, once. Even now that I didn’t … Pol, Ismene, and Eteocles still did, and I wouldn’t be the one to take the hope of my parents enduring away from them. And so the axe blade was always dangling over us.