The Older Machine

The library table had a roll of paper taped down the middle of it, and a nurse named Priya kept saying the same thing to every kid who sat down.

"Draw your mothers," she said. "Your mother, her mother, her mother. As far back as anyone remembers."

Maya had already drawn six circles going up the left side of the paper. Soren had drawn two and stopped.

"That's it?" Maya said.

"That's who I can name," Soren said. "After my great-grandmother it's just a word. Someone said her mother came from a village near a river. That's the whole fact."

"A village near a river," Maya said. "That's still a person."

"It's a person I can't draw."

Priya leaned over their table. She had a printout in her hand, the kind with the folds still in it. "You two are on the mitochondria table," she said. "Different from the other tables. The other tables do the whole family. You do one line."

"Why one line?" Maya asked.

"Because there's a piece of you that only comes down one line," Priya said, and then a kid two seats over knocked over a cup of pencils and she went to deal with it and did not come back.

Maya read the printout out loud. "Every cell has these little engines in it. Mitochondria. They make the energy. And they have their own DNA. Separate from the big set in the middle of the cell."

"Their own," Soren said. "How separate?"

"Thirty-seven genes. That's the whole thing. The big set is twenty thousand. This one is thirty-seven."

"That's tiny," Soren said. "That's a note, not a book."

"And," Maya said, tapping the page, "it only comes from your mother. Not your father. His don't get in. Yours are hers, exactly."

Soren put his pencil down. "Say that again."

"The little engines. They come from the egg. The egg is your mother's. Your father's engines don't make it into you. So the thirty-seven genes in you are the thirty-seven genes in her."

"Exactly hers."

"Almost exactly. They copy a little wrong sometimes, very slowly. Mostly hers."

Soren looked at his two circles. His mother. His grandmother. Then the word after that, the one that was just a word.

"So the engines in me," he said slowly, "are my mother's engines."

"Yes."

"Which are her mother's engines."

"Yes."

"Which are the ones in the woman from the village near the river."

Maya stopped drawing.

"Keep going," Soren said. "Don't stop, do it up the line."

"Her mother's," Maya said. "And her mother's. The engines don't get mixed with anybody. They just get handed straight down. Mother to daughter to daughter."

"So the line doesn't stop where the names stop."

"No," Maya said. "The names stop. The line doesn't."

Soren picked his pencil back up and drew a third circle above his great-grandmother. Then a fourth. He did not write names in them because he did not have names.

"I can't draw who she was," he said. "But I'm carrying the thing she carried. The actual thing. Not a copy of a photo. The engines."

"The actual thing," Maya said. "Running in you right now. Making the energy so you can sit here and be annoyed you don't have names."

Soren laughed. "How far, though," he said. "That's what I want. How far up does the line go before it breaks."

Maya read down the printout, fast, then read it again slower. "It says the little differences build up so slow that scientists use them to walk backward. Every mother's line meets another mother's line eventually, further back. And if you go back far enough, all the lines meet."

"All of them."

"Every person. Every single person alive. If you follow the engines up the mothers, all the lines run into one woman. Way back. Tens of thousands of years. They call her the mitochondrial mother. Everybody's engines trace to her."

Soren sat very still.

"Everybody at this table," he said.

"Everybody in this building."

"The kid who spilled the pencils."

"Him too. His engines and your engines. Follow both lines up far enough, they're the same engines."

Soren looked at Maya's six circles and his four, and the space above all of them, the enormous empty paper where the names had run out.

"So the tree doesn't end," he said. "I thought it ended at the village. It doesn't end at the village. It goes past the village, past whoever the village came from, back and back, and it never breaks, because the engines never got handed to a stranger. They only ever went mother, daughter, mother, daughter, the whole way, without one gap."

"Not one gap," Maya said. "If there was one gap you wouldn't be here. Every mother in that line lived long enough to hand it on. Every single one. Or you're not sitting here."

"Every one of them made it."

"All the way down to you. That's not luck once. That's luck ten thousand times in a row."

Soren looked at his hand. He turned it over. Somewhere down inside every part of it, in every cell, the little engines were running, the same thirty-seven genes, humming along, doing the exact old job.

"They're older than the names," he said. "They're older than the village. They're older than the river."

"They're older than the words for river," Maya said.

Priya came back to the table with a fresh cup of pencils. She saw Soren's four empty circles and the space above them.

"You only got to four?" she said. "The workshop's about naming as many as you can."

"We're not naming them," Soren said. "We're counting them."

"You can't count what you can't name."

"You can," Soren said. "There's more of them than names. That's the whole point."

Priya looked at the paper, and then at the two of them, and did not have a printout for that.

Maya took the pencil from Soren and drew one more circle, way up at the very top of the paper, above all the empty ones, right at the edge where the paper ended. She didn't write a name in it. She left it open.

Soren reached up and drew a line from that top circle all the way down through every empty circle to himself, one line, no breaks, and pressed the pencil until the mark went dark.