Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [171]
“Here’s how I think about it,” Nannie said. “You know there’s two different ways to make life: crossing and cloning. You know about that from grafting trees, right?”
Deanna nodded tentatively. “You can make a cutting of scionwood from a tree you like and grow it out into a new one.”
“That’s right,” Nannie said. “You call that a scion, or a clone. It’s just the same as the parent it came from. And the other way is if two animals mate, or if two plants cross their pollen with each other; that’s a cross. What comes of that will be different from either one of the parents, and a little different from all the other crosses made by those same parents. It’s like rolling two dice together: you can get a lot more numbers than just the six you started with. And that’s called sex.”
Deanna nodded again, even more tentatively. But she understood. She followed the path through the tall grass that Nannie was tramping down in front of her.
“Sexual reproduction is a little bit riskier. When the genes of one parent combine with the genes of the other, there’s more chances for something to go wrong. Sometimes a whole piece can drop out by mistake, or get doubled up. That’s what happened with Rachel.” Nannie stopped walking and turned around to face Deanna. “But just think what this world would be if we didn’t have the crossing type of reproduction.”
Deanna found she couldn’t picture the difference, and said so.
“Well,” Nannie said, pondering this, “probably for just millions of years there were little blobs of things in the sea, all just alike, splitting in two and making more of themselves. Same, same, same. Nothing much cooking. And then, some way, they got to where they’d cross their genes with one another and turn out a little variety, from mutations and such. Then starts the hullabaloo.”
“Then there’d start to be different kinds of things?” Deanna guessed.
“More and more, that’s right. Some of the kids turned out a little nicer than the parents, and some, not so hot. But the better ones could make even a little better. Things could change. They could branch out.”
“And that was good, right?”
Nannie put her hands on her knees and looked Deanna earnestly in the eye. “That was the world, honey. That’s what we live in. That is God Almighty. There’s nothing so important as having variety. That’s how life can still go on when the world changes. But variety means strong and not so strong, and that’s just how it is. You throw the dice. There’s Deannas and there’s Rachels, that’s what comes of sex, that’s the miracle of it. It’s the greatest invention life ever made.”
And that was it, the nearest thing to a birds-and-bees lecture she’d ever gotten from Nannie, the nearest thing to a mother she had. It was a cool fall day—September, probably—and they were making their way through the hillside field that had gone derelict since Nannie took over running the farm. It was full of sapling apple trees sprouted from seeds left here in the droppings of the deer and foxes that stole apples from the orchard down below. Nannie claimed that these wild trees were her legacy. The orchard trees planted by her father were all good strains, true to type, carefully grown out from cuttings so they’d be identical to their parent tree. All the winesaps in the world were just alike. But Nannie’s field saplings were outlaws from seeds never meant to be sown, the progeny of different apple varieties cross-pollinated by bees. Up here stood the illegitimate children of a Transparent crossed with a Stayman’s winesap, or a Gravenstein crossed with who knew what, a neighbor’s wild apple or maybe a pear. Nannie had stopped mowing this field and let these offspring raise up their heads until they were a silent throng. “Like Luther Burbank’s laboratory,” was how she’d explained it to an adolescent girl who wanted to understand, but Deanna could think of them only as Nannie’s children. On many an autumn Saturday, the two of them had beat their way through the grass of this overgrown field from one tree to