Chapter 1
NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM
HELSINKI
Today the museum is quiet, only a few visitors wander absent-mindedly among the dead, examining labels and bones, the quiet drum of the rain filling the hall.
An elderly woman stops in front of the sea cow, looks up and down its remains, sees the centuries of deeds they contain, the cracked vertebrae, the handiwork, a creature that is no more.
The sea cow is gone, but hasn’t everyone dreamed of being able to look the past in the eye?
Each generation comes up with its own ways of honouring the dead.
Now researchers are reconstructing a mammoth in their laboratories, boring a hole into a rock dove’s egg, cutting off the inheritance of the embryo inside it and refilling it with genetic material from an extinct bird.
One day, a dove will hatch from that egg.
It will grow, mate and lay its own eggs – and then we’ll be in for a surprise.
Instead of a common rock dove, the fledgling that hatches from that egg will grow up to develop the distinctive red plumage of the passenger pigeon.
Now researchers’ attention turns to other species carrying another relative in their genetic constitution, the female Asian elephants from whose wombs the mammoth could be born again.
What a comforting thought! Perhaps our loss isn’t permanent after all, perhaps we can correct the mistakes of the past and reverse extinction.
But even this resurrection is a compromise: what the Asian elephant will push from her womb will not be a mammoth but a barely credible chimera, an elephant whose genes have been imbued with a long coat and the ability to withstand the cold.
The new fledgling might look like a passenger pigeon, but half of its genetic inheritance will still be that of the rock dove, and what hatches from the egg is but more proof of man’s scientific prowess, beckoned from the underworld.
What has died cannot be brought back to life, but a thought can, a hope, a realistic copy. Maybe that is enough.
The woman continues on her way. Her footsteps echo through the galleries, merging with the sound of whale song coming from one of the rooms, and all of a sudden everything stops.
The rain pauses, Steller’s quill freezes above his notebook, Constance lowers the chamois in her hand, Gronvall’s paintbrush stops on the paper and the poisonous spiders hiding inside the museum walls stand stock-still, all breath holds a brief hiatus, then everything resumes, but for a fleeting moment it is here, a faint, all-consuming sorrow upon beholding this creature, so large and so meek, so irrevocably departed.