Catch the Lightning (26 page)

Desperation finally drove the Raylicans back to the stars. They were dying, succumbing to a gene pool too small to remain viable. They hoped an influx of genes from rediscovered colonies would save their race. But the colonies had either perished— victims of inbreeding—or else self-induced genetic drift now divided them from their lost empathic kin. Kyle genes often produce lethal abnormalities; the colonies that thrived did so because their gene pools had lost the empathic traits.

The Kyle genes didn’t disappear completely, however. Althor’s parents are Rhon psions, a class of Kyle operators named for the geneticist Rhon. The Rhon project was dual-pronged: using DNA derived from the Ruby Dynasty, Rhon engineered for increased empathy and produced Althor’s family; using other DNA, he engineered for increased pain resistance and produced the Trader Aristos.

Aristos are the reason genetic research on Kyle operators is now illegal. In a sense, they are reverse empaths. They can receive input, but their “receiver” is abnormal: it picks up only pain. The signal must come from an empath, someone whose brain amplifies it enough for the Aristo to receive. An Aristo’s brain, in trying to lower his or her sensitivity to pain, relays the signals to neural centers that register them as pleasure.

“Do you think the Aristos are the ones who tried to kill Althor?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” Ming said. “They would probably give anything to capture him alive.” She spread her hands. “Maybe someone wants to stop the marriage. Essentially he’s asking us to establish a treaty between his government and ours, the kind that usually take years to arrange.”

“Why should my marrying him involve a treaty?”

She smiled. “It’s one of the oldest stories in the book. Two powers establish an alliance through an advantageous marriage.” Her comments puzzled me. I didn’t know then that Althor’s people view lineage as more durable than government. The Raylicans have spent six thousand years struggling to survive their infertility. During that time their empire rose, collapsed, and rose again. To them, fertility is the most enduring symbol of a union. Two centuries ago the Imperial Assembly arranged a marriage between Althor’s mother and an Allied man. The contract for that union was a treaty that filled a library. Although the marriage eventually failed, the treaty remained in effect until the last Skolian-Trader war, when Earth betrayed the Imperialate.

Was it truly betrayal? That depends on your point of view. During the war, Althor’s aunt, Sauscony Valdoria, commanded the Imperial fleet. As per terms of the treaty, she sent the most vulnerable members of the Rhon to Earth, for protection. After the war the Allieds refused to release them, fearing it would restart the star-spanning destruction. What made it even more galling was that the Traders agreed to release their most valuable prisoner of war—Althor’s father—in exchange for the son of the late Trader emperor.

“An Imperial special operations team eventually freed the members of the Rhon being held on Earth,” Ming said. “But we almost went to war over it. The Raylicans themselves may be dying, but their Imperialate thrives, especially with the influx of genes from Allied immigrants. The only reason they don’t overthrow us is because, small as we are, we’re almost big enough to tip the balance of power toward whoever allies with us.”

I considered the implications of her words. “Althor’s parents are both Rhon, aren’t they?” I searched for a tactful way to put it. “They’re both—close.”

“It’s called inbreeding.” Ming exhaled. “It’s not my place to judge. Inbreeding is one of the few ways the Rhon can reproduce themselves.” She considered me. “Do you know your Kyle rating?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“It’s an exponential scale. Ninety-nine percent of humans are between 0 and 2. Those who test higher than 3, about one in a thousand, are empaths. A rating of 6 qualifies a person as a telepath, about one in a million. Only one in ten billion rates as a 10. The scale starts to break down above 11 or 12. Rhon operators—like Althor—are rated as ‘Rhon’ instead of by a number because their ratings are much too high to quantify. The Rhon are also rare to the point of extinction.”

That took a moment to absorb. “He thinks I’m a telepath. But before I met him, I never picked up much.”

She nodded. “I’ve heard it’s not unusual, in a link between two or more operators, for the stronger to expand the abilities of the others. But even without him I bet you have a high rating, at least four. Perhaps even five.”

Four. Perhaps five. I had never thought of myself as special in any way before.

After Ming left me to rest, I lay on the quilt, reaching for the Jag…

Attending
, the Jag thought.

How is Althor?
I asked.

Asleep. I’m still working on him.

I’ve been wondering about Kyle operators.

I can make my library available to you.

Will it distract you from your work?

No. The index is a minor automatedfunction. It requires no attention
. A menu formed in my mind:

Index
Help
Exit

Index
, I thought.

I closed my eyes and a library seemed to appear, a room of ceiling-high shelves crammed with books. A librarian who looked like Martinelli seated me in an armchair. In response to my questions, he brought books or else sat in another chair and talked to me. He made images in the air, detailed pictures to illustrate his words.

Several hundred Kyle genes exist. They are alleles, or alternate forms, of normal genes. Mutations. Like most mutations they do more harm than good. Fortunately they are almost fully recessive, which means that they show almost no manifestation unless you inherit copies from both parents. People who carry one Kyle allele and one normal gene are normal, but those with paired alleles often have problems. Anemia. Missing limbs or organs. Lung or heart disease. Abnormalities in nerve, muscle, or circulatory development. Brain damage. Kyle fetuses often die within weeks of conception. Those that survive rarely live long enough to reproduce.

Kyle genes survive in human gene pools because they help people who carry them unpaired. It’s the same reason sickle-cell anemia persists; not only do carriers with one normal and one sickle-cell allele show few signs of the disease, they are more resistant to malaria. People with unpaired Kyle genes rarely manifest harmful mutations, but they do show slightly heightened empathic responses. It aids parenting, and their offspring also tend to associate positive qualities with parenthood, becoming parents more often on average than in other groups. Gene pools maintain an equilibrium: Kyle genes survive, but empaths remain rare because of debilitating effects produced when the genes pair up.

The Rhon carry some form of every Kyle allele and every one of those alleles is paired. So how are they healthy? It depends on many factors: control sequences in genes; stretches of DNA known as introns; positioning of genes on chromosomes; how many alleles are present. One allele alone might cause an undesirable trait to be expressed; the presence of another might suppress it. The genes are also pleiotropic, which means they do more than one thing. In rare cases, an empath can be born healthy, or almost healthy, like Althor. Problems still exist, though. Suicide was once the leading cause of death among higher-rated Kyles. Even now, when psiberneticists can train empaths to mute the onslaught of other people’s emotions, it. remains a problem.

Jagernauts have protection; their biomech webs can release a drug that suppresses psiamine, the neurotransmitter needed to interpret empathic input. In other words, they can “block” emotions. The web provides only limited amounts of the drug, however; otherwise it interferes with the Jagernaut’s ability to function. Empaths without biomech can still block emotions, though less effectively, by using biofeedback to suppress the psiamine. I learned to do it at an early age, without realizing it, by imagining a mirror that reflected emotions back to people, or a fortress around my mind, or a blinding white light.

Everyone has a KAB and a KEB. Normal genes produce enzymes that limit growth of the organs. People with paired Kyle genes can’t make the enzymes properly, so their KAB and KEB keep growing; instead of a few active molecular sites, they have thousands, even millions. The probability of someone like Althor being born—a healthy Kyle operator with billions of active sites on his KAB and KEB—is unlikely to the point of impossibility.

But nature is patient.

Humans have settled over three thousand worlds: Traders on fifteen hundred, Althor’s people on nine hundred, Earth on three hundred. Three trillion people. Multiply that by the centuries humans have known how to search out Kyle operators and the numbers become even more daunting. In all of those people, the entire complement of Kyle genes has twice been known to match up and create a healthy psion. Those two men were Rhon psions. One, a giant with metallic gold skin, fathered Althor’s mother, and also her sister, who is both Althor’s aunt and his paternal grandmother. The second man was Althor’s paternal grandfather. Althor’s maternal grandmother was a result of the Rhon project. His grandparents produced healthy children because they came from different gene pools and because their DNA had, through natural selection, determined ways to suppress harmful traits.

Still, the Rhon are like genetic bombs waiting to explode. The most severe mutation is the CK complex. It formed early on in the Raylicon population, from radiation exposure they suffered when they looted the ruined star shuttles. Althor carries CK. The librarian assured me that sex made him safe, and didn’t understand why I smiled at the phrasing. Sex chromosomes, it said. Men are male because they have one X and one Y chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes. In the female, only one X is fully active in each cell; otherwise we would get a double dose of genetic activity. But even on a dormant X, a small number of genes express—including, unfortunately, CK. It occurs only on the X and has no homologue on the Y, so no male can ever carry it paired. When unpaired, CK is harmless and suppresses other mutations.

When paired, it kills the embryo.

Because CK suppresses other mutations, Raylicans with only one CK gene had a survival rate far higher than those without it. So the complex became more and more common despite numerous attempts to eradicate it, until eventually all Raylicans carried it. As a result, CK paired up in one out of every two females conceived and the number of surviving girl children plunged.

When they saw what was happening, the women without CK tried cloning themselves using their zygotes, or fertilized eggs. A single-celled zygote is totipotent: all of its DNA is active, so it can grow into a human being. The same is true of the two cells made when the zygote divides; separate them and they make identical twins. Two divisions gives quadruplets and three gives octuplets. Sixteen doesn’t work; the zygote loses totipotence after three divisions.

Embryos with Kyle DNA are different; the more Kyle genes, the sooner the embryo loses totipotence. Most Raylicans are lucky to produce twin clones. For Althor’s family, even twins fail. If the cells are forced to develop anyway, the resulting clones have no empathic abilities and suffer severe abnormalities. After several attempts to produce Rhon twins ended in tragedy, it was declared illegal to experiment on Althor’s family, a belated attempt on the part of an Imperialate ethics committee to protect them from less scrupulous forces in their government.

But that research led to advances. Geneticists learned to “wake up” dormant DNA in cells that had lost totipotence. Now—in theory—they can use any cell to make a clone. They take out the nucleus of a fertilized egg and replace it with a reawakened nucleus. Waking up DNA is tricky, though, as is finding a suitable egg. For Kyle clones, the egg must come from an empath or else the clone fails. With the aid of female empaths in rediscovered colonies, the Raylicans can clone themselves, but as yet their success rate is too low to fend off their eventual extinction.

For Rhon psions, the reactivated nucleus is simply too sensitive to its environment. All clones fail. After bruising debates with the ethics boards, one group tried cloning Althor’s aunt by putting a nucleus of her reactivated DNA into her mother’s egg. It failed. So they laboriously reconstructed the egg that produced her, building its DNA unit by unit. Even that clone failed. Perhaps someday science will succeed, but so far the results have been disheartening.

Why is it so important to produce more Rhon? The Assembly uses them for the psibernet that binds Imperial Skolia together. Any telepath with a biomech ,web can access the net, but only Rhon telepaths have the strength to power it. Without them, the psibernet would cease to exist.

Even if a method of cloning the Rhon is found, however, it will only provide a partial solution. Psiberspace obeys the rules of quantum mechanics, including the Pauli Exclusion Principle, but applied to quanta of thought rather than light or matter. Just as no two fermions can ever have identical quantum numbers, so no two minds in the link that powers the psibernet can be identical. So having ten clones of the same person is no help. Even breeding back into the line isn’t useful after one or two generations; in addition to the ethical questions involved, the greater the inbreeding, the more similarities among offspring.

The library also gave me chilling facts the Imperial Assembly never made public. Contrary to popular belief, Rhon never made a Rhon psion. He fast realized that unless he found a way to eliminate the harmful effects of Kyle genes, he would never create a diverse, robust population of telepaths. That was why he experimented with pain tolerance; a gene that affects the brain’s recognition of pain also prevents production of an enzyme that limits KAB growth. So carriers of that gene tend to have both a larger KAB and lower pain resistance.

Rhon tried to separate the effects, raising pain tolerance without losing the enhanced KAB. To avoid complications, he chose subjects who carried only the Kyle gene of interest. They had no genes for the rest of the biological machinery needed to produce a Kyle operator and so weren’t empaths. Because only one gene was involved, it looked like a good test case. His group labored for years, their work exemplary, monitored at every step by an ethics board.