Ell Donsaii 13: DNA (14 page)

Zage stared at her for a moment, then shook his head, “The random ordering of 31 amino acids? That’s 31 shriek! That’s a huge number!” He turned to his dad the mathematician, “How big
is
it, dad?”

“31 shriek is eight to the 33
rd
power,” his mother said grimly, “which is an
enormous
number, but the number of permutations of your peptide wouldn’t really be that big, ‘cause there’re only 20 amino acids, not 31.”

Zage’s eyes flashed to his mother, “How did you know that?!” he asked suspiciously. Apparently he’d believed his dad might estimate the size of 31 shriek in his head since he was a mathematician, but obviously he hadn’t thought that his mother would have any idea.

“My AI told me,” Ell said dryly.

Zage looked a little startled, apparently thinking that he should have realized she might get the answer from her AI rather than concluding that she’d done it in her head even if the answer had come very quickly. He shrugged, “So, the chances of me randomly generating something toxic is infinitesimal. Even 20 shriek is huge.”

Ell shook her head, “You didn’t generate anything
randomly
though, did you? You specifically designed a peptide that you think is going to
do
something. If you were to take a deck of cards and lay them out in an order that was pleasing to you, the chances that I might lay them out in the same order is a
lot
less than 52 shriek.”

Zage got a distant look, then he shrugged, apparently accepting his mother’s thesis. “I guess.” He got a mulish look on his face, “I still don’t think it would be dangerous though.”

“You think it’s going to do
something
powerful, i.e. make you lose weight. You just
can’t
assume that it will be able to do that
without
thinking that there’s a chance that it might generate some other, possibly dangerous, side effects!” She shook her head, “There aren’t any
other
medications that don’t have side effects.”

Zage looked chastened for a moment, but then he said, “But I really think this will work! How
else
am I going to test it?!”

Ell looked at him fondly for a moment, “I’m really not an expert at this, so you probably should ask Dr. Turner or Vanessa. I think the way it’s usually done is that first you test it on some cells in tissue culture. You can’t see if the cells lose weight, obviously, but,” she lifted an eyebrow, “you could see if they
die
. And,” she shrugged, “maybe there’s some way to measure whether they make more Trim28?”

“Oh…” Zage said, looking like a light had just come on.

“Then, if
that
seems to be okay,” Ell continued, “maybe you could try it in some of those obese rats you were talking about?”

Zage sat for a minute, staring at nothing, evidently thinking, then said, “I’ll talk to Vanessa about it. If we’re going to test it in rats, though, I’ll have to ask her to apply for an animal protocol approval. I’m almost sure the university won’t let me apply for it myself.” His eyes shifted back and forth from his mother to his father, “
Or
do the injections… Uh, I’ve already spent most of the money you put in Dr. Turner’s lab account. This will cost quite a bit more…”

Shan and Ell looked at one another, “We’ll need to…”

Zage interrupted, “You could take me out of that expensive kindergarten and save some money that way,” he said hopefully.

Ell laughed merrily, “You’re
not
getting out of kindergarten that easily. I’m pretty sure we can come up with the money for you to keep doing your research. We think the time you spend in the lab’s really important for you.”

The smile that spread over Zage’s face warmed Shan’s heart. Then the kid narrowed his eyes and turned to his mother, “How come you even
know
about factorial numbers?”

Ell grinned at him, “My AI has strict instructions to feed me information about
any
esoteric subjects my smart-aleck son brings up.”

Zage looked suspiciously at his mother for another minute. Shan thought he probably found it hard to believe that, even if Alan could put the information up on the HUD in Ell’s contact, she could have read and understood it fast enough to respond as quickly as she had. However, he apparently decided not to express his doubts. After a minute he nodded as if he accepted her explanation. He said in a serious tone, “Thanks for letting me keep working in the lab. I know it’s a lot of money.”

Shan simply said, “You’re welcome.”

Ell reached out to ruffle his hair, “It
is
a lot of money, but we think it’s wonderful that you’re so interested in science. We don’t mind making some sacrifices so you can keep it up.”

Later that evening, Shan and Ell were both sitting on the couch looking at things on their own HUDs. Shan looked over at his wife. He’d been struggling with his new theory that gravity worked through Ell’s tiny fifth dimension. Although rough approximations had initially made it look like a very plausible explanation for many of the surprising physical facts about gravity, to his frustration, more precise calculations kept coming out just a little bit off.

Although he kept telling himself he wanted to figure this one out by himself, it was getting to the point that he thought bouncing it off of
somebody
would be very helpful. And, of course, the most obvious person to bounce it off of would be Ell.

However, the expression on her face showed that she was very frustrated with an issue of her own. He could tell she wasn’t really looking at whatever was being shown in her HUD. “Worried about Zage?” he asked.

“No,” she said, slowly shaking her head, “worried about extraterrestrials.”

“Thinking about what to do if we encounter even more dangerous ones?”

Ell shrugged, “We’ve already encountered some new ones and they’re what I’m worried about. The problem is that I can’t decide whether they’re
actually
dangerous or not.”

“Oh. Ones I haven’t heard about yet?”

“Yeah,” she sighed, “let me tell you about them. Maybe you’ll have some ideas.” Ell went on to describe the world circling 61 Virginis, then the Virgies themselves.

“So,” Shan said musingly, lifting one finger, “you have a world where
we
could actually live.” He lifted another finger, “On that world you see no evidence of an advanced technological civilization. Rather you find primitive horticulturalists who use few if any tools.” Shan lifted a third finger, “They may have somehow been transported to 61 Virginis from other worlds, or, alternately, have mutated into what seems to be a large number of different intelligent species.” He frowned, “The only thing I can think of that might make them a threat would be the possibility that all the mutations came from some kind of bio-weapon that might spread to us?” He shrugged, “My thought would be that we certainly shouldn’t go there in person until we know, but they hardly seem to be a danger to us where they are.”

“I guess you’re right,” Ell said, “it’s just that there’re a lot of people who’d
like
to know about them. If the government knew about them, they’d want to start undertaking diplomatic missions and otherwise communicating with them. Some people would want to help them advance their technological level. There’d be a few crazies who’d want to wipe them out” She shook her head, “On the one hand, I’d like to at least let the scientists start trying to understand them and how they came to be. On the other, I feel guilty not letting the government know about them because, like you say, it’s hard to imagine a primitive people like theirs posing a danger to us. But… something about them… Just worries me.”

Zage’s voice came from behind them, “
I
don’t think they sound primitive. They’ve
got
to be purposefully modifying their own DNA to have developed the way you’ve described. They may not be very advanced in the physical sciences, but they’re way ahead of us in the biological ones.”

Shan and Ell had frozen, eyes widening at one another as soon as they heard their son’s voice back there. They’d had no idea he was in the room or they most certainly wouldn’t have been talking about
that
topic. Ell grimaced for a moment, then purposefully relaxed her face and turned slowly to look at Zage. “Um, I hope you understand that we wouldn’t want you to tell anyone about what you’ve just heard?”

Zage grinned at her, “Yeah, from what you said I got the impression you guys were spilling some pretty big secrets. Probably didn’t know I was back here, huh?”

Though she wanted to snap at him, Ell calmed herself and said in her most sober tone, “No. Can you promise me that you won’t tell anyone what you’ve just heard?”

Zage nodded, a serious look on his face. “I understand. This is the kind of thing that Dr. Donsaii went to prison for, right? She didn’t want to tell the government about alien races until she was sure they were safe and the government felt like they had a right to know.”

Ell nodded, “So, you can understand that this is
very
serious business, right?”

“Sure. But,” he said, a big smile breaking across his face, “this is
really
cool stuff. I had no idea you worked in the part of D5R that dealt with the early exploration of ET planets! I knew you sometimes helped with interstellar stuff because you were on the team that helped the Teecees when they got hit by the asteroid, but I had no idea Dr. Donsaii trusted you enough to have you on the team that works with them
before
she’s sure they’re safe!”

Ell said, “She
does
trust me, but she wouldn’t be very happy if she knew I’d let my five-year-old son hear all this stuff.”

Zage frowned, his eyes going back and forth between his father and his mother. “Are you even supposed to be telling
Dad
about these aliens without Dr. Donsaii’s approval?”

Shan studied Ell as he wondered how she was going to dig herself out of
this
hole. In fact, she didn’t say anything for a moment, then she replied carefully to Zage, “Dr. Donsaii knows your dad and she trusts him.”

Zage turned to his dad, “Because you wrote that paper with her?”

Shan nodded, doing his best to keep a solemn look on his face. He looked at Ell and explained, “The DeWitt’s mentioned the K-D paper to Zage at the company picnic.”

Zage turned to his mother and frowned a little, “It doesn’t seem like the fact they’ve written a paper together would make her trust him on something like this though. Are you
sure
she’d be okay with it?”

Ell nodded, “She’s asked him for help on a similar problem in the past.”

“Oh, okay,” Zage said. Shan thought his son looked very impressed that his own father knew Ell Donsaii that well.

Ell said in a very serious tone, “Thank you Zage. I appreciate your willingness to keep this
very
important secret for me. I hope you’ll give some thought to the possibility that sometimes you can let a secret slip without meaning to, okay?”

“You mean,” Zage said, a little grin creeping up on his face, “like you just did?”

Ell snorted, “Yes! You’ve got me there, but I hope you’ll try to do better than I did, okay?
Only
talk to me or your dad about it OK?”

Zage got a very serious look on his face. “I will.” He turned, “Tanner,” he called to his dog, “here boy.” As the dog came running in from the other room, Zage patted his stomach, “Tanner and I are going out for a run, okay?”

“Yeah,” Ell said distractedly. “Um… Wait a minute. What was it you said about the aliens earlier?”

“I said, ‘I don’t think they’re primitive.’”

“I remember that part,” Ell said, “I’m just trying to remember your rationale.”

“Well, the only possible explanation for them to have so many different body plans without one becoming dominant over the others
has
to be because they’re purposefully modifying their own DNA. That way they can
look
like different species even though, underneath, they’re actually all from the same one.” He shrugged, “I guess by our definition they might have mutated themselves into a different species, but, you get what I mean. Anyway, they may not be using a lot of high tech, but they’ve got to be biological geniuses.”

“Wait a minute,” Shan said, “If they’re not technologically advanced, how are they purposefully modifying their own DNA?!”

“Well,” Zage said thoughtfully, “maybe calling them biological geniuses wouldn’t be quite correct. What I was thinking was that they might have evolved an organ or some other kind of structure or biologic process that lets them purposefully control DNA splicing.”

“So, you’re thinking that,” Ell said with a look of intense concentration, “they make their own random mutations? I don’t see how that’d be different from some kind of environmental influence that causes mutations. They’d still wind up with a lot of bad outcomes.”