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.
The pr
oblems weren’t obvious at first. The humans Rhon created looked odd, with red eyes and glittering black hair, but that was mild compared to what genetic fiddling had produced in some colonies. Almost everything went as anticipated. His creations did indeed have the hoped for combination of increased pain tolerance and enhanced KAB. Just one unexpected twist turned up; their KAB detected only signals produced by pain. At the same time, their brain was receiving the order increase pain tolerance—so it routed the pain signals to its orgiastic centers.
That one glitch changed interstellar history.
When Rhon realized what happened, he understood the implications far better than the well-meaning committees regulating his work. His insistence that these new humans be killed appalled the ethics boards. While the debate raged, Rhon’s creations—the soon-to-be Aristos—murdered Rhon, stole or destroyed his records, and set out on their own.
A race with no qualms about causing human suffering can wreak havoc in a gender universe. Only after the Aristos reached a population of several thousand, when they began to “step on each other’s toes,” did their expansion slow. But those few thousand, within a space of decades, founded a brutal empire.
They also continued Rhon’s work, trying to create super-empaths. Why? The stronger the empath, the stronger the signal that person’s pain sends, and so the more intense the pleasure response it evokes in an Aristo. They breed empaths for sensitivity and beauty, call them “providers,” and seek them with a drive as strong as their need to eat or sleep.
Eventually they succeeded in their ultimate goal: they created two Rhon telepaths, a male and female for breeding. The youth, when he realized his future, killed himself. The female reached adulthood and escaped, murdering her creators to avenge her mate. She also destroyed every record she could find of the work that led to her birth. To this day she is the only known Rhon psion successfully created in the lab.
That woman was Althor’s grandmother.
Jag. I thought. That’s a terrible story.
Yes, the Jag answered.
Althor’s parents are so closely related. He’s lucky he turned out normal.
The Jag paused. He does have a chromosomal abnormality. An extra Y chromosome.
You mean he’s XYY?
Yes.
Don’t people with extra sex chromosomes have problems? I thought of the children we hoped to have. Like sterility?
XYY males are not infertile. Nor do they pass the extra Y to their offspring.
But?
They tend to be taller on average.
That’s all?
The Jag paused. As a group, they are below average in intelligence.
Althor isn’t. He was a rocket scientist, in fact, or a rocket engineer.
You are correct. Most Kyle operators are above average, due to their extra neural structures.
Is that all that’s different about him?
The Jag paused again. A significantly high proportion of human males in prisons tend to have the XYYgenotype, particularly the population above six feet tall.
A half-remembered news report I had heard in my own universe came back to me. Because they’re more aggressive. More violent.
Yes.
Althor isn’t that way. I knew as soon as I said it that it wasn’t true. When the Jag didn’t respond, I said, He’s not criminally violent.
No. He’s not. It isn’t all genetics, either. Upbringing, personality, and environment all affect personality development.
Why are you telling me this?
A number of the simulations I have constructed to model your future yield the following as a solution: you will find the Pilot’s aggressive tendencies unacceptable.
You think I’m going to walk out on him.
Yes.
Then you’re using the wrong data.
My data sets for you are small, the Jag agreed. I augmented them by extrapolating behavior patterns developed from algorithms applied to gamma humanoid females witk a phenotype that approaches yours.
Does that mean you guessed, based on what I look like?
Essentially.
Who did you compare me to?
You appear Raylican. So I extrapolated behaviors of females from the Ruby Dynasty. However, models incorporating these data become unstable. In fact, the most stable simulations employ patterns opposed to those of a Raylican female. Such a woman would seek a lack of aggression in the male. You appear to seek the opposite.
I blinked. I never thought about it that way before.
Given your small size and nonaggressive nature, combined with the subcultures that have formed your environment, your criteria for mate selection are logical.
Then you know I won’t dump Althor.
I will add your input on this matter to my models. Its response had a curious sense of lightening, like relief. It made me wonder just how far the Jag would go to protect its pilot.
12
Star Union
Ming opened the door onto a panorama of stars: rubies, topazes, sapphires, opals. I stood with her in the doorway of the Observation Deck. Only the wall behind us was opaque; the rest of the room was dichromesh glass, a bubble extending “below” the wheel of the station. A crystalline pulpit stood across the chamber, silhouetted against the starscape. A lacquer box sat on it, and a vase with a rose. Next to them a book lay open, a real book, paper and leather, an antique. I had requested Ming use it because her electronic holobook didn’t feel right to me for this ceremony.
People filled the chamber, standing around and talking. Kabatu was there, wearing a blue jumpsuit like Ming’s, with NASA and Allied Worlds shoulder patches. Stonehedge stood near the pulpit, also in uniform, with medals on his chest. Gold glimmered on his clothes like reflected starlight.
Then I realized the glimmer didn’t come from the stars. The scene had so overwhelmed me, and Althor looked so different, that it was a moment before I realized he was standing next to Stonehedge. The metallic,.gold cloth of his uniform glistened. It was also holographic, creating sparkles of gold light that gave it a shimmering depth. The style was simple, a long-sleeved pullover with horizontal ribbing across his chest that made his shoulders look even broader, and pants with a line of darker gold running down the outer seam of each leg. The pants tucked into knee-high gold boots polished to a mirror shine. A sword hung at his waist, sheathed in gold, its point arcing back in a curve.
As Ming walked with me into the chamber, Althor glanced in our direction and did a double take. He looked like I felt: dazed. This had all happened so fast. Ming took me over to him, then went to stand behind the pulpit. Althor kept staring at me, until finally Stonehedge pushed him. Blinking, Althor stepped in front of the pulpit. When Ming cleared her throat, he and I stopped looking at each other and turned to her.
It had taken Ming and me a long time to find a ceremony I recognized. We finally dug up a Catholic wedding over three hundred and fifty years old, dated even by my standards. It surprised me that she could read Mass; I didn’t know then about the charter of the Allied Worlds Interfaith Council, which provides for Inspace Chaplains, religious leaders who serve the diverse populations of space habitats and colonies, where access to well-established religious communities isn’t yet available.
We sent the ceremony to the Jag for Althor’s approval. Although the Jag sent back his agreement, I suspected Althor never actually saw it. I had felt his mind slumbering as the Jag worked on him.
Althor and I stood in front of the pulpit, bewildered, trying to pay attention while Ming read the ceremony. I thought of hbme, of the people I would have liked to share this day with, of Manuel and my mother.
“Tina?” Ming said.
I suddenly became aware the' ceremony had stopped. “Yes?” She tilted her head at Stonehedge. “He won’t go with the term.”
“It’s illegal,” Stonehedge said, his voice low enough so it didn’t carry to our audience.
“Tina picked it,” Althor said. “If this ceremony is the one the Jag rec
eived, then it was her choice.”
Stonehedge scowled at him. “You didn’t read your own wedding ceremony?”
“I couldn’t,” Althor said. “The Jag just woke me up.”
“Max, it was her choice,” Ming said. “She insisted, in fact.”
“It’s illegal,” he said. “We’re pushing the law as it is, claiming we’re her guardians. I can’t authorize a lifetime term for a seventeen-year-old.”
“Don’t you all marry for life?” I asked.
“Not at your age,” Stonehedge said. “You can set up a ten-year contract, maximum. By the time the renewal comes around, you’ll be of legal age to decide if you want to spend the rest of your life with this man.”
“I think we should let them do it,” Ming said. “The legal definitions don’t apply to this situation.”
Stonehedge’s exasperation sparked in the air. But when Ming gave him a questioning look, he waved his hand. “Go on. Finish.”
She backed up a few lines. “In sickness and in health.”
“In sickness and in health,” Althor repeated.
“As long as we both shall live.”
“As long as we both shall live.”
After I repeated the vows, Ming went on. She read the passage for exchanging rings even though Althor and I had none to give each other. Then she opened the lacquer box—and took out a gleaming gold band. As my mouth fell open, she handed it to Althor.
Althor blinked at the ring. “What do I do?”
Ming smiled. “Say, ‘With this ring I thee wed, and plight unto thee my troth.’”
His face blanked into computer mode. “I do not find this phrase.” He came back to normal. “What is ‘pleat into thee trough’?”
Catch the Lightning Page 21