“Just out of curiosity,” Keith called. “Are there any knives left?”
Laffite gave him a strange look, but did a quick search. He returned with a concerned expression.
“Not a one. How did you know?”
“Remember, I warned you?”
“The machetes are gone too.”
Keith looked around. “Not good. Not good at all.”
His ominous tone disturbed her. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking they’ve seen how useful a sharp blade can be—they’ve watched us cut up things with them. I’m hoping they want to use them to cut more notches in the baobab trunks. But they’ve also seen Bakari try to slice Garrick.”
He said no more as Laffite led them to a small opening in the trees—not a clearing, just an exceptionally shady spot where undergrowth was thin. One of their live traps sat in the middle. Bakari and Razi were busy suspending a large square of black nylon netting, easily twenty feet on a side, above it.
Rick said, “A little obvious, don’t you think?”
Laffite shook his head. “Not if you’ve never seen a net.”
Laura had to admit he had a point. The dapis would not associate that strange material with a danger to themselves.
“Even if it works,” she said, “how many times do you think you can fool them?”
He shrugged. “Maybe twice. Maybe we catch five or six. I take them back to test the market for selling them. I take orders and deposits. We return with tranquilizer darts and bag as many as we please.”
Great. Just what she didn’t want to hear.
He pointed back along the path they’d just traveled. “The three of you stand back there where I can see you and you won’t get in the way.”
They retreated as directed. She could tell by the stiffness in Rick’s shoulders and the flint in his eyes that taking orders from the shifty Frenchman rankled him. She put a hand on his arm.
“Hang in there, partner. We’ll be out of here soon.”
“‘Partner,’” he said with a smile. “I like that. And ‘patience’ is my new mantra.”
“Right there!” Laffite called.
Rick’s eyes turned flinty again. “But if we weren’t leaving within the hour…”
She patted his arm. “I know, I know. But we are.”
She turned to Keith. Now was as good a time as any to get the answers she was dying for.
“Keith,” she said, waving a hand in front of his eyes to make sure she had his attention. “Earth to Keith. Come in.”
He blinked and looked at her mouth. Not full eye contact, but close.
“Yes?”
“It’s time for you to come clean: What wasn’t in Mozi’s genome that made you change your whole life?”
He looked away. “You must swear that you will never whisper a word of what I am about to tell you, not to anyone else in the world. Ever.”
“Okay.”
I guess.
“‘Okay’ isn’t good enough. You must say, ‘I swear.’”
“Very well. I swear.”
“Garrick?”
“Yeah, sure. I swear. Now what didn’t you find?”
“All right. Remember the mansion I mentioned?”
“Yeah-yeah,” Rick said. “Dusty, dirty, with a generator in the cellar.”
“Don’t forget the generator’s lever is in the on position. And especially don’t forget the well-lit, inordinately neat bedroom, without a spot of dust anywhere. As I said before, what conclusion would you draw from that?”
Laura gave Rick a let’s-play-along shrug. “Okay. I’ll bite. I’d conclude that I wasn’t alone in the house. Someone else has been there.”
“Exactly. Being clean is very important. The room didn’t clean itself—somebody put in a lot of effort to get rid of all the dust and dirt. Or … it might have been an add-on, new construction.”
“Okay,” Rick said. “It could be either. So what? What does this have to do—?”
“And what if,” Keith said as if Rick hadn’t spoken, “on the bed you found a mold for the lever that turned on the generator?”
Wait. This wasn’t a riddle. Keith was constructing an allegory. So what was the lever and what was the generator?
She had it.
“Are you saying the lever is hsa-mir-3998 and the generator is human creativity?”
A big grin but still no eye contact. “Bingo!”
“The room is Mozi’s genome.”
A wider grin. “Double Jeopardy! winner!”
“So what?” Rick said. “We knew that!”
Keith’s grin vanished. “It’s staring you in the face! All the dust and dirt were missing from the room, either cleaned out or never there in the first place! Think! Think!”
The answer was doing a tantalizing Chippendale dance on the edge of Laura’s consciousness but her reach was just a tad too short to grab hold of it.
Keith ran out of patience. “Mozi had no non-coding DNA!”
Laura looked at Rick, certain that the bafflement on his face mirrored her own. And then … and then …
“Oh, shit! Oh, crap! Oh, fuck!”
Keith looked away, pointing a waggling finger at her. “She’s got it! She knows!”
“Knows what?” Rick said, his head swiveling back and forth between them like a radar dish. “You made Laura say ‘fuck.’ Laura never says ‘fuck,’ so I know it can’t be good. In fact, it’s gotta be awful. What?”
Right. She never said fuck. In her younger days, sure, every now and then, but with motherhood she’d purged the word from her vocabulary.
But this deserved many fucks. Many, many, many fucks.
She grabbed Keith’s arm. “No junk DNA?”
“‘Non-coding’ is the preferred term.”
She wanted to punch him. “Who cares what it’s called?”
“It’s important in this case. Biological activity often gets confused with biological function. All DNA that had no useful function, biologically active or not, was absent from Mozi’s genome. Better than ninety percent of the average primate’s DNA is just taking up room on the chromosome—dust and dirt, if you will. Mozi’s was half that.”
“That … that’s impossible.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. Why do you think I ran and reran her genome so many times?”
“But that means…”
“Yes,” he said, nodding vigorously. “Somebody cleaned the room.”
Rick had his hands folded as if in prayer. “Will one of you please…?”
Poor Rick. He had no background in any of this.
She faced him. “Every creature on Earth carries what’s known as junk DNA.” She held up a hand to stop Keith from correcting her again. “It contains all the leftovers from our evolutionary past—mutations that didn’t work out, bits and pieces of viruses, non-primate genes.”
“Evolution I get. But what—?”
“As a species evolves, all that junk stays onboard and is passed up the line. The mutations that work are put to use, the ones that don’t are consigned to the junk pile.”
She was oversimplifying the process, but she felt the end point was valid.
Rick was frowning as the light began to dawn. “So I’m gathering from what you’re saying is that somebody cleaned up Mozi’s junk pile.” He shook his head. “Is that possible?”
“No!” Keith said. “It’s way, way beyond any existing technology. That’s the whole point! As Laura said, primates—and humans and dapis are primates—share DNA with all sorts of lower life forms. We share a sixth of our DNA with daffodils and more than a third with the common fruit fly. But the dapi genome has been cleaned up—no extraneous DNA from prior species, also no non-functional DNA. It’s like it was custom-designed, streamlined to produce a designated species. And it contains a human-specific gene—hsa-mir-3998.”
Rick was nodding. “One of the so-called God Genes.”
Keith threw his head back. “How I loathe that term! B
ut that’s what the creationists and the intelligent-design crowds will be shouting from the rooftops when they hear about it.”
“So what?” Laura said. “Science is on the side of human evolution.”
“Science was on the side of human evolution. Not anymore. Anyone with half a brain who looks at the dapis’ genome will have to come to the conclusion that this species did not develop through natural selection and mutation, but was either altered or manufactured de novo.”
“Where?” Rick said. “By whom?”
“The billions of believers around the globe will say in Heaven by God, of course.”
“What do you say?”
Keith shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t a clue. But what I can say is that it’s powerful evidence that we humans are the result of deliberate genetic manipulation. The dapis were created—I use that term advisedly because all the evidence points to deliberate genetic manipulation. Beyond that, I can offer only suppositions that will sound wild and off the wall and totally insane to anyone listening.”
Rick began the stuttering bass line of “Ice Ice Baby.”
Laura groaned.
Keith said, “Why are you making that noise?”
“Try me, bro. Just try me.” Rick’s grin was hard and humorless. “I can outdo you in the ‘wild and off the wall and totally insane’ department any day.”
Laura hadn’t seen it before, but this situation fit snugly with Rick’s scenario of the human species being manipulated by outside forces. Perhaps a little too snugly for comfort.
“Right then,” Keith said. “How’s this? The dapis were placed in Africa millions of years ago to insert this specific gene, one related to creativity—hsa-mir-3998, to be specific—into the hominid line via a retrovirus or some other means of horizontal transfer.”
“Do you think they knew what would happen?” Rick said.
“I don’t even know who ‘they’ are, so how can I answer that?”
“Do you think your 3998 was the first gene they tried to insert?”
“Who’s this ‘they’ you keep referring to?”
Rick had that look.
“You’re going to get into that now?” Laura said.
“How can I not?” He turned to Keith. “Okay, try this on for size. Forces we cannot understand—intrusive cosmic entities, intellects vast, cool, and unsympathetic, call them what you like—placed a seed species with a manipulated genome among the African primates and sat back to see what happened.”
“Ridiculous. You’re talking a wait of millions of years to find out if it worked.”
“Maybe millions of years isn’t such a long stretch for them.”
“You’re adding a whole extra layer of supposition to the situation.”
Rick smiled. “I’m allowed. Because Occam’s razor doesn’t work here. You already have evidence of outside manipulation of a primate’s genome. It didn’t happen by itself, right?”
Keith shook his head. “No, certainly not.”
“Well, I’m offering a possible explanation. If you’ve got a better one, or even an alternate theory, I’m all ears. Shoot.”
“I … I don’t have one.”
“Okay, then we’ll go with mine for now. So, these intellects placed the dapis here to kick-start a brighter species of primate. And now that the resultant species is self-aware and self-sufficient and seated atop the food chain, maybe it’s time to throw them a curve. Maybe it’s time to let them know they’re the cosmic equivalent of a genetically modified strain of lab rat, then sit back and watch the ripple effects of that revelation.”
Keith snorted. “That’s preposterous!”
“No more preposterous than all these gene carriers clustered here on an island that’s somehow been missed by all the sailors and mapmakers and satellites. No more preposterous than a certain zoologist—one who has the knowledge and access to the technology to decode exactly what that primate is—just happening upon one of the species in a street bazaar. Don’t you see? We’re all being played!”
Keith waved his hands in the air. “Noise! Nothing but noise! I’ve introduced you to the equivalent of an evolutionary hydrogen bomb and you reduce it to the level of a freshman dormitory bullshit session with an inane cosmic conspiracy theory!”
“If you’d seen what I’ve seen…” He wagged his finger back and forth between himself and Laura. “… what we’ve seen, you wouldn’t be calling it ‘inane.’”
“It doesn’t matter what you think or I think. It doesn’t matter whether the changes in the dapi genome are the result of divine or unnatural intervention. None of it changes the inescapable fact that not one dapi can be allowed to leave the island. I knew the moment I sequenced Mozi’s impossibly clean genome that I would have to track down her species and kill every last one of them.”
Laura felt her jaw drop. “Wh-wh-what? Why on Earth…?”
“To save human civilization.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Rick said.
“Science has led us to believe that we struggled up the evolutionary chain, mutation by mutation, pulling ourselves from the DNA muck to build a globe-spanning civilization that has driven a golf buggy on the moon and sent probes to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond. But the existence of the dapis is proof we were jump-started from outside. Whether it’s attributed to a divine power fusing a bit of itself into us or the result of an experiment by extraterrestrial intelligence, either way, the implications of the dapi genome diminish us as a species. We go from movers and shakers and builders and explorers, from masters of our fate to … pets. Yeah, that’s what this means: We’re house pets.”
Rick spread his arms. “Hallelujah, a convert! He’s seen the light!”
“Don’t joke about hallelujah. If the truth about the dapis gets out, it will be taken all over the world as proof of humanity’s divine origin. And that will set science back centuries—creationism will be legitimized, intelligent design will be taught in science courses, human progress will stagnate. Politicians who don’t toe that line will fall and theocracies will rise.”
“You don’t know that,” Laura said.
“Oh, but I do, I do. The divine origin of mankind is taught by all the Abrahamic religions. The Jews, all the Christian sects, all the Muslim sects—we’re talking billions of people here—will all buy into it, because that’s what they’ve heard all their lives. The Hindus to some extent too. Even for people who’ve been on the fence in their belief, the God Gene is proof.”
“The UFO crowd could make just as good a case for alien origin,” Rick said. “They can say the artificial dapi genome means we Homo saps are the result of some sort of experiment.”
Keith gave a derisive snort. “Pissing in the ocean. They’re an infinitesimal minority of kooks who will be drowned out by the overwhelming majority of True Believers. The growing theocracies might even martyr them. Scientific inquiry will not only be discouraged under those theocracies, it could well be forbidden. No need to do research for answers when we already have the answer to everything: God.” He slashed the air with his hand. “No! Nobody can know about this. And the only way to assure that is for every dapi to be hunted down and destroyed. The species should have died off millions of years ago. It’s time to make their extinction a reality.”
“Wiping out a species,” Rick said with a slow shake of his head. “I never thought I’d hear you say that.”
Laura tried to catch Rick’s eyes but couldn’t. “He can only say it. He can’t do it. Can you, Keith?”
Keith kept his eyes fixed on a point somewhere past Laura’s left shoulder and said nothing.
“Keith Somers could never do such a thing,” Laura continued, “but Marten Jeukens can, isn’t that right?”
Rick gave her a nod and jumped on board. “How convenient that the dapis are all in one place.”
“How inconvenient they exist at all! They should be extinct with all the rest of the adapiforms.”
Laura said,
“But you could have invented Marten Jeukens without selling everything you own.”
“I didn’t know where the dapis were or how long it would take me to find them. I thought it might take the rest of my life to track them all down. Now it’s clear it won’t, but … after Marten does what he has to do, I don’t think I can go back to being Keith.”
“Well, with the police after Marten now,” Rick said, “you can’t be him either.”
Keith shrugged. “I’ll work something out.”
“‘After Marten does what he has to do…’” Laura said. “Marten knows how to solve the dapi problem?”
Keith nodded. “The plan is in place. All it needs is to be set in motion.”
“What’s he gonna do?” Rick said. “Nuke the island?”
A sad smile. “If only he could.” He looked toward where Laffite and company were toiling. “I’m tired of talking. I’m going to go watch what they’re up to.”
He wandered away, but not too far.
“He’s really gone off the deep end,” Rick said.
“You mean you don’t believe him about the dapi genome?”
“Oh, I do. But of course I would. What about you?”
“I think he’s telling the truth, and I think it unhinged him.” She looked at Rick. “It’s momentous, isn’t it? I mean, it changes everything.”
“Well, it doesn’t change the world as it is, just how you look at it. If it gets out, it’ll rub everyone’s nose in the secret history.”
“Secret history … what’s that?”
“There’s consensus history, which is what people agree on as to what happened and why. Then there’s the secret history of what really happened and what was really behind those events.”
“But do you think he’s right? About the theocracies and new dark ages?”
“I can see the news changing the world to some degree. If I adopt a god-the-creator belief-set, whether that god’s Yahweh or Allah or Brahma, I can see myself calling 3998 the God Gene and feeling, well, exalted that the creator had inserted a piece of himself—or herself or itself—into humanity. The world’s already got somewhere between four and five billion believers in a divine creator. I can definitely see that number jumping. But I don’t know about Keith’s plague of theocracies.”
The God Gene Page 30