Get a grip, Marianne.
She did. The alien had said his name, an impossible collection of trilled phonemes, and immediately said, “Call me Ambassador Smith.” How had he chosen that—from a computer-generated list of English names? When Marianne had been in Beijing to give a paper, some Chinese translators had done that: “Call me Dan.” She had assumed the translators doubted her ability to pronounce their actual names correctly, and they had probably been right. But “Smith” for a starfarer…
“You are Dr. Jenner?”
“Yes, Ambassador.”
“We wanted to talk with you, in particular. Will you please come this way, all of you?”
They did, trailing like baby ducklings after the tall alien. The room beyond the single door had been fitted up like the waiting room of a very expensive medical specialist. Did they order the upholstered chairs and patterned rug on the Internet? Or manufacture them with some advanced nanotech deep in the bowels of the Embassy? The wall pictures were of famous skylines: New York, Shanghai, Dubai, Paris. Nothing in the room suggested alienness. Deliberate? Of course it was. Nobody here but us chickens.
Marianne sat, digging the nails of one hand into the palm of the other to quiet her insane desire to giggle.
“I would like to know of your recent publication, Dr. Jenner,” the ceiling said, while Ambassador Smith looked at her from his disconcertingly large eyes.
“Certainly,” Marianne said, wondering where to begin. Where to begin? How much did they know about human genetics?
Quite a lot, as it turned out. For the next twenty minutes Marianne explained, gestured, answered questions. The others listened silently except for the low murmur of the Chinese and Russian translators. Everyone, human and alien, looked attentive and courteous, although Marianne detected the slightly pursed lips of Ekaterina Zaytsev’s envy.
Slowly it became clear that Smith already knew much of what Marianne was saying. His questions centered on where she had gotten her DNA samples.
“They were volunteers,” Marianne said. “Collection booths were set up in an open-air market in India, because I happened to have a colleague working there, in a train station in London, and on my college campus in the United States. At each place, a nominal fee was paid for a quick scraping of tissue from the inside of the cheek. After we found the first L7 DNA in a sample from an American student from Indiana, we went to her relatives to ask for samples. They were very cooperative.”
“This L7 sample, according to your paper, comes from a mutation that marks the strain of one of the oldest of mitochondrial groups.”
Desai made a quick, startled shift on his chair.
“That’s right,” Marianne said. “Evidence says that ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ had at least two daughters, and the line of one of them was L0 whereas the other line developed a mutation that became—” All at once she saw it, what Desai had already realized. She blinked at Smith and felt her mouth fall open, just as if she had no control over her jaw muscles, just as if the universe had been turned inside out, like a sock.
An hour later, Ryan arrived at Elizabeth’s apartment. Repeated calls to their mother’s cell and landline had produced nothing. Ryan and Elizabeth sat on the sagging sofa, conferring quietly, their usual belligerence with each other replaced by shared concern. Noah sat across the room, listening.
His brother had been short-changed in the looks department. Elizabeth was beautiful in a severe way and Noah knew he’d gotten the best of his parents’ genes: his dead father’s height and athletic build, his mother’s light-gray eyes flecked with gold. In contrast, Ryan was built like a fire hydrant: short, muscular, thickening into cylindricalness since his marriage; Connie was a good cook. At thirty, he was already balding. Ryan was smart, slow to change, humorless.
Elizabeth said, “Tell me exactly what Evan said about the FBI taking her away. Word for word.”
Ryan did, adding, “What about this—we call the FBI and ask them directly where she is and what’s going on.”
“I tried that. The local field office said they didn’t know anything about it, but they’d make inquiries and get back to me. They haven’t.”
“Of course not. We have to give them a reason to give out information, and on the way over I thought of two. We can say either that we’re going to the press, or that we need to reach her for a medical emergency.”
Elizabeth said, “I don’t like the idea of threatening the feds—too potentially messy. The medical emergency might be better. We could say Connie’s developed a problem with her pregnancy. First grandchild, life-threatening complications—”
Noah, startled, said, “Connie’s pregnant?”
“Four months,” Ryan said. “If you ever read the emails everybody sends you, you might have gotten the news. You’re going to be an uncle.” His gaze said that Noah would make just as rotten an uncle as he did a son.
Elizabeth said, “You need to make the phone call, Ryan. You’re the prospective father.”
Ryan pulled out his cell, which looked as if it could contact deep space. The FBI office was closed. He left a message. FBI Headquarters in D.C. were also closed. He left another message. Before Ryan could say, “They’ll never get back to us” and so begin another argument with Elizabeth over governmental inefficiency, Noah said, “Did the Wildlife Society give you that cell for your job?”
“It’s the International Wildlife Federation and yes, the phone has top-priority connections for the loosestrife invasion.”
Noah ducked his head to hide his grin.
Elizabeth guffawed. “Ryan, do you know how pretentious that sounds? An emergency hotline for weeds?”
“Do you know how ignorant you sound? Purple loosestrife is taking over wetlands, which for your information are the most biologically diverse and productive ecologies on Earth. They’re being choked by this invasive species, with an economic impact of millions of dollars that—”
“As if you cared about the United States economy! You’d open us up again to competition from cheap foreign sweatshop labor, just let American jobs go to—”
“You can’t shut out the world, Elizabeth, not even if you get the aliens to give you the tech for their energy shields. I know that’s what you ‘border-defense’ types want—”
“Yes, it is! Our economic survival is at stake, which makes border patrol a lot more important than a bunch of creeping flowers!”
“Great, just great. Wall us off by keeping out new blood, new ideas, new trade partners. But let in invasive botanicals that encroach on farmland, so that eventually we can’t even feed everyone who would be imprisoned in your imported alien energy fields.”
“Protected, not imprisoned. The way we’re protecting you now by keeping the Denebs off-shore.”
“Oh, you’re doing that, are you? That was the aliens’ decision. Do you think that if they had wanted to plop their pavilion in the middle of Times Square that your Border Patrol could have stopped them? They’re a starfaring race, for chrissake!”
“Nobody said the—”
Noah shouted, which was the only way to get their attention, “Elizabeth, your cell is ringing! It says it’s Mom!”
They both stared at the cell as if at a bomb, and then Elizabeth lunged for the phone. “Mom?”
“It’s me. You called but—”
“Where have you been? What happened? What was the FBI—”
“I’ll tell you everything. Are you and Ryan still at your place?”