Yesterday's Kin Read Online Free Page B

five-toed and broad, the nails cut short and square. Those feet looked so much like hers that she thought wildly: He could wear my shoes .
    “Hello,” the alien said, and it was not his voice but the mechanical one of the radio broadcasts, coming from the ceiling.
    “Hello,” Desai said, and bowed from the waist. “We are glad to finally meet. I am Secretary-General Desai of the United Nations.”
    “Yes,” the alien “said,” and then added some trilling and clicking sounds. His mouth did actually move. Immediately the ceiling said, “I welcome you in our own language.”
    Secretary Desai made the rest of the introductions with admirable calm. Marianne tried to fight her growing sense of unreality by recalling what she had read about the Denebs’ planet. She wished she paid more attention to the astronomy. The popular press had said that the alien star was a K-something (K zero? K two? She couldn’t remember). The alien home world had both less gravity and less light than Earth, at different wavelengths . . . orange, yes. The sun was an orange dwarf. Was this Deneb so tall because the gravity was less? Or maybe he was just a basketball player—
    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’