Waking Gods (Themis Files #2)(26)

—I believe he is. He offered to meet you and tell you exactly what was done to you. I refused. Before you do anything that cannot be undone, let me contact him and arrange that meeting. Your scientific knowledge is infinitely greater than mine and you should be able to understand a great deal more than I did. I suspect he had to vulgarize things a lot for my benefit.

— …

—Will you listen to what he has to say?

— …

—Good. I am relieved to see that your curiosity is still greater than your despair. Now, will you give me the gun?

—What if it doesn’t work? What if I don’t like what he has to say?

—Then I will try something else.

—You can’t babysit me forever.

—Probably not. But I can order other people to do so. If you want me to say I will give you back your gun and close the door behind me on the way out, I will not. I will do everything I can to stop you from ending your life, in part because I care about you, but mostly for purely selfish and practical reasons. That being said, you are a very intelligent and resourceful woman, and if you are fully motivated, I will probably fail. Then I will try something else.

—What do you mean?

—You were brought back from the dead once. There is no reason to believe it cannot be done again, and again.

—I … You’d do that to me?

—I would do anything I feel is necessary to protect us. I would very much like to avoid having to tell you about “the needs of the many,” but this is one of those moments. Most experts, including yourself if I am not mistaken, believe in the impending return of our alien visitors. Even you should concede that your current despondency is inconsequential in comparison. If Ms. Resnik were contemplating jumping into the abyss, I trust you would do everything in your power to stop her.

—Probably. But her role in all this is obvious. I just don’t think I can be useful to you anymore.

—Time will tell. May I change the subject for a moment?

—What do you wanna talk about?

—I would like you to tell me what you have learned about the beings that were inside the alien robot.

—Why? There’s nothing new to tell.

—Humor me.

—You know all this. You read the reports. We talked about this!

—Are they similar to us?

—Where are you going with this? You know what they look like. You’ve seen them! They’re humanoid. Type V, dark olive skin, knees reversed like the robot. And it’s really their knees, they’re not digitigrade like we suspected. They have an extra joint in their legs. No eyebrows. Everything else looks human, inside and out.

—How close are they to us from a genetic standpoint? I know that we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. Can you tell me how much of it we share with the aliens?

—You’ve read the report. What more do you need!

—I want you to tell me.

—You should have stuck with Alyssa. She’s the expert in all this.

—I wish I could talk to Alyssa about a great many things. But as she is unavailable at the moment, I would like you to tell me what you understand.

—Well, the first part of what you said isn’t exactly true. How similar our DNA is to a chimp depends a lot on what you compare. It’s really not that close if you look at everything. The short answer for the aliens we found is 0 percent since they don’t have DNA.

—I find it difficult to believe that they could be so different from us.

—They’re not. They’re made pretty much the same way. It’s just not … Do you know what DNA is?

—Deoxyribonucleic acid. My understanding is that it contains genetic instructions for life as we know it. I realize this is a simplistic answer.

—That’s the gist of it. It’s information storage. It’s a complex molecule that can store an incredible amount of information. And it’s stable. The really cool part is that it can replicate itself. That’s basically all you need to create life. The ability to hold information for a certain amount of time and to pass it on. And you got the name right. I was asking whether you knew what it’s made of.

—Tell me.

—DNA’s a nucleic acid, like the name says. It’s made up of smaller things called nucleotides. To make a nucleotide, you need three things. A phosphate, a base, and a sugar.

—Sugar?

—Yep. There’s sugar in life. If the sugar is the one we call deoxyribose, you get deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. If the sugar is ribose, a simpler sugar, you get RNA, which can also store information, but isn’t as stable as DNA. The aliens have a very similar genetic makeup, but their nucleotides use a different sugar, a form of what we call arabinose.

—ANA.

—Exactly.

—And that is the only difference?

—Not quite. Each nucleotide also has a base. In DNA … Are you sure you want to hear this?

—Please.

—In DNA, there are four possible bases: cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine, which we just call C, G, A, and T. That’s the genetic alphabet. The alien genetic code doesn’t use A but something called diaminopurine. It makes their genetic code a little more stable than ours.

—Is it compatible with our DNA?

—Maybe. It’s close enough the two might be able to talk to each other.