Djinn City, page 35
“It’s definitely got gross congenital defects,” Maria said.
“This brings us to sample K. Sample K is a human with twenty-three chromosomes. It seems like a normal human, although there are some possible anomalies. The majorly strange thing is in the Y chromosome. Now in normal humans the Y chromosome is about a third in size to the X chromosome. Why is that, you ask? ’Cause it’s lost a lot of genetic material over the past few million years. Parts got miscopied, left out, whatever. The Y has fewer functional genes than other chromosomes, but it’s important because it determines sex, right, it essentially makes males. It carries the SRY gene, which starts off testicles in men. It also has genes that create sperm. Now this is the curious part. Sample K has a longish Y chromosome. It’s like got twice the amount of information. That’s not supposed to happen, right, the Y chromosome tends to get shorter with time, because it doesn’t recombine during meiosis—”
“I’m losing it a bit,” Rais said, raising his hand.
“Meiosis is when the cell divides to make the sex cells, with like half the chromosomes, dumbass,” Maria said. “Like the sperm has twenty-three and the egg has twenty-three, and you put them together and get a perfect forty-six? What? I took bio.”
“She’s right, of course,” Roger said. “And during meiosis, normal chromosomes kind of swap DNA—it’s called recombination. It means the eventual offspring benefits from greater genetic variety. Getting back to it, the Y can’t take advantage of recombination because it doesn’t fit with the X anymore, except right at the ends, because it’s lost a whole lot of genes. This means the Y gets passed on pretty much intact from father to son. That’s important.”
“Yeah, that’s how you trace family patrilineage,” Rais said.
“Yeah. So anyway, this sample K has a long Y, which is strange, but could just be a mutation. I was curious why, though, so I went ahead and used FISH to light up the Y. That’s basically the technique we use to look at individual genes on a chromosome. What I think this guy’s got is called sperm heteromorphism.”
“That sounds bad.”
“Not really. It’s common in moths and butterflies.”
“Rare in humans?”
“Never found in humans, as far as I know. It means the body makes two kinds of sperm. In this case, I think he makes haploid sperm and diploid sperm. Normal sperm for humans is haploid, right, it sends just twenty-three chromosomes including a single Y or X, which combines with the ovum’s X, and you get an XY or XX zygote with a combined forty-six regular chromosomes. Then there’s the bigger diploid sperm, which sends forty-six chromosomes, including a YY or an XX. Now you get YY or XX sperm sometimes, but it’s an accident, and normally those fetuses abort naturally. In a human, this kind of thing leads to major birth defects. This guy is making them on purpose. It’s just strange.”
“It’s actually beginning to make some sense now.”
“Owfff, can you just get to the point?” Maria said.
“Not yet,” Rais replied, and smiled. “Rog, keep going. I want to hear your theory first.”
Roger took a deep breath and drank some water. “Okay. Logically, these two cases are related, since you sent me the samples together. Sample B is a tetraploid male with twenty-four by four chromosomes. Sample K is a diploid male with twenty-three by two chromosomes, a seemingly normal human, except for the strange Y chromosome, which appears to allow it to mate with tetraploids. If I could get a sperm sample from sample K, I guess I’d find that he makes both haploid and diploid sperm, probably in equal proportions, which, theoretically, would allow him to have viable offspring with either normal humans or the tetraploid ape thing. See, the sperm with the extra chromosomes would be bigger, thus a different shape. I’m guessing the shape itself would ensure that the correct sperm would get into the correct egg. Of course we also have to look at the epigenetic side of things. It’s possible that something environmental triggers the production of either kind of sperm. It’s actually pretty common for an outside stimulus like temperature or something chemical to switch genes off or on.”
“What about the extra chromosome?” Rais asked. “Won’t that lead to a mule-type situation?”
“You’d think that, right? I was worried about it, but then I looked at it another way. The fusion of chromosome two was a mutation, right? I mean, it happened to one guy first. So how was he able to pass it on? He must have had offspring with a regular ape with twenty-four chromosomes. The answer is that no genetic material was lost in the fusion. The two smaller ape chromosomes just lined up against the bigger human chromosome, and you got viable, fertile offspring no problem. Of course, it’s not that simple. Every gene codes for different numbers of proteins. There’s most likely an RNA signaling system that works on top, which directs which protein exactly is being made. Basically DNA is a lot more resilient than people think, and mutations often stick around for millions of years, until they actually have some impact. Anyway, in short, it just works.”
“Say that you’re correct, and our sample K mates with a tetraploid twenty-four-chromosome ape creature like sample B. What would the offspring be like?” Rais asked.
“Well, everything says they’d be grotesque, unviable, sterile deformities.”
“Supposing they weren’t.”
“Then you’d have tetraploid hybrid creatures with genes from humans and some branch of great ape descended from our common ancestor. A creature that could be mostly human or mostly ape in look, but able to fully mate within the tetraploid community, as well as with human males carrying the anomalous Y chromosome,” Roger said.
“Which brings us to our original contract, the haplogroup study.”
“Well, we look at SNPs, which is single nucleotide polymorphisms, meaning just one nucleotide is out of place, whereas this is a major, major genetic difference in the chromosome. I mean, the magnitude of this is mind-blowing. I broke sample K’s Y into a bunch of snips and looked for them, and they match the historic samples I told you about before, plus some notes on unlikely-looking Y chromosomes, which just about confirms that this is a peculiar mutation that has been with us for a very long time and spread out over a very large land area.”
“Okay, let me tell you the secret. Sample K is my uncle, the emissary Kaikobad. Sample B is Barabas, a djinn.”
“Like an actually djinn?”
“Yup.”
“Woohoo! Yessss! Woooh! I knew this was something cool!”
“You’re going to believe him, just like that?” Maria asked. “You’re not going to like ask for a rational explanation?”
Roger leaned forward, his eyes big, sweat beading his forehead, a vein popping on his neck. “Hey, I’ve waited for this moment my whole life. I knew magic was real. I knew there was more to life than chairs and tables. I was raised by Wiccans. I’ve seen magic.”
“So, Roger, what’s your best guess now?”
“So first off, looking at djinn DNA, we appear to come from a common ancestor, except for the tetraploidy. Can you imagine what this means? This is proof of another intelligent species on earth! Wait, they are intelligent, aren’t they?”
“They’re either complete idiots or they’re psychopathic mass murderers,” Maria said. “Take your pick. Guess which ones are on our side.”
“If we assume that we are all descendant from the great ape line, at some point there was a tetraploidy mutation. The chromosome count matches up, but no other branch off the ape line has any kind of polyploidy. The break-off must have been distant,” Roger said.
“What kind of time frame?” Rais asked.
Roger began to sketch on the tablecloth with a pencil.
“If we make a third hypothetical djinn line, that split must have occurred at least eight hundred thousand years ago. The djinns could have split off the main line as early as that or much earlier—there’s no way to tell without more study. The other issue is the whole tetraploidy thing, which is not really present in great ape genes. However, it could be. People think DNA is like eighty percent garbage, but that’s wrong of course. We carry a lot of useful mutations, and they only get expressed when it’s relevant. That’s the whole point of epigenetics. That’s how animals can adapt so fast to environments. So it’s entirely possible that tetraploidy is carried somewhere in the great ape line, and for whatever reason it got switched on with the djinn branch. Hell, even humans could be carrying the genes—we just don’t know enough to rule it out.
“If I could map the whole genome, I could get a better idea. You have to give me a live sample…” Roger was now practically grabbing Rais by the neck. He was surprisingly strong, seemed well capable of strangling him out of excitement. “I need to see it, man. You can’t keep me out of this!”
“Relax, Rog, trust me, I’m not trying to keep you out. We might have trouble finding a djinn who’ll actually cooperate with this. I don’t think they’ll be exactly thrilled by your ape theory.”
“Well, give me your uncle then, let me verify the Y chromosome issue.”
“He’s in a coma back home.”
“Let’s fly back there then,” Roger said. “I’ll charge it on the lab. I’ll sell all the equipment if I have to.”
“We can’t, we’re a bit pressed for time,” Rais said.
“Wait, he’s your real uncle, right?”
“My father’s cousin.”
“So let me run the tests on you. You might have the same condition. Ys get passed on intact. If it runs in your family, well…”
“What?”
“Gimme a sperm sample, man, let me check if you’ve got the goods.”
“Ugh,” said Maria. “This is just getting ridiculous now.”
“Like right now?”
“I can’t sleep knowing all this, man. I’ve got to see djinns, man. This is like a Nobel Prize–winning type of breakthrough in genetics, dude. We’ll pop over to the lab and you can get some out.”
“You want to come and help me?” Rais asked Maria.
“Is stabbing you in the eye going to help?”
“No, psycho…”
“Then no.”
CHAPTER 43
Entourage
“Congrats! You’ve got tetraploid sperm. About fifty percent. You wanna see the little suckers?”
“Can we just stop waving his damn sperm around?”
“So that confirms one part.”
“It’s almost like someone engineered a kind of human that can mate with djinns,” Roger said. “It could have occurred through natural selection if there was a large population of tetraploid djinn females sometime in the past, and the dual sperm humans would double their chances of creating offspring. Or something triggers the production of tetraploid sperm at the right time. If only we had a genuine hybrid…”
“Well, my uncle married a djinn, and they had a child,” Rais said. “My cousin was perfectly formed—there were no deformities—and he wasn’t retarded—”
“Well, bring him over then!”
“Can’t. He’s dead.”
“Oh.” Roger scratched his head. “Can we exhume his body and get some DNA maybe?”
“No, Roger, we can’t,” Rais said.
“We could get a dead djinn body, though, couldn’t we?” Maria asked. “What about your aunt? Didn’t she die at childbirth? Isn’t she buried in your plot?”
“There’s an empty headstone for her at our graveyard. Matteras took her body. I asked Mother about that,” Rais said. “Look, actually, Roger, I might have placed you in a bit of danger with this whole thing. I have a feeling if the wrong djinn finds out about this line of inquiry, he’ll kill you and burn down the lab.”
“A lot of danger, actually,” Maria said.
“I don’t care. I need to see djinns. I have to physically know they’re real. I want to see magic,” Roger said. His eyes were fixed far away. He was remembering hours of Dungeons and Dragons in his parents’ basement. Their game master had always had a fondness for djinns. One of their recurring story lines had been set in the desert.
“How old is the haplogroup for the long Y chromosome, Roger?”
“If this is part of the R2D subclade, and if all four of the cases I told you about actually do belong in one subclade, then the oldest was the Siberian one at 14,000 B.C.,” Roger said. “If I could get those samples, I could establish the subclade very easily, because the long Y is so distinctive. I guess I could write to those labs and try to get some reports.”
“Okay, Roger, you’re going to come with us,” Rais said. “We’re basically following the same line of inquiry as the historian, and she got yanked out of the sky and offed, so we can’t risk that happening to you. Take all your stuff—you can do the research while we travel.”
“Like right now?” Roger asked.
“You want to see djinns or not?”
“I’m ready,” Roger said.
“You can pack a bag, Roger,” Rais said. “And maybe take some of your kit.”
“Where are we going now?” Maria asked.
“Beltrex.”
“Rais, we don’t have much time,” Maria said. “They just issued a hurricane warning in Teknaf. I don’t think it’s natural. What if Matteras has already started his shit?”
“I can’t possibly stop a hurricane, or an earthquake, or anything else Matteras throws at us,” Rais said. “No, our only shot is to negotiate a peace. We don’t have any leverage, but something is going on with this whole genetics and Great War thing, and if we figure it out, we might have some chips. Beltrex is part of the solution. We need some serious dignatas backing us to get Matteras’s attention.”
“Your mom sent me a message. They’ve accepted a preliminary hearing on the breach of contract. Looks like Dargoman’s going to court,” Maria said.
“You’re texting with her now?”
“Hey, looks like I passed the Juny test. A few years too late, but whatever.”
Roger, suffering from growing bewilderment, was now raising his hand and waving it around. “Guys, these are djinns we’re talking about, right? What about the magic? When do I get to see magic?”
Rais frowned. “You know, they don’t do too much magic actually.” He glanced at Maria. “You ever actually seen Barabas do anything useful?”
Maria snorted. “Is drinking, puking, and passing out useful?”
“Yeah, I think you’re going to be a bit disappointed, Rog. They mostly talk shit and sue each other,” Rais said.
Roger’s face fell. “They don’t have magic swords and armor and stuff?” he asked.
“They mostly wear regular clothes,” Rais said. “The rich ones wear suits.”
“Magic carpets?”
“They ride rickshaws and cars,” Rais said. “Oh, wait. They have airships. You’re going to like the airships.”
“Can we ride in one?”
“Yeah,” Rais said. “You’ll love Golgoras. He’s got tusks and a telescopic eye.”
“What? Like a pirate?”
“Yeah, pretty much exactly like a pirate.”
Later, sitting in Roger’s house waiting for him to pack, Rais called his mother. She answered on the first ring, as she almost always did, blessed with the supernatural power for anticipating phone calls.
“Still alive,” he said. “How’s it going on your end?”
“The djinn court is… interesting,” Juny said. “It’s packed with Matteras’s clients and the conservative faction, but these guys take their contracts very seriously, so it’s not over yet. Breaking contract is worse than murder apparently. We’re stuck now on the finer points of the validity and strength of a verbal contract.”
“Will you win?”
“No, but I can tie him up for a long, long time.”
“Good. I think we can flip him if you keep the pressure on.”
“You want to sit with him?” Juny sounded skeptical. “I don’t think he’d agree.”
“Maria might be able to convince him.”
“Was this her idea?”
“Nope. She still wants to stab him with the invisible knife.”
“He killed your father.”
“I know, but we can deal with that later. Right now we need to put him to work.”
“He’ll never believe we actually want to negotiate.”
“He will, if you let him know that you two were estranged, that, in fact, you hated my father.”
“I’m not sure I want that.”
“Mother, you’re not one to become sentimental after all these years. Let him know that you’re happy enough with your coup and that I’m sick of looking over my shoulder.”
“He’ll think you’re a coward.”
“What do I care if he does what I want?”
“Everyone else will think that too.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“You’re getting better at this game,” Juny said. There was a faint note of smugness in her voice.
“I’ve had a hard teacher.”
“Okay, what else?”
“I need to see Beltrex, but he’s not taking my calls.”
“Why?”
“I want to test out my theory on him.”
“Beltrex is difficult to pin down. Be careful, son. I think he’s the djinn referred to in legends as Barkan. He’s spilled a lot of blood in the past, no matter how senile he comes off now.”
“He said he owed Uncle Kaikobad a favor or two.”
Juny laughed. “They all say that, only because they know Kaikobad isn’t going to claim anything. Djinns are the biggest frauds around. I’ve got some markers with Elkran, Beltrex’s cousin. He spends a lot of time out in California.”
“I didn’t know djinns cared for family like that.”
“Between you and me, I think they are lovers.”
“Oh.”
“What else?”
“I’m going to need the airship. Can you ask Golgoras to meet me somewhere near L.A.?”
“That miser is going to charge us. He’s expensive. You better make it count. And, Rais, don’t dawdle.”
“I’m not. Why?”
“It’s starting to rain over here.”
They took Roger’s white van full of equipment to the airport in Reno and a cheap flight to Oakland, California, and then a rented suburban to the Sonoma Valley, where Beltrex owned three old properties, cabernet vineyards, under different names. He normally stayed in his compound in Sonoma, although he had other fields in different regions. There was a time when he had owned most of California, apparently. His main vineyard was on rolling acreage that seemed to stretch to the mountains, with perfect rows of grapes and winding roads, eerily quiet. A house sat in a dip in the ground flush against a hill, almost hidden from view, until they got close enough for security cameras to stir to life. There was an electronic gate and, carefully disguised behind foliage, an electric fence. A camouflaged militia-type man popped up, seemingly from underground, and informed them that this was not a tourist vineyard, there was no wine tasting, and they should get the hell off private property. He was tense, his walkie-talkie kept crackling, and he gripped his semiautomatic with white knuckles.
