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  Now these men in front of her were hinting that her father was a Seed. That just couldn’t be.

  “My dad would have told me,” she said. But even as she spoke, doubt wormed its way into her heart. No close family except for the “distant cousins” who lived in Norway, which just happened to be the location of one of the Vaults. And Dad’s extreme aversion to public communication terminals and D-tats…

  The major and Ian sat quietly, waiting. Furious as she was, Vars still appreciated the space to think. Would EPSA have a reason to lie to her? They are the good guys, right?

  “I need to talk to my dad,” she said finally.

  “I figured as much,” said Ian. “We’ve sent a representative to talk with him.”

  The major added, “And we would also like to run a blood test on you.”

  “You didn’t get all you needed from my coffee cup?”

  “We just want to be sure,” Ian said. “I…we want you on our team, Dr. Volhard. You have a tremendous contribution to make to our understanding of how to even approach what we’re dealing with. This genetic thing,” he glanced over at the major, “will be straightened out, one way or another. If you could just overlook this very…this awkward start to our relationship, I’m sure you will find working at EPSA very rewarding.”

  “Are you offering me a job?” Vars asked.

  “If we can straighten out this genetic mystery,” said Major Liut.

  Ian glanced sharply at the man and said, “Yes.”

  “I see,” Vars said. A job at EPSA was what she had always wanted. It’s just...

  “And I would like you to start immediately,” Ian added. “My department will smooth everything out with your university—”

  Everything was happening too fast. Vars felt confused and conflicted. “I still have a few classes left to teach this semester,” she said and realized that she was agreeing to the offer.

  “That won’t be a problem,” Ian assured her. “We need you, Dr. Volhard.”

  “Where do I go to take the blood test?” Vars asked. She noted that as soon as she said it, not only did she feel better, but Ian seemed to relax. Even Major Liut’s face was drained of some of its tension. They really do want me.

  “If you’ll follow me, please, Dr. Volhard,” said Ian.

  “We can go back to Vars.”

  “Perfect! Thank you, Vars.”

  The test didn’t take long, or at least the top-level pass at the results didn’t. The more detailed analysis would take a day or so. Vars felt herself holding her breath as they stood around the display in the medlab. It read:

  The paternal haplogroup is E-M5021—a relatively common haplogroup, associated with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.

  The maternal haplogroup is U5a1—a very old mitochondrial haplogroup that was part of the initial human expansion into Europe after the retreat of the ice sheets, 30,000 years ago.

  Top-level analysis of potentially problematic variants:

  •increased risk for age-related macular degeneration

  •hereditary hemochromatosis variant detected

  •lactose intolerance

  •less likely to be a deep sleeper

  •wet earwax variant

  •variant for a high number of freckles

  •dark red hair variant

  •light skin pigmentation

  •likely to taste a wide range of bitter compounds

  •likely to consume more caffeine

  It continued on, but Vars stopped there. She’d never paid much attention to genetic testing—she always figured if there was something truly problematic, her dad and her pediatrician would have fixed it or kept track of it. At a minimum, she would have known about it. She did note that the list of traits didn’t explain her slight epicanthic eyefold—but then who really cared?

  “Your results are excellent,” Ian said.

  “And they match your genetic ID profile,” added Major Liut.

  “In fact,” Ian said, “there’s nothing there that would preclude you from going on an outer planetary mission—”

  “Wait, what?” Vars was taken aback by the suggestion. Sure, she had always been interested in participating in some space program mission, theoretically. But to hear it said so casually…

  “We’ve already obtained your health records, and you are in fine physical shape for your age,” Ian continued.

  “You obtained my health records?” Vars felt violated all over again. How could her personal doctor hand over medical records without her explicit permission? There were laws against that.

  “Your agreement to employment at EPSA—we have the recording of your assent for legal purposes—gave us permission to initiate a full background check on you and your father,” the major said. “Medical records were obviously part of that.”

  Had she actually agreed to take this job? Vars wasn’t sure she had, at least not without ambiguity. She never actually came out and said she would take the job offer...she didn’t think. Then again, she knew she wouldn’t turn down a chance to be part of Ian’s team—and potentially go into space to investigate the strange alien artifact. Yes, of course she was taking the job. She just hated how all of this was being handled.

  “And my father?” Vars wasn’t sure what she had agreed to with regard to her dad.

  “Once we explained the situation to him,” said Major Liut, “Dr. Volhard volunteered to take the genetic test.”

  “When did you even have a chance to talk to him? No, hang on. You’re saying he volunteered?” Her dad was a very private man; that would had been very unlike him to agree to genetic testing.

  “Once we told him we realized who he was…” Ian said.

  Who he was? “Do you mean to say that my father admitted to being an ex-Seed?”

  Neither man answered the question. “We have his preliminary test here,” the major said. “Would you like to see his results?”

  Vars could only nod. This was all happening too fast.

  The major typed a few commands on the D-tats embedded into his left arm, and the medlab display lit up with genetic information for Dr. Matteo Volhard.

  The paternal haplogroup is E-M5021—a relatively common haplogroup, associated with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.

  The maternal haplogroup is U5a1—a very old mitochondrial haplogroup that was part of the initial human expansion into Europe after the retreat of the ice sheets, 30,000 years ago.

  Top-level analysis of potentially problematic variants:

  •increased risk for age-related macular degeneration

  •hereditary hemochromatosis variant detected

  •lactose intolerance

  •less likely to be a deep sleeper

  •wet earwax variant

  •variant for a high number of freckles

  •dark red hair variant

  •light skin pigmentation

  •likely to taste a wide range of bitter compounds

  •likely to consume more caffeine

  “Something is wrong,” Vars said. “This is identical to mine.”

  “At the top level, yes,” the major said. “We will, of course, do a complete analysis of both of your DNA profiles. In the meantime, would you like to see how similar your genetic profiles really are?”

  “Major, are you saying…?” Ian didn’t finish. He looked as surprised as Vars felt.

  “Dr. Varsaad Volhard and Dr. Matteo Volhard share over 80% of their genetic traits, according to preliminary DNA profiles,” the major read out from his report. He looked Vars in the eyes. “Dr. Matteo Volhard is both Varsaad’s father and sibling.”

  Vars felt her head spin. Her vision tunneled as she lost all of her peripheral sight to darkness. Someone kept repeating her name, but that was all she was able to process.

  “Vars? Var
s?” A woman’s voice. “It will be okay. Here, drink this.”

  Vars felt cold water trickle past her lips. She took a real sip and swallowed. It felt good going down her throat. The cold spread into her chest.

  She slowly opened her eyes. She was lying down on a hospital bed, still in the same medlab where she’d learned of the genetic results. The thick-spectacled woman from Ian’s team, the exo-biologist, stood beside her. There was no one else in the room.

  “Alice?” she said.

  “I got here as quickly as I could.” Alice had a look of real concern etched on her gentle face. Why had she come here? Why did she care how Vars felt?

  “I’m okay,” Vars said. “I’m just tired. No sleep. The stress of the book tour. The artifact you found. And now all this.” She waved her hands feebly in the air. She wasn’t sure how much Alice knew. “Did Ian tell you he offered me a job at EPSA?”

  “Yes. And that you’ve accepted.”

  Vars sat up, picked up the glass of ice water, and finished it. Dehydration was never a plus. “Do you know how complicated my genetic relation is to my father?”

  Alice flicked her eyes up to the ceiling in a gesture that Vars somehow understood. She’s telling me that they’re recording us. Vars double-blinked to indicate that she’d received the warning.

  “I know about you and Matteo,” Alice said in answer to Vars’s question. News certainly got around fast at EPSA.

  “So…do we need to call someone in order to leave the medlab?” Vars asked. They clearly couldn’t talk about anything here—not privately, anyway. And she wanted to learn more about the Mimas artifact. She wanted to know why Ian thought she could help. And she wanted to know why Alice seemed so invested in her well-being. She needed to know if she could work here.

  Chapter Four

  Alice took Vars back to the tree house, where the others were already assembled, waiting. Trays of sandwiches and coffee carafes were arranged on a table along the wall. Vars eyed the cups with suspicion—but what was done was done. She had made a decision to work with these people.

  “Welcome back,” said Ian. Vars thought she detected a forced note of excitement in his voice. “Thank you, Alice, for guiding our new team member back here. Vars, I was just updating everyone on your new status as a senior scientist in charge of understanding alien motivations.”

  “What?” Vars froze in the middle of grabbing a turkey and cheese on sourdough.

  “Well, in our group, you have unique qualifications to deal with solving the mystery of why,” Ian said. “So far we’ve only been focusing on the how—how the artifact got buried in a crater on one of Saturn’s moons and how it managed to free itself and send a message.”

  “We’re also looking at its age, power requirements, and abilities,” said the youngest-looking member of the JPL team, the one who had joked about Star Trek. Thankfully, everyone was now wearing nametags, and Vars was able to read his name: Dr. Benjamin Kouta. He saw her looking at his tag. “Call me Ben,” he said with a smile.

  “And I’m Trish Cars,” said the woman from the same team. “No honorifics.”

  “That’s because she’s smarter than everyone in this room,” Ben joked. “Present company excluded, of course.” He glanced at Vars, turning slightly red.

  “Only for the time being,” said Trish. But Vars saw that the woman was just joking. This was just a friendly rivalry, nothing toxic. That boded well for Vars’s ability to fit into this group. “We’re also focusing on where the message was sent,” Trish continued, “what it was, and whether there may have been any previous messages.”

  “As you can see, we have a rather full agenda,” Ian said. He gestured toward the food. “So please, everyone eat so we can start up again.”

  Vars took a seat and began to eat, and the other scientists got up and got food as well. So they hadn’t been waiting for her long. Good. She noticed that Major Liut and his partner, the one who kept her jailed in her room, had taken up their same positions in back as before, observing but not eating. As she looked at the major, Vars felt her indignation well up again. She hated the feeling of being trapped. She wondered what precisely they had said to get her dad to “volunteer” his DNA sample. It had to have been something very persuasive. Or very threatening. Vars vowed to find out.

  When they had all finished their sandwiches, Dr. Evelyn Shar—“Please call me Evi”—spoke up. “This morning, Vars, you made a distinction between collectivist and individualist cultures.” Was it only this morning? “Would you mind elaborating on how social groups might evolve into such different cultures?”

  Vars nodded. “I assume for now you’re interested in just the general brush strokes?”

  “Yes, let’s start there. We can dive into the details later.”

  “Keep this concrete, Vars,” Ian said. “We’re all used to data-driven science in this group.”

  Vars didn’t think he intended this as an insult, though it certainly sounded like one. Physicists, biochemists, and engineers—the hard-science types—tended to feel superior to practitioners of the soft sciences like sociology. And Vars, with her expertise in evolutionary socio-history, must really seem an odd duck to these people. What hard-science types didn’t always understand was that she was just as data-driven as them—it was just that it tended to be rather difficult to conduct controlled studies on groups of people who had died thousands of years ago. Even experiments on people alive today were frowned upon. So, in many ways, the job of a “soft” scientist was the more challenging one when it came to data analytics.

  “Despite any belief to the contrary,” Vars said, “we evolutionary socio-historians do rely on real hard facts to drive our theories.”

  “Of course you do,” Ian said. But Vars could tell that none of them were convinced.

  “I will focus on Homo sapiens for now,” Vars said. “We can use examples from other species once we’ve covered some basics.” She took a deep breath. “When we talk about evolutionary history, it is important to zoom out and to look on a grand scale, ignoring the small perturbations of individual personality-inspired events that tend to even out over eons of human evolution. Hitler, for instance, might have been very consequential to the history of the twentieth century but, in the grander scheme of human evolution, he’s a minor bump. While the Keres Triplets were even more devastating, it took us only a century to rebuild the Earth’s population to pre-impact levels. In the macro view, it was a minor event too.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly say that Keres was a minor event,” objected Alice. “It radically changed the psyche of the human race. It pushed us beyond the Earth.”

  “And yet there have been many other events during our deep history that have been just as influential,” said Vars. “The Keres impact devastated our most important nest of genetic diversity—Africa—but it was far from the first time that the human population experienced a genetic bottleneck. Compared even to other great apes—gorillas, for example—humans are genetically monochromatic.”

  “Thus the Human Genome Heritage Project,” said Bob Shapiro.

  Vars noticed that Alice gave him an odd sideways glance. So they all knew about her heritage. Well, it was better that way. Secrets like that tended to fester and impede communication within a group. These people needed to accept her into their team, if they were to work well together.

  “DNA propinquity is a problem,” Ian said, “but please, Vars, go on with your explanation for the rise of cultural differences.”

  “If we date modern humans to about 150,000 years ago, then we can consider behavior and environmental conditions on that time scale,” Vars said.

  “Why environmental?” Ian asked.

  “Behavior and the environment are tightly linked. Just as gene expression and the environment are. It’s nonsensical to talk of one without the other.” This was a point that confused most of Vars’s students early on
in her class—before it became obvious to all of them. “Let’s talk food. The type and availability of food are dependent on the environment, which is in turn dependent on location. Some early humans were luckier than others.

  “Consider, for example, the animals humans cultivated for domestication. There are animals associated with food goals—the main staples are goats, pigs, cows, sheep, water buffalo, yak, reindeer, ducks, geese, turkeys, and chickens—and there are animals mostly associated with tool goals—horses, donkeys, camels. These are not exhaustive lists, of course. And I’m setting aside our canine companions, since humans and dogs coevolved together. Anyway, as you can guess, the ancestors to these domesticated animals were not evenly distributed among ancient human settlements.”

  “The Americas got stuck with llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs, and ducks,” said Dr. Izzy Rubka. “So no wheel carts. Tough luck there.” He must have read at least parts of Vars’s book.

  “Yes,” Vars agreed. “What’s the point of inventing the wheel if there are no workhorses to pull them? So, in this way, the animal availability in the environment influenced the behavior of humans—our inventions, our way of life, our culture.

  “The same applies to plants. There are only a few plants on our planet that meet the criteria required for domestication. First, seeds need to be large enough for easy cultivation. Too small, and the effort to gather them isn’t worth the caloric energy they provide. Second, nutritional value. The goal here is great-tasting, calorie-rich, nonpoisonous, easy-to-process plants. Alternatively, or in addition, different parts of plants could be useful as tools—rope, clothing, building material. Third, a reasonable growth season. Consider oaks. Acorns are large enough and have rich nutritional value—”

  “They’re bitter as all hell,” Izzy interrupted. Based on his features, Vars guessed the man likely had some Mesoamerican ancestry. Perhaps his elementary school teachers made him eat acorn mush as part of some cultural enrichment curriculum, teaching him the wrong lesson.

  “It’s true,” Vars said, “most acorns are very bitter and unpalatable. But a few oak trees carry a mutation that lacks the bitter agent compound. The acorns from those trees are quite palatable, tasty even. But even those trees, however, aren’t suitable for domestication because of their extreme growth season. It takes a full human generation for oak trees to mature; and that makes cultivation highly impractical. When a tribe discovered a good oak in the neighborhood, people partook of its harvests and even made sure to plant some acorns, sure—but that’s quite different from domestication.”