Prophet of Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

these terms?”
    “Books.” Paul smiled as he looked down at the mouse. “She’s kin to herself.”
    “So this is your project for the fair?”
    “Yeah. I’ve been working on it for a long time.”
    “That’s a big mouse,” his mother said.
    “The biggest yet. Fifty-nine grams, weighed at a hundred days old. The average weight is around forty.”
    Paul stroked the mouse’s tawny fur. The little nose twitched—long colorless whiskers that existed at the very edge of visibility. Paul gave the mouse a tiny sunflower seed, and it rose up on its haunches, gripping the seed in tiny front paws. Paul had always thought there was something strangely human about a mouse’s stance when it fed that way.
    “What have you been feeding it to get so big?” she asked.
    Paul put the mouse on her hand. “It has nothing to do with food,” he said. “I feed all the mice the same. Look at this.” Paul showed her the charts he’d graphed on the white poster board, like the figure in his life sciences book, a gentle upward ellipse between the x- and y-axes—the slow upward climb in body weight from one generation to the next.
    “One of my F2s tipped the scales at forty-five grams, so I bred him to several of the biggest females, and they made more than fifty babies. I weighed them all at a hundred days old and picked the biggest four. Then I bred those and did the same thing with the next generation, choosing the heaviest hundred-day weights. I got the same bell-curve distribution—only the bell was shifted slightly to the right. Bertha was the biggest of them all.”
    “You just bred the biggest ones?” his mother said.
    “Yeah. I keep the big ones in the glass aquariums, apart from the others.”
    “It was easy as that?”
    “It’s the same thing people have been doing with domestic livestock for the last five thousand years. Cattle are bigger now than they used to be. Sheep give more wool. Our chickens lay more eggs.”
    “But this didn’t take thousands of years.”
    “No, it kind of surprised me it worked so well. This isn’t even subtle. I mean, look at her, and she’s only an F4. Imagine what an F10 might look like. I think I can make them even bigger.”
    She laughed nervously. “It sounds like you want to turn them into rats.”
    “Rats are a different species, but I bet with enough time … hundreds of generations … I might be able to get them close to that size.”
    Her face grew serious. “You shouldn’t talk like that.”
    “It’s just directional selection. With a diverse enough population, it’s amazing what a little push can do. I mean, when you think about it, I hacked off the bottom ninety-five percent of the bell curve for five generations in a row. Of course the mice got bigger. I probably could have gone the other way if I wanted, made them smaller.”
    “You father won’t like this,” she said. She handed the mouse back to Paul.
    “I know. I’ll tell him about it at the science fair. After I’ve won. He can’t get mad at me then.”
    His mother’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know,” she said. “What if he finds them before the fair?”
    “He won’t,” Paul said. He put the brindle mouse back in the aquarium. It scampered across the cedar chips toward the food dish. “Besides,” he said softly, so that his mother couldn’t hear. “This is all I have now.”
    “Just be careful,” she said.
    “There’s one thing that surprised me though, something I only noticed recently.”
    “What’s that?”
    “When I started, at least half of the mice were albino. Now it’s down to about one in ten.”
    “Why does that matter?”
    “I never consciously decided to select against that.”
    “So?”
    “So, when I did culls … when I decided which ones to breed, sometimes the weights were about the same on two mice, so I’d just pick one. I thought I was picking randomly, but now I’m not so sure. I think I just happened to like one kind more than the other.”
    “Maybe