Yesterday's Kin Read Online Free PDF

who would be imprisoned in your imported alien energy fields.”
    “Protected, not imprisoned. The way we’re protecting you now by keeping the Denebs offshore.”
    “Oh, you’re doing that, are you? That was the aliens’ decision. Do you think that if they had wanted to plop their pavilion in the middle of Times Square that your Border Patrol could have stopped them? They’re a starfaring race, for chrissake!”
    “Nobody said the—”
    Noah shouted, which was the only way to get their attention, “Elizabeth, your cell is ringing! It says it’s Mom!”
    They both stared at the cell as if at a bomb, and then Elizabeth lunged for the phone. “Mom?”
    “It’s me. You called but—”
    “Where have you been? What happened? What was the FBI—”
    “I’ll tell you everything. Are you and Ryan still at your place?”
    “Yes. You sound funny. Are you sure you’re okay?”
    “Yes. No. Stay there, I’ll get a cab, but it may be a few hours yet.”
    “But where—”
    The phone went dead. Ryan and Elizabeth stared at each other. Into the silence, Noah said, “Oh yeah, Mom. Noah’s here, too.”
    MARIANNE
    “You are surprised,” Ambassador Smith had said, unnecessarily.
    Courtesy had been swamped in shock. “You’re human ? From Earth?”
    “Yes. We think so.”
    “Your mitochondrial DNA matches the L7 sequence? No, wait—your whole biology matches ours?”
    “There are some differences, of course. We—”
    The Russian delegate stood up so quickly her chair fell over. She spat something which her translator gave as a milder, “‘I do not understand how this is possible.’”
    “I will explain,” Smith said. “Please sit down.”
    Ekaterina Zaytsev did not sit. All at once Marianne wondered if the energy field enveloping Smith was weaponized.
    Smith said, “We have known for millennia that we did not originate on World. There is no fossil record of us going back more than 150,000 Earth years. The life-forms native to World are DNA-based, but there is no direct genetic link. We know that someone took us from somewhere else and—”
    “Why?” Marianne blurted. “Why would they do that? And who is ‘they’?”
    Before Smith could answer, Zaytsev said, “Why should your planet’s native life-forms be DNA-based at all? If this story is not a collection of lies?”
    “Panspermia,” Smith said. “And we don’t know why we were seeded from Earth to World. An experiment, perhaps, by a race now gone. We—”
    The Chinese ambassador was murmuring to his translator. The translator, American and too upset to observe protocol, interrupted Smith.
    “Mr. Zhu asks how, if you are from Earth, you progressed to space travel so much faster than we have? If your brains are the same as ours?”
    “Our evolution was different.”
    Marianne darted in with, “How? Why? A hundred fifty thousand years is not enough for more than superficial evolutionary changes!”
    “Which we have,” Smith said, still in that mechanical voice that Marianne suddenly hated. Its very detachment sounded condescending. “World’s gravity, for instance, is one-tenth less than Earth’s, and our internal organs and skeletons have adjusted. World is warmer than Earth, and you can see that we carry little body fat. Our eyes are much larger than yours—we need to gather all the light we can on a planet dimmer than yours. Most plants on World are dark, to gather as many photons as possible. We are dazzled by the colors on Earth.”
    He smiled, and Marianne remembered that all human cultures share certain facial expressions: happiness, disgust, anger.
    Smith continued, “But when I said that our evolution differed from yours, I was referring to social evolution. World is a more benign planet than Earth. Little axial tilt, many easy-to-domesticate grains, much food, few predators. We had no Ice Age. We settled into agriculture over a hundred thousand years before you did.”
    Over a hundred thousand years more of settled