Yesterday's Kin Read Online Free PDF Page B

communities, of cities, with their greater specialization and intellectual cross-fertilization. While Marianne’s ancestors fifteen thousand years ago had still been hunting mastodons and gathering berries, these cousins across the galaxy might have been exploring quantum physics. But—
    She said, “Then with such an environment, you must have had an overpopulation problem. All easy ecological niches rapidly become overpopulated!”
    “Yes. But we had one more advantage.” Smith paused; he was giving the translators time to catch up, and she guessed what that meant even before he spoke again.
    “The group of us seeded on World—and we estimate it was no more than a thousand—were all closely related. Most likely they were all brought from one place. Our gene pool does not show as much diversity as yours. More important, the exiles—or at least a large number of them—happened to be unusually mild-natured and cooperative. You might say, ‘sensitive to other’s suffering.’ We have had wars, but not very many, and not early on. We were able to control the population problem, once we saw it coming, with voluntary measures. And, of course, those subgroups that worked together best made the earliest scientific advances and flourished most.”
    “You replaced evolution of the fittest with evolution of the most cooperative,” Marianne said, and thought: There goes Dawkins .
    “You may say that.”
    “I not say this,” Zaytsev said, without waiting for her translator. Her face twisted. “How you know you come from Earth? And how know where is Earth?”
    “Whoever took us to World left titanium tablets, practically indestructible, with diagrams. Eventually we learned enough astronomy to interpret them.”
    Moses on the mountain, Marianne thought. How conveniently neat! Profound distrust swamped her, followed by profound belief. Because, after all, here the aliens were, having arrived in a starship, and they certainly looked human. Although—
    She said abruptly, “Will you give us blood samples? Tissue? Permit medical scans?”
    “Yes.”
    The agreement was given so simply, so completely, that everyone fell silent. Marianne’s dazed mind tried to find the scam in this, this possible nefarious treachery, and failed. It was quiet Zhu Feng who, through his translator, finally broke the silence.
    “Tell us, please, honored envoy, why you are here at all?”
    Again Smith answered simply. “To save you all from destruction.”
    NOAH
    Noah slipped out of the apartment, feeling terrible but not terrible enough to stay. First transgression: If Mom returned earlier than she’d said, he wouldn’t be there when she arrived. Second transgression: He’d taken twenty dollars from Elizabeth’s purse. Third transgression: He was going to buy sugarcane.
    But he’d left Elizabeth and Ryan arguing yet again about isolationism, the same argument in the same words as when he’d seen them last, four months ago. Elizabeth pulled out statistics showing that the United States’ only option for survival, including avoiding revolution, was to retain and regain jobs within its borders, impose huge tariffs on imports, and rebuild infrastructure. Ryan trotted out different statistics proving that only globalization could, after a period of disruption, bring economic benefits in the long run, including a fresh flow of workers into a graying America. They had gotten to the point of hurtling words like “Fascist” and “sloppy thinker” when Noah left.
    He walked the three blocks to Broadway. It was, as always, brightly lit, but the gyro places and electronics shops and restaurants, their outside tables empty and chained in the cold dusk, looked shabbier than he remembered. Some stores were not just shielded by grills but boarded up. He kept walking east, toward Central Park.
    The dealer huddled in a doorway. He wasn’t more than fifteen. Sugarcane was a low-cost, low-profit drug, not worth the gangs’ time, let alone that of