The Paladin Prophecy

RULAN GEIST

For the second time since he’d arrived at the Center, Will had fallen into deep water in a classroom. Genetics—Tomorrow’s Science Today. Eighteen students wearing lab coats and goggles worked in two-person teams at stations on long benches.

Their instructor, Professor Rulan Geist, wore a lab coat that hung down to his black ankle boots, like a cowboy’s duster. He roamed the aisles as he talked them through the day’s procedure: gene splicing and DNA extraction from some creature called a nematode, which wasn’t a “toad” at all, Will learned, but a tiny primitive worm they were dissecting. Geist might as well have been speaking Iroquois.

Geist was tall and bulky, with long arms and big thick hands that he clutched behind his back or gestured with awkwardly. His deep, resonant voice had the hint of an accent. Maybe Scandinavian or Dutch. Geist was one ugly dude. He had dark circles under his eyes and rough bronzed skin, the lower half of which he tried to improve with a trim Van Dyke beard and mustache. The beard looked as if it would grow back, if he shaved, in less than an hour. Short, curly salt-and-pepper hair carved a sharp widow’s peak into his receding hairline like a dorsal fin. Bristly hairs sprang from his ears and bushy eyebrows like a row of corkscrews. A pair of heavy, square black glasses perched on the end of a ski-slope nose and magnified his dark liquid eyes when he looked down at you.

He stopped a few times to do that at Will’s station. Will gamely tried to pretend he was helping his partner, a serious redheaded girl named Allyson Rowe, who was polite enough not to rub Will’s face in how hopeless he was. Geist smiled kindly at Will each time, unconvinced but appreciative of his effort. The last time, he patted Will’s shoulder and leaned in to say, “Let’s speak after class.”

After the room emptied, Will and Geist sat down on tall stools. Smiling and friendly, Geist hooked his boots on the bottom rung and spread his hands on his knees. Patches of black coarse hair sprouted between the knuckles of his long thick fingers.

“Science is a foreign land for you, I think,” said Geist.

“Where they speak a different language,” said Will.

“Most assuredly. But it’s more than language. A different culture altogether. One that seems very strange to anyone who first sets foot in it.”

“That obvious, huh?”

“I don’t mean to be critical, Mr. West. I’ve seen your transcript. You were taking geometry, and you’ve had only a year of biology. No chemistry or algebra. That puts you far off our pace. I also noticed your father works as a researcher.”

“Yes, sir. Neurobiology.”

“And none of his interest in science rubbed off on you?”

“I didn’t even know what he did for a living until a few years ago.”

“So he never brings his work home or discusses it with you.”

“He never did,” said Will, then remembering to keep everything in the present tense, added, “He never talks about his work.”

“That’s surprising. Neurobiology is an adventurous discipline,” said Geist enthusiastically, “with high rates of discovery and thrilling themes. I’d have thought you might inherit some residual interest.”

“Maybe I have and don’t know it. Maybe it’s just a recessive gene.”

Geist laughed. “So you do know a little about our subject.”

Will held his fingers a millimeter apart.

“Well, I’m a firm believer that before you visit a new country, it’s very useful to have a look at a map. Let me draw one for you. Metaphorically speaking.”

Geist led him to a large blank whiteboard on the wall. Will felt grateful for Geist’s kindness in response to his cluelessness. As opposed to, say, Professor Sangren melting his face off in front of the whole class.

Geist picked up a stylus and flipped a switch on it. The brightness of the board intensified; light beamed out of the stylus.

“Genetics,” said Geist. “From the same root word as genesis, meaning ‘origin.’ The beginning of all things. The branch of science in which we study the role played in the development of living organisms by two factors: heredity and variation. Traits either inherited from biological predecessors—our parents and ancestors—or influenced by a multitude of factors in nature.”

“Nature versus nurture,” said Will.

“Exactly! The philosophical polarities that define our field.” Operating the stylus, Geist somehow made the words fate and nature appear on one side of the board and drew a circle around them.

“Over here,” he said, tapping the circle, “think of heredity as a form of destiny. What the Greeks liked to call fate. Everything that happens to us in life is predetermined, because the definitions of our character are set in advance by the limits of what’s in our individual genetic code. While over here is the other extreme …”

On the opposite side of the board, Geist stamped the word nurture, then added the words free will and circled them.

“… which argues that people have complete autonomy in how they develop. Embracing the idea that as unique creatures, each of us evolves into what we become in life because we choose to do so through the unfolding expression of our character, regardless, or in spite of, what’s written in our code. These two positions and everything in between, in the simplest terms, constitute our map.”

“I’m with you,” said Will.

“Good. Where do you suppose we’ll find objective, scientific truth?”

“Somewhere in the middle.”

“A fine answer.”

Geist used the stylus again and the center of the board opened like a window looking into a three-dimensional aquarium. A graphic of twin multicolored spirals of DNA strands twisting around each other spanned the length of the window. Around it appeared clusters of animated boxes, filled with letters and symbols pointing to different sections of the strands.

“The human genetic code,” said Geist. “The blueprint of life. It contains over twenty-four thousand individual genes and three billion chemical base pairs, each one capable of thirty thousand variations. All of which contribute to the existence and persistence of human life. Over seven billion humans alive today carry their version of what you see here, inside trillions of cells in their body. And all these blueprints are as unique as the stars in the sky. Now turn your mind to the difference between a map …”

The screen zoomed in and hovered over magnified sections of the double helix, as large, detailed, and dimensional as the surface of an alien planet.

“… and the territory it describes. And this territory, Will, is as dark and unknown to us as the Great Plains were to Lewis and Clark when they set off to find the Northwest Passage. As mysterious as space exploration was to my generation.

“Every generation finds its own frontier, and this one is yours, Will,” said Geist with an evangelist’s zeal. “It may well be the last frontier. Someone from your cohort, maybe even a person you know, will become the Magellan, Cortés, or Columbus of this world. They won’t be in search of a new trade route or commodities like spice or sugarcane. The possibilities of discovery here are infinitely more profound, because we can now say with certainty that somewhere on this map all the answers to the mystery of human existence—of creation itself—are waiting to be found.”

Images of plant and animal life, boundless varieties of both, flashed across the screen, around the twisting strands of DNA and four letters: A, T, C, and G. Will was mesmerized by the elegant spectacle.

“All life on earth owes its existence to the secrets of these simple, elegant forms, but for most of nature, their fates are written in their code—as limitations—with the finality of stone. This flower blossoms in purple; that small mammal mates exclusively during two weeks each spring; this bird’s life is ruled by rigid migrations.

“Less than seven percent of the building blocks of life are unique to human beings. Seven percent that allows our species to ‘transcend’ in a single generation what, to every other form of life, are unbreakable boundaries. Seven percent that, in ways we don’t yet understand, is responsible for the phenomenon of ‘human consciousness.’ The phenomenon that in only a few thousand years has given us …”

A cascade of images flowed on-screen, familiar faces, mathematical formulas, engineering blueprints, musical notes.

“… Shakespeare, Newton, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Jesus, Beethoven, Dickens, Michelangelo, Edison, Einstein, Gandhi, Galileo, the Buddha, the Beatles … With this map in hand, we will one day, soon, crack the secrets of that seven percent. You and your contemporaries may awaken as an evolutionary generation that leads humankind to a brighter future.”

Geist tapped the stylus and a sea of young faces appeared, students at the Center gazing up at something dazzling and unseen. “And here lie wonders to behold.”

Will walked away from class lost in thought. If Geist’s intention had been to make him think, he’d succeeded: His primer on genetics focused Will’s mind in a new way on these mysterious abilities he’d been discovering almost every day. They had to have a genetic basis, but as far as he knew, Jordan and Belinda West had never demonstrated anything like these talents he now possessed.

If he didn’t inherit them from his parents, where the hell had they come from?

OceanofPDF.com