Iris smiled again. “We too were doing such things before we contacted the Baltrons. The difference is, we now can Read and Write in a natural way, within ourselves. Each Individual can do it. We do not require machines to assist us. In fact, Writing has become our way of making machines, and we use Reading and Writing to control and communicate with them.” She held out her hand to Roger. “I would like to Read you now,” she said.
She took Roger’s hand. He sat passively, gazing at the silent child. His face had been looking more and more haggard with each passing day. Alice wondered how long it would be before he had another seizure, how much longer he might live.
Finally Iris spoke. “You have a very high level of intelligence for your race, and you are particularly adept at abstract thinking, perhaps less so at focusing on concrete objectives. Your vermiform appendix is subject to infection, and perhaps it has already been removed. The dynamic range of your vision is peaked toward focusing on nearby objects. I presume that is why you suspend artificial lenses before your eyes.”
Alice smiled. The child sounded like a fortune-teller.
“Your mother had blue eyes,” Iris continued, “but yours are brown. Your father became bald, starting at the crown of his head and progressing. You will begin to do the same in a few years. You have a tendency toward cancer of the colon. You…” Her eyes widened. “Your life is severely threatened by a series of seizures, and you will die soon. I did not Read that from your DNA, but from some messenger RNA that I came across almost by accident. Were you aware of this, Roger?”
He nodded. “I took an experimental drug, a neuroprotein that increases intelligence. The seizures are an irreversible side effect.”
She looked closely at him. “I believe I should correct that condition immediately. Do you agree?”
Roger swallowed hard, then managed to say, “Yes!”
Iris placed her index finger in his mouth and seemed to be concentrating and breathing hard. “There. It is done,” she said. “You will have no more seizures.”
Alice felt a wave of relief. Her concern about Roger’s condition had been like a weight, dragging down her usually optimistic outlook.
“I corrected the neurostability problem,” Iris said, “and also increased the natural supply of the neuroprotein you wanted. Your neural processes will henceforth function at the level you wanted, but without the side effect. Is it usual for your race to accept such risks for such a purpose?”
“Roger is rather special and unusual in that regard,” said George. “How were you able to do that?”
“It is the product of what you would call genetic engineering,” said Iris. “My body, this body, has special chemical receptors and manipulators in the hands that can isolate and read DNA and RNA very rapidly. My brain has a special pattern-recognition section devoted to decoding the information received and reconstructing what the implications of that coding are for the organism from which it comes. You might call it online genetic modeling. That is what we call Reading. It feels quite natural to me. It’s really no more difficult than the pattern recognition done by your vision centers. It is only pattern recognition applied in a different domain.”
“And Writing?” asked Alice.
“It’s the reverse process. If you understand how an organism works, you can see how to change it for the better or to accomplish some particular purpose. The manipulators in my hands can produce DNA, RNA, or retroviruses that can alter the genetics of an individual or produce a new organism or nanomachine with the desired characteristics. It’s a little harder than Reading and takes more training and concentration, but it works the same way.
“I should add that there is a strong compulsion that comes inextricably with these abilities. When you use these skills, you will always feel compelled to do good for the target organism involved, never harm. That’s quite inconvenient on some occasions, but it is for the best.” She smiled.
“A wired-in Hippocratic oath,” said Roger, who now looked more relaxed.
“And you’re going to teach us to do these things?” asked George. “Why?”
“There are two reasons,” said Iris. “First, Reading and Writing are gifts of contact that we received from the Baltrons and that we are obligated to pass on. When your race has received these gifts, you will incur the same obligation.”
“We are the first race in our universe, our Bubble, that you have contacted?” asked George. “That seems strange. Surely there are other intelligent species here, and many of them must be doing something equivalent to high-energy physics.”
“There are no others that we have detected,” said Iris. “Intelligent life is extremely rare. We know of no other intelligent species within our own Bubble, for example, and our exploration probes have been investigating other star systems for many dozen gross of orbits, thousands of your years.”
“How can that be?” Roger asked. “Surely life is not so rare.”
“Primitive life is common, but intelligence is rare,” said Iris. “The process you call evolution usually moves forward only slowly and spasmodically. Even the achievement of multicellular life takes a long time. Species evolve to fill the available ecological niches and then stabilize. It requires a dramatic climate change or some disaster to disrupt that stability and restart the evolutionary process. Your scientists have described this pattern as ‘punctuated equilibrium.’”
“Disasters drive evolution?” Roger asked.
“In part,” said Iris. “Your solar system contains a giant planet, Jupiter, and a belt of asteroids in the next inner orbit where a planet might have formed. In that asteroid belt are certain empty zones where the orbits become completely chaotic from the influence of Jupiter.”
“Ah yes, the Kirkwood zones,” said Roger. “Asteroids there would have orbit periods that are integer ratios to the orbit period of Jupiter, like 3:1 or 5:2.”
“This structure in your solar system is like a weapon that about every twenty million years sends a large asteroid to collide with your planet. This produces a sequence of disasters that have driven forward the evolution of life on your planet. The solar system of our world has much the same arrangement.”
“Like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago,” said Alice.
“But surely,” said George, “there must be other star systems where similar structures exist, and where the evolutionary process is driven even faster.”
“Yes,” said Iris, “but there is an optimum rate. If the disasters, the ‘punctuations,’ occur too often, there is not enough time for recovery from the previous disaster. If they occur too slowly, the organisms are too firmly embedded in their ecological niches and cannot readily adapt to the changed conditions. In your world and ours, the rate of disasters from asteroid collisions is near the optimum, and intelligence has evolved. In most star systems in most universes, the conditions are wrong, and this does not happen.”
Alice had been trying to take notes, and she was becoming impatient. “I’m getting confused,” she interrupted. “Let me try to summarize what you’ve said so far. Your race uses wormholes to contact other intelligent species, which are rare. You had two reasons for coming to our world to teach us to Read and Write the genetic code. First, you are obligated to pass on this skill. I’ve been waiting to hear the second reason, but you haven’t mentioned it yet. Or did I miss it?”