Catch the Lightning by Catherine Asaro

Author:Catherine Asaro
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2013-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

Index, I thought.

I closed my eyes and a library seemed to appear, a room of ceiling-high shelves crammed with books. A librarian who looked like Martinelli seated me in an armchair. In response to my questions, he brought books or else sat in another chair and talked to me. He made images in the air, detailed pictures to illustrate his words.

Several hundred Kyle genes exist. They are alleles, or alternate forms, of normal genes. Mutations. Like most mutations they do more harm than good. Fortunately they are almost fully recessive, which means that they show almost no manifestation unless you inherit copies from both parents. People who carry one Kyle allele and one normal gene are normal, but those with paired alleles often have problems. Anemia. Missing limbs or organs. Lung or heart disease. Abnormalities in nerve, muscle, or circulatory development. Brain damage. Kyle fetuses often die within weeks of conception. Those that survive rarely live long enough to reproduce.

Kyle genes survive in human gene pools because they help people who carry them unpaired. It’s the same reason sickle-cell anemia persists; not only do carriers with one normal and one sickle-cell allele show few signs of the disease, they are more resistant to malaria. People with unpaired Kyle genes rarely manifest harmful mutations, but they do show slightly heightened empathic responses. It aids parenting, and their offspring also tend to associate positive qualities with parenthood, becoming parents more often on average than in other groups. Gene pools maintain an equilibrium: Kyle genes survive, but empaths remain rare because of debilitating effects produced when the genes pair up.

The Rhon carry some form of every Kyle allele and every one of those alleles is paired. So how are they healthy? It depends on many factors: control sequences in genes; stretches of DNA known as introns; positioning of genes on chromosomes; how many alleles are present. One allele alone might cause an undesirable trait to be expressed; the presence of another might suppress it. The genes are also pleiotropic, which means they do more than one thing. In rare cases, an empath can be born healthy, or almost healthy, like Althor. Problems still exist, though. Suicide was once the leading cause of death among higher-rated Kyles. Even now, when psiberneticists can train empaths to mute the onslaught of other people’s emotions, it. remains a problem.

Jagernauts have protection; their biomech webs can release a drug that suppresses psiamine, the neurotransmitter needed to interpret empathic input. In other words, they can “block” emotions. The web provides only limited amounts of the drug, however; otherwise it interferes with the Jagernaut’s ability to function. Empaths without biomech can still block emotions, though less effectively, by using biofeedback to suppress the psiamine. I learned to do it at an early age, without realizing it, by imagining a mirror that reflected emotions back to people, or a fortress around my mind, or a blinding white light.

Everyone has a KAB and a KEB. Normal genes produce enzymes that limit growth of the organs.

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