The Jaguar's Children by John Vaillant

Author:John Vaillant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I must say to you, AnniMac, that I wonder if César’s girlfriend is you. I searched in his phone, but there is no Anna or Anni or AnniMac anywhere but the directory.

In all the time we were in Altar, César went outside in the daylight only once—that last morning to the church of Guadalupe, which was three blocks away. “With all the Oaxaqueños coming through here you’d think there would be a shrine for Juquila,” he said. “This is where we need her most.”

“You really believe in her?” I asked. “Or are you just lighting candles for your mother?”

“My father taught me that in every kernel of corn is the Creation. For me,” said César, “Juquila is the face of that mystery. When I look at a kernel of corn, that’s who I see.”

“They always looked like teeth to me,” I said.

“Maybe you didn’t look close enough.”

César finished his beer and opened another with his belt buckle. I was on my second and trying not to shiver. César took a sip and looked off to where the stars faded into the glow of Nogales and Tucson. “You know in the Sierra on a clear night when the stars seem so close? Did you ever imagine you could reach up there with your finger and move them around?” César snapped his bottle cap across the parking lot. “That’s what they taught me to do at UNAM.”

“With the corn?”

“They aren’t just studying it up there,” he said. “They’re taking it apart, one gene from another, and putting it back together in a different way and saying it belongs to them, like they invented it. What would God say to that, I wonder. It is the reason I still pray to Juquila. I am the first Zapoteco to see these things, to understand what our ancestors understood without seeing. But we’re like children playing with the master’s tools.”

“How do you do it?” I asked. “Move the genes around.”

“For corn you use a gene gun.”

“No mames,” I said. I thought he was playing with me.

“¡Animal! Es verdad. This gene gun is a real thing, and it fires golden bullets—”

“No estés chingando.” I turned away then because I was cold and had no patience for jokes.

But César said, “No, Tito, I’m not shitting you. This gun is powered by CO2 and the bullets are tiny grains of gold. Each one is coated with DNA, with the transgene, and you fire it into the cell of the plant you wish to change. This is how it’s done. In the lab we call it transformation, but into what? That’s the question, right? Because you don’t aim a gene gun, you point it in the general direction and shoot. The bullets come out like a shotgun blast and the genes go everywhere. They’re like spies, you know? Or assassins—working from the inside. And once they’re in there, they can do things you didn’t plan on. They can mutate, they can sterilize themselves, they can make food with less nutrition or none at all, and the bugs they’re supposed to kill can become resistant.

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