The pilot had no idea who had come before himself and his son, from whom they were descended, whose traits they had inherited. Shilin’s mother had never let her son or grandson into the secret, and so they lived in ignorance, but their blood was clearly hinting at something. After the pilot became our patient at Division X, he often bombarded me with questions. He was keenly interested in genetics, heredity. He would ask which inherited traits were subject to mutation over time, and which were stable and remained unchanged for a long time.
What could I tell him? I knew his ancestry only along his maternal line. I had to explain to him how genes worked, what the structure of DNA was. I talked of the right-hand and left-hand spirals, where personal traits were encoded down the ages.
“Does
