They had their Edisons and Fords but no Darwin, no Mendel. When their airports got to be just like ours, if not worse, they began to travel between planes; and on some plane, about a hundred years ago, one of their scientists discovered applied genetics. He brought it home. It fascinated them. They promptly mastered its principles. Or perhaps they had not quite mastered them before they started applying them to every life-form within reach.

“First,” she said, “to plants. Altering food plants to be more fruitful, or to resist bacteria and viruses, or to kill insects, and so on.”

I nodded. “We’re doing a good deal of that too,” I said.

“Really? Are you…” She seemed not to know how to ask the question she wanted to ask. “I’m corn, myself,” she said at last, shyly.

I checked the translatomat. Uslu: corn, maize. I checked the dictionary, and it said that uslu on Islac and maize on my plane were the same plant.

I knew that the odd thing about corn is that it has no wild form, only a distant wild ancestor that you’d never recognise as corn. It’s entirely a construct of long-term breeding by ancient gatherers and farmers. An early genetic miracle. But what did it have to do with Ai Li A Le?

Ai Li A Le with her wonderful, thick, gold-colored, corn-colored hair cascading in braids from a topknot…

“Only four percent of my genome,” she said. “There’s about half a percent of parrot, too, but it’s recessive. Thank God.”

I was still trying to absorb what she had told me. I think she felt her question had been answered by my astonished silence.

“They were utterly irresponsible,” she said severely. “With all their programs and policies and making everything better, they were fools. They let all kinds of things get loose and interbreed. Wiped out rice in one decade. The improved breeds went sterile. The famines were terrible… Butterflies, we used to have butterflies, do you have them?”