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By Root 631 0

’s right. Every genome has an equivalent proteonome—the full set of proteins that its genes can produce. Some genes work in collaboration, you see, to produce whole populations of related proteins. Different sets of genes are active in different kinds of cells, producing different sets of proteins, so that tissues and organs can do different jobs within the body. When I was born, human bodies had to get by with the genes and proteins that nature provided, but you and I are both equipped with several extra sets. Your smartsuit has the most obvious one, but various bits of your internal technology have minigenomes of their own. It’s not as marvelous as it might seem—pre-Crash humans had resident bacteria, and every cell had mitochondria with genes of their own, as well as the genes in the chromosomes. We’ve just taken the process a little further. Are you with me so far?”

Sara didn’t feel that a mere nod was sufficient, so she tried to anticipate the next step in the argument. “And the shadowbat’s just an extra bit of smartsuit, or an extra piece of IT,” she said. “Another genome, another pre-pro....”

“Proteonome,” the Dragon Man finished for her, as her tongue faltered over the unfamiliar word. “That’s right—except that DNA isn’t equipped to produce vaporous entities, so what the shadowbat has instead makes up what we call pseudogenes...although they still produce proteins, so we can still talk about its proteonome without having to modify the term, even though many of the proteins have never been generated before by natural or artificial genomes. Sorry, that’s probably unnecessarily complicated. To cut a long story short, although sublimate organisms—astral tattoos, in the advertising jargon—have gone through all the standard tests to make sure that they’re safe to wear, that doesn’t mean that every possible interaction between shadowbat proteins and the proteins produced by natural and artificial genomes has been investigated. There’s still scope for surprises, especially when one new technology comes into contact with another.”

“Just because it’s safe for us to wear shadowbats,” Sara said, looking down at the dark patch on the rag of synthetic skin, “it doesn’t mean that it’s safe for the shadowbats to be worn.”

“That’s true,” the Dragon Man conceded. “Sublimate organisms—sublimate just means that they can pass from the solid to the vaporous state without going through a liquid phase, by the way—are rather delicate. It may not have been very wise for the owner of the flock you encountered to let them stray. Having said that, though, there hasn’t been any previous report of shadowbats reacting oddly to colibri nectar. I checked that very carefully. Which probably means that someone—probably me—has altered these particular shadowbats in such a way as to open up the possibility.”

“Why would you—or someone else—have done that?” Sara asked, warily.

“I’m not the only inveterate tinkerer in the world,” Frank Warburton said, defensively. “Everyone does it. Everyone with an atom of curiosity. Anyhow, although the full analysis will take a few hours, tickling the secondary trace with a little electricity in this bath here will separate the organic compounds into a line-spectrum, like the ones police scientists and the newsvids call genetic fingerprints. Comparing that to the print the bat is supposed to produce should tell us in a matter of twenty or thirty minutes whether there is an anomaly, and might offer a clue as to its nature. Until then we might as well make polite conversation. Your parents know about the shadowbat, I suppose?”

“Oh yes,” said Sara. “They also know about every move I made yesterday.”

“Ah,” the Dragon Man murmured. “The old jungle telegraph. It never fails to deliver the news. Are they annoyed with me too?”

“I don’t think so,” Sara reassured him. “Father Lemuel sent you his best wishes, and he wouldn’t have done that if he’d been annoyed. In fact, he wouldn’t have persuaded the others to let me bring the shadowbat in if he’d been seriously annoyed with either of us. I think it was more a matter of