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her hopes too high. The girl must not allow herself to dream of being the intellectual equal of one of the godspoken, or her life would be filled with disappointment instead of contentment.
"He detected a consistent, inheritable genetic difference in some of the people of Path, but when he reported it, his transfer came almost immediately. He was told that human beings were not within the scope of his study."
"Didn't she tell you this before she left?" asked Qing-jao.
"Keikoa? She didn't know. She was very young, of an age when most parents don't burden their children with adult affairs. Your age."
The implications of this sent another thrill of fear through Qing-jao. Her father had loved a woman who was the same age as Qing-jao; thus Qing-jao was, in her father's eyes, the age when she might be given in marriage. You cannot send me away to another man's house, she cried out inside; yet part of her also was eager to learn the mysteries between a man and a woman. Both feelings were beneath her; she would do her duty to her father, and no more.
"But her father told her during the voyage, because he was very upset about the whole thing. As you can imagine-- for his life to be disrupted like this. When they got to Ugarit a year ago, however, he plunged into his work and she into her education and tried not to think about it. Until a few days ago, when her father ran across an old report about a medical team in the earliest days of Path, which had also been exiled suddenly. He began to put things together, and confided them to Keikoa, and against his advice she sent me the message I got today."
Father marked a block of text on the display, and Qing-jao read it. "That earlier team was studying OCD," she said.
"No, Qing-jao. They were studying behavior that looked like OCD, but couldn't possibly have been OCD because the genetic tag for OCD was not present and the condition did not respond to OCD-specific drugs."
Qing-jao tried to remember what she knew about OCD. That it caused people to act inadvertently like the godspoken. She remembered that between the first discovery of her handwashing and her testing, she had been given those drugs to see if the handwashing went away. "They were studying the godspoken," she said. "Trying to find a biological cause for our rites of purification." The idea was so offensive she could hardly say the words.
"Yes," said Father. "And they were sent away."
"I should think they were lucky to get away with their lives. If the people heard of such sacrilege ..."
"This was early in our history, Qing-jao," said Father. "The godspoken were not yet fully known to be-- communing with the gods. And what about Keikoa's father? He wasn't investigating OCD. He was looking for genetic drift. And he found it. A very specific, inheritable alteration in the