But with such abilities came the inevitable urge to tamper. The prophecies of Isaiah were remolded and removed from their original context, as were the apatosaurs.

Crichton stood barely forty centimeters high at the shoulders, and his personality—also genetically remodelled—was that of a loyal and reasonably smart lapdog. Isak never tired of watching him drive herds of Chihuahua-sized mammoths across the fields or having a romp through the amaryllis gardens, which he had all but taken over as his private territory, even to the exclusion of Isak. As a pup he had always slept in Steven’s bed, until the mysterious illness that broke the hearts of a hundred million children nearly struck the saurian down.

Crichton was three years old, and a full-fledged family member, when throughout the solar system, all at once, the apatosaurs began dying. The dwarfing and brainboosting of the dinosaurs had rearranged delicate biochemistries in subtle and unpredictable ways. The distortions seemed such a little thing, until they reached the flash point and began resounding through entire organ systems like a harmonic chord misstruck.

Yeon, the only woman Isak had ever married, had removed Crichton from Steven’s room and banished the ailing pet from the house, fearing that the disease might be contagious. Yeon had never known a time when an ailment could not be quickly and routinely cured. Despite Isak’s protests that the condition was purely genetic, the dying saurians filled her with an irrational dread, which turned out to be the only ailment that truly was contagious.

Crichton emerged as practically the sole survivor of the first generation minisaurs—thanks largely, Isak believed, to the long nights he had spent out in the garden with his son’s pet, trying to nurse him through the crisis. But even expensive joint and nerve replacements could not repair or hide all the damage, and even Steven’s love for his boyhood friend—shaken by the fact that Crichton had almost died, and also by his mother’s fear—never fully recovered.Steven’s childhood was not all that ended with the minisaur die-off. Isak and Yeon were two people deeply in love but terribly mismatched. He believed in monogamy; she did not. Isak felt attracted only to women, and to only one woman in particular; Yeon had always felt an attraction to both sexes—and the more variety the better—but she had chosen monogamy for Isak’s sake. Isak, who seemed to worship science, spoke constantly about how immunogenetic therapy could render her choice completely painless by simply changing her desires at the source, or removing them completely. Such treatment seemed unnatural to Yeon, even sacrilegious. If the medical community had its way, everyone who felt as she did would be extinct within a single generation. The prospect smelled a little of Buchenwald.

The final break between Yeon and Isak gave the appearance of being caused by escalating argu ments about “not letting that filthy animal back into the house,” but in truth poor Crichton was merely the explosive charge that brought a whole swamp of hidden conflicts bubbling to the surface.