[Jerry Abbott]

Divine Heritage, Chapter 3, section 3.

After class, I was coming down the stairs to the exit of the building that was nearest the street that led back to the grade school campus. Ms. Emory was waiting near the exit, and apparently had been waiting the whole time I was in class. Thinking about that gave me the creeps. She was nice, and she had been very helpful to me, but just what the hell was going on here? A vice president of Brookstone School wouldn't wait two hours in the corridor of a class building just to play chauffeur to a student, no matter how promising the student might be.

"Are you all done?"

"With class? Yes. Where are we going now?"

Vanessa Emory smiled. She knew I'd guessed that she had something in mind.

"To my house," she said. "There are some things I want to tell you in private. I've called Dean Klang and told him that you're with me, and that you'll be late getting back to your dorm."

So we got into her car, and she drove to a large, impressive house a short distance outside Columbus in Muscogee County. We went inside and, first thing, we had a snack. Then we went into her living room and sat down.

"This is one of my father's homes, though he isn't staying here at the moment," she said. "Do you like it?"

"It's nice," I admitted, looking around at the drapes, the furniture, the carpet, the lighting fixtures. The polished and carved mahogany paneling that faced the walls. The jade statuettes. The antique clock that showed the correct time. "Expensive looking."

"Quite expensive. My father's taste in home furnishings runs to the high end of quality. Now let me get to the reason I asked you to come here."

Vanessa Emory held out her hand. The indoor lights went out. The heavy drapes were drawn against the sun, so, lacking indoor lighting, it had become somewhat dark in the living room. How had she turned the lights off?

"No, I don't have a remote control device," she said. "I turned off the lights by willing the circuit open. It's a divine power that I have, similar to your power to alter the rate at which you experience time."

That startled me. No one else had ever guessed what I could do with time.

"Now watch this," she said, as she made a ball of light appear above her palm. It grew in brightness until the room was as well illuminated as it had been by the electric lights. "About twenty thousand years ago, the gods and goddesses about whom the Greeks would, much later, tell in their legends, actually lived. They built a civilization of which there remain only a few traces, now mostly buried in parts of Europe. If they'd endured, they might have explored space and colonized the moons and planets of our solar system."

Vanessa Emory smiled sadly.

"But they did not endure."

"Why not?" I asked.

"The ancient divines made the mistake that all of the higher races since have made. They married, or informally consorted with, lesser men and women. The Greek legends recollect this failing in the stories about Zeus, or Jove, in which he frequently took mortal lovers and had children by them. In truth, it wasn't just one god who did that. Nearly all of them started doing it. For some reason, race-mixing became popular among the divines of long ago. And after only a few centuries, a half-breed race of demigods arose, and the race of pure gods died out."

"Tragic," I said.

"Yes, it was. Of course, if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here. I am a demi-goddess. And so are you."

I considered that. It certainly explained the facts as I knew them.

"Why us?" I asked. "Why aren't powers like ours more common among, um, white people?"

"Ah. You've guessed more than I thought," said Ms. Emory. "Yes, the white race is a degenerate form of the race of demigods. Mortals had outnumbered the gods by a very large ratio. Perhaps by a thousand to one. And the first generation of demigods continued the race-mixing ways of their fully divine parents. So the god-genes became ever more dilute as the generations continued to roll by. Eventually, the only special benefit the white race had from their god side of their family tree was a slightly higher average intelligence than other humanoid races."

"The Asians have a higher average IQ than than whites do," I pointed out.

Vanessa Emory dismissed her ball of light and turned the electric lights back on with another wave of her hand.

"The Asians," she said, "got their advantages from racial admixture with white people." She sat on a soft chair that faced where I was sitting on her sofa. "Do you know what population pressure is?"

I nodded. "It's when there are too many people living in a territory that can't grow enough food for everyone to eat."

"Food or some other necessary resource," said Ms. Emory. "But usually it is food. Well then. About fifteen thousand years ago, after the gods were gone and the demigods had grown few, white tribal groups began wandering from their original homelands in Europe and in northern Asia. They went in all directions. Those who went into central Asia met a new humanoid race, which we refer to as the Yoyoi. The Yoyoi were the original Asian race, a primitive race having an average intelligence inferior to that of the invading whites. And here is where the white race repeated the error that caused the extinction of the ancient gods."

"Whites married, or informally consorted with, the Yoyoi and made a new hybrid race," I guessed.

"Exactly so," said Ms. Emory. "And that new hybrid race, over the course of time, became the modern race that, today, we call 'Asians.' To the extent that they have beauty and mental ability, they got it from our race. It certainly was never present in the original Yoyois."

"But their average IQ is higher than the average IQ for white people," I said. "If dilution lessened our godlike attributes, then surely the further dilution with the Yoyoi would have lessened them the more."

"Before the dilution had spread far, the wisest of the Yoyoi-Aryan hybrids became politically ascendant over the others and determined that their culture would practice a form of eugenics aimed at cultivating two traits. One of them was intelligence. The other was respect for authority. As the centuries passed, those in leadership positions weren't always the wisest or smartest Asians, and yet the Asians kept bowing to them anyway, simply because they were the civil authorities."

"The two traits sometimes get in each others' way."

"Yes. Meanwhile, in Europe, white people were far more divided, more rambunctious, more tempestuous, more prone to rebellion. The lack of discipline made a unification of white civilization late to reappear. However, it had its own eugenic effect on the race. One of the effects was a broadening of the normal distribution for white intelligence. Or, in statistician's terms, the standard deviation rose. With the passing of time, there was a reduction of the hump in the middle of the bell curve and a rise in the percentage of whites found at the extremes."

"So white people have higher percentages of both idiots and geniuses than the Asians do," I said, following the logic. "And a smaller percentage of mediocrities."

"And that's an advantage," said Vanessa Emory. "Can you tell me why?"

"Of course," I said. It was obvious. "Those who do the most challenging tasks, and advance the sum of human knowledge, are always those in the high extreme of the distribution of intelligence. When it comes to pushing the envelope, the mediocrities count no more than the retards do. So flattening the distribution and squeezing equal percentages in both directions increases the percentage of the race that can make significant scientific achievements and contributions to culture."

"Yes," said Ms. Emory. "That's quite a good summary. And that is why the white race, rather than the Asian race, produced the world's first technical civilization. The gods never tinkered with electronics or with nuclear physics because they didn't need to. Their innate abilities were much, much greater than those of their demigod offspring were."

Ms. Emory continued. "But also, in eugenic terms, there's another advantage to a larger standard deviation. It makes culling to improve the race with respect to the trait having the flattened distribution more rapidly effective."

She'd answered my question about why demigods were no longer common. But there remained the other side of the coin.

"If the god-genes became more dilute with time, then why do any demigods or demigoddeses exist today at all?"

"How do you feel about Adolf Hitler?" she asked.

"I think he was a man who underestimated his opponent, and lost a war because of that miscalculation."

"Well, so much is true. However, the Führer had plans to improve his nation genetically. He ordered one of his senior deputies, Heinrich Himmler, to start a program of human breeding. Its purpose was to promote human biological virtues among the German people. Biological virtues in general, that is. But along the way, somewhere, Himmler discovered that there was a bit of truth to the legends of the ancient Greeks, and he began to focus his program on recovering the god-genes as a special task of the Lebensborn project. Whether Hitler himself knew about it is unclear. Himmler didn't always fully account for his doings."

"So the Nazis brought back the god-genes?"

"To some extent, they did. Himmler barely knew that he was on to something when Germany lost the war. Most people believed that the Lebensborn project ended when Germany fell to the Allies. But it continued in secret. Himmler gave the task to SS officers who escaped to Argentina. The project was very quietly expanded to include white people in Australia, then in America, in the United Kingdom, and, finally, back in Europe once again. I am of the fourth generation of the project. You are of the fifth."

"How do you know?" But I'd guessed the answer before my question was completely asked.

"The internet has made genealogical research a rather simple matter," said Ms. Emory. "I looked up your family tree. You have Lebensborn ancestors on both your mother's and your father's sides."

"Do your parents have talents like yours?"

"My father doesn't. My mother is dead. But, no, she didn't. Or, I should say, not as far as I know. Apparently, the genes that enable some manifestation of divine power only rarely occur to the necessary extent, or line up in the proper way, even among those who carry them. At the molecular level, they're just alleles. Many of them are probably recessives."

My father and my mother had been introduced to each other by their own parents, by my two sets of grandparents. They didn't just happen to hook up at school and start dating. It fit right into what Ms. Emory was telling me. It was even possible that my parents were part of the Lebensborn project and still didn't realize it.

"How many of us are there?"

"Demi-divines? Not many," she said. "I doubt that there have been as many as ten alive at any one time. Lebensborn has had only a little success in bringing back the gods, but it's a start."

"Why did you tell me this?" I asked.

"To give you an idea of the importance of your staying alive, of not taking unnecessary risks with yourself. And to encourage you, when the time comes, to have children. Many."

"Did you?"

A pained expression crossed Vanessa Emory's face.

"Five," she said. "And all of them were killed before they could grow up."

"Murdered?"

"Well," said Vanessa Emory. "That's what I think. My two daughters were killed in a hit-and-run automobile accident, and the police never found the driver. My oldest son fell to his death from an apartment building rooftop, and the police never found out who had pushed him. In fact, they said it appeared to have been an accidental fall, though I suspect that they simply wanted to close the case. Another died of food poisoning. The last, a boy about your age, was killed by blacks during a flash riot. They swarmed the streets, attacking any white person they saw. They saw him, and so he died."

"I suppose, then, that I ought to marry a demigod once I come of age. It would be the best way to concentrate the god-genes."

"It would," agreed Vanessa Emory. "But there is a problem. There are, at present, no living male demi-divines. You'll have to find the best mortal man you can, the man who is physically and mentally the most perfect, because such a man is likely to have an above-average concentration of the god-genes."

"Such a man is likely to be already claimed."

"Then you cheat," said Vanessa Emory. "You don't have to marry him. You only need to get his genes combined with yours in a baby. Once you've done that, you need trouble neither him nor his wife evermore."

She looked at the antique clock on the marble fireplace mantle.

"I must get you back to your dorm," she said with a curious smile. "Norman Klang might be wondering what I'm doing with you."

"Giving me a stern safety lecture," I suggested.

"Exactly."

We left the house and got back into her Mercedes.