Her voice was low, hissing: “It is not to be tolerated. It will not be tolerated. The Great Realm strongly urges the World Confederation to adopt whole-heartedly the proposal put forward by our Gha fellow-toilers. Failing that, the Great Realm will do it alone.”
Ainsley sucked in his breath. “Well,” he muttered, “there’s an old-fashioned ultimatum for you.”
“What does this mean?” asked Fludenoc.
Ainsley rose from his seat. “What it means, my fine froggy friend, is that you and I don’t have to spend the rest of the afternoon watching the proceedings. It’s what they call a done deal.”
As they walked quietly out of the chamber, Ainsley heard the Chairperson saying:
“-to Commodore Craig Trumbull, for his unflinching courage in the face of barbaric tyranny, the Great Realm awards the Star of China. To all of the men and women of his flotilla who are not Chinese, in addition to he himself, honorary citizenship in the Great Realm. To the crew of the heroic Quinctius Flaminius, which obliterated the running dogs of the brutal Doge-”
When the door closed behind them, Fludenoc asked: “What is a ‘done deal’?”
“It’s what happens when a bunch of arrogant, stupid galactics not only poke a stick at the martial pride of North Americans, but also manage to stir up the bitterest memories of the human race’s biggest nation.”
He walked down the steps of the Confederation Parliament with a very light stride, for a man his age. Almost gaily. “I’ll explain it more fully later. Right now, I’m hungry.”
“Ice cream?” asked Fludenoc eagerly.
“Not a chance,” came the historian’s reply. “Today, we’re having Chinese food.”
XI
And now, thought Ainsley, the real work begins. Convincing the Romans.
He leaned back on his couch, patting his belly. As always, Gaius Vibulenus had put on a real feast. Whatever else had changed in the boy who left his father’s estate in Capua over two thousand years ago, his sense of equestrian dignitas remained. A feast was a feast, by the gods, and no shirking the duty.
Quartilla appeared by his side, a platter in her hand.
“God, no,” moaned Ainsley. “I can’t move as it is.”
He patted the couch next to him. “Sit, sweet lady. Talk to me. I’ve seen hardly anything of you these past few weeks.”
Quartilla, smiling, put down the platter and took a seat on the couch.
“Did Gaius tell you that we’re going to have children?”
Ainsley’s eyes widened. “It’s definite, then? The Genetic Institute thinks they can do it?”
Quartilla’s little laugh had more than a trace of sarcasm in it. “Oh, Robert! They’ve known for months that they could do it. The silly farts have been fretting over the ethics of the idea.”
Ainsley stroked his beard, studying her. Quartilla seemed so completely human-not only in her appearance but in her behavior-that he tended to forget she belonged to a species that was, technically speaking, more remote from humanity than anything alive on Earth. More remote than crabs, or trees-even bacteria, for that matter.
And even more remote, he often thought, in some of her Ossa attitudes.
The Ossa-whether from their innate psychology or simply their internalized acceptance of millennia of physical and genetic manipulation by their Doge masters-had absolutely no attachment to their own natural phenotype. They truly didn’t seem to care what they looked like.
To some humans, that attitude was repellent-ultimate servility. Ainsley did not agree. To him, the Ossa he had met-and he had met most of the “women” whom the Guild had provided for the Roman soldiers’ pleasure-were simply unprejudiced, in a way that not even the most tolerant and open-minded human ever was. Ossa did not recognize species, or races. Only persons were real to them.
He admired them, deeply, for that trait. Still-Ossa were by no means immune to hurt feelings.
“What phenotype will you select?” he asked.
Quartilla shrugged. “Human, essentially. The genotype will be fundamentally mine, of course. The human genome is so different from that of Ossa that only a few of Gaius’s traits can be spliced into the embryo. And they can only do that because, luckily, the chemical base for both of our species’ DNA is the same. You know, those four-”
She fluttered her hands, as if shaping the words with her fingers.
“Adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine,” intoned Ainsley.
“-yes, them! Anyway, our DNA is the same, chemically, but it’s put together in a completely different manner. We Ossa don’t have those-”
Again, her hands wiggled around forgotten words.
“Chromosomes?”
“Yes. Chromosomes. Ossa DNA is organized differently. I forget how, exactly. The geneticist explained but I couldn’t understand a word he said after five seconds.”
Ainsley laughed. “Specialists are all the same, my dear! You should hear Latinists, sometimes, in a bull session. My ex-wife-my second ex-wife-divorced me after one of them. Said she’d rather live with a toadstool. Better conversation.”
Quartilla smiled archly. “Why did your first ex-wife divorce you?”
Ainsley scowled. “That was a different story altogether. She was a Latinist herself-the foul creature!-with the most preposterous theories you can imagine. We got divorced after an exchange of articles in the Journal of-”
He broke off, chuckling. “Speaking of specialists and their follies! Never mind, dear.”
He gestured at Quartilla’s ample figure. “But you’re going to stick with your human form?”
“Not quite. The children will have a human shape, in every respect. They’ll be living in a human world, after all. Human hair, even. But their skins will be Ossa. Well-almost. They’ll have the scales, but we’ll make sure they aren’t dry and raspy. Gaius says people won’t mind how the skin looks, as long as it feels good”-she giggled-“in what he calls ‘the clutch.’ ”
Ainsley raised his eyebrow. “Gaius doesn’t object to this? I thought-you once told me-”
Quartilla shrugged. “That was a long time ago, Robert. It’s his idea, actually. He says modern humans aren’t superstitious the way he was. And he doesn’t give a damn about their other prejudices.”
The last sentence was spoken a bit stiffly. Ainsley, watching her closely, decided not to press the matter. By and large, the Ossa “women” had shared in the general hero worship with which humanity had greeted the Roman exiles. Most of them, in fact, had quickly found themselves deluged by romantic advances. But there had been some incidents It was odd, really, he mused. Years after their return from exile, the Roman legionnaires still exhibited superstitions and notions which seemed absurd-outrageous, even-to modern people. Yet, at the same time, they shared none of the racial prejudices which so often lurked beneath the surface of the most urbane moderns. The ancient world of the Greeks and Romans had its prejudices and bigotries, of course. Plenty of them. But those prejudices were not tied to skin color and facial features. The Greeks considered the Persians barbarians because they didn’t speak Greek and didn’t share Greek culture. It never would have occurred to them, on the other hand, that the Medes who dominated their world were racially inferior. The very notion of “races” was a modern invention.
It had often struck Ainsley, listening to the tales of the legionnaires, how easily they had adapted to their sudden plunge into galactic society. No modern human, he thought, would have managed half as well. Their very ignorance had, in a sense, protected them. The world, to ancient Romans, was full of bizarre things anyway. Every Roman knew that there lived-somewhere south of Egypt, maybe-people with tails and heads in their bellies. A modern human, dropped onto a battlefield against aliens, would have probably been paralyzed with shock and horror. To the Romans, those aliens had just seemed like weird men-and nowhere near as dangerous as Parthians.