I interrupted him. “I thought you said it was a history.”
“It was at the end of the history. We were giving pretty current data—so many of equestrian rank, so many citizens, so many freedmen, so many slaves.” He hesitated, and then said thoughtfully, “Paulus Magnus—I don’t know if you know him, he’s an Algonkan—pointed out that that was the first time we’d ever mentioned slavery.”
I waited for him to go on. “Yes?” I said encouragingly.
He shrugged. “Nothing. Paulus is a slave himself, so naturally he’s got it on his mind a lot.”
“I don’t quite see what that has to do with anything,” I said. “Isn’t there anything else?”
“Oh,” he said, “there are a thousand theories. There were some health data, too, and some people think the Olympians might have suddenly got worried about some new microorganism killing them off. Or we weren’t polite enough. Or maybe—who knows—there was some sort of power struggle among them, and the side that came out on top just didn’t want any more new races in their community.”
“And we don’t know yet which it was?”
“It’s worse than that, Julie,” he told me sombrely. “I don’t think we ever will find out what it was that made them decide they didn’t want to have anything to do with us.” And in that, too, Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus was a very intelligent man. Because we never have.