Worlds

  "You are concerned," he stated.

  Fludenoc exhaled sharply, indicating his assent. "I think—thought—had thought"—the Gha struggled for the correct Latin tense—"that you would be more—" His thought drifted off in a vague gesture.

  "United?" asked Ainsley, cocking an eyebrow. "Coherent? Rational? Organized?"

  Again, the Gha exhaled assent. "Yes. All those."

  Ainsley chuckled. "More Guild-like, in other words."

  The Gha giant swiveled, staring down at the old historian next to him. Suddenly, he barked humor.

  Ainsley waved at the madding crowd below. "This is what a real world looks like, Fludenoc. A world which, because of its lucky isolation, was able to grow and mature without the interference of the Guilds and the Federation. It's messy, I admit. But I wouldn't trade it for anything else. Not in a million years."

  He stared down at the chaos. The Venezuelans were now squabbling with representatives from the Caribbean League. The Caribs, quite unlike the Chinese delegate, were far from imperturbable. One of them shook his dreadlocks fiercely. Another blew ganja-smoke into the Venezuelans' faces. A third luxuriated in the marvelously inventive patois of the islanders, serene in his confidence that the frustrated Venezuelans could neither follow his words nor begin to comprehend the insults couched therein.

  "Never fear, Fludenoc hu'tut-Na Nomo'te," he murmured. "Never fear. This planet is as fresh and alive as a basket full of puppies. Wolf puppies. The Guilds'll never know what hit 'em."

  He turned away from the rail. "Let's go get some ice cream. The important business is going to take place later anyway, in the closed session of the Special Joint Committee."

  The Gha followed him readily enough. Eagerly, in fact.

  "I want cherry vanilla," announced Fludenoc.

  "You always want cherry vanilla," grumbled Ainsley.

  The Gha's exhalation was extremely emphatic. "Of course. Best thing your insane species produces. Except Romans."

  X

  After the first hour of the Special Joint Committee's session, Ainsley could sense Fludenoc finally begin to relax. The Gha even managed to lean back into the huge chair which had been specially provided for him toward the back of the chamber.

  "Feeling better?" he whispered.

  The Gha exhaled vigorously. "Yes. This is much more—" He groped for words.

  "United?" asked Ainsley, cocking a whimsical eyebrow. "Coherent? Rational? Organized?"

  "Yes. All those."

  Ainsley turned in his seat, facing forward. Behind the long table which fronted the chamber sat the fifteen most powerful legislators of the human race. The Special Joint Committee had been formed with no regard for hallowed seniority or any of the other arcane rituals which the Confederation's governing body seemed to have adopted, over the past century, from every quirk of every single legislative body ever created by the inventive human mind.

  This committee was dealing with the fate of humanity—and a number of other species, for that matter. Those men and women with real power and influence had made sure they were sitting at that table. Hallowed rituals be damned.

  Not that all rituals and ceremony have been discarded, thought Ainsley, smiling wryly.

  He was particularly amused by the veil worn by the Muslim Federation's representative—who had spent thirty years ramming the world's stiffest sexual discrimination laws down her countrymen's throats; and the splendiferous traditional ostrich-plume headdress worn by the South African representative—who was seven-eighths Boer in his actual descent, and looked every inch the blond-haired part; and the conservative grey suit worn by the representative from North America's United States and Provinces, suitable for the soberest Church-going occasions—who was a vociferous atheist and the author of four scholarly books on the historical iniquities of mixing Church and State.

  The Chairperson of the Special Joint Committee rose to announce the next speaker, and Ainsley's smile turned into a veritable grin.

  And here she is, my favorite. Speaking of preposterous rituals and ceremonies.

  The representative from the Great Realm of the Chinese People, Chairperson of the Special Joint Committee—all four feet, nine inches of her—clasped her hands demurely and bobbed her head in modest recognition of her fellow legislators.

  Everybody's favorite humble little woman.

  "If the representative from the European Union will finally shut his trap," she said, in a voice like steel—

  Mai the Merciless.

  "—maybe we can get down to the serious business."

  Silence fell instantly over the chamber.

  "We call her the Dragon Lady," whispered Ainsley.

  "She good," hissed Fludenoc approvingly. "What is 'dragon'?"

  "Watch," replied the historian.

  * * *

  Two hours later, Fludenoc was almost at ease. Watching Mai the Merciless hack her bloody way through every puffed-up dignitary who had managed to force himself or herself onto the Committee's agenda had produced that effect.

  "She very good," the Gha whispered. "Could eat one of those stupid carnivores we ride in a single meal."

  "—and what other asinine proposition does the august Secretary wish us to consider?" the Chairperson was demanding.

  The Secretary from the International Trade Commission hunched his shoulders. "I must protest your use of ridicule, Madame Chairperson," he whined. "We in the Trade Commission do not feel that our concerns are either picayune or asinine! The project which is being proposed, even if it is successful—which, by the way, we believe to be very unlikely—will inevitably have the result, among others, of our planet being subjected to a wave of immigration by—by—"

  The Chairperson finished his sentence. The tone of her voice was icy: "By coolies."

  The Trade Commission's Secretary hunched lower. "I would not choose that particular—"

  "That is precisely the term you would choose," snapped Mai the Merciless, "if you had the balls."

  Ainsley had to fight not to laugh, watching the wincing faces of several of the legislators. From the ripple in her veil, he thought the Muslim Federation's representative was undergoing the same struggle.

  "What are 'balls'?" asked Fludenoc.

  "Later," he whispered. "It is a term which is considered very politically incorrect."

  "What is 'politically incorrect'?"

  "Something which people who don't have to deal with real oppression worry about," replied the historian. Ainsley spent the next few minutes gleefully watching the world's most powerful woman finish her political castration of the world's most influential regulator of trade.

  After the Secretary slunk away from the witness table, the Chairperson rose to introduce the next speaker.

  "Before I do so, however, I wish to make an announcement." She held up several sheets of paper. "The Central Committee of the Great Realm of the Chinese People adopted a resolution this morning. The text was just transmitted to me, along with the request that I read the resolution into the records of this Committee's session."

  A small groan went up. The Chairperson smiled, ever so slightly, and dropped the sheets onto the podium.

  "However, I will not do so, inasmuch as the resolution is very long and repetitive. There is one single human characteristic, if no other, which recognizes neither border, breed, nor birth. That is the long-windedness of legislators."

  The chamber was swept by a laugh. But the laughter was brief. The Chairperson's smile vanished soon enough, replaced by a steely glare.

  "But I will report the gist of the resolution. The Chinese people of the world have made their decision. The so-called galactic civilization of the Guilds and the Federation is nothing but a consortium of imperialist bandits and thieves. All other species, beyond those favored as so-called 'Doges,' are relegated to the status of coolies."

  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.

  Ainsley, catching a glimpse of Pompilius Niger across the room, smiled. Only an ancient Roman would have so doggedly tried to make mead by following something that might be a funny-looking bee. A modern human would have understood the biological impossibility of the task.

  And, in that wisdom, died in the hands of the Guild.

  He looked back at Quartilla.

  And so it had been wit
h her and Gaius. The ancient Roman had been frightened and repelled by her scaly reptilian skin, when he first met her. But he had never thought she was anything but a—person.

  "I am glad," he said quietly. "I approve of that decision. You understand, of course, that your children will face some difficulties, because of it."

  Quartilla shrugged. It was a serene gesture.

  "Some, yes. But not many, I think. If other children get too rough on them, Gaius says he will put a stop to it by simply crucifying a couple of the little bastards."