Adams argued that their behavior stemmed from pure chromatophoric instinct. Julius insisted that the reason the color green calmed the maia was because the creatures realized that the humans understood what it meant.
“I don’t think the maia are actually all that intelligent,” he’d said to Indira in private later. “Sapient, yes; bright, no. Like austrolopithecenes. No, more than that—say, roughly equivalent to Homo habilis, or maybe even Homo erectus. But they’re sure a lot smarter than the Doctor. At least they understand that we’re intelligent.”
The children, once they got over an initial hesitation, fell in love with the maia. Like giant, walking teddy bears. At first, the adult humans grew nervous at the sight of swarms of children romping around the maia—especially after crawling under a maia became a popular game. But it soon became obvious that the creatures were conscious of the childrens’ actions. The maia never harmed a human child, not even inadvertantly. And they never seemed to become irritated at the children’s antics—even after the children invented a new game, which they called “ride-the-maia.”
The day came when Indira saw a maia pick up a child and gently place the girl on the cowl of its mantle. And she wondered.
Then the day came when Joseph Adekunle, the son of the Magellan’s electronics officer, came running to her.
She watched him approach with fondness. She would never admit it to anyone (for she maintained a public stance of being an impartial mother who loved all her children equally), but the truth was that Joseph was one of her favorites. He was one of the oldest children in the colony (six, now), and big for his age. Big, and extraordinarily athletic. Only Jens Knudsen, among the boys, and Ludmilla Rozkowski, among the girls, came near to him in physical prowess. But Joseph never abused his strength, never acted the bully, never boasted or bragged. To the contrary. He was invariably helpful to the smaller children. And on two occasions that Indira knew of, when Joseph had witnessed a larger child abuse a smaller, the boy had taken the perpetrator aside and quietly informed him that if he thought he was such hot stuff Joseph would be glad to prove him wrong. He was a charismatic figure, even at the age of six, and he had become, almost as if it were a law of nature, the central figure in the children’s generation.
He was also—it was obvious to Indira, even at his age—extraordinarily intelligent.
You would have been so proud of him, Susan, thought Indira, as she watched the boy race across the valley floor and begin climbing the hillside toward the camp. She remembered the electronics officer of the Magellan, with some sadness, but not much. It had been over a year since the disaster. She had even finally been able to stop grieving for her own children.
She had not known Susan Adekunle well, but on the few occasions when they had met she had taken an immediate liking to her. It was impossible not to. The Yoruba woman had been invariably witty and cheerful, in her inimitable big and booming style.
Big. Susan Adekunle had been at least six feet tall, and not at all slender.
And judging from the evidence, thought Susan, Joseph’s father must have been even bigger.
The boy was now halfway up the hillside.
He certainly inherited his mother’s color.
Joseph’s skin color was something of a rarity in the modern age, after two centuries of unparalleled war and migration (and then, blessedly, a world at peace for the first time in millenia) had thoroughly mixed up the human gene pool. The majority of the human species had blended into various shades of brown, usually accompanied by dark hair and, more often than not, at least a trace of epicanthic fold to the eyes.
Joseph, on the other hand, is going to look like an ancient Ashanti king when he grows up.
Among the children in the colony, only Jens Knudsen and Karin Schmidt exhibited the same kind of extreme racial differentiation. They were by no means the only white children in the colony, but they were the only two who would grow up looking like Nordic stereotypes—yellow hair, bright blue eyes, skin as white as milk.