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.