As the argument exploded, Sheida glanced around the room, looking at the faces and trying to guess who knew about the bombshell Chansa had just dropped. She suspected from the pained expression on Bowman’s face that he had intended to work up to the conclusion.

“It is the only way!” Paul shouted. “No! Listen for a moment! Just hear me out!”

He waited until the shouting and muttering had died then gestured around. “We are a dying race. If we continue as we have been, the last human, of whatever form, will close a door in a few thousand years and that will be it. I’m not talking about shutting everything down and dropping the world into chaos, I’m just talking about… reinstituting cultural items that will strengthen the interest in children, in discovery and advancement! And, at the same time, strengthen us as a species! We have descended into lotus-eating, all of our virtue lost to the sink of endless games and delights! We must regain our virtue as humans, so that we can take our true birthright and continue to thrive as a species!”

“So you would end the games and delights?”

It was the first that Aikawa Gouvois had spoken and Sheida didn’t know if he was on Paul’s side or not. He was fully humanoform, but also perfectly Asiatic in features. Thousands of years of crossbreeding and genetic tinkering meant that most humans naturally tended to be a light brown in color and have very few noticeable features, other than striking beauty, perhaps one of the reasons that so many chose wild body forms. Aikawa, however, had the broad face and epicanthic fold of a classic Son of Han. His appearance was so true to standard that it actually detracted from his looks; the flattened nose, broad cheekbones and epicanthic folds being decidedly nonstandard.

Without doing a DNA scan and violating privacy, Sheida couldn’t tell if his appearance was natural or artificial. Whichever it was, the appearance was a personal statement, like Bowman’s height. However, it was a far more ambiguous one. And Aikawa had also cultivated a poker face to make any of the rest of the Council envious.