“If we gain at all,” Paul said. “You have your trends to show, I have mine. The rate of scientific progress has dropped to nothing. Quantum jumping and replication were developed nearly five centuries ago and they were the last significant scientific breakthrough. Despite your pronouncements, the population rate is crashing and we are stagnating and falling into sloth and lotus-eating. We’re becoming less and less human every year and if we don’t do something, there may be no humans left. A crisis is upon us and you stick your head in the sand and prattle about ‘maternal genetics’!”

“It’s not prattle, Bowman, it’s science,” Sheida said. “But logic seems to have left you behind. You want to make people ‘work,’ but at work that has never, historically, enhanced reproduction, work that has, in fact, tended to detract from it. I have to ask: can all of this work be done by those who have chosen to Change?”

“The program may necessitate some adjustments to the Change… fad,” Paul said with a distasteful expression.

“Oh, ho!” Cantor said. “Now we come to it! You want me to be a nice little humanoform and work in a… what’s the word, a place where things were made?”

“Factory,” Sheida supplied.

“You want me to be a nice little humanoform ‘working’ in a factory instead of what I choose to be!” He stood up, kicked back the chair and transformed. Suddenly, in the place of the large, hirsute “man,” a four-meter-high grizzly bear reared.

“I doooo’ ’hin’ soooo,” the grizzly growled. He leaned forward and rested on the table, his long claws gouging the natural wood of the tabletop, as his head transformed back to human. “I’m not giving up my form for you, Paul Bowman! Nor am I going to force any of the Changed!”

Ishtar caught Sheida’s eye and threw a Whisper into her ear. “Makes me glad he’s not a dragon.”