* * * * *
“It seems you’ve all managed quite well together.” Beren commented some time later in the conference room, looking now and then at a few scientists sitting on the wrong side of the table. Before the misunderstandings carried any further, we quickly explained the inter-attachments of the six scientists.
Both leaders were further surprised, and perhaps even annoyed, to learn that five children had been born to these couples. Although the public had lost interest in our voyage, it being, unremarkably, the second mission to the previously discovered territories, it seemed Orashean didn’t care to promote the idea that inter-attachments were acceptable.
The children were, essentially, incontrovertible living proof that both peoples were genetically the same. Orashean didn’t want that kind of information becoming public before he was ready to make it known. Yet what could be done now? If Beren seemed pleased about it, he was even more so when he heard that the couples had chosen to make Tiasenne their permanent residence. As if the more Orians who made it to Tiasenne might somehow pave the way for others to follow.
At one point in the debriefing, Orashean was gesturing with his writing instrument to Hisden, the senior astrophysicist from Ernestia’s observatory who had catalogued new star systems on the voyage. While Hisden was speaking, the pen slipped from Orashean’s grasp as he played with the end of it, and it rolled to the floor out of his reach beside me.
I retrieved it and held it out, waiting for him to take it. Orashean turned to me absently and reached for the instrument while still listening to Garic Hisden’s report, but clasped my fingers accidentally as he reached his arm closer to get at the pen.
He stared at my hand slowly a moment before turning my hand palm up. The conversation had come to a complete halt.
“Remarkable,” he mumbled in confusion. He raised his own hand in comparison.
He stared at me again. “Tell me, Alessia, how is it that you stay so young-looking? You must tell me your secret. My wife says I need to get more exercise, but there are so many things that won’t get done on their own, you know. Ah well, Hisden, forgive me for that little diversion. You were saying…?”
Orashean purposefully turned his full attention back to Hisden, dropping his pen on the table and looking down at it from time to time.
Beren and Orashean had noticed something that the others had taken for granted by now. Eight years had passed for us on board Baidarka, but the time had had no visible effect upon me at all.
And they wanted to know why.
The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire Page 23
