"Okay. Um. I think - I have a sort of mystical appreciation for the uniting of undoctored sperm and undoctored egg into potential child, where that method is available, and from that basis I don't really mind what changes are made as long as they're all unambiguous improvements - all the things you said about headaches and colds made sense to me, but, say, if you were going to make the kids tetrachromats I'd want to find some way to convert standard colour formats into something that a four-coloured display could render so they'd see it properly. Actually, now that I've thought of that, I want to do it anyway. Is it possible? Can you bend your genius to it or locate an appropriate engineer or something? I'm getting off-track, sorry - because it seems like being a tetrachromat isn't unambiguously better, see, you have that problem with holos, but if the problem was adequately solved it would, er, not be a problem."

He takes a quick breath.

"—And as long as enough of the original sequence remains that you can fairly say you didn't just replace the genome wholesale with something designed from scratch. And - I don't know, I'd want to be appraised of what you were doing, I'd want to get a say, express opinions, but I trust your judgment enough that I don't expect to want to really veto anything. You aren't going to give our children, I don't know, fangs or something else that would get them spit on in the street, you aren't going to insist that their heights be arranged in birth order or want to predetermine their sexualities according to specific ratios or something - I thought it was terribly sweet that you wanted to give them all my eyes." Another breath. "And it's not as though we urgently require an heir at this very moment, so we have time to work out the details? I think? I hope?"