It wasn’t so much that Aïda had done things that couldn’t be undone as that she had said things that couldn’t be unsaid. In that sense her Curse had real effect. An individual Aïdan of the Second Millennium was the product of a mixed-race culture that was more than a thousand years old. He or she had grown up with persons of all races, loving some and hating others, getting on well, perhaps, with certain Teklans and Moirans while getting into fights with certain Aïdans. In terms of his or her own personal experiences, there was no reason to stick together with others of the same race. But each race did have an ineradicable narrative, by now encoded into a culture that had become ancient. The narrative of the Aïdans was that their Eve had spawned not just one race but a "race of races," a mosaic, as proof that her children could do all that those of the other Eves could, and more. And if you were a descendant of Aïda, clearly endowed with genetic markers that she had chosen for that purpose, then the inexorable force of that narrative would drive you toward colonies populated largely or purely by other Aïdans.