“Excuse me,” said Hak. “I have found it.”
“What?” said Mary.
“The cabin—or, at least, a cabin that is not on any of the older maps. It is approximately thirty-five kilometers due west of Kraldak.” Hak translated the Neanderthal units for Mary, although Ponter had probably heard something like “70,000 armspans” through his cochlear implants.
“Wonderful!” exclaimed Mary. “Ponter, we have to go see her!”
“Certainly,” he said.
“Can you go tomorrow?”
Ponter’s voice was heavy. “Mare…”
“What? Oh, I know. I know, Two are not One but…”
“Yes?”
Mary sighed. “No, you’re right. Well, then, can we go when Two are next One?”
“Of course, my love. We can do whatever you want then.”
“All right,” said Mary. “It’s a date.”
Bandra and Mary seemed very simpatico—a word Bandra relished using. They both liked to spend quiet evenings at home, and although they had an endless array of scientific things to discuss, they also touched on more personal matters.
It reminded Mary of her first days with Ponter, quarantined at Reuben Montego’s house. Sharing opinions and ideas with Bandra was intellectually and emotionally stimulating, and the female Neanderthal had a wonderfully warm way about her, kind and funny.
Still, as they sat in the living room of Bandra’s house, the topics sometimes got, if not heated, at least quite pointed.
“You know,” said Bandra, sitting at the opposite end of a couch from Mary, “this excessive desire for privacy must be fueled by your religions. At first I thought it was just because certain appealing behaviors were forbidden, and so people required privacy to indulge in them. And, doubtless, that’s part of it. But, now that you’ve told me about your multiplicity of belief systems, it seems that even just wanting to practice a minority belief required privacy. Early practitioners of your system, Christianity, hid their meetings from others, isn’t that so?”
“That’s true,” said Mary. “In fact, our most important holy day is Christmas, commemorating the annual anniversary of Jesus’ birth. We celebrate it on December 25—in winter—but Jesus was born in the spring. We know that because the Bible says it happened when the shepherds watched over their flocks by night, which only happens in the spring, when new lambs are born.” Mary smiled. “Hey, you guys are like that: you like to give birth in the spring, too.”
“Probably for the same reason: to give the offspring the best chance to grow before having to face winter.”
But the simile had stuck in Mary’s mind, and she ventured forward tentatively. “You Barasts are like sheep in other ways, too. You’re so peaceful.”
“Does it seem that way?” said Bandra.
“You don’t have wars. And from what I’ve seen, you don’t have much societal violence. Although…” She stopped herself, before she mentioned the shattering of Ponter’s jaw, an unfortunate event from years ago.
“I suppose. We still hunt our own food—not all the time, of course, unless that happens to be one’s particular contribution. But often enough that it provides an outlet for violent impulses. How do you say it? It gets it out of our systems.”
“Catharsis,” said Mary. “A purging of pent-up feeling.”
“Catharsis! Oooh, another great word! Yes, indeed: smash in a few animal skulls, or tear flesh from bone, and you feel wonderfully peaceful afterward.”
Mary stopped to think if she’d ever killed an animal, for food or any other purpose. Except for swatting mosquitoes, the answer was no. “We don’t do that.”
“I know,” said Bandra. “You consider it uncivilized. But we consider it to be part of what makes civilization possible.”
“Still, your lack of privacy—doesn’t it give rise to abuses? Couldn’t someone be clandestinely—secretly—watching what you’re doing, by compromising the security of the alibi archives?”
“Why would anyone want to do that?”
“Well, to prevent an overthrow of the government, say.”
“Why would someone want to overthrow the government? Why not just vote it out of office?”
“Well, today, yes. But surely you haven’t had democracy since the dawn of time?”
“What else might we have had?”
“Tribal chieftains? Warlords? God-emperors? No, scratch that last one. But, well…” Mary frowned. Well, what? Without agriculture, there were no small-scale defensible territories. Oh, primitive farmers could doubtless defend a few hundred acres, but the tens or hundreds of square miles that represented a hunting forest were beyond the abilities of small groups to protect.
And, indeed, why bother defending them? A raid on farmlands produced immediate results: plant food and fiber, stolen from the field or taken from the granary. But, as Ponter had pointed out time and again, hunting and gathering were based on knowledge: no one could just enter a new territory and profitably exploit it. They wouldn’t know where the animals came to drink, where the birds laid their eggs, where the most bountiful fruit trees grew. No, such a lifestyle would engender peaceful trade, since it was far less work for a traveler to bring something of value along to swap for freshly captured game rather than to try to hunt the game himself.
Nonetheless, if push came to shove, most Neanderthals were probably robust enough to forage for themselves—just as apparently this Vissan was now doing. Besides, with a cap on population size—and the Neanderthals had had that for hundreds of years—there was plenty of unused territory for anyone who wished to strike out on their own.
“Still,” said Mary, “there must have been times when people didn’t like their elected officials, and wanted to get rid of them.”
“Oh, yes, indeed. Yes, indeed.”
“What happened then?”
“In the old days? Before the purging of our gene pool? Assassination.”
“Well, there!” said Mary. “That’s a reason for compromising other people’s privacy: to thwart assassination attempts. If someone was plotting to assassinate you, you’d want to keep an eye on them, to prevent them from pulling it off.”
“An assassination doesn’t require any plotting,” said Bandra, her eyebrow lifted. “You just walk up to the person you want to be rid of and smash their skull in. Believe me, that provides a wonderful incentive for elected officials to keep their constituents happy.”
Mary laughed in spite of herself. “Still, surely even if the majority are happy, there will always be discontented individuals.”
Bandra nodded. “Which is why we long ago saw the necessity of purging the gene pool of those who might act in an antisocial manner.”
“But this purging of the gene pool…” Mary was trying not to be judgmental, but her tone betrayed her. “I’ve tried to talk to Ponter about this, but it’s difficult; he’s so blindly in favor of it. But even more than your lack of privacy, that notion is what creeps my people out the most.”
“‘Creeps them out’! Oooh, that’s a classic!”
“I’m serious, Bandra. We’ve attempted such things in the past, and…it’s never gone well. I mean, we don’t believe that sort of thing can be done without corruption. We’ve had people try to wipe out specific ethnic groups.”
A bleep.
“Groups that have distinctive characteristics, based on their geographic origin.”
“But diversity is of great value genetically,” said Bandra. “Surely you, as a life chemist, know that.”
“Yes, but—well, I mean, we have tried…my people, I mean…well, not my people, but bad people, bad members of my species, have tried to perform…we call it ‘genocide,’ wiping out whole other races of people, and—”
God damn it, thought Mary. Why couldn’t she just chat with a Neanderthal about the weather, instead of always getting into these horrible topics? If only she could learn to keep her mouth shut.
“Genocide,” repeated Bandra, but without her usual rel
ish. She didn’t have to say that her own kind, Homo neanderthalensis, had been the first victim of Homo sapiens genocide.
“But,” said Mary, “I mean, how do you decide which traits to try to eliminate?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Excessive violence. Excessive selfishness. A tendency to mistreat children. Mental retardation. Predisposition to genetic diseases.”
Mary shook her head; she was still bothered by her aborted conversation on this topic with Ponter. “We believe everyone has the right to breed.”
“Why?” said Bandra.
Mary frowned. “It’s—it’s a human right.”
“It’s a human desire,” said Bandra. “But a right? Evolution is driven by only some members of a population reproducing.”
“I guess we believe that superseding the brutality of natural selection is the hallmark of civilization.”
“But surely,” said Bandra, “the society as a whole is more important than any individual.”
“Fundamentally, I guess my people don’t share that view. We put an enormous value on individual rights and liberties.”
“An enormous value? Or an enormous cost?” Bandra shook her head. “I’ve heard of all the security precautions you require at transportation terminals, all the enforcers you require throughout your cities. You claim not to want war, but you devote a huge proportion of your resources to preparing for it and waging it. You have terrorists, and those who exist by addicting others to chemicals, and a plague of child abuse, and—if you will forgive me—an average intelligence that is much lower than it need be.”
“We’ve never found a way to measure intelligence that isn’t culturally biased.”
Bandra blinked. “How can intelligence be culturally biased?”
“Well,” said Mary, “if you ask a rich child of normal intelligence what word goes with cup, he’ll say ‘saucer’; saucers are little plates we put underneath the cups we drink coffee—hot beverages—from. But if you ask a poor kid with normal intelligence, he might not know the answer, because his family might not be able to afford saucers.”
“Intelligence is not a trivia game,” said Bandra. “There are better ways to assess its strength. We look at the number of neural connections that have grown in the brain; a tally of them is a good objective indicator.”
“But surely those who were denied the right to breed because of their low intelligence…surely they were upset by that.”
“Yes. But, by definition, they were not difficult to outwit.”
Mary shuddered. “Still…”
“Remember how our democracies are constituted: we don’t let people vote until they have seen at least 600 moons—two-thirds of the traditional 900-month lifetime. That’s…Delka?”
“Forty-eight years old,” said Delka, Bandra’s Companion.
Bandra continued. “That’s past the age of possible reproduction for most females, and past the usual reproductive age for men. So those voting on the issue no longer had to be concerned about it themselves.”
“It’s not really democracy if only a minority get to vote.”
Bandra frowned, as if trying to comprehend Mary’s comment. “Everybody gets to vote—just not at every point in their lives. And unlike in your world, we have never denied anyone of sufficient age the right to vote just because of gender or dermal coloration.”
“But surely,” said Mary, “those who did vote must have been worried on behalf of their adult children, who were at reproductive age, but couldn’t vote themselves.”
Bandra hesitated, and Mary wondered why; she’d been on quite a roll until now. “Of course hoping for our children’s happy futures is of great importance,” she said finally. “But the vote was taken before the intelligence tests were administered. Do you see? The decision was to bar the bottom five percent of the population from reproducing for ten consecutive generations. Try to find a parent who thinks his or her own child is in the bottom five percent—it’s impossible! The voters doubtless assumed none of their own children would be affected.”
“But some were.”
“Yes. Some were.” Bandra lifted her shoulders, a small shrug. “It was for the good of society, you see.”
Mary shook her head. “My people would never countenance such a thing.”
“We don’t have to worry much about our gene pool anymore, although there are some exceptions. Still, after ten generations of restricted breeding, we relaxed the rules. Most genetic diseases were gone for good, most violence was gone, and the average intelligence was much higher. It still falls on a bell curve, of course, but we ended up with—what do you call it? We have a concept in statistics: the square root of the mean of the squares of the deviations from the arithmetic mean of the distribution.”
“A standard deviation,” said Mary.
“Ah. Well, after ten generations, the average intelligence had shifted one standard deviation to the left.”
Mary was about to say “to the right, you mean,” but remembered that Neanderthals read from right to left, not left to right. But she did add, “Really? That much of a change?”
“Yes. Our stupid people are now as intelligent as our average people used to be.”
Mary shook her head. “I just don’t see any way my people would ever be comfortable with limiting who had the right to breed.”
“I don’t defend our way,” said Bandra. “As one of your very best sayings goes, ‘to each his own.’ ” She smiled her wide, warm smile. “But, come, Mare, enough of this seriousness. It’s a beautiful evening! Let’s go for a walk. Then you can tell me all about yourself.”
“What would you like to know?”
“Everything. The whole ball of wax. The whole shebang. The whole nine yards. The whole enchilada. The—”
Mary laughed. “I get the idea,” she said, rising to her feet.
Chapter Seventeen
“How could that have possibly happened? How could we have given up that most noble of drives that had taken us from Olduvai Gorge to the lunar craters? The answer, of course, is that we’d grown content. The century we recently left saw greater advances in human wealth and prosperity, in human health and longevity, in human technology and material comfort, than all of the forty millennia that preceded it…”
Mary Vaughan was settling into a routine: spending days studying Neanderthal genetics with Lurt or other experts, and spending nights being very comfortable at Bandra’s house.
Mary had always thought her own hips too wide, but the average Neanderthal pelvis was even wider. Indeed, she remembered Erik Trinkaus’s old suggestion that Neanderthals might have had an eleven-or twelve-month gestation period, since their wider hips would have accommodated a bigger baby. But that theory had been abandoned when later work showed that the differently shaped Neanderthal pelvis was just related to their style of walking. It had been suggested they had a rolling gait, like Old West gunslingers—a fact now very much confirmed observationally.
Anyway, Mary found Neanderthal saddle-seats uncomfortable and, because most Neanderthals had shorter lower legs than upper legs, bench-type Barast chairs were a bit too low to the ground for her tastes. So she’d asked Lurt’s carpenter friend to make her a new chair: a frame of knotty pine with generous cushions lashed to its back and seat.
Bandra had gotten home before Mary did that day, and was off in her bedroom. But she emerged just after Mary came in the front door. “Hi, Mare,” she said. “I thought I smelled you.”
Mary smiled wanly. She was getting used to it all; really she was.
“Look!” declared Bandra, pointing. “Your chair has arrived! You must try it out.”
Mary did so, lowering herself onto its cushioned seat.
“Well? Well?”
“It’s wonderful!” said Mary, after shifting around in it. “Really. Very comfortable.”
“Just what the doctor ordered!” declared Bandra, and then she astonished Mary by making a thumbs-up sign.
Mary laughed. “Exactly.”
“Right on the money! The perfect thing!”
“All of that, yes,” said Mary.
“Yes!” repeated Bandra, who was enjoying herself immensely. “Bingo! Exactamundo!” Bandra beamed at Mary, and Mary smiled warmly back.
Later that evening, Mary gave her new chair a longer test, curling up in it with one of the books she’d bought at the Laurentian University bookstore.
For her part, Bandra had been working on a new bird painting, but evidently decided it was time to take a break. She crossed the room and stood behind Mary. “What are you reading?”
Mary instinctively showed Bandra the book’s cover before she realized Bandra couldn’t possibly read the title—although with her delight in English, she doubted it would be long before Bandra tackled learning to read it. “It’s called The Man of Property,” said Mary, “by a writer named John Galsworthy. He won my world’s top writing award, the Nobel Prize for Literature.” Colm had been recommending Galsworthy for years, but Mary had only finally decided to read him after her sister Christine had raved about the new BBC adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, of which The Man of Property was the first volume.
“What’s it about?” asked Bandra.
“A rich lawyer married to a beautiful woman. He hires an architect to build a country house for them, but the woman is having an affair with the architect.”
Bandra said, “Ah,” and Mary looked up at her and smiled. She tried again: “It’s about the complexities of interpersonal relationships among Gliksins.”
“Would you read some of it to me?” asked Bandra.
Mary was surprised but pleased by the request. “Sure.” Bandra straddled a saddle-seat facing Mary, arms folded in her lap. Mary softly spoke the words on the page, and let Christine translate them into the Neanderthal tongue.
Most people would consider such a marriage as that of Soames and Irene quite fairly successful; he had money, she had beauty; it was a case for compromise. There was no reason why they should not jog along, even if they hated each other. It would not matter if they went their own ways a little so long as the decencies were observed—the sanctity of the marriage tie, of the common home, respected. Half the marriages of the upper classes were conducted on these lines: Do not offend the susceptibilities of Society; do not offend the susceptibilities of the Church. To avoid offending these is worth the sacrifice of any private feelings. The advantages of the stable home are visible, tangible, so many pieces of property; there is no risk in the status quo. To break up a home is at the best a dangerous experiment, and selfish into the bargain.
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