“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 relish. 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.