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.

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.