Later analysis, by historical scholars, of the bread crumb trails left by A?da in computer logs suggested that she had spent almost as much time studying the genomes of the Four, whom she saw as her direct competitors, as her own. And of the Four, she spent as much time learning about Moira’s genome as Dinah’s, Tekla’s, and Ivy’s combined. This was because Moira was of African descent, and A?da had become fascinated by the idea that Africans carried more genetic diversity within their genomes than non-Africans, as a simple result of the fact that humanity had originated on that continent and spread outward. Non-African races had been founded by isolated groups of adventurers. Breeding among themselves, they had created gene pools that were necessarily limited to what they had brought with them: only a subset of what was to be found in Africa. This idea had been used to explain, for example, why Africa contained both the tallest and the most diminutive people in the world, and why so many top athletes were African. It wasn’t because they were naturally better athletes but because the bell-shaped curve of random genetic variation was wider. For every African who was a great athlete there was presumably another who was miserably uncoordinated, but no one paid any notice to the latter. Whether or not this was a valid theory, the fact was that A?da swallowed it hook, line, and sinker and used it to inform her genetic strategy in the Great Game. And to the extent that the Four bothered to develop counterstrategies, they had to take it into account. The very existence of Moirans, as a race, was a result. Rather than try to follow all of A?da’s machinations in detail, base pair for base pair, Eve Moira had chosen to tinker with those aspects of the genome that controlled epigenetics, making her children into Swiss Army knives.
Tekla had been an easier target, where A?da was concerned, since she had stated so forthrightly what she considered desirable in a future race. It was easy enough to see that the children of Tekla were going to be strong, disciplined, formidable fighters. And one did not have to be a military genius to understand that fighting, for the foreseeable future—several millennia of being bottled up in space colonies—was going to be up close and personal. To the extent that violence was going to be an ongoing factor in human history, it was going to be a style of violence that relied on size, strength, and toughness. If history was any guide, those best at violence might end up ruling over everyone else. A?da was not about to see her children dominated by the sons and daughters of Tekla.
She might simply have done what Tekla did, and created versions of herself modified for certain traits associated with athleticism. Instead, having become fascinated by the odd detail in her genetic report, she had embarked on a program to reawaken the Neanderthal DNA that, or so she imagined, had been slumbering in her and her ancestors’ nuclei for tens of thousands of years. It was a somewhat insane idea, and in any case she didn’t have enough Neanderthal in her to make it feasible, but she did produce a race of people with vaguely Neanderthal-like features, and in later centuries the processes of Caricaturization, Isolation, and Enhancement—which had affected all the races to some extent—had wrought especially pronounced changes on this subrace. Gene sequences taken from the toe of an actual Neanderthal skeleton, found on Old Earth and sequenced before Zero, were put to use. Old Earth paleontology journals had been data-mined for stats on bone length and muscle attachment so that those could be hard-coded into the Neoander wetware. The man sitting at the end of the table was the artificial product of breeding and of genetic engineering, but, had he been sent back in time to prehistoric Europe, he would have been indistinguishable, at least in his outward appearance, from genuine Neanderthals.
The creation of the new race had happened incrementally, over centuries. By the time Neoanders existed it was too late to bother with the trifling ethical question of whether it was really a good thing to have created them. During their slow differentiation from the other races they had developed a history and a culture of their own, of which they were as proud as any other ethnic group.
Not surprisingly, much of that history was about their relationship with Teklans, which was, as foreordained, largely combative. At its most simple-minded and stupidly reductionist bones, the Teklan side of the story was that Neoanders were dangerous ape-men brought into existence by a crazy Eve as a curse upon the other six races. The Neoander side had it that Teklans were what Hitler would have produced if he’d had genetic engineering labs, and that it was a damned good thing that Eve A?da had had the foresight to produce a countervailing force of earthy, warm, but immensely strong and dangerous protectors.
Much of this combative relationship had become irrelevant as the tactical landscape had become dominated by katapults and ambots, and physical strength had become less important to the outcome of fights. But the old primordial animus remained, and explained why Beled’s immediate response, upon entering a room that contained a Neoander, was to make himself ready for hand-to-hand combat.
Doc chose to ignore this. If he even notices, Kath Two thought, but she was pretty sure Doc noticed everything. “Beled, Kath, I do not believe you have met Langobard.”
It was a fairly common A?dan name.
“Bard for short,” Langobard offered.