Neal Stephenson - Seveneves

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 Aïda 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 Aïdan name.

“Bard for short,” Langobard offered.

“Langobard, may I present Beled Tomov and Kath Amalthova Two.”

Bard rose to his full height, which was not all that impressive, while performing the Aïdan version of the salute, which was done with both hands. He then reached out across a seemingly impossible distance with his right, offering to shake. Beled was still reluctant to move, and so Kath Two stepped forward and extended her hand. She had never made physical contact before with a Neoander. Even in Red they had become somewhat scarce, as many of the existing population had moved down to New Earth to become Indigens. In Blue they were rarely seen at all. Langobard took her hand with elaborate delicacy, swallowing it up in a meat paw with fingers the size of baby arms, and giving it the gentlest of squeezes. He was clean-shaven and carefully groomed, wearing a good suit of clothes that actually fit — prompting her to wonder where such a person would find a tailor. He had a slightly bemused look on his face, as if he knew what she was thinking. “Charmed,” he said, with a little nod that only emphasized the size and mass of his head. And after she had nodded back, he released her hand, no worse for wear, and stretched it out toward Beled. “Lieutenant Tomov? Pleasure to meet you. What’s it going to be? Punch in the face? Handshake? Or a big warm hug?” He swung his hand back while extending the other arm, displaying a wingspan much greater than his height, as though offering to embrace Beled across the table. This, at least, broke the tension enough that Beled finally collected himself into a less minatory posture, saluted, and extended his hand in return. The Teklan’s hand gripped the Neoander’s just a few centimeters away from Kath Two’s face. She could hear the knuckles cracking as they tested each other’s strength. Standing on the far side of this spectacle was Ty, watching it with an expression that was not all that easy to read, given that the damaged side of his face was toward her. But she thought she detected a certain level of wry amusement, perhaps a little dampened by awe.

Ty caught Kath Two looking, then shook his head and snorted.

“I hope I didn’t overdress,” Bard remarked, after he and Beled had finally let go of each other without incident. “I sometimes overcompensate when I come to Cradle.”

“Is that often?” Ty asked.

Kath Two understood that Bard’s remark had been a conversational gambit and not just a bald assertion. Ty, with the social reflexes of a Dinan bartender, had recognized it as such and was already following up.

“It’s actually surprising that you and I have never crossed paths before,” Bard said, addressing Ty but watching Kath Two out of the corner of his eye. Only after she had sat down in one of the available chairs did he resume his seat. He picked up the empty glass. “I noted on your drinks list that you cellar some surface produce. Thank you for the beer, by the way.”

“You’re most welcome,” Ty said.

“I have spent most of my life on the surface,” Bard explained, “where some members of my clan grow grapes. We produce wine. Our primary market is restaurants in Cradle, though we do ship a few cases up to private cellars on the Great Chain.”

“Well then, that’s one explanation for our not having met,” Ty said.

Kath Two interpreted this to mean The Crow’s Nest generally doesn’t stock such high-end wine, but Bard got a sly look on his face and, after a moment, returned, “Did you have another possible explanation in mind, Ty?”

“Where is your clan’s vineyard?” Beled demanded. Then, in a belated attempt to soften it, he added, “If you don’t mind.”

“Oh, it’s not a secret,” Bard said. “Antimer. Just near the line of demarcation.”

She didn’t know much about the place but she could visualize it: a crescent-shaped archipelago in the middle latitudes between the Aleutians and Hawaii. It was the rim of a huge impact crater. Some of the islands were fairly large. The largest of them straddled the antimeridian—180 degrees east or west of Greenwich — which was the origin of the name. But most of the archipelago lay to the east of there, stretching all the way across the longitude of 166 degrees, 30 minutes west. That was the location of one of the two turnpikes that the Aïdans had built across the ring. It was as far west as the Eye could travel, and so it served as a border between Red and Blue. Since it was in the middle of the Pacific, which, notwithstanding the best efforts of the Hard Rain, was still largely an empty expanse of water, there wasn’t much of a land border. 166 Thirty did cross through Beringia: the union of Alaska with the easternmost part of Siberia. A land border did, therefore, exist in that place as well as in the somewhat more climatically benign part of Antimer lying a few thousand kilometers due south. This was the “line of demarcation” that Bard had alluded to, carefully omitting mention of on which side of it the vineyard was actually located. The border was fuzzy. There was no need to bother with strict enforcement on a world so thinly populated. The much longer land border at ninety degrees east, above Dhaka, wandered all over the place as it rambled north across the broadest part of Asia, squirming this way and that to circumvent craters, Himalayas, and other complications.