1        Soul Bound 1.3      Making a Splash 1.3.3    An Unrequited Love 1.3.3.14 Sharpe Lecture: allies (part one)

Flashback to being a student in 2030s studying "Effective Political Activism" at University College London.

It had taken Nadine longer than usual to enter Dr. Sharpe's lecture theater at UCL, because a queue had formed at the door, where he'd placed a basket of playing card sized jigsaw pieces, under a note suggesting students take them to use as a silent communication tool during the lecture.

She studied the pieces being picked up by those ahead of her as she waited her turn and guessed jigsaw must have been a painting of a scene from antiquity; partially because many of the pieces showed men in armour, perhaps arrogant Greeks versus ambitious Romans, judging by how the painter had drawn the hair and facial expressions under the two styles of helmet.

Other pieces showed distant walls being attacked by forests of spears, scab-ridden rats nibbling upon the fallen, and saddled stallions with every muscle depicted so cleanly that Nadine thought the warriors must have spent more hours grooming them than riding them. Or perhaps the warriors didn't do the work? The other human figures were women wearing simple linen peplos dresses, some brave and some cowering, none identical - the painter had shown old and young, noble and commoner, some strong or comely, and some weak or withered.

The students varied in how long they spent at the basket. Bungo, for example, took less than a second to pick the strongest warrior he could see. Wellington took a bit longer, because he'd noted there was a drawing on both sides of each piece, with different coloured paper dots stuck at the top; he systematically flipped several and then picked two jigsaw pieces that between them had all four colours of paper dot: black, white, red and blue.

Alderney, however, seemed perfectly content to spend the whole lecture trying to solve the jigsaw right there and right then, bent over the basket with intense concentration while her hands flipped and moved the pieces together, oblivious to the people waiting behind. Finally Nadine had managed to drag her away, still clutching a handful showing different parts of one distinctive turret, by suggesting Alderney could carry on trying to find a match while sitting down. She nearly forgot to take one for herself and, trapped by having to retain a firm hold on the arm of the reluctant Alderney, Nadine settled for blindly reaching behind her to take one at random.

"Do you have all the pieces? Do you all have pieces?"

A few minutes later Tomsk, acting as Dr Sharpe's assistant, had quietly walked around with the basket whispering to them, handing out the remaining contents, while Dr Sharpe stood at the front and started to speak:

"King Scilurus did as he wanted for most of his life. The Tauri, the mountain people, were stronger than their neighbours, tall red-haired riders and pale-skinned sea plunderers with dark tattoos of fierce animals and, whether fighting the Spartans or getting intoxicated on kumis, they did it lustily, and none more so than their kyrios, their lord.

By the time he lay dying of old age in his craggy Crimean fastness, he had fathered 80 sons, and was feared by his many enemies - he'd extended his archè, the area he dominated, hundreds of kilometers in every direction.

But one doubt plagued his mind.

What if all his enemies attacked the Tauri, once they heard of his death? Yes, his sons were strong, but they disdained working together - they'd never felt a need to. What if his enemies united and his children did not?

And so he summoned them one final time and, as they gathered around his bedside, he raised a withered arm and pointed at eighty thin reeds which had been tightly tied into a bundle.

'The one who breaks those reeds will rule you all' said Scilurus.

His sons took his words as a challenge. One by one his sons lifted the bundle up with their war-muscled arms and tried to snap it. One by one they failed until even Palacus, the strongest of them, refused further attempts.

He halted them without words by raising one hand and, as he'd previously arranged, a servant, a quick-witted Greek woman whom Scilurus had claimed as battle spoils, dragged the bundle over to him, untied it, and handed Scilurus the reeds one by one by one.

Snap. Snap. Snap.

The last one was thicker than the rest but he finally broke it with the aid of the servant who took a certain satisfaction in seeing the crestfallen looks of the mighty sons as they watched a foreigner do what they had failed at.

Snap.

The King held up the two halves of the last reed, and spoke directly to Palacus.

'My son, you are like this reed. You may be stronger than the other reeds, but when you stand alone you too can be broken if enough enemies join together. Seek strength in unity.'

Scilurus did not explain further because those turned out to be his dying words. Nor could his faithful servant explain, though she'd helped the king devised the demonstration, because one of the first acts of Palacus, the new king, had been to beat her head in with a club and then throw her body into the sea as a sacrifice to their ancestral Iranian deities in memory of his father.

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Did Palacus understand the King's lesson? The Tauri survived a few more generations, spreading their genes widely, so we can suppose at least some of his brothers had paid attention. But how much better would the Tauri have done, if they'd unified not only their family but also with the non-native born talent now living inside their borders, treating them as equals rather than using them for their bodies and unpaid labour?

Would tolerating citizens who worshipped different deities have made their culture stronger or weaker? The Tauri had a foundation myth, a story that defined who they were as a people, and they weren't open to the possibility that definitions can change. Sons were counted, were individuals. Daughters were disposable. Foreigners might as well be a different species. How could you unify with that? Even the life of a horse was more valuable than that of a foreigner - a horse had to be treated with proper respect or it couldn't be relied upon in battle.

In a way, the Tauri remind me of Neanderthals, who were strong, red-haired, and who lived in that same area, about 40,000 years ago. There are many suggested causes for the Neanderthals going extinct, ranging from lack of fertility due to not dividing jobs along gender lines or due to genetic problems caused by insufficient gene exchange between neighbouring tribes, to my own favourite: the Cro-Magnons smelled differently, and were able to domesticate dogs to help with hunting while the Neanderthals were stuck with cats."

Nadine glanced at red-haired Alderney sitting next to her, still fiddling with her jigsaw pieces, and heard her mutter: "Stinky Cro-Magnons."

Dr Sharpe continued:

"Were the Cro-Magnons a different species to the Neanderthals? The two groups evolved apart more than 400,000 years ago, developing their own culture, their own music, stories, myths and deities. They even tended to have a slightly different shapes of skull, so the scientists originally decided they were different. But, once geneticists had provided more evidence, the scientists changed their definitions. Cro-Magnons are now termed 'Early Modern Humans', part of our own species. Neanderthals, it turned out, did occasionally have viable off-spring with them, and may be counted the same. They were kindred. They could have worked together, learned from each other."

Bungo raised his hand, waving his jigsaw communication card for attention and revealing a female servant on the reverse of his warrior to tittering from some of the other students. Dr. Sharpe permitted the question.

Bungo: "Were the Neanderthals as smart as the Cro-Magnons?"

Dr Sharpe winced slightly, by now familiar with Bungo's obsessions.

"Whose IQ test would you use to decide? One devised by a Cro-Magnon, or one devised by a Neanderthal? Tests can contain a lot of unstated assumptions about which types of knowledge, skill or thinking are the important ones worth measuring. If I'm cautious about giving you a simple 'yes' or 'no' based upon boiling their 'smartness' down to a single mathematically comparable test score, it's because I'm aware of the many occasions that's been misused by bigots to justify withhold rights from groups they feel superior to.

For example, in 1832 the American state of Alabama passed an anti-literacy law, which made it a flogging offense for black people to learn to read, or even be near a place where black people might be assembling for that purpose. Yet, more than a hundred years later, long after slavery had been abolished, Alabama was still using supposedly impartial tests to determine who was smart enough to be trusted to vote responsibly. Tests in fact based upon measuring the ability to read and define words the way the white lawyers defined them, and which incidentally also required the person being tested to agree that 'Involuntary servitude' was a legitimate thing, permitted under some circumstances by the American constitution."

Bungo wilted and lowered his hand, but Dr Sharpe carried on speaking in a kindly voice.

"It isn't a bad question; just one that shouldn't be given a simple answer.

What we do know is that, while their brains grew more slowly than ours, the overall full adult brain volume was comparable to that of modern humans. However it was distributed differently - some parts of the brain were smaller while others were larger. They were probably better than us at body coordination, visual processing and related memory tasks. If the test of smartness was solving a double sided jigsaw puzzle, they'd rate highly.

But they were probably a bit less flexible when it came to changing their traditional ways, and they had the social skills of a naïve child - unable to lie well, and without the awareness of status and favours needed to navigate a complex social hierarchy. Like the Tauri, they weren't good at making allies.

That's what we're going to be talking about today. Why allies are needed, how to make allies and how to be a good ally. And along the way we'll touch on mutual support, fraternity, class, solidarity, individuality, diversity, assumptions and several other things - it's a lot to get through, so as a courtesy to everyone else, please try to keep questions to a minimum unless they simply can't be asked later."

Dr Sharpe moved over to his podium to bring up a slide, tall and fluid. What would it have been like to meet a Neanderthal? To have been one? A supreme solo hunter, rejecting outside influences and trying to live each day like the last, while surrounded by increasing numbers of deceitful chatty pack hunters who used hounds and advanced wooden technology to steal kills on territory that had belonged to my tribe for thousands of years? No, not just thousands of years, hundreds of thousands - how much original music, whole traditions and instruments never heard by modern ear, had been lost?

The thought staggered her, and it took a moment or two to realise a slide was now projected onto the board at the front, containing pairs of definitions for nearly a dozen words: labour, class, unjustified negative group-based discrimination, structural racism, privilege, justice... her eyes glazed over as he quickly railroaded the class through using their jigsaw pieces as approval indicators to pick one definition of each for the whole class to use 'for the sake of efficient clear communication'.

Which side of her own card was best? Were Romans better than Greeks? Were spears positive? If it was the dots that mattered, was a black dot good or bad? Many students were looking around, hoping to spot a pattern in what the others picked then copy it, but each jigsaw piece was too different. Alderney had picked two different cards and was using a well-built piece of turret to agree with a definition and a piece that was crumbling to disagree, but how did that help Nadine? Her dots were a different colour, and her card showed a well fed rat on one side, and a Greek lyre (a sort of ancient harp) on the other.

Dr. Sharpe refused to explain, or even listen to questions, obviously wanting to get through the material as fast as possible, leaving Bungo poking his card despondently, stuck between two bad choices: being heard at the risk his fellow students would think Bungo thought women were inferior, or not voting at all - remaining voiceless.

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