Three days later, the family elders met near the river in an area surrounded by standing stones, each about three meters tall. The current villager’s ancestors built them at some point in the last few thousand years. Humans erected similar things in other villages. It seemed that wherever a handy source of stone could be found nearby, a stone circle of some kind would eventually be made, especially in places with hard winters because the primitives could use ice to help them break and move the rocks to more esthetically pleasing shapes and locations. Some of the circles were quite large with impressive trilithons and huge altar stones. Others were little more than rings of roughly shaped boulders. MO-126 wondered why the primitives went through all the trouble. The circles were considerably difficult to construct using only stone tools to chisel the monoliths into their final shapes and with nothing but muscles, logs, and ropes to place them upright, but the primitives took considerable pride in them. Sometimes, the circles were considered holy, or lucky, or just a place to gather for celebrations involving fermented beverages and group mating rituals. The primitives in this village considered the circle the place of their ancestors, and they used the area for cremations and other ceremonies.
The meeting was not secret. Everyone in the village knew where and when it would take place, but only the family elders were allowed to attend. Men who were senior but not elders formed a cordon around the area to ensure that no other villagers came near. This exclusion did not extend to a simple dog, and no one objected to MO-126’s presence just outside the stone circle.
Forty-two men representing the village’s extended families stood in their finest linen tunics listening to the current elder of the last headman’s family, a bent-backed old man with a gray beard and clouded eyes, standing behind an altar stone.
“My nephew departed us without leaving a successor,” the bearded man began in a croaked voice. “Two men have stepped forward to take on the duty, Movey and Ranex. You all know them, and each of them has support from several families. This has only happened once before in the spoken memory of our people. At that time, according to legends told by the fires, the new headman was chosen by a tally of the family elders. It is for this reason that we are gathered here today.”
Without a clear successor, the village descended into a form of democracy, which might be a fine system for an enlightened population, but MO-126 held doubts about how it would work for a group of Neolithic illiterates. They lacked a procedure for weighing their available choices with respect to any objective criteria. They could not examine records, present evidence, nor have the candidates’ ideas on various subjects debated by experts in the applicable disciplines. All they could do is take a vote to determine which candidate currently enjoyed the greatest popularity, which is a fickle thing. It is easily swayed, even in a well-informed society.
“Each of you has been given two small clay disks,” the old man went on, “one marked with a circle and one marked with a square. If your family wishes to have Movey as the new headman, put your token with a square in the jar.” He lifted a narrow-mouthed clay jar on the stone slab and shook it noiselessly to prove it was currently empty. “If Ranex is your choice, drop the token with the circle. I will collect the tokens you did not drop as you pass. When all have made their choice, you will watch as I lay out the tokens to see which of the two men has more.”
Lining tokens was a common way to determine relative quantities. The counting system used in most villages included names for numbers up to somewhere between seven and twelve. Anything greater than this they normally just considered ‘many.’
“Let us begin.”
A line formed with no apparent direction from anyone. MO-126 observed people do this before and concluded from it that humans possessed some kind of queuing instinct. It might be a carryover from their early mammalian evolution going back to when the number of small mouths could exceed the number of available teats.
The men approached the altar stone and dropped their tokens with an audible clunk. It took them less then ten minutes. The elder ostensibly in charge of the gathering emptied the jar and began making two parallel lines of tokens, one row for the squares and one for the circles. When he placed the last stone, the conclusion became clear. There were two more circle tokens than square ones. Ranex had won.