Addenda





The excerpts posted on the previous two webpages were written in letters to Margaret Carter; and, although they are being posted in Companion in Zeor, they have merely been edited for typographical and punctuation errors, plus a few changes made to improve comprehension.   However, I do have a few further comments.

1.   As the need to drug the breeders is far less than the need to drug children of establishment age, it is quite likely that, in the two years Gen girls are kept before being bred, they are weaned off the strong drugs used to prevent them from killing the valuable breeders.   If so, this would mean that, even at the time of Zelerod's Doom, the adult population of most of the traditionally-run Genfarms is undrugged or only lightly drugged.   It seems likely, therefore, that Genfarm language and culture would have survived until Unity.   (Then, of course, the breeders were killed off.)

2.   So far, I have only given proportional numbers.   People may be curious about the actual population figures.   We have not been given any numbers for Territories other than Nivet; however, in Zelerod's Doom, in response to a question from Risa about the number of people living there, Ediva says, “Before winter—about a million and a half Simes, not counting Freebanders.   But more have died than have changed over, and thousands moved to other Territories.   The biggest drop is in Genfarm stock.”
        It is not at all surprising that the junct government has quite exact numbers available:   they do, after all, need to know how many Simes live in Nivet, and where in Nivet they live, in order to stock the local pens with the proper number of Gens to provide the Sime citizens with the kills they need to survive.   And they do not know about the number of Simes in unlicensed raider bands, since these people do not pay taxes, nor use the pen system.   The government will also have pretty exact figures on the in-Territory Gen population:   the poll tax on Gens is a major source of income.
        Children—both pre-Gen and pre-Sime—are left out of the numbers quoted by Ediva.   It is possible that the government keeps track of them; but it is also entirely possible that they ignore pre-Simes (i.e. the children of two Sime parents) entirely until they change over.   There are, of course, taxes on pre-Gens; so they must have census figures for them.   But Ediva was explicitly reporting the numbers for the Sime population, not the Gen population.



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