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.
Main Population Page
|