John Ringo: There Will Be Dragons

“So you say,” Bowman snarled. “That is history so old that it’s practically fable!”

“There are at least four similar failures in history, Paul,” she said with a thin smile. “Many of them closer in time. Individual males may be excellent mothers, but letting any old male uncork a child ‘just because’ is a route to another dysfunctional generation. And we’ve had far too many of those over the years. You really should do some research for a change instead of just listening to the voices in your head. Speaking of which, what sort of ‘work’ were you intending to enforce?”

“I said nothing of ‘enforce,’ ” Bowman snapped.

“As you wish. I’m not sure what other term to use for making people do things they don’t want to do and don’t have to do. But I’d like an answer to the question.”

“It would be up to the individual,” Paul said. “But attainment of goods and energy would be dependent upon work. Manufacturing, services, that sort of thing. I have a five-year plan to shift from full replication to a work-based economy.”

“ ‘A five-year plan,’ ” Sheida said with a groan. “Do you know how horrifying those words are to even a casual student of that history you dismiss as fable?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” she sighed. “The one thing we learn from history is that we’re doomed to repeat it. So you are discussing industrial work? For males and females? Or information technology work?”

“It would be open to both,” Paul agreed. “And both.”

“You do realize that in anything but a low-tech agricultural environment, there is no surety of population increase, right? That population growth is a market-based factor? And that it’s only low-tech agriculture that has a market for children? More hands to do the chores. That is not the case in an industrial society. Especially one where both sexes work.”

“There have been plenty of industrial societies that had high population growth rates,” Celine Reinshafen said. The woman was dark and almost skeletally thin, her long black hair drawn back in a bun. She shrugged at Sheida and smiled thinly. “I know that much history.”

“Generalities that you learned from your nanny are not what we’re dealing with here,” Sheida said. “All of those societies were in postagriculture adjustment or had a strong cultural emphasis on children. If we had a few million members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, Reform Zoroastrian or Islam we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“So you agree that there is a problem?” Chansa said. “Then why are you arguing?”

“As Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘my esteemed colleague has his facts in order but his conclusions are in error.’ That’s why. Among other things, the rate of decrease is decreasing. Yes, Paul, I’ve been looking at the same thing for nearly a hundred years . It just occurred to you! Congratulations!”

“So what is the answer?” Bowman asked. “And who in the hell is Abraham Lincoln?”

“Give me strength,” she replied, looking upward. “Skip the literary allusions. The answer, as usual, is to leave it alone .

“Look, there are more differences between men and women than plumbing. Something I don’t think you understand. We were talking about maternal instincts a moment ago. On a scale of one to ten, men average about four. Whereas women average about eight. There are women who can’t stand children or babies. Still most women think that babies are just adorable, but let other things get in the way of having them. Men, on the other hand, rarely think that babies are great. Women tend to coo and ooh and ahh over babies; men tend to give them a wide berth.

“Some of this is still cultural, but most of it is genetic and the reason it’s cultural is that the genetics pressure the culture. If you want, I can get my sister to show you the individual genes. They express whether there is a general positive response to babies and children. Or, for that matter, small, furry animals. These responses can be masked by culture, but they are expressed much more aggressively in females than in males. With me so far?”

“So why aren’t there enough children?” Aikawa asked.

“Because, as Ungphakorn pointed out, children are a pain in the ass,” Sheida replied. “There isn’t a nanny yet designed that can give children the right kind of love and attention for maximum positive development; that takes a human and preferably a female. One female can do a decent job, especially with the quality of life in this era. One female and one male work okay, better than just a female. Multiple females and a male work pretty well, possibly better than straight monogamy. Multiple males and one female is suboptimum. One male depends on an unusual male. That’s all ‘in general’ and there is some flex on individuals. But those are the best patterns overall as proven by repeated and reproducible studies. End of child-rearing lecture.

“But if you have kids, and are raising them well, they take up time, lots of it. So you end up spending time on your children that you could be using… other ways. And the world is filled with other things to do. Most people would rather surf or mass-game than answer ‘why, why, why’ questions all day long.

“Most women realize this and realize that they are going to be doing most of the rearing. Those that don’t, learn after the first child. And if they give the kid away, the Net won’t let them replicate another; they lose the right.”

“Another thing we could change,” Celine said. “Producing large numbers of fully viable human children is a trivial exercise. Indeed, there are still improvements that could be made to the human genome, despite the work that has been done over the centuries.”

“Who is going to raise them?” Ishtar snapped. “What she just said is that most people don’t want to go to the trouble. We already have a slight surplus of unwanted children. Are you saying that we should have more ?”

“There’s also a cultural conditioning aspect,” Sheida said. “Human populations tipped over in the mid-twenty-first century and have been tending downward ever since. But our society still has a cultural mythos that ‘Gaea is wounded.’ Which is why nearly fifteen percent of total energy usage goes to repairing ‘environmental damage’ on a world where the last strip mine shut down a thousand years ago! People still think we have a population problem, so having passels of kids is societally frowned upon.”

“And your point is?” Paul asked.

“Women aren’t all the same, either,” Sheida continued. “There are women who through a combination of genetics and culture adore children. You can find them out there, the women who have had three, four, five children, despite the cultural prohibitions. Their bodies say ‘make babies.’ They don’t use their bodies anymore, thank God, what a God awful mess that would be, but they still raise the kids.”

“One of the reasons that the rate of population decrease has been decreasing is an increasing trend towards those genes. Basically, women who didn’t want babies haven’t reproduced for the last two to three thousand years. I think we’re leveling off, or will in the next two, three hundred years. Also, we’re always pushing the boundaries of life extension. We’re up to five hundred years now. We could be over a thousand in the next century or so. That, right there, will change the premises.”

“If we gain at all,” Paul said. “You have your trends to show, I have mine. The rate of scientific progress has dropped to nothing. Quantum jumping and replication were developed nearly five centuries ago and they were the last significant scientific breakthrough. Despite your pronouncements, the population rate is crashing and we are stagnating and falling into sloth and lotus-eating. We’re becoming less and less human every year and if we don’t do something, there may be no humans left. A crisis is upon us and you stick your head in the sand and prattle about ‘maternal genetics’!”