Heh. For a long time, in Sime Territory, gens were basically "food"--every adult sime was expected to use up one gen per month for their entire adult life.
Yes, a bit of math says "this will not end well." Even if you breed the gens like mad.
They discovered channels, a type of sime that can take selyn from gens without killing, and give it to other simes. (The average gen creates a lot more selyn in a month than the average sime needs. Channels have a much higher capacity, but a gen who can match them still leaves enough to give out more. And a channel can take selyn from gens other than in transfer; they have a sort of internal battery.)
Sime territory starts much, much smaller than gen territory. From what we can figure out, when the world split into larities, most of the simes were killed or died quickly. Killing your neighbors with tentacle-attacks was frowned upon in most communities, and even if they managed to survive that, a sime who doesn't get selyn in time, every month, dies from it. So: Sime territory, relatively small pockets in the midst of huge gen territories. Gen territory: huge open regions, where kids who change over into sime are murdered as soon as they're identified, whether that's before or after they kill someone in First Need. (Not killing someone is possible--if the gen doesn't fear. Which takes a lot more trust and usually a lot more information than most of them have.)
Sime territory, pre-channels, had pens in every town where the gens were raised & stored until they were killed one at a time. Pen gens are drugged from childhood; they're the reason many simes never believed gens were human. (Kids who established as gen were often killed by relatives, often accidentally--a spike of gen fear can trigger a sime attack.)
Eventually, channels managed to prove that, duh, every adult in the region cannot kill 12 other adults per year and have a stable population in the long run, even if you think one type of adult isn't really people. They set up rules whereby normal simes (rensimes) were required to go to channels for transfer instead of killing gens. (This had problems: the kill is physically addictive. Those who've been at it long enough--more than a year into adulthood--can't stop for more than a few months before their body starts to have really bad problems, which would lead to death, except that mostly, they lead to grabbing the first available gen and killing it. Him or her, rather, except most of sime territory thinks of gens as animals.)
There are way more gens than simes. The way the biology works, there will probably always be more gens than simes, because isolated simes *die* and isolated gens don't, but in the later books, the numbers get closer to equal.
no subject
Yes, a bit of math says "this will not end well." Even if you breed the gens like mad.
They discovered channels, a type of sime that can take selyn from gens without killing, and give it to other simes. (The average gen creates a lot more selyn in a month than the average sime needs. Channels have a much higher capacity, but a gen who can match them still leaves enough to give out more. And a channel can take selyn from gens other than in transfer; they have a sort of internal battery.)
Sime territory starts much, much smaller than gen territory. From what we can figure out, when the world split into larities, most of the simes were killed or died quickly. Killing your neighbors with tentacle-attacks was frowned upon in most communities, and even if they managed to survive that, a sime who doesn't get selyn in time, every month, dies from it. So: Sime territory, relatively small pockets in the midst of huge gen territories. Gen territory: huge open regions, where kids who change over into sime are murdered as soon as they're identified, whether that's before or after they kill someone in First Need. (Not killing someone is possible--if the gen doesn't fear. Which takes a lot more trust and usually a lot more information than most of them have.)
Sime territory, pre-channels, had pens in every town where the gens were raised & stored until they were killed one at a time. Pen gens are drugged from childhood; they're the reason many simes never believed gens were human. (Kids who established as gen were often killed by relatives, often accidentally--a spike of gen fear can trigger a sime attack.)
Eventually, channels managed to prove that, duh, every adult in the region cannot kill 12 other adults per year and have a stable population in the long run, even if you think one type of adult isn't really people. They set up rules whereby normal simes (rensimes) were required to go to channels for transfer instead of killing gens. (This had problems: the kill is physically addictive. Those who've been at it long enough--more than a year into adulthood--can't stop for more than a few months before their body starts to have really bad problems, which would lead to death, except that mostly, they lead to grabbing the first available gen and killing it. Him or her, rather, except most of sime territory thinks of gens as animals.)
There are way more gens than simes. The way the biology works, there will probably always be more gens than simes, because isolated simes *die* and isolated gens don't, but in the later books, the numbers get closer to equal.