94: Family Structure

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I waited for him to explain. He looked to Seiba, waiting for kem to explain. Seiba realised that Yamin was waiting for kem, started, and cleared kes throat.

“Um. Well. So, the natural level of a desire for raising children, among humans, is thought to be somewhere between fifteen and eighty per cent.”

“Oh,” I said. “How specific.”

“It’s difficult to calculate because the cultural influences are, frankly, massive. If you build a culture where parenthood is seen as a part of someone’s identity, that they’re not a real adult or a real brennan or man or woman unless they’re raising children, and put a lot of prestige on parenthood (or shame on a lack of it), along with the support to make it easier to do, then you can get the number really high; up above ninety five per cent. On the other hand, if you make parenting really difficult and have a culture where it’s not broadly considered rewarding or respectable and childcare is considered easy and not really supported or valued, then you can push it down below ten per cent. It also depends a lot on how much parenthood is seen as contributing to a ship’s future; if there’s already plenty of children being raised already, people are less likely to feel it worth raising more of their own, whereas in low populations without an existing child-rearing system, or in populations where there’s a lot of individual subcultures, then people are more likely to want to be involved in raising kids. It’s all incredibly complicated, and too connected to culture to really give a precise baseline.”

“We reckon it was probably way higher before artificial wombs were invented,” Dava cut in. “When every person who got made had to be incubated inside somebody else’s body, it was probably a really, really big deal. But nobody knows for certain.”

“Furthermore,” Seiba said, “just measuring the desire to raise kids is really hard.”

“Why?” I asked. “Can’t you just look at how many people are doing it? Or ask people if they plan on doing it?”

“And that’d tell you what you wanted to know about the Courageous,” Seiba said, nodding, “but it doesn’t tell you much about humanity in general, because it’s basically impossible to compare to other ships. I mean, some ships, yeah; anyone with a similar family structure to us can be compared. But… okay, take the Celestia Arborea. Extremely similar ship to ours, all things considered, but their family structure is different. On the Arborea, almost everyone belongs to a cluster, which is… well, it’s not a harem, but that’s the closest thing we have. Everyone is part of a ‘family’; you’re a weird loner if you aren’t. And all the adults in the cluster raise the kids in the cluster together, kind of like our harems, right? So being an adult is almost completely synonymous with childrearing. If you ask an Arborean ‘do you raise kids’ or ‘do you want to raise kids’, almost all of them will say yes, because that’s just a part of their social structure. The only ones that say ‘no’ would be the people who hate kids or go out of their way not to be involved with their clusters’ children.

“Of course, you could be more precise in your questions – Arboreans can move between clusters, and every child has a primary caregiver, a ‘mother’, who they stay with if the structure changes. So you could ask specifically if people want to be mothers. But then you have the opposite problem – you’re turning most of the answers that should be ‘yes’ into ‘no’. Plenty of people who would be parents or orphanage carers if they were on the Courageous don’t necessarily want to be mothers on the Arborea. If you wanted to compare the desire for childrearing between the ships, you’d have to get into really specific questions about individual behaviours and preferences, and the people from each ship would still interpret those questions differently. So the whole thing is very complicated.”

“We’re getting very far off topic,” Yamin pointed out.

“Right, yes. Sorry. We were talking about men. The point is,in most cultures where there isn’t some specific reason for a difference, the desire for parenthood is pretty stable across genders. On the Courageous, men, women, brennans and everyone else want to raise children in about the same proportions; about fifteen per cent show interest, and about thirteen per cent make a serious attempt to go through with it.”

“That can’t be right,” I said. “Don’t brennans raise a huge majority of the kids here?”

“Yes,” Seiba said, “we do. But more children being raised by brennans doesn’t mean that more brennans are raising children. Brennans are massively overrepresented in orphanage work, and while it does fluctuate a lot, orphanages tend to have about eight kids per carer at any given time. Families, on the other hand, tend to raise about one kid per two parents, on average. One and a half per two parents at the moment; an increase when we’re approaching a star is normal. More kids come out of the orphanages, but there are more parents than orphanage carers.

“And the thing is, if you want to raise kids badly enough to make it a major life goal, then on a ship like the Courageous, your gender matters a lot. Because anyone can make friends with kids or become a teacher or a paediatrician or something, but if you want to raise children, your choices are a family or an orphanage. For brennans, this is incredibly easy – any brennan who wants to raise kids can do so, unless they’re truly unfit for the work. They can partner with a man and a woman and join a nuclear family, or they can join an orphanage and make raising children their actual career and get to focus on it even more than parents can.

“Men and women have a slightly trickier time, because while men and women can work in orphanages, it’s more difficult. I’ve spoken to men and women who do it and it’s… well, the stereotypes are strong in such work, and the environment can be pretty hostile, apparently. Some still do it, but it’s not as easy.

“Women still have some good opportunities, though, because they have two options for family structures. A woman can join a nuclear family or a harem. Harems can have any number of women, so there are generally plenty of opportunities for a woman who wants that sort of life.

“Men, though, have difficulties. Unless he wants to beat the odds and work in an orphanage, a man’s only option is a family, like a woman, except that our structures only have one man per family. Which means that unless there are far more women than men who want to raise kids, some men who want it are going to be left out.

“There’s also the issue with men who want to raise kids with other men. It’s not unusual for adults to gather in small non-family groups. It’s not unusual for adults who are close to each other to want to raise children together. If they’re of different genders, they can simply start a family; if it’s a pair or small group of women, then they can find a man who doesn’t mind moving in, and also start a family. Brennans… well, they’re absolutely not supposed to, but it’s not at all unusual for orphanage workers to have favourite charges, who they might privately consider to be ‘their’ children. It’s frowned upon, but impossible to eradicate without doing more harm than good if they’re being subtle about it. Brennan orphanage workers do sometimes use this to create pseudofamilies.

“But if a man wants to raise children with another man, there’s simply no way to do that on the Courageous. We don’t have a family structure that allows for that arrangement. So his choices are to live a life without it, or go to a ship that will let him. And the end result of all of this is that we lose more men to emigration than women or brennans, because our family structures give them less opportunities.”

“What about people outside the three main genders?” I asked.

“Oh, they’re rusted out,” Dava said. “Their only option is to slog through the brennans’ club of an orphanage job. We bleed potential non-ternary parents, but since there’s way to genetically make more of them, Growth and Medical can’t make stupid decisions based on it. But trying to make more men just to keep the genders standard, especially for such a small difference, is just costly for no reason. We should be making more people who are less likely to emigrate.!”

“Is there a problem with emigration?” I asked.

“W-well, it’s the right of anybody in the fleet, obviously,” Dava said, “but it’s a huge pain. It takes a lot of time, effort and resources to raise and train a person. If they run off to spend that life and use those skills on a different ship, it’s basically a waste. I mean, there’s a slight diplomatic advantage in the cross-ship ties it creates, but not nearly enough.”

“Then can’t we import the same amount of people from other ships?” I asked. “I bet lots of people want to live on the Courageous. Then we’re making them pay to raise our new citizens.”

“Yeah, lots of ships do that. Some ships barely even raise kids, they just absorb immigrants from worse ships. Which is kind of cheating, I think. But the thing about living in a rusting ancient museum that’s allergic to any kind of change from the cultures of the oh-so-wonderful Earth is that Immigration is always really, really choosy about who it lets in, and how many. Anyone not from one of our culturally close and ancient allies is really unlikely to get on, and most people from those ships don’t want to come here specifically. So we lose a lot more than we gain. And we’re going to lose far more when we hit orbit, because a whole bunch of people are going to want to be in the action, building the colony, not on this ship doing the same stuff they’d be doing in transit except orbiting a star this time. And this is the time when that idiot is like ‘oh, hey, let’s go out of our way to make people who are even more likely to leave’.”

“It won’t just be the child thing,” I said, nodding. “There’ll be piloting and external work and new, maybe dangerous types of science and building entirely new things. Lots of men will want to do that.”

“Lots of people in general will,” Yamin said. “But we have that population dip at most stars, especially if we’re not going to be directly involved in the colony. We spend generations in anticipation of each colony; is it surprising that so many people want to be involved?”

“It’s going to be a nightmare,” Dava groaned.

“It’s a nightmare that the ship has weathered time and time again,” Yamin shrugged.

“And it’d be just our luck if everything fell apart on our watch,” Dava said.

“I’m sure pessimists have said that at every previous colony, too,” Seiba said.

Dava snorted. “And maybe they were right. You know as well as I do, when you see something start to break, it usually means it actually broke a long time ago. That’s why we spend all day looking through this stuff to catch things when they actually break. But on the scale of colonies…”

“Don’t worry,” Yamin said, “we watch for those dangers, too. It’s normal to feel tense and unsure at a new colony, but this is a perfectly routine colony build with no unusual threats. We’re perfectly equipped to handle any threats.”

He looked at me, and I knew he was remembering the conversation we’d had after my apprenticeship interview, where I’d promised to help him keep the Courageous strong and healthy and well-positioned in the fleet.

I nodded. Whatever happened, we’d handle it.

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