Chapter 139: Day 138

Day 138,

Made it through a couple more years worth of census compiling today.  So far that two-to-five average births per year seems to be holding true.  More eerie is the fact that the death rate is almost a one to one match.  Not perfectly so, and they rarely happen as close together as what I personally got to see, but it’s close enough that I suspect if you had data points stretching out over decades (centuries?) that ratio would approach a true one to one.

In other words, it flies directly in the face of everything I would expect to be seeing from a healthy population in a resource-rich environment with practically no deadly diseases or violent dangers to speak of.  Sure, the in-built birth control stemming from the alleged reliance on the Blossom Field for fertility (which in and of itself is definitely not normal human biology) would go a long ways toward keeping the birth rate low enough to match the death rate, that doesn’t seem like enough.  

To have this close a match I’d expect there to be actual planning and enforcement required, but as far as I’ve been able to discern that isn’t the case.  The logical way to do something like that would be to wait until there’s a death and then somehow decide who is allowed to get pregnant for the replacement.  But not only are there no signs of such a system being in place, but pregnancies themselves are only sometimes recorded in the archives.  Almost like the sort of thing where some expectant parent or grandparent went out of their way to ask the current archivist to write it down by way of announcement rather than the sort of standard procedure that would be expected if births were being explicitly planned to replace deaths.

What’s more is the timing of the births and deaths.  Lin mentioned that births have a tendency to shortly follow deaths and from what (admittedly still small) sample size I’ve seen that general trend still seems to hold.  If people were waiting until deaths to conceive, then you’d expect the births to be maybe nine or ten months later rather than days or weeks.  Then again, both births and deaths seem to generally be clustered toward the start of either of a given year’s dry seasons.  Then again, I suppose that works out if the death happens toward the start of the season and then people wait until the end of the season for the following conception.  But somehow that kind of cold calculation and coordination just doesn’t seem to properly fit with what I’ve seen of the people here.

Then again, the only other apparent explanations would be that either some outside force is at place in regulation or that conception somehow triggers declines in health among the elderly to make room.  Which both sound patently absurd.  Then again, as I so often have to remind myself, magic exists here.

Perhaps I should ask someone about this.  I suppose Lin has some insight into births and deaths.  Then again, if anyone would know actual esoteric answers it’d be Pat or Theo.  And I haven’t visited Pat in a while.  Not since our beachside conversation on my hundred and first day I think.  I should probably do that, even if I don’t bring this up.  I somehow doubt he’s able to do his usual rambling walks in this weather, and it’s a bit sad to think of him cooped up home alone.

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