Parity

My brother cost our mother four thousand hours.

She paid them in the recycler galleries, on the night shift, scrubbing biofilm from the condensate stacks, and she never once called it a debt. She called it the price, the way you’d speak of the price of flour. She had bid for him at the forty-first Levy, against sixty other households, and when the gavel came down she went out and started earning him. I was nine. For six years I fell asleep to the sound of her coming in at four, washing the smell of the stacks off her hands, and I understood — the way children understand things, completely and without content — that a boy was worth more than I was.

It took me thirty years and a career in the Natality Office to understand it properly, which is to say, to understand that she’d been right about the price and wrong about the worth, and that the distinction between those two things is the whole of what I have to set down here.

The Charter’s arithmetic was never secret. Growth was the colony’s first obligation — eight hundred founders against a world that would take a hundred thousand pairs of hands to hold — and the rate at which a population grows is set by its mothers. Every birth requires a woman for the better part of a year; a man’s contribution takes minutes and can be banked. So the founders came five women to each man, and the clinic, which assigned sex the way it assigned every other trait a gamete could carry, held the ratio: one boy in five. The Charter called this allocation “generous”. There were founders who had argued for none at all — for an all-female colony drawing on the seed freezers — and lost, because the freezers ran on power and luck, and the Charter’s authors did not trust a freezer with the species.

Households were mostly women. Marriage adapted, as it always has.

What the Charter’s authors did not put in the Charter, though I now believe some of them knew it, is the second piece of arithmetic, the one that comes free with the first. Every child ever born has exactly one mother and one father. Add up all the children fathered by all the men, and all the children borne by all the women, and the two sums are the same sum. If men are one fifth of the parents, then the average man has five times the children of the average woman. Not every man — there were men who died young, men no one chose — but on average, and averages are what grandmothers count.

And they counted. Within one generation, everyone could see it. A household that had raised a son had, by the time that son was fifty, a spread of grandchildren that no household of daughters could match, because the daughters’ children were rationed by their own bodies and the son’s were rationed only by the ratio itself. The scarcer the clinic made boys, the more each boy was worth. The quota manufactured, automatically and precisely, the desire that strained against it.

First came petitions. Then came the bribery trials, which I will not relate, except to say that two clinicians went to the outworks and a councilwoman’s name is still not spoken in the Assembly. And then, because the Office could not abolish the wanting and had learnt what wanting does to institutions that pretend it isn’t there, came the Levy: the year’s male allocations — the same one-in-five, not one boy more — sold at open auction, the proceeds to the crèches. If sons carried a premium, the premium would be paid to everyone, in daylight, in hours.

I joined the Office at twenty-four, and in my third year I found Fisher.

He was a terrestrial biologist, dead a century before the founders left, and the argument takes up about a page of a book he published in 1930. Darwin had looked at the problem — why are the sexes everywhere so stubbornly equal in number? — and set it down again, saying the future could have it. Fisher picked it up. Suppose sons are scarce, he says. Then a son is the better bargain, in grandchildren, for exactly the reason our grandmothers discovered; so parents disposed to produce sons prosper, and their disposition spreads, and sons become less scarce, and the bargain shrinks as it is taken, until it is gone. The only resting point is the point where neither sex is the better buy. On Earth, no committee enforced this. Meiosis dealt the ratio, blind, and the dealing had been audited by that argument for five hundred million years.

Fisher’s argument doesn’t require genes. I want to record that plainly, because the Office spent decades believing our clinic walls kept it out. It requires only that every child have one father and one mother, and that someone, somewhere, be keeping count. We had removed the genes from the decision and left the counting to grandmothers, and the principle came through the wall as if the wall were air. It simply changed currency. What could not express itself in births expressed itself in bids.

I sat my first appeal in my eleventh year, across a table from a woman named Doran Vey, who worked the same galleries my mother had and had watched the forty-ninth Levy clear at eleven thousand hours. She was not asking for a waiver. She had come to say one thing and she said it without raising her voice: you have made boys into a thing that rich houses own. Their sons have five children each, and those children owe their house, and the house grows rich enough to buy the next son, and the next. You have taken the one lottery meiosis ran fairly and sold it.

I gave her the Office’s answer, which was true as far as it went: that the Levy was the premium made visible and made common — that every hour a wealthy house paid for a son ran the crèche where her daughters were minded, so that the families most determined to bend the ratio were made, by their own wanting, to pay for keeping it. She heard me out. Then she said, “My mother paid four thousand for my brother. You’re telling me she bought my crèche.” I did not tell her that mine had done the same. It would have sounded like fellowship, and it was only coincidence.

But her visit sent me back to the price series, and the price series is where I earned whatever place this account has in the archive.

I laid ninety years of clearing prices against ninety years of rearing costs — the audited cost of raising any child, food and schooling and clinic and air. The clearing price of a son, decade over decade, ran at almost exactly four times the rearing cost. Four times over, on top of the rearing itself: five in all. Five, when boys were one in five. I checked it against the years the ratio was eased to one in four, after the blight: the multiple fell towards four. The auction had been solving an equation and printing the answer for ninety years, and no one had read it.

Because here is what Fisher’s page actually says, and what the Office had never finished reading: the equilibrium is not equal numbers of sons and daughters. It is equal expenditure on them. A population may hold any ratio it likes, so long as the total spent on each sex balances; scarce sons at five times the price are exactly as much in equilibrium as even sons at even prices. We had believed the Levy was our defence of the quota against the principle. It was the principle. The wanting had bid the price of a son to precisely the level that restored the equality we thought we had suspended, and the colony had never once, in ninety years, been out of equilibrium. We had only denominated one side of it in hours, and given my mother the job of paying.

I will finish with the ending, because the ending is the part the price knew first.

When the census crossed ninety thousand, the Assembly began to draft the Parity Schedule: the clinic ratio to glide from one in five to one in two over twenty-five years, the growth mandate discharged, the Levy to be retired at the glide’s end. The draft was debated in closed session. It leaked, as drafts do — and the fifty-eighth Levy, held while the Assembly was still amending commas, cleared forty per cent below the fifty-seventh.

We were slow to see why, and then ashamed of our slowness. A son bought at auction is not a son in this year’s world. He is a man in the world of twenty-five years hence, competing among the men of that world, and his premium is set by that ratio, not this one. The auction had never priced the present. It had been quoting the future all along, and we had been reading the quote as if it were the spot. From then on the Office watched the son price the way the granaries watch pressure. The year the blight returned and a councilman moved to extend the mandate, the price doubled in five weeks, before the motion reached a vote — the bidders had priced the extension while the Assembly was still pricing the blight. We had built, without meaning it, an instrument that measured belief, and it was more honest than the minutes of the Assembly, because every reading cost the reader something.

The last Levy was held four years ago, in the first year of full parity. One in two, as the Schedule promised; the allocations outnumbered the bidders. It cleared at the registration fee — the price of the paperwork, the price of a daughter. The couple who paid it wanted a boy the way you might want a child with her grandmother’s eyes: a wish that had finally stopped being an investment.

My brother Anselm has eleven children. I have two. Our mother lived to see nine of his and died certain of her arithmetic, and her arithmetic was sound; it was the Office’s that took ninety years to balance. What I think now, filing this last determination, is that parity was never ours to invent. On Earth the auction was held by meiosis, and it cleared before anyone was born. We held ours in a hall, on the first Tuesday of the year, and it took us ninety years — and my mother’s four thousand hours — to clear.