The low houses and other buildings of Kith Town have endured for centuries while the towers of a city have grown up around them, then their immediate urban neighborhood has declined. Kith Town has a few permanent residents but most Kith families leave their homes unoccupied for decades while they trade between stars. Over a lifetime, a Kithman returns to Earth in different centuries and historical periods. Kenri Shaun was born eight hundred years ago and even some Kith children were born a hundred or more years ago.
During the period when Kith Town is surrounded by a slum, the Terrestrial world state, called the Dominancy, decrees that, when outside the Town, Kith must wear a badge, like Jews in Medieval Europe or Nazi Germany, and must also pay for it, a new extortionate tax. The Dominancy has a genetic hierarchy:
the Star-Free are unspecialized geniuses, aesthetic and ornamental;
Star-A's do intellectual work;
Norm-A's do physical work;
the armed, uniformed guards of residential towers are "...giants bred..." (p. 197).
The Kith have seen the Dominancy become more repressive but will simply outlast it.
2 comments:
The genetic hierarchy is one of the ways genetic engineering tech can be misused.
Given serious genetic engineering technology, it is hard to think of wiser use of it than what is in the backstory of Heinlein's 'Beyond this Horizon'.
Ie: any couple wanting a child can choose which genes each has goes into the child, eg: a carrier of the cystic fibrosis gene would make sure the non-defective allelle would go into the child.
If the genetic variants are not evidently better or worse, which goes into the child *must* be left to chance, so humanity does not through some fad eliminate something that turns out to be beneficial. Eg: eye or hair color is left to chance.
Heinlein's society also designated some rare variants as 'experimental', ie: people who happen to have them are considered natural experiments to determine if the gene variant should be selected for.
I think in addition to what is shown by Heinlein, I would cautiously sometimes add a deliberate new gene that is almost certainly not harmful & may be beneficial, to be kept in the 'experimental' category for some generations.
Kaor, Jim!
I mostly agree with what you wrote here, albeit I would modify it somewhat, along the lines of what Anderson wrote in Chapter 17 of THE GAME OF EMPIRE, Kukulkan Zachary speaking: "Genetic treatment was in process of eliminating heritable defects. To this day, they seldom recur, in spite of ongoing mutation and in spite of the fact that comparatively few prospective parents avail themselves of genetic services. Many can't, where they are. I daresay your conception was entirely random, 'natural.' But thanks to ancestors who did have the care, you are unlikely to come down with cancer or schizophrenia or countless other horrors that you may never even have heard named."
While I certainly hope such services, and others discussed by Chip Walter in his book IMMORTALITY, INC., soon becomes practical, it may well be that not all humans will make use of them. But enough probably will that their effects and consequences will spread thru out mankind in future generations.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment