#or are Harrow and Gideon just really fucking bad at judging ages due to their weird circumstances?

[mayasaura]

Great question!! And one that does not have a definitive answer in the text, though the mystery is alluded to by Silas making the assumption that there are infants and young children on the Ninth, despite him already knowing about the massacre.

There are two prevailing theories I'm familiar with.

First is very similar to your partner's; that the thanergetic fallout of the ritual used to create Harrow caused all the current inhabitants of the Ninth to become infertile. Thanergetic exposure is why necromancers struggle to reproduce, and the entire Ninth was exposed to a fuckton of thanergy that night.

Second is that there's a missing generation. A whole demographic of people older than Ortus and younger than the Reverend Mother who just.... no longer exist. Or no longer exist on the Ninth.

The first theory seems more likely for its simplicity, and for how neat the cutoff is. The creche massacre marks the end of children on the Ninth, the radiation from the event ending any current pregnancies and making future conception impossible.

The second theory is supported by Ortus' comparative youth standing out as unusual, and Harrow's offhand mention in Harrow the Ninth that by the time she was ten all but two of the womb-possessing population of the Ninth were too old to have children. The youngest members of the Ninth congregation should have been around twenty-nine at that time. So basically.... what the fuck?

For proponents of the missing generation theory, it's basically open season to guess at what may have happened to them. Was there a civil war following the massacre that no one ever talks about, and both Harrow and Gideon are too young to remember? If so, is that why everyone left on the Ninth is an obsessive cultist? Was there a mass exodus? Did everyone of recruitment age join the Cohort to gtfo? Was there an attempted mass exodus, and Crux bombed the ships? Who knows! Maybe Tamsyn Muir, but she's not telling!

Edit: Another point in favor of the first theory is that it also works as a Fisher King allegory. The Fisher King, King Pellam, was wounded in the groin and rendered sterile, and his kingdom became a barren wasteland to match. Pelleamena was unable to conceive, and the workaround she developed doomed her kingdom to be without any future children.

so, my partner read gideon the ninth in a single day (which is great and all their takes are correct). among other questions i had disappointing answers to (mostly "no we never learn what's wrong with the eighth house"), there was one i had no answer for: why did no one on the ninth have another kid after the two hundred died to make harrow?

their reasoning: "infants existing suggests that there are at least a few people of childbearing age who could potentially have had at least one other child, unless the gas that killed the kids made everyone infertile, i dunno"