Prisoners of Tomorrow (85 page)

“It’s a thought,” Colman replied vaguely. The same idea had crossed his mind while the painter was talking. It was a sobering one.

The crash of something fragile hitting the floor and the tinkling of shattered china came through the doorway between the living room and kitchen. Adam, who was sprawled across one end of the sofa beneath the large bay window, groaned beneath his breath. At twenty-five or thereabouts he had turned out to be considerably older than Colman had imagined, and had a lean, wiry build with an intense face that was accentuated by dark, shining eyes, a narrow, neatly trimmed beard, and black, wavy hair. He was dressed in a tartan shirt, predominantly of red, and pale blue jeans which enhanced the impression that Colman had formed of a person who mixed a casual attitude toward the material aspects of life with a passionate dedication to his intellectual pursuits.

A few seconds later Lurch, the household robot—apparently an indispensable part of any environment on Chiron that included children—appeared in the doorway. “It slipped,” it announced. “Sorry about that, boss. I’ve wired off an order for a replacement.”

Adam waved an arm resignedly. “Okay, okay. Never mind the sackcloth-and-ashes act. How about cleaning it up?”

“Oh, yes. I should have thought of that.” Lurch about-faced and lurched back to the kitchen. The sound of a door opening and the brief clatter of something being fumbled from a closet floated back into the room.

“Does it do that a lot?” Colman asked from his chair, which had been cleared of a pile of books and some stuffed birds to make room for him when they had arrived an hour or so earlier.

“It’s a klutz,” Adam said wearily. “It’s got a glitch in its visual circuits somewhere . . . something like that. I don’t know.”

“Can’t you get it fixed?” Colman asked.

Adam threw up his hands again. “The kids won’t let me! They say it wouldn’t be the same any other way. What can you do?”

“We couldn’t let him do that, could we?” Kath said to Bobby, age ten, and Susie, age eight, who were sitting with her across the room, where they had been struggling to master the intricacies of chess, “Lurch is half the fun of coming here.”

“You don’t have to live with it, Mother,” Adam told her.

Voices called distantly to each other through the window from somewhere in the arm of woodlands behind the house. Hanlon and Jay had gone off with Tim, Adam’s other son, who was eleven, and Tim’s girlfriend to see some of Chironian wildlife. Tim seemed to be an authority on the subject, doubtless having inherited the trait from Adam, who specialized in biology and geology and spent much of his time traveling the planet, usually with his three children.

Or, at least, the three that lived with him. Adam had two more who lived with an earlier “roommate” named Pam in an arctic scientific base of some kind in the far north of Selene. Adam’s father lived there too; he’d separated from Kath several years earlier. Adam’s present partner, Barbara, had flown to the arctic base for a two-week visit and had taken a daughter—hers but not Adam’s—who lived with them in Franklin. Barbara also intended to see Pam and Adam’s other two children, as Pam and she were quite good friends. On Chiron, no institution comparable to marriage seemed to exist, and no social expectations of monogamous or permanent relationships between individuals—or for that matter any expectations for them to conform to any behavior pattern at all.

Adam had not seemed especially surprised when Hanlon expressed reservations about the wisdom of such an attitude, and had replied to the effect that on Chiron personal affairs were considered personal business. Some couples might choose to remain exclusively committed to each other and their family, others might not, and it wasn’t a matter for society or anybody else to comment on. As far as he was concerned, Adam had said, the notion of anybody’s presuming to decree moral standards for others and endeavoring to impose them by legislation was “obscene.”

Adam also had an older sister—to the surprise of the Terrans—who designed navigation equipment for spacecraft at an establishment located inland from the Peninsula, a twin brother who was an architect and rumored to be getting friendly with a lively redhead from the
Mayflower II
whom Colman couldn’t place, a younger sister who lived with two other teenagers somewhere in Franklin, and a still younger half-brother, not a son of Kath’s, who was with their father in Selene. It was all very confusing.

“But doesn’t this kind of thing upset the kids when it happens?” Hanlon had asked uneasily.

“Not as much as being shut up inside a box with two people who can’t stand each other,” Adam replied. “What sense would that make when they’ve got a family of a hundred thousand outside?”

“We’re dying to meet your sister, Jay,” Tim’s girlfriend had said, an arm slipped through Tim’s on one side and Adam’s on the other.

“Her mother’s dying too,” Jay had replied dryly.

Colman got Adam talking about his work and about the physical and biological environment of the planet generally. Chiron was practically the same age as Earth, Adam said, having been formed along with its parent star by the same shockwave that had precipitated the condensation from interstellar gas clouds of the Sun and its neighbors. It was an intriguing thought, Adam suggested, that the bodies of the people being born now on Chiron and on Earth all included heavy elements that had been formed in the same first-generation star—the one that had triggered the shock wave when it exploded as a supernova. “We might have been born light-years apart,” he told Colman. “But the stuff we’re made of came from the same place.”

Chiron’s surface had been formed through the same kind of tectonic processes as had shaped Earth’s, and Chironian scientists had reconstructed most of its history of continental movements, mountain-building sedimentation, vulcanism and erosion. Like Earth, it possessed a magnetic field which reversed itself periodically and which had written a coherent story onto the moving seafloors as they spread outward and cooled from uplifts along oceanic ridges; the complicated tidal cycle induced by Chiron’s twin satellites had been unraveled to yield the story of previous epochs of periodic inundation by the oceans; and analysis of the planet’s seismic patterns had mapped its network of active transform faults and subduction zones, along which most of its volcanoes and earthquake belts were locked.

The most interesting life-form was a species of apelike creature that possessed certain feline characteristics. They inhabited a region in the north of Occidena and were known as “monkeats,” a name that the infant Founders had coined when they saw the first views sent back by the
Kuan-yin
reconnaissance probes many years ago. They were omnivores that had evolved from pure carnivores, possessed a highly developed social order, and were beginning to experiment with the manufacture of simple hand tools. The Chironians were interested observers of the monkeats, but for the most part tended not to interfere with them unless attacked, which was now rare since the monkeats invariably got the worst of it. Other notable dangerous life forms include the daskrends, which Jay had already told Colman about, various poisonous reptiles and large insects that were concentrated mainly around southern Selene and the isthmus connecting it to Terranova, though some kinds did spread as far as the Medichironian, a flying mammal found in Artemia which possessed deadly talons and a fanged beak and would swoop down upon anything in sight, and a variety of catlike, doglike, and bearlike predators that roamed across parts of all four continents to a greater or lesser degree.

Colman remembered what Jay had said about the Chironian custom of going armed outside the settlements, and guessed that it traced back to the days when the Founders had first ventured out of the bases. Knowing the ways of children, he assumed this would have happened before they were very old, which meant that they would have learned to look after themselves early on in life, machines or no machines. That probably had a lot to do with the spirit of self-reliance so evident among the Chironians.

“How else could it be?” Adam said when Colman asked him about it. “Sure they had to learn how to use a gun. You know what kids are like. The machines couldn’t be everywhere all the time. Ask my mother about it, not me.”

Kath smiled on the other side of the room. “I was from the first batch to be created. There were a hundred of us. Leon—he’s Adam’s father—was another. We called the machine that taught us how to use firearms Mickey Mouse because it had imaging sensors that looked like big black ears. I shot a daskrend when I was six or maybe less. It came at Leon from under a rock which was why the satellites hadn’t spotted it He’s still got a limp today from that.” She emitted a soft chuckle. “Poor Leon. He reminds me of Lurch.”

Colman’s eyes widened for a moment as he listened. “I’d never really thought about it,” he admitted. “But I guess, yes . . . it’d have to have been like that. Your kids today don’t seem to have changed all that much either.”

“How do you mean?” Kath asked.

Colman shrugged and nodded his head unconsciously in the direction of Bobby and Susie “They’ve got heads on their shoulders, they’ve got confidence in their own thinking, and they trust their own judgments. That’s good.”

“Well, I’m pleased to hear that at least one Terran thinks so,” Bobby said. “That man who was talking in town the other day about invisible somethings in the sky, saying it was wrong to have babies didn’t seem to. He said we’d suffer forever after we were dead. How can he know? He’s never been dead. It was ridiculous.”

“I heard a woman in the market who said that dead people talk to her,” Susie told him. “That’s even more ridiculous.”

“They’re not all like that, are they?” Bobby asked, looking hopefully at Colman.

“Not all, I guess,” Colman replied with a grin. He turned to Adam and then Kath. “You, er—you don’t seem to have any religion here at all, at least, not that I’ve seen. Is that right?” Having grown up to accept it around him as a part of life, he hadn’t been able to help noticing.

Adam seemed to think about it for a long time. “No . . .” he said slowly at last. “We’re on our own on a grain of dust somewhere in a gas of galaxies. Inventing guardian angels for company won’t change it. Whether we make it or not is up to us. If we mess it up, the universe out there won’t miss us.” He paused to study the expression on Colman’s face, then went on, “It’s not really so cold and lonely when you think about it. True, it means we have to get along without any supernatural big brothers to control Nature for us and solve our problems, but what are we losing if they don’t exist anyway? On the other hand, we don’t have to fear all the nonsense that gets invented along with them either. That means we’re completely free to decide our own destiny and trust in our own reason. To me that’s not such a bad feeling.”

Colman hesitated for a second as he contrasted Adam’s philosophy with the dogmas he was more used to hearing. “I, ah—I know a few people who would say that was pretty arrogant,” he ventured.

“Arrogant?” Adam smiled to himself. “They’re the ones who are so sure they ‘know,’ not me. I’m just making the best interpretation I can of the facts I’ve got.” He thought for a moment longer. “Anyhow, arrogance and pride are not the same thing. I’m proud to be a human being, sure.”

“They’d tell you modesty was a better virtue too,” Colman said.

“It is,” Adam agreed readily. “But modesty and self-effacement aren’t the same thing either.”

Colman looked unconsciously toward Kath for her opinion.

“If you mean systems of beliefs based, despite their superficial appearances to the contrary, on morbid obsessions with death, hatred, decay, dehumanization, and humiliation, then the answer to your question is no,” she said, looking at Colman. She glanced at her grandchildren. “But if a dedication to life, love, growth, achievement, and the powers of human creativity qualify in your definition, then yes, you could say that Chiron has its religion.”

* * *

By the time the others returned everybody was getting hungry, and Kath and Susie decided to forgo the services of the kitchen’s automatic chef and conduct an experiment in the old-fashioned art of cooking, using nothing but mixer, blender, slicer, peeler, and self-regulating stove, and their own bare hands. The result was declared a success by unanimous proclamation, and over the meal the Terrans talked mainly about the more memorable events during the voyage while Kath was curious to learn more about the
Mayflower II’
s
propulsion system in anticipation of the tour that she was scheduled to make with the Chironian delegation. Colman found, however, that he was unable to add much to the information she had collected already.

Then came the question of what to do with the rest of the evening. “Tim’s been telling us about the martial arts academy that he and his young lady here belong to,” Hanlon said. “It sounds like quite a place. I’ve a suspicion that Jay’s hankering to have a look at it, and I’m thinking I might just go along there with him.”

“Me?” Jay exclaimed. “I’ll come long, sure, but I thought it was you who couldn’t resist it.”

“Bret’s an unarmed-combat instructor with the Army,” Tim explained.

Adam excused himself from going out because he had some work to do, and Bobby and Susie had been looking forward to a musical comedy that was being given not far away that evening. Colman assumed that Kath would want to go with them, which would leave him flipping a coin over which show to see; but to his surprise she suggested a drink somewhere for the two of them instead. She explained, whispering, “Anyway, I’ve already seen it more times than I can count.” So who was he to turn it down? Colman asked himself. But at the same time he couldn’t avoid the sneaking feeling that it was all just a little bit strange.

Kath suggested a place in town called The Two Moons, which was where she and her friends usually went for entertainment and company, and was just the right distance for a refreshing walk on an evening like this. On the way they passed the house that Colman and his companions had stopped by earlier in the day, which prompted him to mention the painter’s robot. “It looked as if it was learning the trade,” Colman said.