Voyage From Yesteryear Part 12

"Nope."

"Someone you know?" Colman asked.

"Kind of." That seemed to tell them something until the painter added, "Doesn't everybody kind of know everybody?"

Colman and Hanlon frowned at each other. Obviously they weren't going to get anywhere without being more direct. Hanlon wiped his palms on his hips. "We, ah...we don't mean to be nosy or anything, but out of curiosity, why are you painting it?" he asked.

"Because it needs painting."

"So why bother?" Jay asked. "What's it to you if somebody else's house needs painting or not?"

"I'm a painter," the painter said over his shoulder. "I like to see a paint job properly done. Why else would anyone do it?" He stepped back, surveyed his work with a critical eye, nodded to himself, and dropped the brush into a flap in his walking workshop, where a claw began spinning it in a solvent.

"Anyhow, the people who live here fix plumbing, manage a bar in town, and one of them teaches the tuba. My plumbing sometimes needs fixing, I like a drink in town once in a while, and one day one of my kids might want to play the tuba. They fix faucets, I paint houses. What's so strange?"

Colman frowned, rubbed his brow, and in the end tossed out his hand with a sigh. "No...we're not making the right point somehow. Let's put it this way-how can you measure who owes who what?"

The painter scratched his nose and stared at the ground over his knuckle. Clearly the notion was new to him.

"How do you know when you've done enough work?" Jay asked him, trying to make it simpler.

The painter shrugged. "You just know. How do you know when you've had enough to eat?"

"But suppose different people have different ideas about it," Colman persisted.

The painter shrugged again. "That's okay. Different people value things differently. You can't tell somebody else when they've had enough to eat."

Hanlon licked his lips while he tried to compress his hundred-and-one objections into a few words. "Ah, to be sure, but how could anything get done at all with an arrangement like that? Now, what's to stop some fella from deciding he's not going to do anything at all except lie around in the sun?"

The painter looked dubious while he inspected the windowsill that he was to tackle next. "That doesn't make much sense," he murmured after a while. "Why would somebody stay poor if he didn't have to?

That'd be a strange kind of way to carry on."

"He wouldn't get away with it, surely," Jay said incredulously. "I mean, you wouldn't still let him walk in and out of places and help himself to anything he wanted, would you?"

"Why not?" the painter asked. "You'd have to feel kind of sorry for someone like that. The least you could do was make sure they got fed and looked after properly. We do get a few like that, and that's what happens to them. It's a shame, but what can anybody do?"

"You don't understand;" Jay said. "On Earth, a lot of people would see that as their big ambition in life."

The painter eyed him for a moment and nodded his head slowly. "Hmmm...I kinda figured it had to be something like that," he told them.

Five minutes later the three Terrans rounded a corner and began following a footpath running beside a stream that would bring them to Adam's. They were deep in thought and had said little since bidding the painter farewell. After a short distance Jay slowed his pace and came to a halt, staring up at a group of tall Chironian trees standing on the far side of the stream alongside a number of familiar elms and maples that were evidently imported-genetically modified by the Kuan-yin's robots to grow in alien soil. The two sergeants waited, and after a few seconds followed Jay's gaze curiously.

The trunks of the Chironian trees were covered by rough overlapping plates that resembled reptilian scales more than bark, and the branches, cl.u.s.tered together high near the tops in a way reminiscent of Californian sequoias, curved outward and upward to support domed canopies of foliage like the caps of gigantic mushrooms. The foliage was green at the bottoms of the domes but became progressively more yellow toward the tops, around which several furry, catsized, flying creatures were wheeling in slow, lazy circles and keeping up a constant chattering among themselves. "You wouldn't think so, but that yellow stuff up there isn't part of those trees at all," Jay said, gesturing. "Jeeves told me about it. It's a completely different species-a kind of fern. Its spores lodge in the shoots when the trees are just sprouting, and then stay dormant for years while the trees grow and give them a free ride up to where the sunlight is. It invades the leaf-buds and feeds through the tree's vascular system."

"Mmm..." Colman murmured. Botany wasn't his line. Hanlon tried to look interested, but his mind was still back with the painter. After a few seconds he looked at Colman. "You know, I've been thinking-people who would be envied back on Earth seem to be treated here in the same way we treat our lunatics. Do you think we're all crazy to the Chironians?"

"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, s.h.i.+ning eyes, a narrow, neatly trimmed beard, and black, wavy hair. He was dressed in a tartan s.h.i.+rt, predominantly of red, and pale blue jeans which enhanced the impression that Colman had formed of a person who mixed a casual att.i.tude toward the material aspects of life with a pa.s.sionate 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 inst.i.tution comparable to marriage seemed to exist, and no social expectations of monogamous or permanent relations.h.i.+ps 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 att.i.tude, 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 s.p.a.cecraft 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 located.

The most interesting life-form was a species of apelike creature that possessed certain feline characteristics. They inhabited a region in the north of Occidenia 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's 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 ranged 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 a.s.sumed 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 a.s.sumed 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 refres.h.i.+ng walk on an evening like this. On the way they pa.s.sed 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.

"Very probably it was," Kath replied. "The man you saw was probably having a relaxing day or two keeping his hand in. It's nice to have machines around to take care of things when they become ch.o.r.es."

"People don't worry about being replaced by a chip?"

"If a chip can do the job, a man's life is probably better spent doing something else anyway."

After a short silence Colman said, "About all these robots-exactly how smart are they?"

"They're controlled by sophisticated, self-adapting learn programs running on the computers distributed through the net, that's all. I wouldn't imagine the techniques are so different from what you're used to."

"So they're not anywhere near intelligent...self-aware, anything like that?"

Kath gave a short laugh, "Of course not...but they're deceptive, aren't they. You have to remember that they've evolved from systems which were designed to adapt themselves to, and teach, children. You project a lot of yourself into what you think they're saying."

"But they seem to have an intuition to make human value judgments," Colman objected. "They know too much about how people think."

Kath laughed again. "Do they? They don't really, you know. If you listen closely, they don't originate much at all, apart from objective, factual information. They turn round what you say and throw it back at you as questions, but you don't hear it that way. You think they're telling you something that they're not."

"Catalysts," Colman said after a few seconds of reflection. "You know, you're right, now that I think about it. All they do is make you exercise the brains you never knew you had."

"You've got it," Kath said lightly. "Isn't that what teaching children is all about?"

The Two Moons occupied one end of the bas.e.m.e.nt and ground-floor levels of a centrally located confusion of buildings facing the maglev terminal complex across a deep and narrow court, and had a book arcade above, which turned into residential units higher up. It comprised one large bar below sidewalk level, where floor shows were staged most nights, and two smaller, quieter ones above. Kath suggested one of the smaller bars and Colman agreed, permitting himself for the first time the thought that a pleasantly romantic interlude might develop, though why he should be so lucky was something he was far from comprehending. If it happened, he wasn't going to argue about it.

Of course, Swyley, Stanislau, Driscoll, and Carson had to be there. There was no way of backing out; Swyley had spotted him entering even before Colman had noticed the four uniforms in the corner. "Small world, chief," Driscoll remarked with a delighted leer on his face. "It is, isn't it," Colman agreed dismally.

Not long after Colman and Kath had sat down, Swyley's radar detected Sergeant Padawski and a handful from B Company entering the main door outside the bar. They were talking loudly and seemed to be a little the worse for drink. Colman noticed Artira and another girl from Brigade with them, clinging to the soldiers and acting bras.h.i.+y. He shook his head despairingly, but it wasn't really his business. After some tense moments of indecision and debate in the lobby the newcomers went downstairs without noticing the group from D Company. Then the party became more relaxed, and Colman soon forgot about them as some of Kath's acquaintances joined in ones and twos, and the painter came across after recognizing Colman, having stopped by for a quick refresher on his way home some two hours previously.

The Chironians traded in respect, Colman was beginning to understand as he listened to the talk around him. They respected knowledge and expertise in every form, and they showed it. Perhaps, he thought to himself, that was bow the first generation had sought to compete and to attain ident.i.ty in their machine-managed environment, where such things as parental status, social standing, wealth, and heritage had had no meaning. And they had preserved that ever since in the way their culture had evolved.

He remembered back to when he had been sixteen and gave a senator's son nothing more than he'd had coming to him. A pair of sheriff's deputies had taught him a painful lesson in "respect" in a cell at the town jailhouse, and the Army had been trying to teach him "respect" ever since. But that had been Earth-style respect. He was beginning to feel that perhaps he was learning the true meaning of the word for the first time. True respect could only be earned; it couldn't be extorted. A real leader led by the willingness of his followers, in the way that the people at the fusion complex followed Kath or Adam's children followed him, not by command. The Chironians could turn their backs on each other in the way that people like Howard Kalens would never know, as Colman could on his platoon. These were his kind of people. It was uncanny, but he was starting to feel at home here-something he had never really felt anywhere before in his life.

Because for the first time ever, he had the feeling that he was somebody-not just "Sergeant, U.S.

Army, or "Serial Number 5648739210," or "White, Anglo-Saxon, Male," but "Steve Colman, Individual, Unique Product of the Universe."

It was a nice feeling.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

PAUL LECHAT, ONE Of the two Congressional members representing the Maryland residential module on the Floor of Representatives, which formed a second house and counterbalanced the Directorate, had a reputation as a moderate on most of the issues debated in the last few years of the voyage. Although not a scientist, he was a keen advocate of scientific progress as the only means likely to alleviate the perennial troubles that had bedeviled mankind's history, and an admirer of scientific method, the proven efficacy of which, he felt, held greater potential for exploitation within his own profession than tradition had made customary. He attempted therefore always to define his terminology clearly, to acc.u.mulate his facts objectively; to evaluate their implications impartially, and to test his evaluations unambiguously. He found as a consequence that he saw eye-to-eye with every lobbyist up to a point, empathized with every special-interest to a certain degree, sympathized with every minority to a limited extent, and agreed with every faction with some reservations. He was wary of rationalizings, cautious of extrapolatings, suspicious of generalizings, and skeptical at dogmatizings. He responded to reason and logic rather than pa.s.sion and emotion, kept an open mind on controversies, based his opinions on the strictly relevant, and reconsidered them readily if confronted by new information. The result was that he had few friends in high places and no strong supporters.

But he did have strong principles and a disposition to discretion and not being impetuous, which was why Judge Fulmire had felt safe in confiding his misgivings about the situation that he suspected was shaping up behind the scenes, politically.

Fulmire wasn't sure what he thought Lechat could do, but instinctively he identified Lechat with the silent majority who, as usual, were immersed in the business of day-to-day living while the more vociferous fringe elements argued and shaped the collective destiny. The banking and financial fraternity was solemnly predicting chaos over land tenure in years to come and wanted the government to a.s.sume responsibility for a proper survey of unused lands, to be parceled out under approved deeds of t.i.tle and offered against a workable system of mortgages, which they magnanimously volunteered to finance. The manufacturing and materials-industry lobbies agreed with the bankers that a monetary system would have to be imposed to check the "reckless profligacy of inefficiency and waste" and to promote "fair and honest" compet.i.tion; they disagreed with bankers over the mortgage issue, however, claiming that development lad on Chiron had already been deemed up for grabs "by virtue of natural precedent"; they disagreed with each other about prices and tariffs, the manufacturers pus.h.i.+ng for deregulation of cheap (i.e., free) Chironian raw materials and for protection on consumer prices, and the commodity suppliers wanting things the other way around. The educational and medical professions were anxious to discharge their obligations to teach the Chironians when they were well and treat them when they were not, but were more anxious for a mechanism to raise the taxes for funding them, while the legal profession pressed for a properly const.i.tuted judicial system as a first move, ostensibly to facilitate collecting the tees. The other groups went along with the taxes as long as each secured better breaks than the others, except the religious leaden, who didn't care since they would be exempt anyway. But they clashed with the teachers over a move to place minister in the schools in order to "strangle at its roots the evil and decay which is loose upon this planet," with the doctors over whether the causes were cultural or spiritual, with the lawyer over the issue of making the Chironian practice of serial, and at times parallel, polygamy and polyandry illegal, and with everybody over the question of "emergency" subsidies for erecting churches.

And so it went.