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 ~aid, 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 H 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.