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 petty 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.