“We feel we owe something, and we want to pay our way,” Driscoll confirmed. “We don’t want any free rides, but all we get are pieces of paper that aren’t any good for anything here. What can you do?’
“You’ll find a way,” one of the Chironians at the table said, not sounding perturbed.
“Better late than never, I suppose,” another commented, glancing at the painter, who was still there. The painter nodded but didn’t reply.
“What does that mean?” Driscoll asked, looking at the Chironian who had spoken.
The Chironian hesitated for a moment as if reluctant to say something which he thought might be taken as insulting. Kath caught his eye and nodded reassuringly. “Well,” the Chironian began, then paused again. “Most people here start to feel that way by the time they’re about ten. Fm not trying to offend anyone-but that’s the way it is.”
Carson frowned and thought about the implications, then shook his head. “It’s impossible,” he said. “No system could work like that.”
An intrigued and thoughtful look came over Swyley’s face as he listened. He said nothing, which meant that he didn’t agree.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
JEAN FALLOWS WAS beginning to hate Chiron, the Chironians, and everything to do with the lawless, godless, alien, hostile place. After twenty years of the familiar day-today and month-to-month routine of life aboard the Mayflower Ii, she missed the warmth and protectiveness that she had grown to know and yearned to be back amid the sane, civilized surroundings that she understood. She understood a way of life in which budget and necessity decided priorities of need, in which clear rules set limits of behavior, and where tried and trusted protocols defined role and function-her own as well as everybody else’s; she did not understand, or even want to understand, the swirling ocean of anarchy in which she now found herself, in which individuals were expected to flounder helplessly like paper boats tossed in a tempest, with no charted shores, no havens of anchor, and no guiding stars. She had no place in it, and she desired no place in it. Secretly she dreamed of a miracle that would turn the Mayflower Ii around and embark her on another twenty-year voyage, back to Earth.
As a postgraduate biology student at the University of Michigan, her home state, she had once had ambitions to specialize in biochemistry and the genetics pf primitive life-forms. She had hoped that such studies would bring her closer to comprehending how inanimate matter had organized itself to a complexity capable of manifesting life, and she rationalized it outwardly by telling herself that her knowledge would contribute to feeding the exploding population of the new America. And then she had met Bernard, whose youthful zeal and visions of the
Reformation that would sweep the world had awakened her political awareness and carried her along with hint into a whole new dimension of human relationships and motivations which until then she had hardly recognized as existing at all. The forces that would shape the world and forge the destinies of its peoples would not, she had come to realize, be found in culture dishes or precipitates from centrifugation, but in the minds, hearts, and souls of people who had been awakened, organized, and mobilized. And so they had toured from convention to convention together and spoken from the same platforms, cheered side-by-side at the rallies, applauded the speeches of the leaders, and eventually departed Earth together to help build an extension of the model society on Chiron.
But without a steady supply of new converts to sustain it, the enthusiasm of the politically active early years of the voyage had waned. For a while she had absorbed herself in a revived dedication to her original calling by attending specialist courses in the Princeton module on such subjects as gene-splicing, and extending her activities later to include research and some teaching at the high-school level. Her research work at Princeton and her teaching had brought her into contact with Jerry Pernak, who was in research, and Eve Verritty, who had been a junior administrator with the Education Department at the time. In fact it was Jean who had first introduced them to each other.