"Bearable separately," she answered. "Especially my father. But quite unbearable together-unbearable because they couldn't bear one another. A bustling, cheerful, outgoing woman married to a man so fastidiously introverted that she got on his nerves all the time-even, I suspect, in bed. She never stopped communicating, and he never started. With the result that he thought she was shallow and insincere, she thought he was heartless, contemptuous and without normal human feelings."

"I'd have expected that you people would know better than to walk into that kind of trap."

"We do know better," she assured him. "Boys and girls are specifically taught what to expect of people whose temperament and physique are very different from their own. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that the lessons don't seem to have much effect. Not to mention the fact that in some cases the psychological distance between the people involved is really too great to be bridged. Anyhow, the fact remains that my father and mother never managed to make a go of it. They'd fallen in love with one another-goodness knows why. But when they came to close quarters, she found herself being constantly hurt by his inaccessibility, while her uninhibited good-fellowship made him fairly cringe with embarrassment and distaste. My sympathies were always with my father. Physically and temperamentally I'm very close to him, not in the least like my mother. I remember, even as a tiny child, how I used to shrink away from her exuberance. She was like a permanent invasion of one's privacy. She still is."

"Do you have to see a lot of her?"

"Very little. She has her own job and her own friends. In our part of the world 'Mother' is strictly the name of a function. When the function has been duly fulfilled, the title lapses; the ex-child and the woman who used to be called 'Mother' establish a new kind of relationship. If they get on well together, they continue to see a lot of one another. If they don't, they drift apart. Nobody expects them to cling, and clinging isn't equated with loving-isn't regarded as anything particularly creditable."

"So all's well now. But what about then? What happened when you were a child, growing up between two people who couldn't bridge the gulf that separated them? I know what that means-the fairy-story ending in reverse, 'And so they lived unhappily ever after.' "

"And I've no doubt," said Susila, "that if we hadn't been born in Pala, we would have lived unhappily ever after. As it was, we got on, all things considered, remarkably well."

"How did you manage to do that?"

"We didn't; it was all managed for us. Have you read what the Old Raja says about getting rid of the two thirds of sorrow that's homemade and gratuitous?"

Will nodded. "I was just reading it when you came in."

"Well, in the bad old days," she went on, "Palanese families could be just as victimizing, tyrant-producing and liar-creating as yours can be today. In fact they were so awful that Dr. Andrew and the Raja of the Reform decided that something had to be done about it. Buddhist ethics and primitive village communism were skillfully made to serve the purposes of reason, and in a single generation the whole family system was radically changed." She hesitated for a moment. "Let me explain," she went on, "in terms of my own particular case-the case of an only child of two people who couldn't understand one another and were always at cross-purposes or actually quarreling. In the old days, a little girl brought up in those surroundings would have emerged as either a wreck, a rebel, or a resigned hypocritical conformist. Under the new dispensation I didn't have to undergo unnecessary suffer ing, I wasn't wrecked or forced into rebellion or resignation. Why? Because from the moment I could toddle, I was free to escape."

"To escape?" he repeated. "To escape?" It seemed too good to be true.

"Escape," she explained, "is built into the new system. Whenever the parental Home Sweet Home becomes too unbearable, the child is allowed, is actively encouraged-and the whole weight of public opinion is behind the encouragement- to migrate to one of its other homes."

"How many homes does a Palanese child have?"

"About twenty on the average."

"Twenty? My God!"

"We all belong," Susila explained, "to an MAC-a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old-timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents-everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teen-agers."

Will shook his head. "Making twenty families grow where only one grew before."

"But what grew before was your kind of family. The twenty are all our kind." As though reading instructions from a cookery book, "Take one sexually inept wage slave," she went on, "one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice. Our recipe is rather different: Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection."

"And what comes out of your open pan?" he asked. "An entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family. Twenty pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and ex-mothers, and forty or fifty assorted children of all ages."

"Do people stay in the same adoption club all their lives?" "Of course not. Grown-up children don't adopt their own parents or their own brothers and sisters. They go out and adopt another set of elders, a different group of peers and juniors. And the members of the new club adopt them and, in due course, their children. Hybridization of microcultures-that's what our sociologists call the process. It's as beneficial, on its own level, as the hybridization of different strains of maize or chickens. Healthier relationships in more responsible groups, wider sympathies and deeper understandings. And the sympathies and understandings arc for everyone in the MAC from babies to centenarians." "Centenarians? What's your expectation of life?" "A year or two more than yours," she answered. "Ten percent of us are over sixty-five. The old get pensions, if they can't earn. But obviously pensions aren't enough. They need some-thing useful and challenging to do; they need people they can care for and be loved by in return. The MAC's fulfill those needs."

"It all sounds," said Will, "suspiciously like the propaganda for one of the new Chinese communes."

"Nothing," she assured him, "could be less like a commune than an MAC. An MAC isn't run by the government, it's run by its members. And we're not militaristic. We're not interested in turning out good party members; we're only interested in turn ing out good human beings. We don't inculcate dogmas. And finally we don't take the children away from their parents; on the contrary, we give the children additional parents and the parents additional children. That means that even in the nursery we enjoy a certain degree of freedom; and our freedom increases as we grow older and can deal with a wider range of experience and take on greater responsibilities. Whereas in China there's no freedom at all. The children are handed over to official baby tamers, whose business it is to turn them into obedient servants of the State. Things are a great deal better in your part of the world-better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They're foisted on you by hereditary pre destination. You can't get rid of them, can't take a holiday from them, can't go to anyone else for a change of moral or psycho logical air. It's freedom, if you like-but freedom in a telephone booth."