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."
"Locked in," Will elaborated, "(and I'm thinking now ol myself) with a sneering bully, a Christian martyr, and a little girl who'd been frightened by the bully and blackmailed by the mar tyr's appeal to her better feelings into a state of quivering imbe cility. That was the home from which, until I was fourteen and my aunt Mary came to live next door, I never escaped."
"And your unfortunate parents never escaped from you.'"
"That's not quite true. My father used to escape into brandy and my mother into High Anglicanism. I had to serve out my sentence without the slightest mitigation. Fourteen years of family servitude. How I envy you! Free as a bird!"
"Not so lyrical! Free, let's say, as a developing human being, lice as a future woman-but no freer. Mutual Adoption guarantees children against injustice and the worst consequences of parental ineptitude. It doesn't guarantee them against discipline, or against having to accept responsibilities. On the contrary, it increases the number of their responsibilities; it exposes them to a wide variety of disciplines. In your predestined and exclusive families, children, as you say, serve a long prison term under a single set of parental jailers. These parental jailers may, of course, be good, wise and intelligent. In that case the little prisoners will emerge more or less unscathed. But in point of fact most of your parental jailers are not conspicuously good, wise or intelligent. They're apt to be well-meaning but stupid, or not well-meaning and frivolous, or else neurotic, or occasionally downright malevolent, or frankly insane. So God help the young convicts committed by law and custom and religion to their tender mercies! But now consider what happens in a large, inclusive, voluntary family. No telephone booths, no predestined jailers. Here the children grow up in a world that's a working model of society at large, a small-scale but accurate version of the environment in which they're going to have to live when they're grown up. 'Holy,' 'healthy,' 'whole'-they all come from the same root and carry different overtones of the same meaning. Etymologically, and in fact, our kind of family, the inclusive and voluntary kind, is the genuine holy family. Yours is the unholy family."
"Amen," said Will, and thought again of his own childhood, thought too of poor little Murugan in the clutches of the Rani. "What happens," he asked after a pause, "when the children migrate to one of their other homes? How long do they stay there?"
"It all depends. When my children get fed up with me, they seldom stay away for more than a day or two. That's because, fundamentally, they're very happy at home. I wasn't, and so when I walked out, I'd sometimes stay away for a whole month."