Read Charlinder's Walk for Free Online Page A

"How much does Faithfulness run in families?" Only after he heard it out of his mouth did he realize what a tricky question it could be.
     
    Roy looked at him like he had the same thing on his mind. "Are you thinking of Robert and Ruth?"

    "Mostly them. Is their whole family Faithful?"
     
    "I don't know," said Roy. "Eleanor is, and they probably got it from her. I know Eleanor is especially interested in family structure."

    "Does that mean she wants us to have marriages instead of avuncular families?"
     
    "She'd like to see at least some of the younger generations try it," said Roy. He began to explain how one of Eleanor’s sisters didn’t get along with their brother. Apparently she could always be seen picking a fight with him, well beyond what was typical for young adult siblings. "I mean, Lydia and I had our moments but your grandmother would have kicked both our asses if things ever got that bad between us," he elaborated. And once Eleanor’s sister had children to look after, matters only got worse. The rapport between other family members was just fine, but something was never right between those two. It was a source of constant anxiety for the whole family. Roy said no one knew where the anger came from, but whatever happened couldn’t be undone, and only when the family’s children were all grown did the siblings figure out how to fight where everyone else couldn’t see it.

    "But anyway, when Eleanor saw another community, and saw that they had all nuclear families, you can imagine how she thought that was a really good idea."
     
    Though he was loath to say so out loud, Charlinder couldn’t think of how he would answer the question that Eleanor raised. He and his friends and their families, the rest of their neighbors, were so comfortable in their sibling-run system that he didn’t often remember it had begun essentially by accident. The Paleola founders had been a small group of people spread out over a wide age range who hadn’t chosen so much as found each other. They had nothing in common except that they were still alive. They had no one else to choose from and nowhere else to go, and in those conditions, they accepted that the lifelong marriages and stable nuclear families they saw as the ideal in their former lives were not possible for them. Their goal was to raise their children to adulthood in good health, and they found that the simplest way to do that was to assume that everyone was responsible for supporting the children’s mothers, and if paternity was ambiguous, they would not make an issue of it. The first descendant generation had slightly more in common with each other, but were still a limited number of people spread out over many years in age, and they found that the least complicated way to arrange their families was based on the sibling relationship. It worked out well and became a habit they never broke. Some shortcomings, they worked around; their custom of adoption referred not to parents taking on orphaned children but to men without sisters and women without brothers choosing each other as their family mates, but it only worked if they were very close already. Other problems, such as the dysfunction in Eleanor’s family, were risks that Paleolans accepted because they rarely ever escalated to that degree.

    "Yeah, I guess I can see how that would appeal to her," said Charlinder. "What about God, then? What would that have to do with anything?"
     
    "That part, I'm not so sure about. In stressful times, the idea of God is very comforting to believers, so maybe that's how her Faith started."

    "How does that work?" asked Charlinder, completely bewildered. "How is God comforting to someone under stress?"

    “Think of a parent figure who’s always there, always listening, always has the right answer, and will never die,” said Roy. “Ever notice how they often refer to God as the Father?”

    That much gave Charlinder pause. He had always preferred the presence of his mother