After she’d washed up, Sara looked at her brother’s clothes and fell silent. She found us reasonably fresh linen and went upstairs to change her bed and sleep, but for a long time, I could hear, she tossed and turned. I just made a pallet on the floor by the fire, no desire to sleep in our old bedroom alone.
In the morning I broiled the fish in the fireplace, and made a pot of rice that barely seemed a decade old. Then we went out on various errands, a pair of holo cameras mounted in front of the van. Stephen Funk had insisted on that; someday it would be a valuable historic record. And people would be curious about what their homes looked like, abandoned for eight years.
Most of them would be unhappy, since very few had had landscaping of native plants alone. There was status in planting and maintaining Earth stock, but very little of it had survived even one hard winter unattended. The native forms had taken over, especially the large and small green mushrooms, neither plant nor fungus, pretty ugly even out in the woods, where they belonged. All of the lawns were full of it, knee high to head high. The town looked like a nightmarish fairy tale.
We gathered records and artifacts and a few specialized tools–Stan’s kiln, as he’d said, disassembled into ten pieces, but it was still a monster to load. By the end of the day, we were tired and depressed and ready to leave. But we had to wait till dawn.
I made a stew of boxed fruit with rice, and we sat by the fire, eating and drinking too much.
“Earth is going to be like this to you, isn’t it?” Sara said. “Only worse.”
“I don’t know,” I said; “it’s been so long. I think I’ve adjusted to the fact that there won’t be much I recognize.”
I added some wood to the fire and went back to refill the wine pitcher. “I guess I told you about the guy from the 22nd.”
“A long time ago. I forget.”
“He came to Stargate while I was waiting for Charlie and Diana and Anita to get heteroed. He was alone, supposedly the only survivor of some battle. Too vague about it, though.”
“You assumed he’d deserted.”
“Right. But that wasn’t what interested me.” The wine was cool and tangy. “He’d been back to Earth in the twenty-fourth. Born in 2102, he’d mustered out into the 2300’s. Like your mother and me, he couldn’t tolerate what passed for Earth society, and re-upped to get away from it.
“But what he described sounded so much better than the world he’d been born into. That was a half-century after Marygay and I had left, and it was even worse. The leading cause of death in the United States was murder, and most of the murders were legal duels. People settled arguments and even made business deals and gambled with weapons–I put up everything I own, and you put up everything you own, and we fight to the death for the whole pile.”
“And he liked that.”
“He loved it! And after all his commando training and combat experience, he was looking forward to becoming a wealthy man.
“But the Earth wasn’t like that anymore. There was a warrior class, and you were born into it, biologically engineered. They went into the army as children, and never left it; never mixed with polite society–and I mean polite. The Earth had become a planet of docile lambs who lived communally; no one owned–or desired–more than anyone else had; no one even spoke ill of anyone else.
“They even knew that their harmony was artificial, imposed by biological and social engineering, and were glad for it. The fact that a horrific war was being waged on a hundred planets, in their name, just made it the more logical that their own daily lives be serene and civilized.”
“So he ran back to the army?”
“Not immediately. He knew how lucky he’d been to survive, and wasn’t eager to press his luck. He couldn’t live with the sheep, so he took off on his own–wandering through the countryside, trying to live off the land.”