Worlds Apart

Einstein 28th, 290

What a year it has been. We’re going to torch again, they say seventy-two percent efficiency. I’ll see Epsilon.

My baby girl is sprouting breasts and nagging me about menarche. Don’t do it, girl. Put a cork in it. It’s nothing but trouble. She won’t listen to me.

Incredibly, I heard from old Jeff Hawkings. He looks like Moses. An apt comparison, too; he’s leading children out of the wilderness. He got down to Key West, which was relatively intact, and proceeded to rebuild civilization. Not bad for an ex-cop. He managed to defuse the Manson business and build up a sort of primitive democracy, town-hall scale, all through southern Florida. They’re in contact with Europe and South America, and before long there will be commerce and politics. And maybe not wars. I wished him luck. Hard to carry on a conversation from a light-year away, two years between responses. Earth years.

Hard to recapture how I felt about him. The years between Earth and Torch he was in my mind constantly. Even after I had given him up for dead. But so much has gone on since.

Watching Jeff, and sending my message back, I realized it’s been some time since I actually missed Earth. Or New New. I’m curious about them, and wish them well, but we have our own concerns.

There was something I wanted to say to Jeff but couldn’t find the words, sitting there in front of the camera, under Hammond’s avuncular gaze. How strange it all turned out. Two completely different people; gender, religion, profession, age—born on different planets in wildly contrasting environments—that we should touch once and love, and be wrenched apart and so separated by circumstance and physical distance; that through all the improbable twists and turns we should wind up twelve light years apart but faced with the same responsibility. Building new worlds.