Topic: Lost

Somewhere, Sometime

Wheels -- a name that he hadn't used for a long time, who even knew what wheels were anymore -- glanced out at the ground, still featureless from this height.  It looked a lot of red and brown, barren because of the lack of water.  At one point, the man he knew later to be his father-in-law had found a way to pipe water from underground to turn a small patch of this nothing green.  Or greenish.  It worked well enough to raise some cows, a few goats, and a small number of chickens to keep a family going -- provided someone was there to shoot the dingoes and keep the water flowing in the gardens, of course.

Had it really been nearly a thousand years?  One downside of near-light and time-phased travel across the stars was that dates really didn't mean much.  He'd been to so many places across the galaxy, coming back to the place where he was first born seemed so... He couldn't place a word that expressed what he felt.  How many new worlds, and how many new bodies again?  Whatever, wherever, he was here.

The single-person craft he took from the orbiter quickly fell through the atmosphere towards another red patch, or brown patch.  Even as details emerged, there wasn't much to see, but the AI chirped happily that he had arrived.  It was odd, he thought.  When he first left his mother planet, he'd assumed that he'd never be back.  The Rules said you kept going out, never back.  Finish a life, get a new body built, transfer in hibernation, and wake up somewhere out.  Away.  Never back.

Never back.

Also odd, he thought that progress would just keep going in the old place.  He never imagined, nobody ever imagined, that so many people would lose interest in staying Home that progress would reverse.  If there was anything living near what used to be this farm in what used to be Australia, it was just the wildlife that the old man used to shoot.  A thousand years probably re-wilded anything that was once domesticated.

Yet still, there was a rough rectangle of broken rock and once-solid material, barely noticeable unless someone knew that the view to the distant hills looked like... maybe that?  No there.  There was where the old house used to sit.  Any old gardens and fences were long gone.  But it wasn't that hard to start from the rear corner that always had the nice view through the grove of trees also long gone.  But... there.  Or maybe there.

He remembered all too well the walk he took from that back corner that last time.  When she'd died, he'd given the farm to the caretaker and her family.  His only two requests were that her ashes be buried along her ma and paps, and that they keep the graves there as long as they owned it.  When he'd made it back to orbit at the old marble of a world, he was surprised that the records were still there in the AI, even if it took longer for them to be loaded from the archives than it did to actually find the trace once they were.  The property had lasted for three generations in the new family before being abandoned by the last remaining girl, who'd left for Away.  After that, it was returned to whatever still wanted it.  Not human.  What human wanted to be here?

He stood, looking at the distant hills, knowing that she... MacKenzie, was still here, at least in the dirt.  He irrationally thought that he should use the systems to look for the brass urn.  Before they'd sealed it, he'd dropped her wedding ring in the urn, too pained to still possess it.  Maybe find the urn.  maybe find the ashes. Maybe remember what the ring looked like.  Maybe.

No. It was there.  He didn't need to see it.  Any of it.

After a thousand years, why had those seventeen years stuck?  Why was she still so vivid?  The wind blew hard enough that he thought he could blame it for the tears.

"I still miss you Mac," he said to the wind.  The hills didn't answer.