She sighed. Deitrich poured her some wine. “Have you ever been back?” she asked him.
“Several times.”
“How was it?”
“About as I expected. At least, it was about as I expected after I got to know what to expect. The first time it wasn’t so different, because I had been gone only about thirty years. But the last time I had to take a language course before I could understand what they were talking about.”
“I never went back,” she said. “Just kept on going. Sometimes I was ahead of the local age, sometimes behind. Generally a little behind.”
“That’s why you started moving farther out, trying to catch up.”
“Yes. I’d have gone out to the colonies, but I ran out of money.”
He leaned back and nodded. “That’s what they all do. Somehow, no matter which way you go, you always seem to lag a little behind the popular culture of your destination. But it wouldn’t solve it if you went out to the colonies,” he said. “The colonies wouldn’t be quite so far ahead of you in the things you know, but they’d be just as different as the rest. They all develop a little differently.”
“I imagine so.”
