“After sixty years,” he said, “all your family and friends are very old, dying if not dead. And coming back just at that time makes you feel bad. But it’s not half so bad as coming back after thirty years or so, and finding that they haven’t aged quite enough to be resigned to it. Then you become a positive and glaring indication that they are older than they let themselves think.”
“That never happened to me.”
Deitrich gazed at her, feeling the wine warm his stomach and ease the bitter discipline. Nostalgia began to creep over him. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?”
She asked, “You want to know how I got into it?”
“That’s up to you. But I know you didn’t just come out to see the sights, like you said you did.”
“No. Not really.”
Deitrich waited. He refilled his own glass, and then, as she finished, hers. She took a deep breath and spread her hands on the table. She studied them intently.
“I was just a kid, you know. Twenty-four. But that was before they raised the legal age in the Home Galaxy to thirty. So they couldn’t stop me from going.”
She looked up and forced a laugh. “They should have done it sooner.” Deitrich just smiled back at her and shrugged. “There was a man… boy, I should say, because he was no older than I.” Back to the study of her fingernails again. “I married him. It was a mistake.”
“So you ran away.”