Back From the Long Night: A Visitor’s Guide to Earth’s Culture Swap
A crew returns from a relativistic mission, years out of sync. The Slow Neighborhood When we came home, the coastline looked the same. The ship’s shadow traced the old harbor. The cranes still pointed like sundials. But the street under the cranes was different in a way my eyes understood before my brain did. It was quieter. The quiet had rules. A robot met us at the landing pad. It wore a blue sweater and shoes that would not scrape. The sweater had elbow patches, which made Osei, our mission anthropologist, grin as if the city had told a joke for him alone. “Welcome back,” the robot said. “I’m Elo. I’ll walk you to housing. Please tell me if my voice is too much.” “It’s fine,” I said. It lowered the volume anyway. We walked through a district of rowhouses that looked like postcards from a century I didn’t live in. Every porch had a potted plant. Every window had a curtain drawn to an identical gentle angle. On one step a robot knelt with a watering can and turned it as c...
