It stung and there was a brief instant, a memory of the terrible blackness, but then it just left a nonverbal Welcome home and withdrew.

A lot had changed in the years I had been away. Some of the changes were decorative, like the orderly flower beds that lined the roads, but there were more functional alterations, too. The place was large enough to make vehicles convenient now. There were bicycles propped up or lying down everywhere, and a few power carts for the lazy or load-bearing. Sandra picked up a random bike and went back to work. Dan and I kept walking; I was still a little unbalanced for pedaling. Wouldn’t want to undo all that careful surgery by crashing into a tree. Wouldn’t want to redo it!

Dennison’s cobbled-together office had become an Administrative Center, a climate-controlled brick building about a hundred meters by fifty. An identical building across the street served as a hospital. They also stored meat there, which seemed bizarre and appropriate at the same time.

At least there aren’t any shops yet, or banks or insurance buildings. They do have what they call a “market,” though no money changes hands. It’s just a central place for people to bring fruit and vegetables for general distribution. People who eat meat pick it up at the hospital. Makes you feel like becoming a vegetarian. Or at least a careful meat inspector.

People cook their own meals. Seems primitive and inefficient, but I guess it’s worth the work for being able to choose a menu for yourself. Though ’Home’s weekly Chinese meal was unappetizing enough to save me a couple of thousand calories a month. If Dan cooks something awful, I guess I have to eat it.

I’ll probably learn how to cook myself. Some people on Earth thought that was funny, that I could live to the ripe old age of twenty-one and not know how to cook. Here I am almost sixty, and if you handed me an egg, I wouldn’t know which end to break.

What used to be Lakeside was now a “township,” Drake. There were two other lakeside townships, Columbus and Magellan, each one comprising all the homes along three kilometers of shoreline. Each township had its own substation for power, water, and sewage. Drake had the largest population, being closest to Hilltop and also possessing the only swimming pool and handball courts, along with a recreation building with everything from checkers to VR. The other two townships were basically a string of houses on the lake side of the road; Drake had started crawling up the hill to meet the suburbs of Hilltop crawling down.