"Earth history," Dylan confirms. "Earth joined the Commonwealth and its people spread out across the Known Worlds. Including my ancestors."
It's a good thing Peter doesn't know what Dylan does know about the history of Earth in times more recent to Dylan's understanding. About humanity spreading out from its homeworld and leaving it an ancestral homeworld with little significance to many of its descendants, Dylan included. About the enslavement by the Drago-Kazov after the Fall, and the Magog attacks, and the poverty and hopelessness that gave Harper his lousy immune system and his hatred of Nietszscheans.
About the revolution Harper helped start and Dylan couldn't finish.
"Yeah," he agrees, his voice quiet and, for a moment, his eyes suddenly distant as his thoughts go thousands of years and millions of light-years away. To Tarn-Vedra, the one, unaccountable loss when he'd woken. "So was mine."
His world, and the Vedrans, and the line they should have been able to help hold in the face of the war that destroyed civilization. But they were gone. The slipstream route vanished, and with it, the symbol of all Dylan once knew and loved. Would the world he'd founds after Hephaistos be any easier to handle knowing his home were there, somewhere?
Maybe not. But its loss still aches as deep as any other. If even Harper can love the hellhole that Earth is in his time, then a son of Tarn-Vedra can mourn its loss even more keenly.
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It's a good thing Peter doesn't know what Dylan does know about the history of Earth in times more recent to Dylan's understanding. About humanity spreading out from its homeworld and leaving it an ancestral homeworld with little significance to many of its descendants, Dylan included. About the enslavement by the Drago-Kazov after the Fall, and the Magog attacks, and the poverty and hopelessness that gave Harper his lousy immune system and his hatred of Nietszscheans.
About the revolution Harper helped start and Dylan couldn't finish.
"Yeah," he agrees, his voice quiet and, for a moment, his eyes suddenly distant as his thoughts go thousands of years and millions of light-years away. To Tarn-Vedra, the one, unaccountable loss when he'd woken. "So was mine."
His world, and the Vedrans, and the line they should have been able to help hold in the face of the war that destroyed civilization. But they were gone. The slipstream route vanished, and with it, the symbol of all Dylan once knew and loved. Would the world he'd founds after Hephaistos be any easier to handle knowing his home were there, somewhere?
Maybe not. But its loss still aches as deep as any other. If even Harper can love the hellhole that Earth is in his time, then a son of Tarn-Vedra can mourn its loss even more keenly.