Robert Sawyer: Relativity

“You wanted it all,” Greg said, sitting opposite me in a little café near Edwards Air Force Base. “The whole shebang.” He paused, the first syllable of the word perhaps catching his attention as it had mine. “The whole nine yards.”

“So did you,” I said. “You wanted your hominids, and you wanted your family.” I stopped myself before adding, “And more, besides.”

“What do we do now?” Greg asked.

“What did you do while I was gone?” I replied.

Greg looked down, presumably picturing the archeological remains of his own life. “I married again—no one you knew. We were together for fifteen years, and then…” He shrugged. “And then she died. Another one taken away from me.”

It wasn’t just in looks that Greg was older; back before I’d gone away, his self-censorship mechanism had been much better. He would have kept that last comment to himself.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and then, just so there was no possibility of him misconstruing the comment, I added, “About your other wife dying, I mean.”

He nodded a bit, accepting my words. Or maybe he was just old and his head moved of its own accord. “I’m alone now,” he said.

I wanted to ask him about his second wife—about whether she’d been younger than him. If she’d been one of those grad students that went over to South Africa with him, the age difference could have been as great as that which now stretched between us. But I refrained. “We’ll need time,” I said. “Time to figure out what we want to do.”

“Time,” repeated Greg, as if I’d asked for the impossible, asked for something he could no longer give.

So here I am, back on Earth. My ex-husband—he did divorce me, after all—is old enough to be my father. But we’re taking it one day at a time—equal-length days, days that are synchronized, days in lockstep.

My children are older than I am. And I’ve got grandchildren. And great-grandchildren, and all of them are wonderful.

And I’ve been to another world … although I think I prefer this one.

Yes, it seems you can have it all.

Just not all at once.

But, then again, as Einstein would have said, there’s no such thing as “all at once.”

Everything is relative. Old Albert knew that cold. But I know something better.

Relatives are everything.

And I was back home with mine.