Determined to see the world beyond our dome, I joined the merchant navy and was assigned to a deck crew of like-minded, wide-eyed fledglings.
Older and wiser people than us, who'd once come to our city to escape the desolation outside, warned us we'd find nothing beautiful there. Mostly, they were right. Pole to pole, from port and starboard we saw the ruined remnants of cities: charred and bombed-out buildings whose hollows stared out at us like vacant eyes, and houses buckling under sagging roofs choked with dust.
Infants as we were then, swaddled, unacquainted with fear, what we saw was beyond our capacity to comprehend. Whether the fires that burned up our world had raged twenty years ago, or ten thousand, made no difference to us. To tell the truth, the older I get the sadder those images make me. Time moves in but one direction—away from the past—but the heart moves with equal strength wherever it likes.
Still, amid all that dry and yellow waste tenacious scraps of human life held on: thin naked children, sunburned men, hard and stoical women, huddled together in the last remaining enclaves where something green might grow. They pieced together villages from blocks of concrete rubble and corrugated iron, while behind them loomed the grey collapsing skylines of a civilization few of them were old enough to remember.
Whenever they spied the approach of our vessel, they rushed to the shore shouting and waving their arms. The medicines and simple necessities we brought with us made their lives a little longer and more bearable; in return they brought pearls, or phosphate, or whatever else our city wanted which their hardscrabble existence had little use for, to the beach before the ship. We boxed them up, piled them into our shipping crates, and went on our way without a backward glance.
We regarded those people with wonderment, like long-lost treasures pulled up from the deep. We handled them like treasures, too: delicately, gloved by our pity. In all my years traversing the starving wilds of the world, my love for its inhabitants had been broad but shallow... Until one wind-beaten night when the moon was full, and we pulled into one particular ramshackle little harbor...
Our ship found its mooring, and I, at last, was about to find mine.