Free Third World by Louis Shalako

frozen and wooden,
but the rest of the saying was clear enough. A fellow who waited
too long wasn’t likely to get around to it at all.
    They sat their mounts and the animals
chewed grass and the low growths that corresponded to nothing in
living memory as far as Hank could make out but the horses
tolerated it and the critters were weaned on it, and that was
something.
    The cart crossed a marshy spot in the
bottom of the valley and came up the hill towards them, the small
critter pulling the weight, huffing with the exertion but the pair
making no effort to get out and walk which was what Hank would have
done just to save time. It was good to get off the mount for a
while to stretch the legs and ease lower back muscles, always
flexed by the hard saddle and the fluid movements of the mount. He
helped Polly dismount, heart pounding and very aware that he held
her around the waist, and that she smelled heavenly.
    He’d noticed a difference between
Earthies, the old-timers, and people born on the planet, especially
the younger generation. They didn’t care for time. They had no
drive, no ambition.
    Their lives were complete.
    On the plus side, it was like they
didn’t have a care in the world. In that sense, the company had
delivered on its promises. It really was a whole new way of life.
Even Hank had to admit that it had changed him, and in many ways
for the better.
    He was fourteen…no, fifteen when they
got here.
    The trouble was the social isolation of
the place. Just the sheer raw numbers, or lack of them. It was like
you could count everyone in the world if you had the normal number
of fingers and toes…it meant nothing to the younger ones, and
everything to him.
    It was like no one around here knew
what a bicycle or a skateboard was.
    There was no way in hell he could ever
go back to the old life. The thing to do was just to accept that,
and try to make the best of it. Sooner or later we all have to die,
and his life had been no more tragic than any other. For Hank, life
was sort of objective, and the people around him were living their
lives more subjectively. There was no stigma to eating a turnip
when it was all anyone had. They had never tasted lobster, or crab,
or chocolate. They had never seen television, or listened to a
morning show on the radio. They might know what a car was. Most had
never seen one. He grinned at the thought of what a nine-day wonder
it would be if one actually showed up in town. The cars he was
thinking of wouldn’t even make it this far. The roads, all two or
three of them, were just too poor. People traveled at five
kilometres or ten kilometres an hour and thought nothing of
it.
    Rip away all the veneered layers of
social status and expectation, all narcissism and sense of
entitlement, and a turnip tasted a lot better. It was all they had,
all anyone had sometimes. Even then they thought Hank was rich.
It’s not like he lived any different than they did.
    It was one of the things that set him
apart, and he was all too aware of it. His own biological clock was
ticking, terms he had never consciously used before in his
self-assessments, and he had no idea of what Polly was actually
like. Accustomed to being on his own, self-sufficient, and
accountable to no one really, Hank was doing well. Even if he loved
Polly, and there were no assurances that was what was actually
happening to him, if they were really incompatible then marrying
the girl was the wrong thing to do.
    That was something else that set Hank
apart, for surely no one else on this gol-durned planet gave a hoot
as to who lived with whom, or who married who, or who knocked up
so-and-so.
    People shrugged and rolled their eyes
and life went on as before. Marty was the only preacher in a
hundred kilometres and nature took its own course. A lot of folks
made the pilgrimage to his church only after five, ten or their
twentieth anniversaries. They saved a little money and took their
time. It was more romantic for the women, he