In accordance with the rules of officer's conduct, Baron ven Klaeden, who had ordered the landing, was the first to expose himself to the enveloping conditions outside the flagship. He stood in an open lock, sniffing the autumn air of Earth in late afternoon. It was full of jet-fire smoke, and smelled of burning brush. The automatic extinguishers had quenched the flames, but the blackened trees and brush still roasted and sparked and leaked smoke across the land. Somewhere a bird was singing through the sunlit haze. Baron ven Klaeden recognized the sound as made by a living thing, and wondered if the recognition was born into his bones.
Three hundred and fifty yards to the north, a wingship towered in the sun, its guns trained outward from the inner circle, and to the south, another wingship. The baron glanced down at the earth beneath the flagship. The jets had reduced to ashes something that might have been a low wooden structure. He shrugged, and glanced across the blackened area toward the orderly forest. Trees and shrubs, and a carpet of green turf below, broken here and there by rain-worn rocks and clusters of smaller fragile leafy stuff that might be food-plants. Vivid splashes of color blossomed in the shady forest, scarlets and blues and flashes of brilliant lemon that lived in profusion in the foliage of the shrubbery. Some of the trees were living masses of tiny flowers, and when the wind stirred them, petals showered to the ground in fragrant gusts. The wind changed, and the air that breathed about the commander's face was full of perfume.
I feel nothing, he thought. Here is beauty and warmth, here is the home of Man, and almost an Eden, but I feel nothing. It is just another mote that circles a minor sun, and to me it is only an exploitable supply dump of Nature, a place to accomplish Procedure 76-A, "Refueling Method for Terrestroid Planets Without Facilities, Native Labor Exploitable."
It was only a way-station on the long long road from Scorpius to Ursa, and it meant nothing, nothing at all. It had changed too much. Millenia ago, when the Star Exodus had burst forth to carry Man halfway across the galaxy, things had been different. A few colonies had kept accurate histories of Earth intact, and when the Transpace Empire had gathered itself into social integration, nearly five thousand years ago, the histories had been made universally available. The baron had studied them, but from the viewpoint of the spacer, the history of Humanity had ceased in any way to be associated with Earth after the Star Exodus. Man was a space creature, a denizen of the interstellum--or had been, before the War of Secession--and when history moved into space, Earth was a half-remembered hamlet. Ven Klaeden had seen the Earth-vistas that the historians had reconstructed for the museums--vistas of roaring industrial cities, flaming battlegrounds, teeming harbors and spaceports. The cities were gone, and Earth had become a carefully tended Japanese garden.