the starships don't pass by here no more

It didn't happen fast. God knows, I remember just about everything in my long life, and I couldn't tell you exactly when the passage stopped entirely. But I do know my great-grandpa told us about the ancient days when the skies glittered with ships, the land rumbled beneath them as they leapt out into the vastness with bellies full of hunger and tenacity. And here I am now, with the skies empty but for the sun, moon, and stars.   It's been some few thousand years since mankind unlocked hyperspace and found that the galaxy entire was at their fingertips. I wasn't alive for the glory days, the mythic centuries of conquest and colony on the tides of the stardrive. Nor was my great-grandpa, old though he was. He handed down tales of the Hyades War, the strife along the Scorpius Main, the treaties and terrors of contact with the others out there in the deep.   Once, he said, we were the pride of the Solar Reach: all of humanity joined together across the cosmos, hand in outstretched hand, and us at the center. But the Reach was old when I was young, and now it's older still. Times changed. Mankind spread outward, the Reach reached further and further still, and it left us and our world behind.   Well, I can tell you this much. God didn't cast Man out of Eden. Man cast himself out to search for God in Heaven. And those of us still here on Mother Earth, well, we just do the work to keep her right. Someone's got to look after our home, after all. Someone's got to tend the Garden.