No Early Birds: A Short Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

and see if it used batteries. Then in the next note we were told not to worry about it.
    We underestimated the power of the media to slow the change of language. It was a shock in time when German became an extinct language of scholars. Slang of course, changes. But it also usually goes away and is forgotten. I remember when I was middle aged, I had a cousin who was horribly needy. If you went to a family reunion she'd latch onto you like a leech and ruin your visit. Back then we said she 'glommed onto you'. Currently you'd just say she is 'sticky'. It'll be different in fifty years, but the core words endure.
    One of the first clues we had just how far in the future time travel would be discovered was when we got an uptime communication that wasn't for us, but to relay. We immediately recognized it as one we'd read before, but subtly different. The uptime us didn't trust their memory of the older English usage to say what they wanted clearly. They were right too. We changed three words. It would have sounded slightly odd without the editing.
    When we all moved to the moon it seemed a huge step. Earth was too difficult for four old ladies to live on and be different than the folks around them. Even when everybody was living to near two hundred, being four hundred got to be difficult to cover up. Especially when governments got very controlling, which they did twice very badly before we left. The only thing that got us through that is that we had money. Fortunately, it a universal law of human nature that you don't look too closely at wealthy people and their dealings.
    When we got a chatty letter of instructions one day it was still from the moon, but Anna mentioned she felt bad that our old home in Florida was not only viewed as sort of slummy, but that the shape of the coast had changed. The same cities weren't all there, and it was a province now instead of a state. But they still called it Florida. That made us realize we were in for a very long haul. When people lived on or around other planets in our solar system we were sure the time machine would be invented soon. It wasn't.
    At various times we wondered if we had exceeded our limits to change and created our own time branch, but then we got a message to settle that saying we were OK and not to worry about it. The same message said the future had told them there were other branches too bizarre to understand. So different our line couldn't honestly decide whether to intervene in them, because they really couldn't understand them.
    We're content we haven't attracted the attention of the time police. None of us have done anything important enough that this time line would find us irreplaceable. Not to mention we're glad we didn't happen to be in one of the branches where humans altered themselves like we told ourselves about. We like being upright and bipedal. We could go back to Bradenton and nobody would notice anything odd about us. But of course we all look about thirty now. It's a very good age to appear. Very rarely, we visit a Waffle House when we visit Earth. We ration that because there are only so many Waffle House days in existence. We can go a bit more often since we don't look like the four old ladies who might have been there just yesterday.
    We took another cruise together, but this one went around a distant star and visited a desert world famous for wind carved stones. Each of us has found romance again, but that comes and goes like changes in language. Anybody who would choose one of us for a companion had better understand we have our girlfriends with whom we have a bond of years, stronger than we will ever form with a single person.
    Life is still good, and we actually need intervention from the future less as time goes along. But we are still friends with each other forward as well as backward. On occasion we get a heads up that we'll need to change our thinking on something. When you get past the first thousand years it can be difficult to accept