Things Fall Apart: Chapter 69
Union City, Cherryh's World, Tau Ceti, 16.14.775 CW
Esmé Singer considered the bags of groceries as she hefted them off the checkout counter from the distribution center with a certain resignation. Cherryh's World had, fortunately, not wholly given up agriculture with the advent of replication, but it had cut back quite a bit, in the name of letting more land rewild. It had always been in the mind of Cherryhers not to let their world become what Earth had become, long before its final collapse: a world barely habitable despite being humanity's cradle.
Still, they had a world where crops would grow, so they grew their food as well as allowing replication to supplement it.
Energy, however, was scarce right now, so replication was being very strongly curtailed. The planetary grid was fragmented from scrammed power plants. There had been some EMPs, as well, and other random disasters. All in all, compared to what was going on with space-based habitats and starships, Esmé knew she had very little to complain about.
No one currently living on Cherryh, however, had ever had to endure rationing of any sort. She supposed she should be perfectly pleased that her bag held enough to ensure she would not go hungry. Nor would any guests she received soon, and she had in fact used her expectation of at least one guest, and a somewhat famous one at that, to convince the distro to permit her to overcharge her ration card. If she tried to do that every trip, it would quickly get shut down, but the government was trying hard not to let the necessities of rationing to turn into cruelty. History abounded with examples of governments treating hardships like punishments. Cherryh may not have kept everything about Newer York's culture, but it did keep the determination to learn from past mistakes.
So, despite finding the rations boring due to limited choices, Esmé was forced to admit as she walked up the street back to her home that at least she had enough to eat and to feed her wayward child, should she appear.
Despite that thought being firmly in her mind, in the form of a most devout wish rather than a genuine expectation, she was entirely surprised to open the door and find a uniform jacket hung on a peg by the door. Mindful that some of what was in her bags was breakable, she placed them carefully on the kitchen table before proceeding into the living room, to find that for once in her life, a wish had come most materially true.
There stood her daughter, although Esmé was quite certain she'd been sitting just moments before, a tablet still in hand. Neither one said a word—there were too many words to say all at once, and none of them would come, and anyway, Elyah came by her gift of empathy honesty. Theirs was a relationship that had bordered on the telepathic, and Esmé had often thought, though Elyah had never said, that Elyah had left the planet as much to put distance between so close an emotional bond with her mother as anything else.
After a moment, however, Elyah put the tablet down as carefully as Esmé had put down the groceries in the kitchen, and met her mother in the doorway, where they reached out simultaneously to hug each other.
And then Elyah, her strong, capable daughter who apparently had saved not only her crew but the survivors of Gliese 581, who now captained the only known Treaty Fleet starship, fell entirely apart in her arms.
Yes, I know that's awfully short after a hiatus, but...that's where the chapter starts. The writer doesn't always get to choose that. It doesn't make any sense, but it's true.