Earth! Finally, earth again! It had been visible on screens for many days, but Jason could see it with the naked eye now, looking through the one tiny actual window on their spacecraft, in the very center of one end of the cylinder they lived in. Earth, that lovely place with blue oceans, white clouds, and open space. So much space.

He and Alison and Tom and Melissa had left earth in 2060 and been gone two years ... Two years in space. Their living quarters were a rather small tin can. It rotated to provide artificial gravity. He and Alison were a couple, and got to sleep together at night and have sex. Tom and Melissa were the other couple. There was a running track, a simple loop where a bystander would see you run up the wall, over the ceiling, and down the other wall again, over and over. You yourself would just experience running on the level. There was no end of computer-based entertainment. There was virtual reality of nature, culture, mundane living -- everything the mission designers could think to include. A reasonable variety of food. One perk available to no one on earth was the tube on the center axis for floating. Both couples practiced plenty of zero-G sex. Still, their entire living space had been a cylinder thirty feet in diameter and twenty feet in length, for two years.

Their mission? Passing time. They weren’t selected for their skills -- the computers handled everything. They had been accelerated for several months to very near the speed of light, and traveled at that speed for nearly two years. Now they had been slowing down for months. What they really were was a 4-person time capsule. They would arrive back on earth four hundred years after they left, in 2466, to be exact, though for them it had only been two years. People on earth of their apparent age would be descendants twelve generations on from the people who walked the earth with them before they left.

In another four hundred years, another foursome sent into space in 2060 would return to earth. With a speed closer to that of light, they too would have been away only two years, subjectively. But Jason, Alison, Tom and Melissa were the first time capsule humans to return to earth.

When they landed, their lives were suddenly very busy and very different. Jason had had dreams of grand ticker-tape parades, but in fact they were sequestered. They were experimental subjects. The society of the past had set in motion this experiment for the benefit of the society four hundred years in their future. They were medically examined in every way possible, tested in all sorts of devices, given no end of computer-based tests using words, patterns, and colors, asked about their beliefs, and told to write stories on various themes. There were questions like, “Exactly what procedure did you use when you took a shower before you left earth? What parts did you wash, in what order?” They were shown video clips from their time and asked questions about them -- who was thinking what? There were a surprising number of things that nobody had thought to record four hundred years before but were of intense interest to the moderns.

For a full year, they were not allowed to learn much of anything about the new world they had arrived back into, for that would contaminate them. Their handlers had been trained to speak and dress in the manner the four of them were accustomed to, though the training was imperfect. The accents were slightly different, and now and then one of the moderns would shush another who used a word they were unfamiliar with.

Finally, after a year, Jason and Alison were put on a new path. They said farewell to Tom and Melissa, who would remain ignorant of the new world and undergo more tests. But Jason and Alison were slowly told about the new world, bit by bit, their reactions measured in detail.

The climate crisis had been severe. World population was 3 billion, roughly a quarter of what it had been in 2060. Much of the decline had been due to starvation, heat stroke, and lack of water, but then things had stabilized, then improved. There was no longer any involuntary poverty, though a few groups of people chose to live traditional lifestyles with very little material comfort. Things now were energy-efficient to a degree they would never have dreamed of. High-rise buildings sat in bucolic surroundings, and they traveled within their city in small, silent, driverless cars.

People lived to roughly 100, but suffered the same deterioration and decline towards the end as had everyone in 2060. The food was very tasty, and they swore that the meat and dairy tasted exactly as it had when they left, before learning that it was now all fabricated, without the involvement of animals at all.

But much was unchanged. What is the meaning of life? What should I do with my life? There was corruption, racial and ethnic animosity, and there were even small-scale wars here and there. Artists of all sorts still strove to express their truths through prose, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, theater, and performance art.

But there was one thing that was decidedly different -- the twins. Twins, twins, everywhere. Twins who were identical in most respects, but also very different in one key way. One of each pair was the smarty, and the other the help. Help were genetically engineered to be not especially smart, but cheerful, happy, and very helpful. And to feel OK about what looked to an outsider like their lower status.

Jason’s handlers dropped him off at a large apartment on the 27th floor. He knew he was to live with a typical married foursome, if they all found it a harmonious situation. The foursome was of course deeply honored. Only one other family on earth was similarly honored, the one Alison was going to live with.

“Hello, you are named Jason, is it not so?” said a man who opened the door.

“That’s me.”

“This is Gertrude and Gertrudehelp, That’s Ebenezerhelp, and I’m to be called Ebenezer.”

It was apparent at once that the two women were identical twins, as were the two men. One of each pair was dressed in around-the-house clothes, the other in a more stylish fashion. He thought he could also tell them apart based on their demeanor. The help siblings were relaxed and smiled. The other two had more complex expressions.

He naturally thought about race. Both sets of twins were hard to place. Some East Asian, quite a bit of European white in both. Anything African? The men had very curly hair, cut short, though it was light brown in color. Some Indian subcontinent in the women? They had rather dark complexions, but blonde hair, which he would later determine was natural. The men were about six feet tall, the women five foot six. He himself was five foot ten, and a blue-eyed Nordic blond.

“You’se one the whiz-bang outer space folk, really? Quite the honor, much the honor,” said Ebenezerhelp.

“You will have to become ... accustomed to our new ways of talking,” said Ebenezer, haltingly. This foursome had not been chosen at all randomly. Ebenezer was a linguist, and Gertrude a historian.

“Oh, Ell-oh-ell, you do oldtalk, no no?” said Gertrudehelp.

Jason shrugged. “I guess I just talk the way I always have. Whatever you call it now.”

“Cool cool accentuation!” said Gertrude.

Jason gradually learned to understand the new lingo, the new words, the new expressions, and translated them in his mind into the English of 2060.

“Any time you wanna fuck, I’m ready,” said Gertrudehelp with a seductive smile.

Jason sat up straight, his surprise as evident in 2467 as it would have been in 2060.

“They wouldn’t have said that back in your day, would they?” said Ebenezer.

“Uh, no, not in a situation like this,” said Jason.

“I’m four months pregnant, but I still love to make men happy,” said Gertrudehelp.

Gertrude said, “Back in his day, twins were very rare, and identical twins even rarer. And they had no special roles. Each was his own person, some more like us smarties and some more like you helps.”

“So how did they work things out? Who did the help work and who did the smart work?” asked Ebenezerhelp.

“Some people did the help work, but they got paid less and often lived in poverty. Others did the smart work, and they got paid more and lived better,” said Gertrude. “Does that sound right?”

Jason agreed that sounded about right. That was the human condition, and he had thought it was the way things had to be. The only way things could be, as socialist utopian experiments had been such uniform failures.

“It’s almost time for lunch,” said Gertrude. “Ebenezerhelp will prepare it. Sure you don’t want a quick fuck with Gertrudehelp? It would be our way.” Ebenezerhelp went off to the kitchen.

Jason gulped. “Well, OK.” He stood up.

“You see a woman like her, you want to fuck her, right?”

“Um, yeah. But in my day I’d hardly ever get to. I’d see lots of women I’d like to have sex with, but didn’t get to very often.”

“One way the modern world is better. I’m curious how a guy from ancient history would do it...” said Ebenezer. Gertrudehelp came up to face him, put her arms on his shoulders, and raised her face for a gentle kiss. Gertrude and Ebenezer just sat and looked on with interest.

“Uh, you’re going to watch?” said Jason.

“Oh, right, privacy!” said Ebenezer, with a face-palm. “Go to the guest room and shut the door,” he said to Gertrudehelp.

“OK, shy guy,” she said with a giggle and led him into the guest room. Soon they were both naked, and she got on her knees in front of him and admired his stiff cock, which got even stiffer as she began licking it.

“Or, what do you like better?” she said.

“What ... what would be the custom?” said Jason, feeling lingering pleasure from her oral attentions to his penis.

“From the rear, like horses, that’s the way lots of guys like to start out.”

“That sounds good,” said Jason with a smile.

And there was Gertrudehelp, in doggy position on the bed, back arched, holding her pussy lips apart, looking around at him and smiling.

Jason approached from behind on his knees and slid his cock in. He thought of himself and Alison. Three years together before the flight, two years in space, and two years since -- they had never once done it that way. She would have been offended at the idea...

Now here he was behind Gertrudehelp, his cock deep inside her from the rear, and she was moaning with delight at his vigorous sexual motion.

“What about you?” he asked.

“What about me?”

“When do you have your orgasm?”

“Me, orgasm? Oh, if you really want to I could some time, but not now, surely?”

“OK,” said Jason, grabbing her hips and fucking with greater intensity.

“Most guys wouldn’t last much longer than a stallion,” she said with a giggle. “No need to hold back ... Any time you want to do it again, just let me know...”

Jason was primed for orgasm, and within thirty seconds he lunged deep and ejaculated way up inside Gertrudehelp. Satisfied, he withdrew and sat on the bed, breathing deeply.

“I can tell you liked that,” said Gertrudehelp, turning and sitting beside him.

“Lunch, any time,” came Ebenezerhelp’s voice outside the door.

Gertrudehelp got dressed, as did he, and the five of them ate a delicious lunch of steak, potatoes, broccoli, and a tossed salad, served by Ebenezerhelp.

When lunch was over, Gertrudehelp worked on the clean-up, Ebenezer said he had to check in with work online, while the other three of them retired to the living room.

“Thinking about the two of you got me in the mood, I have to say,” said Gertrude.

Jason wondered if she was going to seduce him too, but she soon clarified when she addressed him. “You mind if we do it out here?”

“Uh, no...” said Jason.

“You can watch if you want.”

Gertrude lay back on the sofa and smiled. Ebenezerhelp kissed her for several seconds, then set to work below. He massaged the inside of her bare thighs, his hands moving up under her dress towards her crotch. He then flipped up her dress and pulled her panties down and off, and then he set to work with his tongue on Gertrude’s organ of female pleasure. The pleasure was plainly visible on her face. Minutes went by, and Jason was soon turned on.

Gertrudehelp emerged from the kitchen, saw the one couple engaged together and the bulge in Jason’s pants, and said, “Hey, want to do it? Out here, the modern way?”

“Uh, OK,” said Jason.

And there was Gertrudehelp on her back on the other sofa, naked from the waist down, legs spread wide. The other two looked briefly to see what was going on but went back to their cunnilingus.

And with his pants around his ankles, Jason mounted Gertrudehelp and entered her, and began thrusting.

On the other sofa, Gertrude gasped and bucked her hips in what must surely have been an orgasm. She smiled at Ebenezerhelp and he smiled at her, and then she whispered, “More!” He went right back to licking her.

Ebenezer walked in. Jason’s upbringing prepared him to be irate at this other man doing it with his wife -- one of his wives? -- but he just smiled.

Jason had been going three minutes but felt like finishing up. It seemed that was the norm, that he would just finish when he felt like it. He felt like it. He panted and groaned and shot his second load of the day into Gertrudehelp. He had to admit he liked this way of doing sex better than with Alison, where it was all about timing and mood and balancing desires and lasting a long time while she got sufficiently aroused and finally came.

“Hey, my turn,” said Ebenezer, as Jason withdrew his slick cock from Gertrudehelp.

“Of course, sweety,” said Gertrudehelp, as Jason sat in the armchair to watch.

Ebenezer just fished his stiff cock out of his pants, mounted, entered her, and thrust for ten seconds before groaning and sighing, then withdrew.

Gertrudehelp smiled sweetly.

As the three of them put themselves back together, Gertrude said, “Help-man, puncture me and just in-and-shoot after I fly!” The modern phrasing was so distinctive that Jason made a mental note of it.

In seconds, Ebenezerhelp stripped, his stiff cock on display, and went back to licking Gertrude. In a minute, she gasped and groaned and moaned.

Ebenezerhelp stopped licking, mounted her and thrust his cock into her all the way in one fast invasion. Gertrude gasped and moaned again, and Ebenezerhelp said, “Oh, yes!” apparently ejaculating just as Gertrude had requested. When he was done he lay down on her and they kissed.

After thirty seconds she motioned him up, sat up herself and said, “Everyone happy?”

They all nodded, got dressed and the conversation turned to other topics.

Later, when he was alone with Ebenezer, he said, “I noticed the pairings. You never did it with Gertrude, nor did I, and the two helps never did it with each other.”

Ebenezer looked surprised. “Oh, oh, sure. You wouldn’t know. Mostly smarties are attracted to helps and vice versa, and almost all the sex happens that way. You’re obviously in the smarty class, so Gertrude wouldn’t do you.”

“What if I asked her?”

Ebenezer looked uncomfortable. “You could, I guess. But it would be rude. Gertrudehelp looks just like her, and if you want sex with Gertrude, you do it with Gertrudehelp instead. Of course, there’s no Jasonhelp around, so if Gertrude did have the hots for you she’d be out of luck -- or have to break tradition.”

“And you don’t mind me doing it to Gertrudehelp? Being like ... I don’t know, your sexual partner within this marriage?”

“Nah, not at all. She’ll do it with any man who asks. And if I see some other help woman, she’ll be happy to let me do her. And I do, plenty. All the females get an implant at puberty and they’re never fertile unless they take a specific drug. And when Gertrudehelp was that way, she would never do it with another guy. She’d only do it with me. So the baby would be ours.”

“Yours plural?”

“Me and Ebenezerhelp. We’re the same person, genetically speaking.”

There was a great deal of what Jason had been raised to call “sleeping around.” He had also learned that the problem of sexually transmitted infections had been solved completely hundreds of years before.

On another occasion he caught Gertrude alone.

“So, the help people. What work do they do? Aside from cooking and cleaning?”

“Well, they do all the child care. Gertrudehelp and Ebenezerhelp will raise the boys when they’re born ... Mortimer and Mortimerhelp.”

“Boys, right. Identical twins. And how will you know which is which? Or do you do something to turn one into a help and the other into a smarty?”

“No, that’s determined before birth, and it becomes apparent pretty soon. Helps are always easy babies. Smarties often aren’t. Smarties have temper tantrums later, helps don’t.”

“What about outside the home? Do the helps work outside?”

“Oh, sure ... nursing aids, delivery people, janitors, hairdressers, yard-work people.”

“And the rest of you?”

“All the other jobs, the higher ones. Engineers, managers, scientists, lawyers, therapists, inventors. Anything that takes more initiative and judgment and skill.”

“From the perspective of my time, we’d call it a class society ... exploitation. Don’t the help people resent it?”

Gertrude paused to look at him. “No, they don’t want anything more. Some don’t even want the responsibility of being a fast food restaurant shift supervisor, for instance. Too much thinking. But some are willing. So it all works out.”

“What about the differential pay?”

“Every smarty and help pair are a single economic unit. We’re inseparable. What belongs to one belongs to the other. You ever see how we sleep at night?”

Soon after he’d arrived, he got up in the middle of the night, and on his way back to bed looked into the master bedroom. The identical twins slept with each other, the one spooned against the other.

“I think I can see how it will work out. How did this whole system get started?”

“I don’t know the details -- that’s not my field exactly -- but they did a bunch of experiments and this seemed to be the one that worked best.”

Jason had learned a version of all this before he came to live with the family, but wanted to hear first-hand accounts, not just rely on the truths this society advertised about itself publicly.

Jason sometimes found Ebenezer and Gertrude sitting in the living room talking earnestly. Often they invited him to join them and they discussed all manner of big questions -- the political controversies of the day, the modern controversies in art, the sensational stories that were still with humanity in the 27th century. Naturally their conversations tended to a comparison of Jason’s time with their own. There was a great deal to discuss.

Other times he saw them holding hands, perhaps with Gertrude’s head on Ebenezer’s shoulder. They certainly had affection for each other.

“Ebenezerhelp, I want to ask you something.”

“Sure. What can I do for you?”

“Are you happy living like this?”

“I’m happy. Living like what?”

“Ebenezer gets to go out in the world and do interesting things. So does Gertrude. You and Gertrudehelp stay home and are their servants.”

“I wouldn’t want to do those ‘interesting things’. They take a lot of knowledge and are very hard. I’m happy helping them in any way I can.”

“You don’t get to make any of the big decisions.”

“They’re better at making decisions than I am.”

Jason paused to consider.