Shakespeare's Planet by Clifford D. Simak

firewood and sat down upon it, patting a place beside him. “Join me,” he said. “Nicodemus will do the cooking. It will take a while.” He said to Nicodemus, “You’d better cook hers well. I’ll take mine rare.”
    â€œI’ll start hers first,” said Nicodemus.
    Hesitantly, she came over to the woodpile and sat down next to Horton.
    â€œThis,” she said, “is the strangest situation I have ever encountered. A man and his robot talking the elder tongue. A carnivore who talks it as well, and a human skull nailed above a doorway. The two of you must be from one of the backwoods planets.”
    â€œNo,” said Horton. “We come straight from Earth.”
    â€œBut that can’t be,” she said. “No one now is straight from Earth. And I doubt that even there they speak the elder tongue.”
    â€œBut we are. We left Earth in the year …”
    â€œNo one has left Earth for more than a thousand years,” she said. “Earth now has no base for far traveling. Look, how fast were you traveling?”
    â€œAt near light-speed. With a few stops here and there.”
    â€œAnd you? You were, perhaps, in sleep?”
    â€œOf course, I was in sleep.”
    â€œAt near the speed of light,” she said, “there is no way to calculate. I know there were early calculations, mathematical calculations, but they were, at best, rough approximations, and the human race did not travel at the speed of light for a sufficient length of time to arrive at any true determination of the time dilation effect. Only a few interstellar ships traveling at the speed of light or less were sent out, and fewer of them returned. Before they did return, there were better systems for far traveling and, in the meantime, Old Earth had stumbled into a catastrophic economic collapse and a war situation—not a single, all-engulfing war, but many mean little wars—and in the process, Earth’s civilization was virtually destroyed. Old Earth is still there. Its remaining population may be climbing back again. No one seems to know; no one really cares; no one ever goes back to Old Earth. I can see you know nothing of all this.”
    Horton shook his head. “Nothing.”
    â€œThat means you were on one of the early light-ships.”
    â€œOne of the first,” said Horton, “In 2455. Or there-abouts. Maybe the first of the twenty-sixth century. I don’t really know. We were put into cold-sleep; then there was a delay.”
    â€œYou were put on standby.”
    â€œI guess that’s what you’d call it.”
    â€œWe aren’t absolutely sure,” she said, “but we think this is the year 4784. There is no certainty, really. Somehow history got all bollixed up. Human history, that is. There are a lot of other histories than Earth history. There was a time of confusion. There was an era of outpouring into space. Once there was a reasonable way to get into space, no one who could afford the going stayed on Earth. It required no great analytical ability to see what was happening to Earth. No one wanted to be caught in the crunch. For a great many years, there were not too many records. Those that did exist may have been erroneous; others were lost. As you might imagine, the human race passed through crisis after crisis. Not only on Earth, but in space as well. Not all the colonies survived. Some survived, but later failed, for one reason or another, to establish contact with other colonies, so were considered lost. Some still are lost—either lost or dead. The people went out into space in all directions—most of them without any actual plans, hoping that in time they’d find a planet where they could settle. They went out not only into space, but into time as well, and no one understood time factors. We still don’t. Under those conditions, it would be easy to gain a century or two or lose a century or two. So