The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  I continued. “Secondly, Emily is right. It’s important to know why and how we got here. The conventional wisdom remains that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

  “How are we supposed to repeat it?” Nelson waved at the pictures on the walls. “We don’t have countries or oil or water. Or guns or swords or bombs. If teachers hadn’t told us about them we wouldn’t even know they existed. We’d be better off not knowing that my ancestors tried to kill Emily’s ancestors, wouldn’t we? Somebody even tried to erase all of that entirely, and you made sure it was still included in the new version of history.”

  “Not me, Nelson. That was before my time.” I knew I shouldn’t let them get a rise out of me, but I was tired and hungry, not the ideal way to start a seven hour music marathon. “Enough. I get what you’re saying, but not learning this is not an option. Send me a thousand words by Tuesday on an example of history repeating itself.”

  Before anyone protested, I added, “You were going to have an essay to write either way. All I’ve done is changed the topic. It doesn’t sound like you wanted to write about space races.”

  They all grumbled as they plugged themselves back into their games and music and shuffled out the door. I watched them go, wishing I’d handled the moment differently, but not yet sure how. It fascinated me that Nelson was the one fomenting this small rebellion, when his great-grandmother ran the OldTime Memory Project. My grandmother was the reason I obsessed over history, why I’d chosen teaching; Harriet didn’t seem to have had the same effect on Nelson.

  As Nelson passed my desk, he muttered, “Maybe somebody needs to erase it all again.”

  “Stop,” I told him.

  He turned back to face me. I still had several inches on him, but he held himself as if he were taller. The rest of the students flowed out around him. Trina rammed her wheelchair into Nelson’s leg as she passed, in a move that looked 100 percent deliberate. She didn’t even pretend to apologize.

  “I don’t mind argument in my classroom, but don’t ever let anyone hear you advocating another Blackout.”

  He didn’t look impressed. “I’m not advocating. I just think teaching us Earth history—especially broken history—is a waste of everybody’s time.”

  “Maybe someday you’ll get on the Education Committee, and you can argue for that change. But I heard you say ‘erase it all again.’ That isn’t the same thing. Would you say that in front of Harriet?”

  “Maybe I was just exaggerating. It’s not even possible to erase everything anymore. And there’s plenty of stuff I like that I wouldn’t want to see erased.” He shrugged. “I didn’t mean it. Can I go now?”

  He left without waiting for me to dismiss him.

  I looked at the walls I’d carefully curated for this class. Tenth grade had always been the year we taught our journey’s political and scientific antecedents. It was one of the easier courses for the Education Committee to recreate accurately after the Blackout, since some of it had still been in living memory at the time, and one of the easier classrooms to decorate for the same reason. I’d enlarged images of our ship’s construction from my grandmother’s personal collection, alongside reproductions of news headlines. Around the top of the room, a static quote from United Nations Secretary-General Confidence Swaray: “We have two missions now: to better the Earth and to better ourselves.”

  Normally I’d wipe my classroom walls to neutral for the continuing education group that met there in the evening, but this time I left the wall displays on when I turned off the lights to leave. Maybe we’d all failed these children already if they thought the past was irrelevant.

  The digital art on the street outside my classroom had changed during the day. I traced my fingertips along the wall to get the info: a reimagining of a memory of a photo of an Abdoulaye Konaté mural, sponsored by the Malian Memory Project. According to the description, the original had been a European transit station mosaic, though they no longer knew which city or country had commissioned it. Fish swam across a faux-tiled sea. Three odd blue figures stood tall at the far end, bird-like humanoids. The colors were soothing to me, but the figures less so. How like the original was it? No way to tell. Another reinvention to keep some version of our past present in our lives.

  I headed back to my quarters for my instrument and a quick dinner. There was always food at the OldTime, but I knew from experience that if I picked up my fiddle I wouldn’t stop playing until my fingers begged. My fingers and my stomach often had different agendas. I needed a few minutes to cool down after that class, too. Nelson had riled me with his talk of broken history. To me that had always made preserving it even more important, but I understood the point he was trying to make.

  By the time I got to the Four Deck Rec, someone had already taken my usual seat. I tuned in the corner where everyone had stashed their cases, then looked around to get the lay of the room. The best fiddlers had nabbed the middle seats, with spokes of mandolin and banjo and guitar and less confident fiddlers radiating out. The only proficient OldTime bass player, Doug Kelly, stood near the center, with the ship’s only upright bass. A couple of his students sat behind him, ready to swap out for a tune or two if he wanted a break.

  The remaining empty seats were all next to banjos. I spotted a chair beside Dana Torres from the ship’s Advisory Council. She was a good administrator and an adequate banjo player—she kept time, anyway. I didn’t think she’d show up if she were less than adequate; nobody wants to see leadership failing at anything.

  She had taken a place two rings removed from my usual seat in the second fiddle tier. Not the innermost circle, where my grandmother had sat, with the players who call the tunes and call the stops; at fifty-five years old, I hadn’t earned a spot there yet. Still, I sat just outside them and kept up with them, and it’d been a long time since I’d caught a frown from the leaders.

  A tune started as I made my way to the empty chair. “Honeysuckle.” A thought crossed my mind that Harriet had started “Honeysuckle” without me, one of my Memory Project tunes, to punish me for being late. A second thought crossed my mind, mostly because of the conversation with my students, that probably only three other people in the room knew or cared what honeysuckle was: Tom Mvovo, who maintained the seed bank; Liat Shuster, who worked in the greenhouse—in all our nights together, I never thought to ask her about the honeysuckle plant; Harriet Barrie, music historian, last OldTime player of the generation that had left Earth. To everyone else, it was simply the song’s name. A name that meant this song, nothing more.

  When I started thinking that way, all the songs took on a strange flat quality in my head. So many talked about meadows and flowers and roads and birds. The love songs maintained relevance, but the rest might as well have been written in other languages as far as most people were concerned. Or about nothing at all. Mostly, we let the fiddles do the singing.

  No matter how many times we play a song, it’s never the same song twice. The melody stays the same, the key, the rhythm. The notes’ pattern, their cadence. Still, there are differences. The exact number of fiddles changes. Various players’ positions within the group, each with their own fiddle’s tim-bral variances. The locations of the bass, the mandolins, the guitars, the banjos, all in relation to each individual player’s ears. To a listener by the snack table, or to someone seeking out a recording after the fact, the nuances change. In the minutes the song exists, it is fully its own. That’s how it feels to me, anyway.

  Harriet stomped her foot to indicate we’d reached the last go-round for “Honeysuckle,” and we all came to an end together except one of the outer guitarists, who hadn’t seen the signal and kept chugging on the last chord. He shrugged off the glares.

  “Oklahoma Rooster,” she shouted, to murmurs of approval. She started the tune, and the other fiddles picked up the melody. I put my bow to the strings and closed my eyes. I pictured a real farm, the way they looked in pictures, and let the song tell me how it felt to be in the place
called Oklahoma. A sky as big as space, the color of chlorinated water. The sun a distant disk, bright and cold. A wood-paneled square building, with a round building beside it. A perfect carpet of green grass. Horses, large and sturdy, bleating at each other across the fields. All sung in the voice of a rooster, a bird that served as a wake-up alarm for the entire farm. Birds were the things with feathers, as the old saying went.

  It was easy to let my mind wander into meadows and fields during songs I had played once a week nearly my whole life. Nelson must have gotten under my skin more than I thought: I found myself adding the weeks and months and years up. Fifty times a year, fifty years, more or less. Then the same songs again alone for practice, or in smaller groups on other nights.

  The OldTime broke up at 0300, as it usually did. I rolled my head from side to side, cracking my neck. The music always carried me through the night, but the second it stopped, I started noticing the cramp of my fingers, the unevenness of my shoulders.

  “What does ‘Oklahoma Rooster’ mean to you?” I asked Dana Torres as she shook out her knees.

  “Sorry?”

  “What do you think of when you play ‘Oklahoma Rooster’?”

  Torres laughed. “I think C-C-G-C-C-C-G-C. Anything else and I fall behind the beat. Why, what do you think of ?”

  A bird, a farm, a meadow. “I don’t know. Sorry. Weird question.”

  We packed our instruments and stepped into the street, dimmed to simulate night.

  Back at my quarters, I knew I should sleep, but instead I sat at the table and called up the history database. “Wind Will Rove.”

  Options appeared: “Play,” cross-referenced to the song database, with choices from several OldTime recordings we’d made over the years. “Sheet music,” painstakingly generated by my grandmother and her friends, tabbed for all of the appropriate instruments. “History.” I tapped the last icon and left it to play as I heated up water for soporific tea. I’d watched it hundreds of times.

  A video would play on the table. A stern looking white woman in her thirties, black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, bangs flat-cut across her forehead. She’d been so young then, the stress of the situation making her look older than her years.

  “Harriet Barrie, Music Historian,” the first subtitle would say, then Harriet would appear and begin, “The fiddler Olivia Vandiver and her father, Charley Vandiver came up with this tune in the wee hours of a session in 1974 … .” Except when I returned, the table had gone blank. I went back to the main menu, but this time no options came up when I selected “Wind Will Rove.” I tried again, and this time the song didn’t exist.

  I stared at the place where it should have been, between “Winder’s Slide” and “Wolf Creek.” Panic stirred deep in my gut, a panic handed down to me. Maybe I was tired and imagining things. It had been there a moment ago. It had always been there, my whole life. The new databases had backups of backups of backups, even if the recordings we called originals merely recreated what had been lost long ago. Glitches happened. It would be fixed in the morning.

  Just in case, I dashed off a quick message to Tech. I drank my tea and went to bed, but I didn’t sleep well.

  “Wind Will Rove”

  Historical reenactment. Windy Green as Olivia Vandiver, Fiddler:

  “We were in our ninth hour playing. It had been a really energetic session, and we were all starting to fade. Chatting more between songs so we could rest our fingers. I can’t remember how the subject came up, but my father brought up a tune called “Windy Grove. ” Nobody else had ever heard of it, and he called us all ignorant Americans.

  He launched into an A part that sounded something like “Spirits of the Morning,” but with a clever little lift where “Spirits” descends. My father did things with a fiddle the rest of us could never match, but we all followed as best we were able. The B part wasn’t anything like “Spirits, ” and we all caught that pretty fast, but the next time the A part came round it was different again, so we all shut up and let him play. The third time through sounded pretty much like the second, so we figured he had remembered the tune, and we jumped in again. It went the same the fourth and fifth times through.

  It wasn’t until we got up the next day that he admitted he had never quite remembered the tune he was trying to remember, which meant the thing we had played the night before was of his own creation. We cleaned it up, called it ‘Wind Will Rove, ’ and recorded it for the third Vandiver Family LP. ”

  My grandmother was an astronaut. We are not astronauts. It’s a term that’s not useful in our vocabulary. Do the people back on Earth still use that word? Do they mention us at all? Are they still there?

  When our families left they were called Journeyers. Ten thousand Journeyers off on the Incredible Journey, with the help of a genetic bank, a seed bank, an advisory council. A ship thirty years in the making, held together by a crew of trained professionals: astronauts and engineers and biologists and doctors and the like. Depending on which news outlet you followed, the Journeyers were a cult or a social experiment or pioneers. Those aren’t terms we use for ourselves, since we have no need to call ourselves anything in reference to any other group. When we do differentiate, it’s to refer to the Before. I don’t know if that makes us the During or the After.

  My mother’s parents met in Texas, in the Before, while she was still in training. My grandfather liked being married to an astronaut when the trips were finite, but he refused to sign up for the Journey. He stayed behind on Earth with two other children, my aunt and uncle, both older than my mother. I imagine those family members sometimes. All those people I have no stories for. Generations of them.

  It’s theoretically possible that scientists on Earth have built faster ships by now. It’s theoretically possible they’ve developed faster travel while we’ve been busy traveling. It’s theoretically possible they’ve built a better ship, that they’ve peopled it and sent it sailing past us, that they’ve figured out how to freeze and revive people, that those who stepped into the ship will be the ones who step out. That we will be greeted when we reach our destination by our own ancestors. I won’t be there, but my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren might be. I wonder what stories they’ll tell each other.

  This story is verifiable history. It begins, “There once was a man named Morne Brooks.” It’s used to scare children into doing their homework and paying attention in class. Nobody wants to be a cautionary tale.

  There once was a man named Morne Brooks. In the fourth year on board, while performing a computer upgrade, he accidentally created a backdoor to the ship databases. Six years after that, an angry young programmer named Trevor Dube released a virus that ate several databases in their entirety. Destroyed the backups too. He didn’t touch the “important” systems—navigation, life support, medical, seed and gene banks—but he caused catastrophic damage to the libraries. Music gone. Literature, film, games, art, history: gone, gone, gone, gone. Virtual reality simulation banks, gone, along with the games and the trainings and the immersive recreations of places on Earth. He killed external communications too. We were alone, years earlier than we expected to be. Severed.

  For some reason, it’s Brooks’ name attached to the disaster. Dube was locked up, but Brooks still walked around out in the community for people to point at and shame. Our slang term “brooked” came from his name. He spent years afterward listening to people say they had brooked exams and brooked relationships. I suppose it didn’t help that he had such a good name to lend. Old English, Dutch, German. A hard word for a lively stream of water. We have no use for it as a noun now; no brooks here. His shipmates still remembered brooks, though they’d never see one again. There was a verb form already, unrelated, but it had fallen from use. His contemporaries verbed him afresh.

  It didn’t matter that for sixteen years afterward he worked on the team that shored up protection against future damage, or that he eventually committed suicide. Nobody wanted to talk about Dube o
r his motivations; all people ever mentioned was the moment the screens went dark, and Brooks’ part in the whole disaster when they traced it backward.

  In fairness, I can’t imagine their panic. They were still the original Journeyers, the original crew, the original Advisory Council, save one or two changes. They were the ones who had made sure we had comprehensive databases, so we wouldn’t lose our history, and so they wouldn’t be without their favorite entertainments. The movies and serials and songs reminded them of homes they had left behind.

  The media databases meant more to that first generation than I could possibly imagine. They came from all over the Earth, from disparate cultures; for some from smaller sub-groups, the databases were all that connected them with their people. It’s no wonder they reacted the way they did.

  I do sometimes wonder what would be different now if things hadn’t gone wrong so early in the journey. Would we have naturally moved beyond the art we carried, instead of clinging to it as we do now? All we can do is live it out, but I do wonder.

  I don’t teach on Fridays. I can’t bounce back from seven hours of fiddling, or from the near-all-nighter, the way I did at twenty or thirty or forty. Usually I sleep through Friday mornings. This time, I woke at ten, suddenly and completely, with the feeling something was missing. I glanced at the corner by the door to make sure I hadn’t left my fiddle at the Rec.

  I showered, then logged on to the school server to see if any students had turned in early assignments—they hadn’t—then checked the notice system for anything that might affect my plans for the day. It highlighted a couple of streets I could easily avoid, and warned that the New Shakespeare and Chinese Cultural DBs were down for maintenance. Those alerts reminded me about the database crash the night before. My stomach lurched again as I called up “Wind Will Rove,” but it was there when I looked for it, right where it belonged.

  The door chimed. Fridays I had lunch with Harriet. We called it lunch, even though we’d both be eating our first meal of the day. She didn’t get up early after the OldTime either. Usually I cut it pretty close, rolling out of bed and putting on clothes, knowing she’d done the same. I glanced around the room to make sure it was presentable. I’d piled some dirty clothes on the bed, but they were pretty well hidden behind the privacy screen. Good enough.