by Neil Clarke
“The old history can’t repeat, and I’m in the next generation of people who make no impact on anything whatsoever. We aren’t making history. We’re in the middle of the ocean and the shore is really far away. When we climb out the journey should have changed us, but you want us to take all the baggage with us, so we’re exactly the same as when we left. But we can’t be, and we shouldn’t be.”
I turned off the screen and closed my eyes. I could fail him for not writing the assignment as I had intended it, but he clearly understood.
“Wendigo”
Traditional. Lost.
Harriet Barrie:
Another tune we have the name of but not much else. I’m personally of the belief “Wendigo” and “Windy Grove”are the same song. Some Cape Bretonians took it with them when they moved to the Algonquins. Taught it to some local musicians who misheard the title and conflated it with local monster lore. There’s a tune called “When I Go” that started making the rounds in Ontario not long after, though nobody ever showed an interest in it outside of Ontario and Finland.
If we were only to play songs about things we knew, we would lose a lot of our playlist. No wind. No trees. No battles, no seas, no creeks, no mountain-tops. We’d sing of travelers, but not journeys. We’d sing of middles, but not beginnings or ends. We would play songs of waiting and longing. We’d play love songs.
Why not songs about stars, you might ask? Why not songs about darkness and space? The traditionalists wouldn’t play them. I’m not sure who’d write them, either. People on Earth wrote about blue skies because they’d stood under grey ones. They wrote about night because there was such a thing as day. Songs about prison are poignant because the character knew something else beforehand and dreamed of other things ahead. Past and future are both abstractions now.
When my daughter Natalie was in her teens, she played fiddle in a band that would be classified in the new DB as “other/undefined” if they had uploaded anything. Part of their concept was that they wouldn’t record their music, and they requested that nobody else record it either. A person would have to be there to experience it. I guess it made sense for her to fall into something like that after listening to me and Gra and Harriet.
I borrowed back the student fiddle she and I had both played as children. She told me she didn’t want me going to hear them play.
“You’ll just tell me it sounds like noise or my positions are sloppy,” she said. “Or worse yet, you’ll say we sound exactly like this band from 2030 and our lyrics are in the tradition of blah blah blah, and I’ll end up thinking we stole everything from a musician I’d never even heard before. We want to do something new.”
“I’d never,” I said, even though a knot had formed in my stomach. Avoided commenting when I heard her practicing. Bit my tongue when Harriet complained musicians shouldn’t be wasting their time on new music when they ought to be working on preserving what we already had.
I did go to check them out once, when they played the Seven Dec Rec. I stood in the back, in the dark. To me it sounded like shouting down an elevator shaft, all ghosts and echoes. The songs had names like “Because I Said So” and “Terrorform”; they shouted the titles in between pieces, but the PA was distorting and even those I might have misheard.
I counted fifteen young musicians in the band, from different factions all over the ship: children of jazz, of rock, of classical music, of zouk, of Chinese opera, of the West African drumming group. It didn’t sound anything like anything I’d ever heard before. I still couldn’t figure out whether they were synthesizing the traditions they’d grown up in or rejecting them entirely.
My ears didn’t know what to pay attention to, so I focused on Nat. She still had decent technique from her childhood lessons, but she used it in ways I didn’t know how to listen to. She played rhythm rather than lead, a pad beneath the melody, a staccato polyrhythm formed with fiddle and drum.
I almost missed when she lit into “Wind Will Rove.” I’d never even have recognized it if I had been listening to the whole instead of focusing on Nat’s part. Hers was a countermelody to something else entirely, the rhythm swung but the key unchanged. Harriet would have hated it, but I thought it had a quiet power, hidden as it was beneath the bigger piece.
I never told Nat I’d gone to hear her that night, because I didn’t want to admit I’d listened.
I’ve researched punk and folk and hip-hop’s births, and the protest movements that went hand in hand with protest music. Music born of people trying to change the status quo. What could my daughter and her friends change? What did people want changed? The ship sails on. They played together for a year before calling it quits. She gave her fiddle away again and threw herself into studying medicine. As they’d pledged, nobody ever uploaded their music, so there’s no evidence it ever existed outside this narrative.
My grandmother smuggled the upright bass on board. It’s Doug Kelly’s now, but it came onto the ship under my grandmother’s “miscellaneous supplies” professional allowance. That’s how it’s listed in the original manifest: “Miscellaneous Supplies—1 Extra-Large Crate—200 cm x 70 cm x 70 cm.” When I was studying the manifest for a project, trying to figure out who had brought what, I asked her why the listed weight was so much more than the instrument’s weight.
“Strings,” she said. “It was padded with clothes and then the box was filled with string packets. For the bass, for the fiddles. Every cranny of every box I brought on board was filled with strings and hair and rosin. I didn’t trust replicators.”
The bass belonged at the time to Jonna Rich. In my grandmother’s photo of the original OldTime players on the ship, Jonna’s dwarfed by her instrument. It’s only a 3/4 size, but it still looms over her. I never met her. My grandmother said, “You’ve never seen such a tiny woman with such big, quick hands.”
When her arthritis got too bad to play, Jonna passed it to Marius Smit, “twice her size, but half the player she was.” Then Jim Riggins, then Alison Smit, then Doug Kelly, with assorted second and third stand-ins along the way. Those were the OldTime players. The bass did double duty in some jazz ensembles, as well as the orchestra.
Personal weight and space allowances didn’t present any problems for those who played most instruments. The teams handling logistics and psychological welfare sparred and negotiated and compromised and re-compromised. They made space for four communal drum kits (two each: jazz trap and rock five-piece), twenty-two assorted amplifiers for rock and jazz, bass and guitar and keyboard. We have two each of three different Chinese zithers, and one hundred and three African drums of thirty-two different types, from djembe to carimbo. There’s a PA in every Rec, but only a single tuba. The music psychologist consulted by the committee didn’t understand why an electric bass wasn’t a reasonable compromise for the sake of space. Hence my grandmother’s smuggling job.
How did a committee on Earth ever think they could guess what we’d need fifty or eighty or one hundred and eighty years into the voyage? They set us up with state of the art replicators, with our beautiful, doomed databases, with programs and simulators to teach skills we would need down the line. Still, there’s no model that accurately predicts the future. They had no way of prognosticating the brooked database or the resultant changes. They’d have known, if they’d included an actual musician on the committee, that we needed an upright bass. I love how I’m still surrounded by the physical manifestations of my grandmother’s influence on the ship: the upright bass, the pygmy goats. Her fiddle, my fiddle now.
I arrived in my classroom on Thursday to discover somebody had hacked my walls. Scrawled over my photo screens: “Collective memory =/= truth,” “History is fiction,” “The past is a lie.” A local overlay, not an overwrite. Nothing invasive of my personal files or permanent. Easy to erase, easy to figure out who had done it. I left it up.
As my students walked in, I watched their faces. Some were completely oblivious, wrapped up in whatever they were listening to, slouchin
g into their seats without even looking up. A few snickered or exchanged wide-eyed glances.
Nelson arrived with a smirk on his face, a challenge directed at me. He didn’t even look at the walls. It took him a moment to notice I hadn’t cleaned up after him; when he did notice, the smirk was replaced with confusion.
“You’re wondering why I didn’t wipe this off my walls before you arrived?”
The students who hadn’t been paying attention looked around for the first time. “Whoa,” somebody said.
“The first answer is that it’s easier to report if I leave it up. Vandalism and hacking are both illegal, and I don’t think it would be hard to figure out who did this, but since there’s no permanent damage, I thought we might use this as a learning experience.” Everyone looked at Nelson, whose ears had turned red.
I continued. “I think what somebody is trying to ask is, let’s see, ‘Ms. Clay, how do we know that the history we’re learning is true? Why does it matter?’ And I think they expect me to answer, ‘because I said so,’ or something like that. But the real truth is, our history is a total mess. It’s built on memories of facts, and memories are unreliable. Before, they could cross-reference memories and artifacts to a point where you could say with some reliability that certain things happened and certain things didn’t. We’ve lost almost all of the proof.”
“So what’s left?” I pointed to the graffitied pictures. “I’m here to help figure out which things are worth remembering, which things are still worth calling fact or truth or whatever you want to call it. Maybe it isn’t the most practical field of study, but it’s still important. It’ll matter to you someday when your children come to you to ask why we’re on this journey. It’ll matter when something goes wrong and we can look to the past and say ‘how did we solve this when we had this problem before’ instead of starting from scratch. It matters because of all the people who asked ‘why’ and ‘how’ and ‘what if ’ instead of allowing themselves to be absorbed in their own problems—they thought of us, so why shouldn’t we think of them?
“Today we’re going to talk about the climate changes that the Earth was experiencing by the time they started building this ship, and how that played into the politics. And just so you’re not waiting with bated breath through the entire class, your homework for the week is to interview somebody who still remembers Earth. Ask them why they or their parents got on board. Ask them what they remember about that time, and any follow-up questions you think make sense. For bonus points upload to the oral history DB once you’ve sent your video to me.”
I looked around to see if anyone had any questions, but they were all silent. I started the lesson I was actually supposed to be teaching.
I’d been given that same assignment at around their age. It was easier to find original Journeyers to interview back then, but I always turned to my grandmother. The video is buried in the Oral History DB, but I’d memorized the path to it long ago.
She’s still in good health in this one, fit and strong, with her trademark purple hair. For all our closeness, I have no idea what her hair’s original color was.
“Why did you leave?” I ask.
“I didn’t really consider it leaving. Going someplace, not leaving something else behind.”
“Isn’t leaving something behind part of going someplace?”
“You think of it your way, I’ll think of it mine.”
“Is that what all the Journeyers said?”
My grandmother snorts. “Ask any two and we’ll give you two different answers. You’re asking me, so I’m telling you how I see it. We had the technology, and the most beautiful ship. We had—have—a destination that reports perfect conditions to sustain us.”
“How did you feel about having a child who would never get to the destination?”
“I thought ‘my daughter will have a life nobody has ever had before, and she’ll be part of a generation that makes new rules for what it means to be a person existing with other people.’ ” She shrugs. “I found that exciting. I thought she’d live in the place she lived, and she’d do things she loved and things she hated, and she’d live out her life like anybody does.”
She pauses, then resumes without prompting. “There were worse lives to live, back then. This seemed like the best choice for our family. No more running away; running toward something wonderful.”
“Was there anything you missed about Earth?”
“A thing, like not a person? If a person counts, your grandfather and my other kids, always and forever. There was nothing else I loved that I couldn’t take with me,” she says, with a faraway look in her eyes.
“Nothing?” I press.
She smiles. “Nothing anybody can keep. The sea. The wind coming off the coast. I can still feel it when I’m inside a good song.” She reaches to pick up her fiddle.
There was a question I pointedly didn’t ask in that video, the natural follow-up that fit in my grandmother’s pause. I didn’t ask because it wasn’t my teacher’s business how my mother fit into that generation “making new rules for what it means to be a person existing with other people,” as my grandmother put it. If I haven’t mentioned my mother much, it’s because she and I never really understood each other.
She was eight when she came aboard. Old enough to have formative memories of soil and sky and wind. Old enough to come on board with her own small scale fiddle. Fourteen when she told my grandmother she didn’t want to play music anymore.
Eighteen when the Blackout happened. Nineteen when she had me, one of a slew of Blackout Babies granted by joint action of the Advisory Council and Logistics. They would have accepted anything that kept people happy and quiet at that point, as long as the numbers bore out its sustainability.
My grandmother begged her to come back to music, to help with the OldTime portion of the Memory Project. She refused. She’d performed in a Shakespeare comedy called Much Ado About Nothing just before the Blackout, while she was still in school. She still knew Hero’s lines by heart, and the general dramatists and Shakespeareans had both reached out to her to join their Memory Projects; they all had their hands full rebuilding plays from scratch.
The film faction recruited her as well, with their ridiculously daunting task. My favorite video from that period shows my twenty-year-old mother playing the lead in a historical drama called Titanic. It’s a recreation of an old movie, and an even older footnote in history involving an enormous sea ship.
My mother: young, gorgeous, glowing. She wore gowns that shimmered when she moved. The first time she showed it to me, when I was five, all I noticed was how beautiful she looked.
When I was seven, I asked her if the ocean could kill me.
“There’s no ocean here. We made it up, Rosie.”
That made no sense. I saw it there on the screen, big enough to surround the ship, like liquid, tangible space, a space that could chase you down the street and surround you. She took me down to the soundstage on Eight Deck, where they were filming a movie called Serena. I know now they were still triaging, filming every important movie to the best of their recollection, eight years out from the Blackout, based on scripts rewritten from memory in those first desperate years. Those are the only versions I’ve ever known.
She showed me how a sea was not a sea, a sky was not a sky. I got to sit on a boat that was not a boat, and in doing so learn what a boat was.
“Why are you crying, Mama?” I asked her later that evening, wandering from my bunk to my parents’ bed.
My father picked me up and squeezed me tight. “She’s crying about something she lost.”
“I’m not tired. Can we watch the movie again?”
We sat and watched my young mother as she met and fell in love with someone else, someone pretend. As they raced a rush of water that I had already been assured would never threaten me or my family. As the ship sank—it’s not real, there’s no sea, nothing sinks anymore—and the lifeboats disappeared and the two lovers were forced to hud
dle together on a floating door until their dawn rescue.
When I was sixteen, my mother joined a cult. Or maybe she started it; NewTime is as direct a rebuttal to my grandmother’s mission as could exist. They advocated erasing the entertainment databases again, forever, in the service of the species.
“We’re spending too much creative energy recreating the things we carried with us,” she said. I listened from my bunk as she calmly packed her clothes.
“You’re a Shakespearean! You’re supposed to recreate.” My father never raised his voice either. That’s what I remembered most about their conversation afterward: how neither ever broke calm.
“I was a Shakespearean, but more than that, I’m an actress. I want new things to act in. Productions that speak to who we are now, not who we were on Earth. Art that tells our story.”
“You have a family.”
“And I love you all, but I need this.”
The next morning, she kissed us both goodbye as if she was going to work, then left with the NewTime for Fourteen Deck. I didn’t know what Advisory Council machinations were involved in relocating the Fourteen Deck families to make room for an unplanned community, or what accommodations had to be made for people who opted out of jobs to live a pure artistic existence. There were times in human history where that was possible, but this wasn’t one of them. Those are questions I asked later. At that moment, I was furious with her.
I don’t know if I ever stopped being angry, really. I never went to any of the original plays that trickled out of the NewTime; I’ve never explored their art or their music. I never learned what we looked like through their particular lens. It wasn’t new works I opposed; it was their idea they had to separate themselves from us to create them. How could anything they wrote actually reflect our experience if they weren’t in the community anymore?