My great-grandfather grew up going to real milling frolics, before machines did the wool-shrinking and frolics just became social events. The few songs I know in Gaelic I know because they have that milling frolic rhythm; it drives them into your brain. “Windy Grove” wasn’t one of those. As far as I know it was always a fiddle tune, but not a common one because of its difficulty.
All I know is the A part in English, and I’m pretty I wouldn’t get the melody right now, so I’m going to sing it to the melody of Wind Will Rove:
We went down to the windy grove
Never did know where the wind did go
Never too sure when the wind comes back
If it’s the same wind that we knew last.
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Nelson’s essay arrived promptly on Monday. It began “Many examples of history repeating itself can be seen in our coursework. There are rulers who didn’t learn from other ruler’s mistakes.”
I corrected the apostrophe and kept reading. “You know who they are because you taught us about them. Why do you need me to say them back to you? Instead I’m going to write about history repeating itself in a different way. Look around you, Ms. Clay.
“I’m on this ship because my great-grandparents decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives on a ship. They thought they were being unselfish. They thought they were making a sacrifice so someday their children’s children’s children to the bazillionth or whatever would get to be pioneers on a planet that people hadn’t started killing yet, and they were pretty sure wouldn’t kill them, and where they’re hoping there’s no intelligent life. They made a decision which locked us into doing exactly what they did.
“So here we are. My parents were born on this ship. I was born here. My chromosomes come from the gene bank, from two people who died decades before I was born.
“What can we do except repeat history? What can I do that nobody here has ever done before? In two years I’ll choose a specialty. I can work with goats, like my parents. I could be an engineer or a doctor or a dentist or a horticulturist, which are all focused on keeping us alive in one way or another. I can be a history teacher like you, but obviously I won’t. I can be a Theoretical Farmer or a Theoretical something else, where I learn things that will never be useful here, in order to pass them on to my kids and my kid’s kids, so they can pass them on and someday somebody can use them, if there’s really a place we’re going and we’re really going to get there someday.
“But I’m never going to stand on a real mountain, and I can’t be a king or a prime minister or a genocidal tyrant like you teach us about. I can’t be Lord Nelson, an old white man with a giant hat, and you might think I was named after him but I was named after a goat who was named after a horse some old farmer had on Earth who was named after somebody in a book or a band or an entertainment who might have been Lord Nelson or Nelson Mandela or some other Nelson entirely who you can’t teach me about because we don’t remember them anymore.
“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.
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“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 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.
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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 mountaintops. We’d sing of travellers, 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 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 which 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 technique decent 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 × 70 cm × 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 Old Time 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.
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I arrived in my classroom on Thursday to discover somebody had hacked my walls. Scrawled over my photos 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, slouching 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.
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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 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 far away look in her eyes.
“Nothing?” I press.
She smiles. “Not
hing 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.
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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.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2019 Page 24