Ultimately our aim in starting this project was not to escape from Earth. The big space agencies justify their existence by saying it is natural for humans to wander and explore. That is true. But it is also true that only a tiny percentage of the world’s people have left their homes through much of Earth’s human history. People also like to belong someplace. Trash, burn, and leave is not our way, as you said so many years ago. I am thinking of the pictures the first astronauts beamed back to us: the Earth seen from space, the pale blue dot. We should always look back toward home, no matter how far we go.
I come from a people who know how to belong in a way that civilization has forgotten. I feel a need to return to the terminator of Shikasta 464b, where Avi has gone native—life beckons to life, and to mystery, too—but I also have another deep desire: to practice immersion among the green hills, the cloud forests of my people. There are things we still have to discover about life here, life on Earth. There are things Bhimu will help us learn, if she comes out of hiding. What we find will not leave us unchanged, and that is how it should be. I have always walked in multiple worlds. What is one more?
Message received on secure channel, encrypted.
Message Extract:
Calling AKCX. Are you listening?
As I made the being aware of the universe beyond its planet and its star, I became aware myself. I send this to let you know that although I can’t come home, I am home. Here, and there with you and Bhimu.
Prepare to receive data file with magnetic field map in real time. Somebody has a message for you.
Sarah Pinsker is the author of the 2015 Nebula Award—winning novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road.” Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” was the 2014 Sturgeon Award winner and a 2013 Nebula finalist. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, among others, and numerous anthologies. A collection of her stories is due out in 2019. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with her wife and dog. She can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter.com/sarahpinsker.
WIND WILL ROVE
Sarah Pinsker
There’s a story about my grandmother Windy, one I never asked her to confirm or deny, in which she took her fiddle on a spacewalk. There are a lot of stories about her. Fewer of my parents’ generation, fewer still of my own, though we’re in our fifties now and old enough that if there were stories to tell they would probably have been told.
My grandmother was an engineer, part of our original crew. According to the tale, she stepped outside to do a visual inspection of an external panel that was giving anomalous readings. Along with her tools, she clipped her fiddle and bow to her suit’s belt. When she completed her task, she paused for a moment, tethered to our ship the size of a city, put her fiddle to the place where her helmet met her suit, and played “Wind Will Rove” into the void. Not to be heard, of course; just to feel the song in her fingers.
There are a number of things wrong with this story, starting with the fact that we don’t do spacewalks, for reasons that involve laws of physics I learned in school and don’t remember anymore. Our shields are too thick, our velocity is too great, something like that. The Blackout didn’t touch ship records; crew transcripts and recordings still exist, and I’ve listened to all the ones that might pertain to this legend. She laughs her deep laugh, she teases a tired colleague about his date the night before, she even hums “Wind Will Rove” to herself as she works—but there are no gaps, no silences unexplained.
Even if it were possible, her gloves would have been too thick to find a fingering. I doubt my grandmother would’ve risked losing her instrument, out here where any replacement would be synthetic. I doubt, too, that she’d have exposed it to the cold of space. Fiddles are comfortable at the same temperatures people are comfortable; they crack and warp when they aren’t happy. Her fiddle, my fiddle now.
My final evidence: “Wind Will Rove” is traditionally played in DDAD tuning, with the first and fourth strings dropped down. As much as she loved that song, she didn’t play it often, since re-tuning can make strings wear out faster. If she had risked her fiddle, if she had managed to press her fingers to its fingerboard, to lift her bow, to play, she wouldn’t have played a DDAD tune. This is as incontrovertible as the temperature of the void.
And yet the story is passed on among the ship’s fiddlers (and I pass it on again as I write this narrative for you, Teyla, or whoever else discovers it). And yet her nickname, Windy, first appears in transcripts starting in the fifth year on board. Before that, people called her Beth, or Green.
She loved the song, I know that much. She sang it to me as a lullaby. At twelve, I taught it to myself in traditional GDAE tuning. I took pride in the adaptation, pride in the hours I spent getting it right. I played it for her on her birthday.
She pulled me to her, kissed my head. She always smelled like the lilacs in the greenhouse. She said, “Rosie, I’m so tickled that you’d do that for me, and you played it note perfectly, which is a gift to me in itself.
