“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
