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.
“You broke the deal, Rosie,” she said, eyeing my hair as I opened my door. “You showered.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
She shrugged and slid into the chair I’d just been sitting in. She had a skullcap pulled over her own hair, dyed jet black. Harriet had thirty years on me, though she still looked wiry and spry. It had taken me decades to stop considering her my grandmother’s friend and realize she’d become mine as well. Now we occupied a place somewhere between mentorship and friendship. History teacher and music historian. Fiddle player and master fiddler.
I handed her a mug of mint tea and a bowl of congee, and a spoon. My dishware had been my grandmother’s, from Earth. Harriet always smiled when I handed her the chipped “Cape Breton Fiddlers Association” mug.
She held the cup up to her face for a moment, breathing in the minty steam. “Now tell me why you walked in late last night. I missed you in the second row. Kem Porter took your usual seat, and I had to listen to his sloppy bow technique all night.”
“Kem’s not so bad. He knows the tunes.”
“He knows the tunes, but he’s not ready for the second row. He was brooking rhythms all over the place. You should have called him out on it.”
“I wouldn’t!”
She cradled the mug in her hands and breathed in again. Liat and I hadn’t been a couple for years, but she still brought me real mint from the greenhouse, and I knew Harriet appreciated it. “I know. You’re too nice. There’s no shame in letting someone know his place. Next time I’ll do it.”
She would, too. She had taken over the OldTime enforcer job from my grandmother and lived up to her example. They’d both sent me back to the outer circles more than once before I graduated inward.
“I’ll tell you when you’re ready, Rosie,” my grandmother said. “You’ll get there.”
“You know Windy would have done it,” Harriet said, echoing my thoughts.
The nickname jogged my memory again. “ ‘Wind Will Rove’!” I said. “Something was wrong with the database last night. The song was missing.”
She pushed the cups to the side and tapped the table awake.
“Down for maintenance,” she read out loud, frowning. She looked up. “I don’t like that. I’ll go over to Tech myself and ask.”
She stood and left without saying goodbye.
Harriet had a way of saying things so definitively you couldn’t help agreeing. If she said you didn’t belong in the second row, you weren’t ready yet. If she said not to worry over the song issue, I would have been willing to believe her, even though it made me uneasy. Hopefully it was nothing, but her reaction was appropriate for anyone who’d lived through the Blackout. I hadn’t even gotten around to answering her first question, but I wasn’t really sure what I would have told her about Nelson in any case.
I went to pick up my grandchildren from daycare, as I always did on Friday afternoons, Natalie’s long day at the hospital. If anything could keep me out of my head, it was the mind-wiping exhaustion of chasing toddlers.
“Goats?” asked Teyla. She had just turned two, her brother Jonah four.
“Goats okay with you, too, buddy?” I asked Jonah.
He shrugged stoically. He didn’t really care for animals. Preferred games, but we’d played games the week before.
“Goats it is.”
The farm spread across the bottom deck, near the waste processing plant. We took two tubes to get there, Jonah turning on all the screens we passed, Teyla playing with my hair.
I always enjoyed stepping from the tube and into the farm’s relatively open spaces, as big as eight rec rooms combined. The air out here, pungent and rich, worked off a different circulator than on the living decks. It moved with slightly more force than on the rest of the ship, though still not a wind. Not even a breeze. The artificial sun wasn’t any different than on the other decks, but it felt more intense. The textures felt different too, softer, plants and fur, fewer touch screens. If I squinted I could imagine a real farm, ahead or behind us, on
