The goats had been a contentious issue for the planners in my grandmother’s generation. Their detractors called them a waste of food and space and resources. Windy was among those who argued for them. They could supplement the synthetic milk and meat supplies. They’d provide veterinary training and animal husbandry skills that would be needed planetside someday, not to mention a living failsafe in case something happened to the gene banks. It would be good to have them aboard for psychological reasons as well, when people were leaving behind house pets like cats and dogs.
She won the debate, as she so often did, and they added a small population of female African Pygmy goats to the calculations. Even then there were dissenters. The arguments continued until the Blackout, then died abruptly along with the idea the journey might go as planned.
She told me all of that three weeks after my mother left, when I was still taking it personally.
“Have you ever tried to catch a goat?” she asked.
I hadn’t. I’d seen them, of course, but visitors were only supposed to pet them. She got permission, and I spent twenty minutes trying to catch an animal that had zero interest in being caught. It was the first thing that made me laugh again. I always thought of that day when I brought my grandchildren to pet the goats, though I hoped I never had any reason to use the same technique on them.
I had wrapped up some scraps for Jonah and Teyla to feed the nippy little things. Once they’d finished the food, the goats started on Teyla’s jersey, to her mixed delight and horror. I kept an eye on goat teeth and toddler fingers to make sure everybody left with the proper number.
“Ms. Clay,” somebody said, and I glanced up to see who had called me, then back at the babies and the fingers and the goats. They looked vaguely familiar, but everyone did after a while. If I had taught them, I still might not recognize a face with twenty more years on it, if they didn’t spend time on the same decks I did.
“Ms. Clay, I’m Nelson’s parent. Other parent. Lee. I think you know Ash.” Ash was Harriet’s grandkid. They’d refused to play music at all, to Harriet’s endless frustration.
Lee didn’t look anything like Nelson, but then I recalled Harriet saying they had gone full gene-bank. The incentives to include gene variance in family planning were too good for many people to pass up.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“I’m sorry if he’s been giving you any trouble,” Lee said. “He’s going through some kind of phase.”
“Phase?” Sometimes feigning ignorance got more interesting answers than agreeing.
“He’s decided school is teaching the wrong things. Says there’s no point in learning anything that doesn’t directly apply to what will be needed planetside. That it puts old ideas into people’s heads, when they should be learning new things. I have no idea where he came up with it.”
I nodded. “Do you work down here?”
Lee gestured down at manure-stained coveralls. “He likes it here, though. Farming fits in his worldview.”
“But history doesn’t?”
“History, classic literature, anything you can’t directly apply. I know he’s probably causing trouble, but he’s a good kid. He’ll settle down once he figures out a place for himself in all this.”
Teyla was offering a mystery fistful of something to a tiny black goat. Jonah looked like he was trying to figure out if he could ride one; I put a hand on his shoulder to hold him back.
“Tell me about the Blackout,” I say at the start of the video I made while still in school. Eighteen-year-old me, already a historian. My voice is much younger. I’m not on screen, but I can picture myself at eighteen. Tall, gawky, darker than my mother, lighter than my father.
“I don’t think there was anybody who didn’t panic,” my grandmother begins. Her purple hair is pulled back in a messy bun, and she is sitting in her own quarters—mine now—with her Cape Breton photos on the walls.
“Once we understood that the glitch hadn’t affected navigation or the systems we rely on to breathe and eat, once it became clear the culprit was a known virus and the damage was irreparable, well, we just had to deal with it.”
“The ‘culprit’ was a person, not a virus, right?”
“A virus who released a virus.” Her face twisted at the thought.
I moved back to safer ground. “Did everyone just ‘deal with it’? That isn’t what I’ve heard.”
“There are a lot of people to include in ‘everyone.’ The younger children handled it fine. They bounced and skated and ran around the rec rooms. The older ones—the ones who relied on external entertainments—had more trouble and got in more trouble, I guess.” She gave a sly smile. “But ask your father how he lost his pinkie finger if you’ve never done so.”
“That was when he did it?”
“You bet. Eighteen years old and some daredevil notion to hitch a ride on the top of a lift. Lucky he survived.”
“He told me a goat bit it off !”
She snorted. “I’m guessing he told you that back when you said you wanted to be a goat farmer when you grew up?”
No answer from younger-me.
She shrugged. “Or maybe he didn’t want to give you any foolish ideas about lift-cowboys.”
“He’s not a daredevil, though.”
“Not anymore. Not after that. Not after you came along the next year. Anyway, you asked who ‘just dealt with it,’ and you’re right. The kids coped because they had nothing to compare it to, but obviously the main thing you want to know about is the adults. The Memory Projects.”
“Yes. That’s the assignment.”
“Right. So. Here you had all these people: born on Earth, raised on Earth. They applied to be Journeyers because they had some romantic
