“By ten years in, we had finally gotten the general populace to relax. Everyone had their part to do, and everyone was finally doing it quietly. We weren’t going to die if a hot water line went cold one day. There were things to worry over, of course, but they were all too big to be worth contemplating. Same as now, you understand? And we had this database, this marvelous database of everything good humans had ever created, music and literature and art from all around the world, in a hundred languages.
“And then Trevor Dube had to go and ruin everything. I know you know that part so I won’t bother repeating it. Morne Brooks did what he did, and that Dube fellow did what he did, and all of a sudden all of these Journeyers, with their dream of their children’s children’s children’s etcetera someday setting foot on a new planet, they all have to deal with their actual children. They have to contemplate the idea the generations after them will never get to see or hear the things they thought were important. That all they have left is the bare walls. They wait—we wait—and wait for the DB to be restored. And they realize: hey, I can’t rely on this database to be here to teach those great-great-great-grandchildren.”
She leans forward. “So everyone doubles down on the things that matter most to them. That’s when some folks who didn’t have it got religion again. The few physical books on board became sacred primary texts, including the ones that had been sacred texts to begin with. Every small bit of personal media got cloned for the greater good, from photos to porn—don’t giggle— but it wasn’t much, not compared to what we’d lost.
“Cultural organizations that had been atrophying suddenly found themselves with more members than they’d had since the journey started. Actors staged any show they knew well enough, made new recordings. People tried to rewrite their favorite books and plays from memory, paint their favorite paintings. Everyone had a different piece, some closer to accurate than others. That’s when we started getting together to play weekly instead of monthly.”
“I thought it was always weekly, Gra.”
“Nope. We didn’t have other entertainments to distract us, and we were worried about the stories behind the songs getting lost. The organized Memory Projects started with us. It seemed like the best way to make sure what we wanted handed down would be handed down. The others saw that we’d found a good way to approach the problem and keep people busy, so other Memory Projects sprung up too. We went through our whole repertoire and picked out the forty songs we most wanted saved. Each of us committed to memorizing as many as we could, but with responsibility for a few in particular. We knew the songs themselves already, but now people pooled what they knew about them, and we memorized their histories, too. Where they came from, what they meant. And later, we were responsible for rerecording those histories, and teaching them to somebody younger, so each song got passed down to another generation. That’s you, incidentally.”
“I know.”
“Just checking. You’re asking me some pretty obvious stuff.” “It’s for a project. I need to ask.”
“Fine, then. Anyhow, we re-recorded all our songs and histories as quick as possible, then memorized them in case somebody tried to kill the DBs again. And other people memorized the things important to them. History of their people—the stuff that didn’t make it into history books—folk dances, formulae. Actors built plays back from scratch, though some parts weren’t exactly as they’d been. And those poor jazz musicians.”
“Those poor jazz musicians? I thought jazz was about improv.”
“It’s full of improv, but certain performances stood out as benchmarks for their whole mode. I’m glad we play a music that doesn’t set much stock in solo virtuosity. We recorded our fiddle tunes all over again, and the songs are still the songs, but nobody on board could play ‘So What’ like Miles Davis or anything like John Coltrane. Their compositions live on, but not their performances, if that makes sense. Would have devastated your grandfather, if he’d been on board. Anyway, what was I saying? The human backup idea had legs, even if it worked better for some things than others. It was a worst case scenario.”
“Which two songs did you memorize history for?”
“Unofficially, all of them. Officially, same as you. ‘Honeysuckle’ and ‘Wind Will Rove.’ You know that.”
“I know, Gra. For the assignment.”
“Windy Grove”
Historical Reenactment: Marius Smit as Howie McCabe, Cape Breton Fiddlemaker:
Vandiver wasn’t wrong. There was a tune called “Windy Grove.”My great-grand-father played it, but it was too complicated for most fiddlers. I can only remember a little of the tune now. It had lyrics, too, in Gaelic and English. I don’t think Vandiver ever mentioned those. There was probably a Gaelic name too, but that’s lost along with the song.
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 millingfrolic 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 sure I
