Catherine George Read online

  Mikaela wavered a hand above the keys, striking a few sharps. “Maybe. It’s got energy.”

  With that we were down around the table, throwing around song names, except Fe, who sat with eyes closed, one hand slipping down the sweating surface of their glass.

  “Fe?” Jae-jin touched their wrist, softly, and the drummer’s eyes snapped open. “You alright?”

  We razzed them a bit, called them old for falling asleep in the bar, and finally, maybe just to shut us all up, they came out with it.

  “Gen and I, we’re trying to have a baby.”

  Well, that sure did shut us up. That was something we didn’t talk about much, the question of whether it was right to tie new generations to this journey of ours; once, late, Mikaela had started to talk about it, asking why—“why? We have it good, don’t we? No hunger, no real violence, a roof over our heads . . . isn’t this a good life?” And she was right, especially when we thought about what we knew of the years before Launch—but there it was; it scared us, and she’d stopped when no one responded. Privately, Mikaela had chosen to contribute to the genetic pool, and so maybe in a crèche somewhere there were children out of artificial wombs who looked like her; but she didn’t want to know. Jae-jin had decided against it, flat out; and Romy was glad, in theory, that the medics could keep a trans woman fertile through transition, so she could make that choice someday, but beyond that she felt she was too young to think any more about it.

  Art, well, a lot more people had raised their own children when he’d been young, but we’d never asked him, and he didn’t say anything to Fe’s revelation. In fact, when we thought back on it, some of us remembered that he got up and went over to the bar and poured himself a shot of soju.

  “The thing is,” Fe said, “it’s constant, you know? Like, if we miss one chance, it might have been the right time.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad,” Mikaela said, with a nervous laugh.

  Fe shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe. But it’s all the time. I’m tired. I’m late because she says, ‘How about now?’ And sometimes it’s like, I don’t think I can do it . . . ”

  We murmured what we thought was consolation, and a moon later they’d get their reward, when Gen announced she was pregnant and Fe began their habit of drumming their fingers on their wife’s belly, to ensure the kid would come out a drummer. That night, though, it was an easy decision: we called the song Trying.

  Unmade Constellations (For Mary Lou)

  The longest solo Mikaela ever had; she kept coming back, searching, to a moment of silence, then breaking it.

  One night she’d brought something to show us, a thin black disk apparently imprinted with music in some way—a record, it was called—that she’d taken from the archives. It was Mary Lou Williams, Zodiac Suite, and the songs weren’t in the databanks. But there was no record player in the archives, and so the music was trapped there forever, unheard.

  She sat looking at it for a long time, tracing one finger over the thin rings on the disc, and then she took it away with her, after. Sometimes we wondered if she’d broken it, too.

  A Handful of Dust

  A slight, misty thing, all the notes shivering and breaking apart, seeming to trickle away from the listener, but still warm, somehow; like the feeling we got, when we were playing together. When Romy laid something down on the bass, a rumbling, slapping run of notes, and Mikaela picked it up, carried it, tossed it in the air with a rattle of her hand on the high end of the piano—well, that was a great feeling. It was like someone reading your mind. It left a warm feeling in our stomachs that couldn’t be matched by any damn synthanol.

  “But what is the point, if nobody is listening?” Romy said, one night, wandering over to the viewport and staring down into the dark expanse of the inner hull. Out the window the growth lights had dimmed for the dark hours, and only the twinkling lights on the bot control panels, like tiny roving stars, were visible.

  She had started to say things like that, a lot. And she had started to talk about other things, too, about Earth things—oh, she’d always talked, dreamily, about Earth, and earth, the soil, the dirt, the dust, the sand, “the weight of it, you understand? The feeling of it under your fingers?” and what clay might feel like in water, what the stars might look like if you weren’t on a ship moving five psol—but we just thought it was nostalgia, and who were we to judge?

  But one night she missed practice, and the next time she said, casual enough, that she’d gotten in with a group that was practicing survival skills, taking sessions in VR and getting on the list for shifts in the biome cylinders at the core of the ship, so they could try living off the land, learn to build a world from scratch. Fire from flint, fishing with a spear, shelter hacked from a jungle. That wasn’t any nostalgia. That was the dream of life on rock, steady and stable, not shooting through space toward unknown destinations.

  “We’ll never need to do things like that,” Mikaela said, sharp, when she heard. If she wasn’t going to make a splash with us, she’d probably never make it, and she knew it; there weren’t too many jazz bassists on board, not good ones—so it mattered. For that, and for other reasons. “You know that, right? We won’t need to start from scratch, we’ve got all the tech we need, we’ve got the manual for starting society again, whenever we—”

  “Leave it alone, Mikaela,” Fe said, watching Romy, who was plucking a little low melody, sad and spare.

  But Mikaela wasn’t done. “And anyway even if we didn’t have all that, it wouldn’t be you doing it, would it? It wouldn’t even be your children’s children.”

  “So what?” Romy said, smacking an open hand against the strings, so the bass seemed to thrum with anger. “So what, and so instead I should do jazz? You think this matters? That we will need this jazz, wherever it is we are going?”

  “Yes!” Mikaela said, nearly shouting now. “Of course we’ll need jazz. We’ll always need jazz—”

  “But it will not be you doing it, it will not be your children,” Romy said. “You all know we are going nowhere, but no one wants to say it, so you all just pretend. This jazz business? This is just marking time.”

  “Enough,” Art said, heavy. “That’s enough.”

  All the Things We’ve Never Seen

  Never seen sunrise, never seen sunset, never seen summertime. Never been caught in a rainstorm, or slipped into the springtime sea. Never been alone, truly alone, with miles to go ’til the next human: even near the end you could do that, on Earth. Never set out to walk with no destination, or stayed up late to watch a meteor shower. Never seen a flock of starlings startled from rest, to swirl and dive against a blue-gray sky. Sky—what was that? We had the ceiling above our heads, and then, out there—space. A vacuum. Never seen our loved ones in the light of the moon. Never gotten lost.

  We thought about how we should have put down roots by now, gone beyond steel horizons to find feet on soil and wide-open spaces. How the ship hadn’t been designed to go so long, and neither had we. We all dreamed of things we’d never truly seen, never truly heard. Like the wind: in our dreams, we heard the wind, and the sound of birds, and we’d wake up with tears, our bodies remembering an impossible world.

  Giant Leap

  “She’s too young for that,” Mikaela said, speaking of the thing nobody wanted to name. Romy had left early, that night, again. “The kids who were born after—”

  “She’s not,” Fe said, who had a closer eye on these things than the rest of us. “It still happens. She needs a distraction—if this, if we could just . . . ” They sighed, and shrugged, and we knew what they meant. If we could just make something of ourselves . . .

  Art, nursing his one glass of synth brew, put it down hard on the table. “Think I’ll be heading out now,” he said, and went; and off we went, too, quiet and bitter, to our pods to rest—

  But warming up for our next show we found Mikaela grinning, riffing on C Jam Blues in one hand, pointing with the other to three people sitting at a back table,
sipping uncertainly from glasses of Jae-jin’s latest: the Council, in the flesh.

  We left it all on the table that night, playing like we could condense our whole lives into song: the babble of the Commons, the Babel of a dining hall, the wailing of a wake, voices raised in harmony and cacophony, drums like a lover’s heartbeat under your ear at night in the sleep-tubes. It was everything we’d wanted to say: the shipboard life, its loves and its losses, in music.

  “Thank you,” Jae-jin said, to Fe, as we packed things up that night, a bit giddy. The Council had liked us, we thought—and we were right: not a Tenthday went by before we got the embossed invite to play on the Commons, the first time some of us had ever seen real paper.

  “For what?” Fe said.

  Jae-jin shrugged toward the three councilors, chatting in one corner with Mikaela.

  Fe shook their head. “You think I’ve got this type of pull? That’s not how credit reg works.”

  “Who, then?”

  And that was how we realized that Art had gotten us in front of the Council. Art! What a mystery he was. We looked at the old saxophonist, and wondered.

  Amy

  Sometimes, at the end of a session, when the rest of us were pulling up to the bar, Art would linger behind and play a little tune. If it hadn’t been on a sax, we might have said it sounded folksy; and once Fe said it sounded like a lullaby, but Art didn’t say anything back.

  Late on the night before our gig on the Commons, just before we packed it in for the night, Mikaela picked out a version of the tune, simple, just in the right hand, and Jae-jin took it up, real quiet, and suddenly everyone was in except Art. We thought maybe he wouldn’t join—he could be stubborn like that—but suddenly, out of the warm ring of the repeated tune, he broke into this golden, chaotic riff, ripping through the tune too fast, and then too slow, and then just right, repeating it like we were playing a round. We couldn’t believe what we were hearing. He was pulling us up there, into some sort of hallowed, golden space, like the dream of sunlight, and for once, we all went there.

  When we came back down, nobody said anything. We just nodded, once. It was too late to talk names; but that night on the Commons, when Mikaela said, “Let’s play that song,” we all knew which one she meant. When we played it that night, we were great: not just good, but great. We could hear it, the audience could hear it. At the end they stood up for us.

  Memoria

  Our quietest song, and our slowest. It opened with a bass solo, played arco, a shadowy melody exhaling beneath Romy’s bow. We can still picture her, all these years later, leaning into that airy hum as if pressing into an imaginary wind. Out beyond her, under the gleaming lights, the ship transformed by the act of listening, into a temple, a hallowed place . . .

  Well. The things you remember.

  Two hours after that show on the Commons we found ourselves deep in the archives, jubilant, swirling in Mikaela’s determined wake.

  “You’ll see,” she said, when we asked what she was looking for.

  The archives were perpetually dim, like the time of day on Earth known as dusk, and hushed, as if someone had wrapped the rooms in a quilt. (A quilt was one of those things we had in the archives, back then. Maybe we don’t anymore, we don’t know; as the years pass there will be less and less space for what we were, all of that pushed out by whatever we become. They were only built for a hundred and fifty years of remembering, and so things will be jettisoned out into space, leaving a trail of human footprints across the galaxy.)

  “Here,” Mikaela said, finally, pulling something out of a drawer. It was a bottle of gleaming spirits. “It’s whiskey,” she said to Jae-jin, and opened it, casual. From somewhere on her chair she pulled out five little glasses, and began to pour.

  “Are we . . . are we allowed to drink it?” Jae-jin asked, awed.

  Mikaela shrugged. “No one’s going to come looking for it for, what, five hundred years? And by then, well . . . I figure we drink some of it now, while we know someone might appreciate it.”

  The first sip was sweet liquid starlight; Jae-jin’s efforts had more in common with synthanol than they did with this. He looked crestfallen for a moment, but then, buoyed: “I probably need to barrel mine for longer,” he said.

  Then Mikaela said, “We need a name for that song,” knowing that it would go into the databanks, join the music we carried with us. “I’ve got a few ideas—”

  We cut her off. The honors for this one belonged to Art.

  “Alright,” Art murmured. “We’ll call it Amy, then.”

  Sure, we said. That sounded fine. Then someone—memory serves, it was Jae-jin—went and said it. “Why that? Why Amy?”

  “Amy’s my daughter,” he said. “Amy was my daughter.”

  After that we got real quiet.

  “When she was little she slept real badly,” he said. “And I had this song I’d hum to her, and sometimes it would help. Then, when she was older, she wouldn’t have any other lullaby. She’d say, ‘No, Daddy. I want your song.’ And then she grew up, and, you know, she could get to sleep by herself. But I never forgot that song.” He paused and took a slow, cautious sip of his drink. It was the longest speech we’d ever heard him make.

  “It was the guitar, with her,” he said, gesturing to his saxophone case on the floor beside him. “She said she was going to play jazz with her feet in the dirt, hear the sound of jazz in atmosphere.

  “The night the news came about Gliese, she was performing on the Commons with a trio she’d started. She had this solo that night . . . I’ve never heard better. She came home and said, ‘I’m a hit, Daddy.’” He paused, and looked thoughtful. “It might be in the databanks. I don’t know. Probably not. There were other things to listen to, that day.”

  Romy and Fe were too young to remember that night when the news came. Mikaela had been seven, and Jae-jin four; they could remember the vidcasts, the sad robotic voice repeating over and over: Error in calculations. Catastrophic change in orbital mechanics in target system . . . Orbital mechanics: what an innocuous sounding phrase.

  “What does it mean?” Jae-jin had whispered, to his father, because his mother was in a fugue state, unspeaking. His mother, who he remembered as a musical presence, a song just out of sight, humming while she worked; now she was silent.

  “It means we don’t have a home anymore,” his father had said.

  “She was fifteen, when we got the news,” Art said. “And eighteen, when she died.”

  All of us knew people who’d died of it, died of the Gliese flu—the flu! What a thing to call it, when it wasn’t a flu at all; the doctors, watching people carry in their loved ones, those first waves of hundreds, listless and immobile, they said it was called psychogenic death. Dying because we’d lost the idea of home, and the next habitable planet was six hundred years out. Jae-jin’s mother had died of it when he was still a child; and Mikaela had lost an older sister, and Fe her grandfather, and Romy two friends in one of the later waves, striking after we’d already been decimated.

  “Maybe it was our fault,” Art said, low. “There was a recording, back then, of the sound of the wind on Gliese. Made by one of the advance drones. We played it for Amy, my wife and I, right from the day she was born. And every time we’d say, ‘This is it, this is the sound the wind makes in your new home.’” In his raw old voice we heard, briefly, a sobbing song, and then he swallowed it, and seemed calm again.

  “A couple years later I realized I couldn’t really remember what Amy looked like anymore. Oh, she had black hair, brown eyes, I knew that . . . but I couldn’t picture her in my head. It was like I had forgotten Amy. But somehow, even though it’s been years and years, I haven’t forgotten that song.”

  He didn’t say anything else, and finished his whiskey in a burning gulp. The evening broke off soon after. A few of us would look into it, later, and find out that Art and his wife had split, after Amy died; she’d thrown herself into community organizing, into establishing the crèches an
d the credit regs, and we had some sense then who he’d appealed to in order to get the Council to our show.

  Art had lived in the temporary pods ever since, and playing jazz was pretty much the only thing he did. It had been half a century since he’d first hummed his lullaby, we realized. But he still remembered that song.

  Angel’s Share (Reprise)

  That was our last show, that night on the Commons.

  Oh, we came back with good intentions; we were gonna be big, we thought. But somehow, over the next few Tenthdays, some of us found that the reasons for being in a jazz band didn’t seem so compelling anymore. Fe, with a newborn, was the first to go; the late nights were too much. And before we could find another drummer, Romy got busy with other things. She stopped talking about dirt after that night, and started making historical VRs about our shipboard history. They were good, too—they still show them in all the crèches. It was nice, we agreed, to see ourselves as making history, and not just—what had she said? Not just marking time.

  After that it didn’t seem like there was much point, and so when Jae-jin told Mikaela that he was giving up the bar, it wasn’t a real blow. He wanted to try something new, he said, apologetic. He went on to wine making, with synth grapes, and made a drink that was very popular for a while. Ever had wine labeled with a picture of a trumpet spilling out roses? That’s Jae-jin.

  And Art—well, none of us ever saw him again, after the band’s last practice. And a few years later, when we looked up Artur Wisniewski in the ship directory, we found it said not listed.

  Most of the songs died with the band. You lose them, after a while, we all agreed on that; when you don’t play, they seep out of you, in puddles of sweat, in tears while you sleep. Even Mikaela, back playing solo and touring the deep-ship dives, said she couldn’t recall the songs we’d once played. There was no record anywhere with those tunes inscribed in its grooves; they’d just disappeared, like they’d never been. All that was left was the names.