Nebula Awards Showcase 2019 by Rebecca Roanhorse

Author:Rebecca Roanhorse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parvus Press
Published: 2019-08-06T11:08:29+00:00

Wind Will Rove

Sarah Pinsker

There’s a story about my grandmother Windy, one I never asked her to confirm or deny, in which she took her fiddle on a spacewalk. There are a lot of stories about her. Fewer of my parents’ generation, fewer still of my own, though we’re in our fifties now; old enough that if there were stories to tell they would probably have been told.

My grandmother was an engineer, part of our original crew. According to the tale, she stepped outside to do a visual inspection of an external panel that was giving anomalous readings. Along with her tools, she clipped her fiddle and bow to her suit’s belt. When she completed her task, she paused for a moment, tethered to our ship the size of a city, put her fiddle to the place where her helmet met her suit, and played “Wind Will Rove” into the void. Not to be heard, of course; just to feel the song in her fingers.

There are a number of things wrong with this story, starting with the fact that we don’t do spacewalks, for reasons that involve laws of physics I learned in school and don’t remember anymore. Our shields are too thick, our velocity is too great, something like that. The Blackout didn’t touch ship records; crew transcripts and recordings still exist, and I’ve listened to all the ones that might pertain to this legend. She laughs her deep laugh, she teases a tired colleague about his date the night before, she even hums “Wind Will Rove” to herself as she works—but there are no gaps, no silences unexplained.

Even if it were possible, her gloves would have been too thick to find a fingering. I doubt my grandmother would’ve risked losing her instrument, out here where any replacement would be synthetic. I doubt, too, that she’d have exposed it to the cold of space. Fiddles are comfortable at the same temperatures people are comfortable; they crack and warp when they aren’t happy. Her fiddle, my fiddle now.

My final evidence: “Wind Will Rove” is traditionally played in DDAD tuning, with the first and fourth strings dropped down. As much as she loved that song, she didn’t play it often, since re-tuning can make strings wear out faster. If she had risked her fiddle, if she had managed to press her fingers to its fingerboard, to lift her bow, to play, she wouldn’t have played a DDAD tune. This is as incontrovertible as the temperature of the void.

And yet the story is passed on among the ship’s fiddlers (and I pass it on again as I write this narrative for you, Teyla, or whoever else discovers it). And yet her nickname, Windy, which appears in transcripts starting in the fifth year on board. Before that, people called her Beth, or Green.

She loved the song, I know that much. She sang it to me as a lullaby. At twelve, I taught it to myself in traditional GDAE tuning. I took pride in the adaptation, pride in the hours I spent getting it right.

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