Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea

by Sarah Pinsker

  “You’re not to let me out, no matter how much I beg. Not until we’re out of the bay.”

  I nodded again, and watched as he lashed the tiller to hold direction. He didn’t say another word, but gave an ambiguous gesture in my direction as he went below. Goodbye, perhaps, or good luck, or don’t wreck us, or just get on with it. I closed the lock and hung the key back on the peg.

  I had never been alone on the deck of a boat before. It felt strange to sit at the tiller as if I were a captain. Powerful. How much more so would it feel to succeed in our task? Maybe if I returned a hero, Ginny’s mother would let us speak again.

  A mast stuck out between the rocks. Here and there, pieces of other ships that had preceded us. Ahead lay the mouth of the bay, wide and glittering gold-blue where the morning sun hit the water. The two rocky promontories that sheltered us loomed taller than I had ever seen them before.

  The one to the starboard side was the one I watched now. I didn’t know what to expect. Would the sirens appear? Would they sing first? What did it feel like to be lured by a song, lulled by a song? What went through the heads of the captains as they dashed their own ships on the rocks? I wanted to know. I didn’t want to know.

  There was a decent breeze by the shore, but it lessened as we sailed toward the open sea. I hummed to myself to pass the time. The air now hung like a woolen blanket on a washline. I took my hand off the tiller; I was only pretending to be a captain. Really, I had no clue what to do if we were becalmed.

  “Let me out!”

  I spoke to the locked door. “Captain, I’m not supposed to let you out. But do you hear them? I don’t.”

  He moaned in response. I scanned the rocks for any sign of the sirens.

  And then I heard them.

  Their voices were hideously beautiful. I made out some of the words. As Old Charley had said, it was a song about the song itself, daring the listener to listen, as if anyone had a choice. The words drifted in the air.

  “Listen to our two voices,” they said, and I did.

  “Sweet coupled airs we sing,” and something about a green mirror, and the whole time they were singing, I kept expecting some key to turn in my own lock, something to make my hand move on the tiller. And the whole time they were singing, I kept thinking: I know this song. I knew it in my bones, knew it though I had never heard it. Not the words, but the challenge behind them.

  The sail moved of its own accord, fighting any direction. A new wind swirled, pushed about by the force of enormous wings. Wings that blocked the sun and sent the boat rocking. The sirens landed on the deck, feather light, and I saw them for the first time.

  They were like me. Or I thought they were, for a moment of wishful thinking. They weren’t, but I found it hard to look at them straight on. They were naked, and they had wings, or they didn’t, and they threw their shoulders back and their chests forward like strutting birds. I understood the two voices, understood the mirror, understood.

  Smythe still moaned in the cabin, but with luck the tide would bring the boat safely to shore even if I didn’t return. His men could pry the door.

  I took off my shirt and unwrapped the binding round my small breasts. I removed one boot, then the other, then my trousers. I dared them to look at me, and they did it as if it wasn’t a dare at all. Like nothing I had ever wanted in my life, I suddenly knew I wanted to grow wings and scales. I wanted to roost with them on rocks in their green meadow.

  No. What about Mrs. Wainwright and Captain Smythe? Roost with the sirens in some other green meadow, overlooking some other sea. Teach them new songs that didn’t sing sailors to their graves.

  “Draw near, bring your ship to rest,” they sang. They never stopped singing. “No man passes without hearing the sweet sound from our lips.”

  I am not a man, some small part of me said. I am but I am not. But the female captain had run aground as well, and I knew I wasn’t exactly a woman either. While I puzzled, each of them took one of my arms. They lifted me into the sky. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  It took me a moment to work up the nerve to look. Everything appeared much smaller viewed from above. I saw the shape of the whole island, the rocky cliffs that made any other landing impossible. The bay really was shaped like a dog’s head, pinched by the collar of the two headlands. Our town, the dog’s snout. I saw the town square, and the tavern, and the barn, where I had sung only to horses. I pictured Mrs. Wainwright starting the porridge, and the twins stirring in their bed, and Ginny’s lips on mine, and I missed them all as if I already gone.

  “Wait,” I said. What belonging could the sirens offer me? I wasn’t one of them. Whatever they were offering wasn’t love, or furtive kisses, or even the satisfaction of a job done well. If I went with them, what would Mrs. Wainwright think of me? The choice overwhelmed me. I wasn’t sure if it even was a choice. Maybe I was already another sailor lost to the sirens.

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I sang. The sirens closed their mouths and listened as I sang their own song back at them, and then shifted the tune to one of my own, keeping some of their words. Their two voices? I lived that story every day. They sang that no life could be hid from their dreaming, so I offered mine as proof. I thought maybe they had never heard a creature such as I was: alone in my knowing, alone of my kind. I sang another song, turning their mirror back on them.

  “But we can tell you everything that will ever happen in the world. All the secrets.” Their voices had lost some luster.

  “I already know what happens. Everybody lives until they die, and most have hard lives, and some have easy ones, and some give up their children and some take them in, and some get a home even with an odd thing about them.”

  “Come with us. No lonely seafarer rows past our green mirror.”

  “I’m not lonely. They’re the lonely ones, all these sailors that long for the sea when they’re home and their homes when they’re at sea. They’re stuck in between. I’m in between, but I’m not stuck. I just am.”

  Their wings beat slower now, and we descended a bit. The hesitation gave me confidence. “I think I won. I heard your song, but mine was better. I’m not going with you. I’m staying here, and you’re leaving, because I won.”

  The sirens dropped me over open water. I might have taken that for a kindness, but it didn’t feel intentional. By the time I hauled myself onto the boat, they were specks on the horizon. Someone else’s problem. I lay naked for a moment on the deck, basking in the bright sunlight. Then I clothed myself and unlocked the cabin. The horses would be waiting for me, swiveling their ears to catch my song over top of the breeze that would bring our small boat back to shore.

  — Wind Will Rove —

  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. I played it for her on her birthday.

  She pulled me to her, kissed my head. She always smelled like the lilacs in the greenhouse. She said, “Rosie, I’m so tickled that you’d do that for me, and you played it note perfectly, which is a gift to me in itself. But ‘Wind Will Rove’ is a DDAD tune and it ought to be played that way. You play it in another tuning, it’s a different wind that blows.”

  I’d never contemplated how there might be a difference between winds. I’d never felt one myself, unless you counted air pushed through vents, or the fan on a treadmill. After the birthday party, I looked up “wind” and read about breezes and gales and siroccos, about haboobs and zephyrs. Great words, words to turn over in my mouth, words that spoke to nothing in my experience.

  The next time I heard the song in its proper tuning, I closed my eyes and listened for the wind.

  “Windy Grove”

  Traditional. Believed to have travelled from Scotland to Cape Breton in the nineteenth century. Lost.

  “Wind Will Rove”

  Instrumental in D (alternate tuning DDAD)

  Harriet Barrie, Music Historian:

  “The fiddler Olivia Vandiver and her father, Charley Vandiver, came up with this tune in the wee hours of a session in 1974. Charley was trying to remember a traditional tune he had heard as a boy in Nova Scotia, believed to be ‘Windy Grove.’ No recordings of the original ‘Windy Grove’ were ever catalogued, on ship or on Earth.

  “‘Wind Will Rove’ is treated as traditional in most circles, even though it’s relatively recent, because it is the lost tune’s closest known relative.”

  The Four Deck Rec has the best acoustics of any room on the ship. There’s a nearly identical space on every deck, but the others don’t sound as good. The Recs were designed for gatherings, but no acoustic engineer was ever consulted, and there’s nobody on board with that specialty now. The fact that one room might sound good and one less so wasn’t important in the grander scheme. It should have been.

  In the practical, the day to day, it matters. It matters to us. Choirs perform there, and bands. It serves on various days and nights as home to a Unitarian church, a Capoeira hoda, a Reconstructionist synagogue, a mosque, a Quaker meetinghouse, a half-dozen different African dance groups, and a Shakespearean theater, everyone clinging on to whatever they hope to save. The room is scheduled for weeks and months and years to come, though weeks and months and years are all arbitrary designations this far from Earth.

  On Thursday nights, Four Deck Rec hosts the OldTime, thanks to my grandmother’s early pressure on the Recreation Committee. There are only a few of us on board who know what OldTime refers to, since everything is old time, strictly speaking. Everyone else has accepted a new meaning, since they have never known any other. An OldTime is a Thursday night is a hall with good acoustics is a gathering of fiddlers and guitarists and mandolinists and banjo players. It has a verb form now. “Are you OldTiming this week?” If you are a person who would ask that question, or a person expected to respond, the answer is yes. You wouldn’t miss it.

  On this particular Thursday night, while I wouldn’t miss it, my tenth graders had me running late. We’d been discussing the twentieth and twenty-first century space races and the conversation had veered into dangerous territory. I’d spent half an hour trying to explain to them why Earth history still mattered. This had happened at least once a cycle with every class I’d ever taught, but these particular students were as fired up as any I remembered.

  “I’m never going to go there, right, Ms. Clay?” Nelson Odell had asked. This class had only been with me for two weeks, but I’d known Nelson his entire life. His great-grandmother, my friend Harriet, had dragged him to the OldTime until he was old enough to refuse. He’d played mandolin, his stubby fingers well fit to the tiny neck, face set in a permanently resentful expression.

  “No,” I said. “This is a one-way trip. You know that.”

  “And really I’m just going to grow up and die on this ship, right? And all of us? You too? Die, not grow up. You’re already old.”

  I had heard this from enough students. I didn’t even wince anymore. “Yes to all of the above, though it’s a reductive line of thinking and that last bit was rude.”

  “Then what does it matter that back on Earth a bunch of people wanted what another group had? Wouldn’t it be better not to teach us how people did those things and get bad ideas in our heads?”

  Emily Redhorse, beside Nelson, said, “They make us learn it all so we can understand why we got on the ship.” She was the only current OldTime player in this class, a promising fiddler. OldTime players usually understood the value of history from a young age.

  Nelson waved her off. “‘We’ didn’t get on the ship. Our grandparents and great-grandparents did. And here we are learning things that were old to them.”

  “Because, stupid.” That was Trina Nguyen.

  I interrupted. “Debate is fine, Trina. Name-calling is not.”

  “Because, Nelson.” She tried again. “There aren’t new things in history. That’s why it’s called history.”

  Nelson folded his arms and stared straight at me. “Then don’t teach it at all. If it mattered so much, why did they leave it behind? Give us another hour to learn more genetics or ship maintenance or farming. Things we can actually use.”

  “First of all, history isn’t static. People discovered artifacts and primary documents all the time that changed their views on who we were. It’s true that the moment we left Earth we gave up the chance to learn anything new about it from newly discovered primary sources, but we can still find fresh perspectives on the old information.” I tried to regain control, hoping that none of them countered with the Blackout. Students of this generation rarely did; to them it was just an incident in Shipboard History, not the living specter it had been when I was their age.

  I continued. “Secondly, Emily is right. It’s important to know why and how we got here. The conventional wisdom remains that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

  “How are we supposed to repeat it?” Nelson waved at the pictures on the walls. “We don’t have countries or oil or water. Or guns or swords or bombs. If teachers hadn’t told us about them we wouldn’t even know they existed. We’d be better off not knowing that my ancestors tried to kill Emily’s ancestors, wouldn’t we? Somebody even tried to erase all of that entirely, and you made sure it was still included in the new version of histor
y.”

  “Not me, Nelson. That was before my time.” I knew I shouldn’t let them get a rise out of me, but I was tired and hungry, not the ideal way to start a seven-hour music marathon. “Enough. I get what you’re saying, but not learning this is not an option. Send me a thousand words by Tuesday on an example of history repeating itself.”

  Before anyone protested, I added, “You were going to have an essay to write either way. All I’ve done is changed the topic. It doesn’t sound like you wanted to write about space races.”

  They all grumbled as they plugged themselves back into their games and music and shuffled out the door. I watched them go, wishing I’d handled the moment differently, but not yet sure how. It fascinated me that Nelson was the one fomenting this small rebellion, when his great-grandmother ran the OldTime Memory Project. My grandmother was the reason I obsessed over history, why I’d chosen teaching; Harriet didn’t seem to have had the same effect on Nelson.

  As Nelson passed my desk, he muttered, “Maybe somebody needs to erase it all again.”

  “Stop,” I told him.

  He turned back to face me. I still had several inches on him, but he held himself as if he were taller. The rest of the students flowed out around him. Trina rammed her wheelchair into Nelson’s leg as she passed, in a move that looked one hundred percent deliberate. She didn’t even pretend to apologize.

  “I don’t mind argument in my classroom, but don’t ever let anyone hear you advocating another Blackout.”

  He didn’t look impressed. “I’m not advocating. I just think teaching us Earth history—especially broken history—is a waste of everybody’s time.”

  “Maybe someday you’ll get on the Education Committee and you can argue for that change. But I heard you say ’erase it all again.’ That isn’t the same thing. Would you say that in front of Harriet?”

  “Maybe I was just exaggerating. It’s not even possible to erase everything anymore. And there’s plenty of stuff I like that I wouldn’t want to see erased.” He shrugged. “I didn’t mean it. Can I go now?”