Migration

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I suppose it stands to reason then that nobody can hear you sing, either. And there'd probably be nobody to pull me up on my German grammar, which would be nice. I wonder about yodelling. Surely that's the real test. If I stood on the outer hull of this ship, face to face with Satine, and yodelled, could she hear me? Seems hard to believe something that spans the Alps back on Earth couldn't travel an inch, even in space.

Back on Earth. Isn't that funny. I've read that generations after one's ancestors leave the mother country, people still refer to it as "home" when they've never even visited. Turns out we do that across the expanse of space too. What is it about the human psyche that reaches back through time and space to cling to unknown places?

Even though it's obvious that we won't actually try the deep space yodel, at least I'm pretty sure we wouldn't, my mind wanders. Can I yodel? How hard could it be? I don't dare try now -- I don't want to wake her. How well would I have to yodel to be convinced that it doesn't work? What would I yodel, if I could? I'd want to be clever about it. I'd want to surprise her. Make her laugh. Eyes closed, smiling, my left hand over my right atop my breasts, holding my heart, her laugh. So sublime and lovely, tears form in my closed eyes.

That Hocus Pocus riff from 1900s? For the century when humans invented electric music, possibly the most famous musical nugget to have survived the following 300 years is a yodel. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising, considering how long yodelling had been around already by the 1900s.

That descending yodel loops in my head. Each time it tries harder to pull me forward into the rest of the song. The falsetto vocals come easily enough. My mind searches for a flute. Also distinctly not electric. ``The train won't stop going, no it don't slow down''. I can't place it, but it feels familiar. Is it the song? Or the metaphor for what I've just left on Europa?

I need to shake these thoughts. Yes. My spacewalk yodelling setlist, my mind still anchored in old music. Wanting to make Satine smile. I try to imagine and subvocalize a yodel adaptation to "You are my Sunshine". "You-da le hi hoo are my-di-hi-hoo Sunshine-y-hoo". I smile, again, imagining the sight of her laughter across an inch of vacuum.

Or so they say. Yodelling and vacuums and the physics of sound are helpful distractions for quite a while. But I have many more whiles than that to occupy,and now the niggling difficulty with that prounoun and verb tense seep into my consciousness. Or so they say.

The entire premise of this Hail Mary voyage is that there is still a "they" back on Earth to say such things. To sing. To conjugate verbs. To yodel. To laugh. We won't know until we get there. After all this, it could well be only Satine and me

until the end of our days. Satine's end of days, of course, will be the same as mine. But I believe her to be eternal. Timeless. And so she is.

The Migration was only two years into its journey to Europa when the Blight was first reported on Earth. It could still have turned back at that point. But there was no reason to think it should. Everybody on the ship had quarantined at the Antarctic facility for three years before they left. That first pocket of Blight in the Asian subcontinent had less to do with that decade's Migration than Hamburg's shock loss to Tunis in the the Euro/fricana Lega Final that week of departure. And that would have been nothing at all had the Migrations chief doctor not been such a football tragic.

Years, weeks, decades. I wonder if we as humans will ever break away from Earth time. Once we leave Earth's rotation, Earth's orbit, Earth time becomes such an arbitrary thing. It makes sense while we remain reliant on Earth that we still think in Earth years. But I wonder when humans will seize on the opportunity to adopt something better. To go metric, perhaps. The British managed to drop the Shilling, and even Americans went metric 50 years ago. When "day" and "year" cease to have any meaning, will we still insist on a February that has 29 days every four years?

There I go again. Plural pronouns. Future tense. Never mind the vacuum -- if there is no they to hear about your curiosity in their future, does ``they'' become a grammatical error? Is grammar even a thing if you're alone?

By the time the second pocket of Blight emerged, the Migration had passed the turnback point by 6 months. Still, nobody would have been too concerned about the Migration if that pocket had popped up also in Asia. They were quick to lock down and isolate the first pocket, but it wouldn't have been inconceivable for something to leak out locally, or for it to be a parallel flare-up. That's been fairly common with disease over the last few centuries. They usually burn themselves out, and life goes on.

But the second pocket appeared in Halifax. By then it had also become clear in India that the fungus was untreatable, and fatal. Even so, it felt like an overreaction at the time to lock down and isolate all of Nova Scotia for something that had appeared in only one neighbourhood. Maybe the geography just made it too practical. Maybe the public health authorities knew more already than what they let on. Now it feels so depressingly optimistic that they thought they were so on top of it.

Three months quarantine was all we could ethically and practically manage when the Migration reached Europa 18 months later. They walked off the ship and into a huge party. Eponymous Moonshine, natural gravity piñatas, synthetic spit roasts, lots of hugs, and a few kisses. Optimism and empathy can be dangerous things.

A year later on Earth the Blight had eclipsed the plague, our attempts to contain it on Europa were failing, and we would soon lose communications with home. Two years later, I'm pushing a wheelbarrow in full bio-isolation gear, collecting every shard of fuel I can find. I had to wait another 14 months to leave before I could gravity sling off of Mars and reach Earth. If this trip works out, in five years I'll find out whether there is a home to return to. Maybe I'll make my way to the Alps. Maybe people took refuge there. Maybe the mountain air helps. Maybe I will practice yodelling while I have the time.