---

The Carina Nebula

By Kelsey Hutton

I heard the soft shit shit shit just when I’d almost floated past the blue hatch door that led into some kind of storage room. I had to laugh. I mean, how many times have I said that? Plus the voice sounded older, a woman’s, and I love when adults just say what they mean, instead of carefully guarding every word around “the kids.”

I wasn’t really doing much, just wandering through some of the ship’s back tunnels. So I reached out right before momentum took me past the hatch and grabbed onto the cool metal. I pulled myself back and shook my head side to side a little to clear away my clouds of dark hair.

We were in zero G these days, and like, I knew that tying my hair back was probably the smarter decision when zooming around, but whatever. My hair was kinda curly, kinda wavey, with some straight pieces thrown in for kicks. The sculptures it made floating around my head was probably my best feature, so hair ties be damned.

The light was all soft and gauzy in the storage room, not like the triangular wedges of light the hallway LEDs made, and it made me feel cozy right away. A huge black canvas made of something almost furred—velvet, maybe? Do they still print that, even?—covered in bright dots of colour sat gently on a small island in the centre of the room. There were also a bunch of long, flat, black-and-silver edged cases attached to the side walls and floor, stacked eight or nine high.

Right! This was the storage room for an art gallery. I’d heard it was around the ship somewhere but never visited.

“Get in or get out!” the older woman said loudly, and I jumped. Honestly, I didn’t even realize she’d seen me. She was looking a little frantic, pushing off against the walls, reaching out with these little clear bags to catch—something—out of the air.

She wore a long-sleeved black top with the art gallery’s name, CaRI:na, across her front. Her ship-issue bamboo slacks, unfortunately, were looking a little wrinkly and worse for wear from her bouncing around. Her cheeks were fried as pink as salmon, and her eyebrows were scrunched together in the middle of her forehead, as if each one was trying to reach out to comfort the other.

Basically, she looked stressed. “Close the door! Quick! In or out!”

“In,” I said, because whatever this was was way more interesting than roaming around until Mom was done her maintenance checks. I hastily pulled myself in and the hatch swooshed gently closed behind me.

Interesting. With the hatch closed, the air smelled different in here than the ship usually did. Maybe a little mustier? But not in a bad way. Kind of like when Grandma pulled out her antique paperback romance novels. (She said she kept them as collectors’ items, but I know she read them at night, very carefully.)

The woman was still netting things out of the air, teeny tiny things, especially around the opening of the air ducts. They were actually super pretty, bright electric pinks and oranges, but I was getting a sinking feeling about this.

“Do you need any—” I started to say at the same time as she shouted “The beads! We have to collect the beads!”

Oh, so that’s what they were!

Oh. Shit. And that’s why this was bad.

Look, I’m a proper-raised ship’s kid. And I’ve lived in closed systems long enough to realize that tiny bits of debris floating into the wrong areas, where delicate machinery needs to keep machining, was a baaad idea.

“My suction hose is broken,” she raced to explain. Her voice was soft, but her words tripped over each other, like each one was scared of the one coming up behind it. “I thought I could just… I know what I’m doing, but the vial tipped over so fast, and my hands….”

I switched my visual focus from the woman to the beads sparkling in the air. Now that I focused on them, they were pretty much everywhere. I took a deep breath—

And hacked out a cough. It was hard to breathe there for a sec, but then I spat the offenders out into my palm. Yep. Bright coral-pink beads, as small as the tip of my stylus, trying to make their way down my throat.

Not great. Definitely not great if they got ship-wide.

“Take this!” the older woman called and tossed me a curved face shield with a small air tank attached via short tube. She quickly pressed one to her own face, although she fumbled a bit, like her fingers were stiff.

It was an ox mask, one of the suction-sealing ones, for short-term oxygen use. Like when the air was too dirty with CO₂, or you needed to quickly go through maintenance pockets of the ship. Those weren’t kept at the standard 21%, since no use wasting good oxygen.

(Mom hated when people wasted oxygen. “Just because we can split water into oxygen doesn’t mean it’s easy,” she’d go on for the fifty millionth time. “And the farther our ships get, the farther it is to haul ice from Europa. Do people even realize how much fuel those haulers take?” It was her favourite rant—don’t even get me started.)

But I got where the gallery woman was going right away. “On!” I shouted through my mask, and the built-in mike staticked to life.

She quickly hit the failsafe to vacuum-seal this room off from the rest of the ship for however long it took us to clean up. The air in the room would still be fine to breathe for a few minutes, but it would probably get uncomfortable soon without the ox mask. Plus, masks meant fewer beads down the throat or getting into our eyes. Which was all A-OK with me. (Mom never let me use her ox mask, despite the fact that I was sixteen, not six.)

“Save as many of the beads as you can,” the older woman said, passing me an extra baggie, finally seeming to calm down a little. “They’re genuine Earth-made, about 180 years old, and the only size 15s I have.”

“Got it,” I said. Then I couldn’t help but rub my hands together, like a crafty bad guy from an old movie. “Let Operation Bead Rescue begin!”

---

“Mom,” I said, but I might as well have been talking into a vacuum.

“—to be in quad 17, where I told you to meet me, and instead—”

“Mom,” I tried again.

“—my heartrate was elevated to 152! I couldn’t find you, all I saw were the alarms—”

“MOTHER OF MINE!” I yelled, mostly because I was SO ANNOYED but also to make her laugh.

She stopped and her face looked like it was trying to jump in five directions at once. All I had to do was widen my eyes and wiggle my eyebrows a little. She tried to hide her laugh with a cough, but I knew it. I had her.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” I said. “I didn’t realize sealing the room would set off the engineering alarms. I just wanted to help—”

I gestured to the gallery woman, whose name I realized I didn’t actually know. The three of us were standing in the storage room, mag strips lightly activated on our boots to make it easier to face each other. Mom was yelling at me in her restrained, in-front-of-other-people voice. On top of that, the room sounded strangely loud now. It had been really nice to listen to the rare silence of not having the air vents on for an hour or two.

The gallery woman and I had successfully cleaned up the beads, which felt immensely satisfying, lemme tell you. But apparently I guess I’d missed my rendezvous time with Mom? And freaked her out a little?

Especially since she’d been called to this quad of the ship for maintenance because of faulty carbon scrubbers, which technically can lead to death by carbon monoxide poisoning if you’re really slow on the uptake (there are monitors, after all) and/or trapped in a sealed room?

“Johanna,” the gallery woman jumped in, a little late to the cue. “Johanna Hostmann, the curator here. Pleased to meet you. Your daughter was a great help.”

Mom harrumped, but graciously held out her hand. At first she forgot she was still wearing her rough work glove, and the gallery woman hesitated, but then Mom hastily whipped the glove off. The woman, Johanna, shook Mom’s hand. Though I noticed she held her hand awkwardly at her side afterwards, like the handshake had hurt a little, and her finger joints were almost as knobby as Grandma’s.

“You hear that, Mom?” I said. “A great help. Couldn’t have done it without me.”

“And why were the beads loose in the first place?” Mom asked, and Johanna winced.

I didn’t think that was entirely fair. Johanna worked here. It was clearly her job to work with really old materials like that. I didn’t know why Mom was prying.

“I was … restoring a small piece of the work, here, behind us. My hand slipped, and…. The artist beaded this piece with thread from the late 1990s, which makes them quite fragile. The beads can come loose, and in some patches the beadwork has been knocked loose entirely.”

Johanna quickly gestured Mom and me over, and spread out the beaded canvas fully so that we could see. It was the first time I’d actually had a chance to stop and admire it, and honestly, it kinda took my breath away.

I was right about it being a black velvet background. It was about as long as I was tall, so close to six feet (Mom said Dad’s side of the family were all tall and knobbly, like me) and maybe four feet high. And it was almost completely covered in pale gold, pulsing pink, and orchid-orange beads showing what had to be a nebula.

But it was a nebula in a shape I’d never seen before. I mean, nebulas are just interstellar clouds of dust and gas, so it’s not like they have to look a certain way, but the orbits of nearby stars and planets do usually make them nicely round or disk-shaped.

But this one had five pretty distinct points to it, almost like a pinwheel. Or a flower. The pale yellow beads sparkled in the centre, while the pinks and oranges glowed fiercer the further you got to the edges. There were dark rifts between the clouds, rare glimpses of negative space where the velvet showed through, that helped create the illusion of petals.

“Like an orchid blossoming, isn’t it?” Johanna said and smiled, the first real smile I’d seen her give.

I leaned in closer, almost dragging my nose against the fabric now. The beads were SO small. Also, up close, I could see translucent aquamarine beads were sewn on too, scattered throughout the whole thing. They had to be the individual stars, some brighter and some more faint, shining through the dark. The relief of the dots of cool blue made the red nebula pulse even redder.

“Wow,” I said, because what else was there to say?

“It’s the Carina Nebula, about 7,500 light-years away,” said Johanna. “The artist created that in her first year in space, about thirty years ago. She used her traditional Anishinaabe Indigenous beading techniques from Earth to capture the beauty of her new environment. Her new home.”

Ah-nish-nah-bay. I quickly turned my neural scanner on and pulled up the word. (Yeesh. There were about fifteen messages from Mom. Really should have turned this on earlier).

Anishinaabe – an Indigenous nation from Earth, whose territory stretches across a big chunk of northern and central North America. There were a lot of related nations that were Anishinaabe, including the Saulteaux, the Mississaugas, and the Odawa. More information popped up—about clans, someone called Nanabush, biographies of Anishinaabe people from other parts of our wider ship flotilla—that I’d have to read later.

There was something about Johanna’s voice that twigged something. “Did you know her?” I asked. “The artist?”

Johanna’s grey-blonde hair bobbed, almost like she’d been caught at something private. She definitely hesitated, but then finally said, “Her name was Nam’aawin.” Another pause. “She was my wife.”

“It’s beautiful,” Mom said, in that voice I knew meant we’re getting off topic here. “But loose particulates, such as those beads, are a danger to the correct functioning of the ship. The system filters should catch any loose beads that slipped through, but still….” Yep, she was going into full Senior Mechanical Engineer mode. “There are regulations about things like this. Spills aren’t just spills on ship. The consequences—”

“It’s just this zero G!” Johanna burst out. “One-third is a perfectly acceptable grav level for my restoration work, and I’m sure for many others. I don’t understand why—”

“We can only simulate that much gravity when the ship’s under thrust, and therefore burning a lot of fuel,” Mom said, and her left eye twitched. Uh oh. “Now that we’ve reached this latest asteroid belt and our mining phase has begun, we can’t just burn extra fuel to create an artificial sense of—”

“Wowee! OK! Mom, I think I really need to get home and do my exercises,” I cut in. “I haven’t lifted any weights today and you know what they say about kids’ muscular atrophy these days. Zero g means more weights for me! Thanks Johanna!”

The gallery woman startled a bit, I think because she hadn’t actually expected me to use her name, but it got her out of defensive fighting mode. And Mom sighed, taking a step back and tapping her heels to de-magnetize. Perfect. That meant we were on our way.

“It was great to meet you,” I said, and meant it. I couldn’t help but look down again at the gorgeous swirl of colours in front of me. Each bead was tightly sewn down beside the next, making beautiful twists and arches with perfect evenness. I couldn’t even imagine how many hours that must have taken.

“Feel free to come again, Meadow,” Johanna said softly, offering me my name in return. I grinned and she cautiously returned the smile.

“Byeee!” I called and hit the hatch button, nearly pulling Mom through the frame. I had to blink briefly in the transition to the harsh hallway lights. The metal walls of the corridor, lined with ox pipes and digital atmo monitoring screens every ten feet or so, looked pretty drab compared to the calming white walls of the gallery storage room. It also smelled distinctly tinny, a bit like iron.

Funny how you don’t notice those things, until suddenly, you do.

Mom was just about through the hatch when she just HAD to say, “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to report this to my supervisors.” She left a small space for Johanna to say something in return, but the gallery woman only let the silence stretch until finally the door snicked shut.

Way to ruin an exit, Mom.

---

Back at home, I was honest-to-God trying to give Mom the silent treatment, but my mouth was not cooperating.

It was dinnertime, and Grandma had volunteered to go pick up our meals from the mess hall, to “give us time to talk,” even though grabbing the grub was usually my job. Sometimes we ate wraps, fish jerky, soups out of squeeze-packs—things we had in our apartment fridge that didn’t go flying awkwardly around the room when you tried to bite into it, or that didn’t require dangerous techniques like frying, since breathing in floating oil droplets can do a lot of damage to your lungs. The more complicated stuff was left to the professionals, who prepped communal meals four times a week that residents could either pick up or eat with others in the mess hall.

Tonight’s meal was something a little special, which I’d only had a couple times. It was called pizza, with tomato sauce and melted nut cheese and deliciously salty slices of tofu cut super thin, on this cooked flat dough, which was much thicker and chewier than a pita.

(Any kind of dough was really hard to cook on ship, since apparently the baking chemistry—magic, more like it—just didn’t work properly in space. “Cinnamon buns….” Grandma would say, with eyes half-closed and drool pooling in the corners of her mouth. “Let me tell you about tall, fluffy, drizzled-in-cream-cheese-icing cinnamon buns….”)

Mom was staring at our fridge as if it, personally, had broken down every carbon filter on the ship and it wasn’t even sorry. She’d changed out of her blue work jumpsuit into simple tights and a wrap top with loose-ish sleeves that floated gently in place—an indulgence she’d never have allowed herself while working.

I’d changed into an oversized sweater the same coral orange as the Carina Nebula in a futile but meaningful, I hoped, kind of defiance. I’m not sure she caught it.

“You can’t seriously report Johanna,” I said in contradiction to my own vow of silence made not ten minutes earlier. “It was an accident.”

“A serious accident,” Mom said, still with her back turned to me. “One that endangered fifty thousand people on this ship.”

I rolled my eyes in full glory, knowing she couldn’t see me. “Oh come on! It wasn’t that serious! It’s not like coolant contaminated our water supply or a fire broke out or something. You have to chill sometimes.”

OK, so I admit my voice got louder there at the end than I meant it to. And I admit something else was building up tight in my chest. Something I was usually really good at not thinking about.

The threat of a report—from my mom, who was pretty high up the engineering ranks—was serious. When Mom reported people, those people lost their jobs.

Sometimes more than just their jobs.

I’d already pulled out three squeeze packs of iced tea and anchored them to the velcro’d basket at the small four-top table in the middle of our kitchen. Cloth napkins swayed lazily in their clips. I was seated in my regular spot at the plastic table, one foot hooked on a toebar to keep from drifting away, one leg folded up under my chin. I could have put my mag boots on, but it felt nice to go free-footed sometimes.

Grandma, with an excited glint in her eye, had reminded me we didn’t need cutlery for pizza. So all I had left to do was stew.

“It was a moderately serious accident, that would have required days of crew clean-up had more beads gotten into the ducts,” Mom said. It was clear that was as far as she was going to compromise on that point.

“And don’t roll your eyes at me, Meadow Rivera,” she snapped, using her psychic Mom powers.

My chest felt too tight to eat, and I almost ditched on dinner. But just then Grandma came in, and even I had to admit—the round delivery sleeve she carried smelled heavenly.

The next few minutes were busy with salty, greasy slices of tomatey goodness. The dough was floppy at the end of each triangular slice tip but crispy by the edge (“the crust, it’s the best part. I’ll eat yours if you don’t want it,” Grandma said. I ate the crust of my first slice but pretended not to want it for the second or third piece, since Grandma clearly loved it so much).

But once I had handed over my last crust, I finally said what had been gnawing at me the whole time.

“Why can’t you see the people?” I burst out. “Instead of just the rules?”

The silence must have only lasted a few seconds, but it felt like eons. In the absence of any talking, chewing, or sighs of contentment from Grandma, the usual hum and thrum of the ship around us absolutely roared.

“Oh, you do not get to make this about your father,” Mom finally growled, and that was it. I was out.

---

Imagine this. You’re a smart guy, a teacher, with a family you love. You have a brilliant wife and a little girl you adore, and who adores you. Everything going for you, right?

But there’s this rule. It’s an old, outdated rule, but it’s a rule. Who made this rule? you might ask. Whose idea was it? Where did the spirit of this rule come from?

Doesn’t matter. A rule’s a rule. And there are consequences for rulebreakers.

My father saw that a rule was getting in the way of one of his students being able to enroll in the language classes they needed, because they were too old for a translator implant to take. But this student had too many infractions, slip-ups, and failures to comply with the mandatory duties that rotated on ship. You don’t serve, you don’t get served. After all, when humanity left Earth for the stars, it traded in a sick and dying environment for one that was just as harsh, but in very different ways.

Dad tried to bend these rules, to help someone who was having a hard time, but you don’t do that when you’re married to the woman who literally wrote the flotilla survival handbook. Excuse me, the Universal Terran Ship Code of Conduct. (Well, big chunks of it, anyway. Apparently there were several writers, yada yada yada, whatever).

Well, when you do, imagine that you’re exiled from your ship in punishment, and then the ship you’re sent away to, the one that doesn’t have your family on it, grossly misjudges its gravitational slingshot around Jupiter while experimenting with the fancy new warp drive everyone in the flotilla was so excited about and ends up 13.2 light-years away and counting.

So every message your daughter sends to you after that starts with the words “Hey Dad, I know you won’t get this for another thirteen years, but…” as the gulf between your faulty-warp-drive ship and the rest of humanity’s flotilla gets wider.

That was eleven years ago. In just under two years, he might finally get to respond.

---

“Meadow.”

I didn’t answer. Instead I drummed my heel against the metal frame of my bed where it was bolted into the wall. I floated and stared holes into the ceiling, where I’d built a screen saver collage of my favourite photos over the years I liked to stare at before I fell asleep.

“Meadow. Come on.”

What else had that artist made? Johanna’s wife? There were a lot of beautiful nebulas out there. Maybe the Carina Nebula was only one in a series. Maybe there were more.

“Meadow. Daughter of mine. Listen to me. I have something for you of your father’s.”

My head whipped around to look at Mom so fast I kept spinning over my tucked-in quilt covers, until I grabbed a wall strap and pulled myself upright.

Mom had what looked like a large necklace—a beaded necklace—with a front piece as big as my hand. She offered it and I took it carefully.

It was a ruby-throated hummingbird, all done in small beads stitched onto some kind of backing. I flipped it over and ran my thumb across the surface of the material, some kind of tanned leather. It was its own piece, whole and smooth, with an almost pebbly texture. I flipped it over again and admired the multi-toned teals over the bird’s back, the ways changes in the direction of the beading created the subtle texture of feathers. It was edged with beads, to seal the front piece with the threadwork to the smooth leather on the back, and made into a necklace with a simple string of green beads.

“This was Dad’s?” I said, incredulous.

“Dad made it, or the medallion, anyway,” Mom said, and you could have knocked me over with… well, with the puff of a hummingbird’s feather. “I think his sister finished the edging, made the necklace part. He was always much better at starting projects than finishing them.”

That was a little too close to criticizing him for either of us at that moment, so Mom changed tactics.

I moved over to let her float close to me over the bed, close enough that I could smell the pizza on her breath.

“Your Dad was… is… Métis on his mother’s side. They’re an Indigenous nation with close ties to the Anishinaabe. I think his mother spoke some Saulteaux actually…. Lots of relations, anyway.” She held her breath and looked at me with very large, dark eyes.

“And you’re just telling me this now?” My chest ached. I shook my head, hiding for a minute behind my dark clouds of hair.

“I never meant to hide it from you,” she spilled out, and I mostly believed her. “But you know… how hard it is for me to speak about your father.”

I did. She almost never. Grandma never said anything, either.

“I guess I thought… you know how it is on ship. Most people don’t like to hold onto old allegiances from Earth. And I thought you were… from me. So you are what I am. Which is ship-born through and through.”

I looked back down at the beading in my hands. The medallion—that was the word. I used to love watching hummingbirds in the temperate biomes. Loved their peaceful thrum. I brought it up to my nose and smelled that same pleasant mustiness I’d smelled back in the gallery.

Métis. May-tee. I rolled the word around on my tongue, too.

What other beautiful things did they make?

“Not telling me this… feels different, though,” I said quietly, and had to hold back an ache in my throat.

“It probably is,” Mom said with a hitch. Her eyes were shiny now and her voice a little husky. “I’m sorry. When I saw how you reacted, how awed you were when you saw that beautiful beadwork, I realized I messed up. I should have brought this up before. I’m sorry, Meadow.”

And then, just when I was about to forgive her, Mom did the most Mom-ish thing ever.

“But I wasn’t wrong about those spilled beads,” she said with passion. “Tiny debris can wreak havoc in a ship like ours if you’re not careful.” And I knew it was a passion not just for rules, but for rules that kept people safe.

I closed both my hands over the medallion, and imagined Dad’s fingers slowly working on other projects too, one tiny bright bead at a time.

“I think I have an idea,” I said with a happy, crafty smile.

---

Surprise surprise, the non-storage area of the small, three-room art gallery was even calmer and cozier than the storage room. When Johanna showed me around, properly this time, I felt like I was wrapped in fluffy clouds with its gentle white and cream colour palette, muffled from the clanging of day-to-day life on the ship and cocooned instead by black-felted canvases that showed me some of my favourite spacescapes in a totally new way.

I was right. Carina Nebula was part of a series. (“Oh! Like CaRI:Na Gallery!” I’d said when I finally made the connection. Johanna had blushed and nodded, grey-blonde bangs bouncing. “My favourite is the Wild Duck Cluster,” Johanna had admitted, and brought me to a heavily-textured piece with electric blue shapes that whispered of wild birds flying north. Flying home.)

“And you’re sure your mother is alright with this plan?” Johanna said for the tenth time and nervously rubbed her knuckles. She may have played it cool to Mom, but she knew how close she’d come to losing her job. Maybe even the whole gallery.

“It was an official recommendation in her report,” I said. “Having an assistant will make things much safer. I can help you with the fussy stuff, be your backup. Engineers love redundancy. Plus Mom said I can probably swing some school credit, too.”

Johanna was ever-so-slowly relaxing, smiling a little, even getting excited to show me her stashes of sinew, thread, and the cutest darn pair of snipping scissors I’d ever seen.

Last of all was her pride and joy – the bead collection. We came to a floor-to-ceiling tall closet, painted white to match the rest of the gallery, and there she hesitated.

“These were Nam’aawin’s, but other beaders share these too,” she said. “I’ll have to introduce you to Melody Leclayr. She’s Métis too, and almost a hundred and three, but the arthritis hasn’t gotten her fingers yet. She makes beautiful moccasins.”

I nodded happily even as my throat ached with a different, bigger emotion. One that was harder to name, but one I really wanted to explore. I clicked off the mag strips in my boots just to be able to bounce freely on my toes, and my loose hair, half-back with a single tie, bounced with me.

“Ready?” she said, and stood poised to open the cabinet doors. I was dying to see them – from neon colours to soft pastels, solid to pearly to translucent, itty bitty teeny tiny seed beads to pea-sized honkers carved from antlers and bone. Happily, these ones would be carefully contained in clear containers and not floating up my nose or down my throat. No masks necessary this time.

I wanted to see it all. Learn it all. Do it all.

Dad would be proud when he heard about this. I knew it. And I knew I’d show him my own work someday.

I clasped my hands together and blinked away a gentle teardrop. “Let the Great Beading Project begin!”

---

Host Commentary

By Tina Connolly

And we’re back! Again, that was The Carina Nebula, by Kelsey Hutton, narrated by Samantha Loney.

About this story, Kelsey Hutton says:

A few years ago I worked with the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. As you can imagine, it was a heavy subject, but it was also an amazing opportunity and one I am so grateful for. 

I worked in the Research team alongside a lovely colleague who was responsible for the Inquiry’s Legacy Archive. This is a living archive of legal evidence, presented as part of a national public inquiry into violence against Indigenous women and gender diverse people, in the form of artwork. Meaning, that people could submit paintings, poems, beading, quilts, sculpture, and much more as their testimony — testimony to the challenges they’ve overcome and testimony to the connections to their culture that helped them heal. 

But those are the kinds of actual, nitty-gritty questions we should be ready to answer if we want to keep carrying forward and evolving the traditions that have been so healing and nation-building for us so far.

And about this story, I say: 

I loved this sweet story about family and traditions. I really liked how our protagonist Meadow was caught in the crosshairs between her engineer mother, who focuses on the rules, and the artist Johanna, who focuses on the people. There is also quite the heartbreaking story lodged in the middle of this, about the father who is lost to them for a long time, who would have taught Meadow about her art and heritage if Mother hadn’t been so unyielding on the rules. Meadow might have been helping Johanna with the beads a lot sooner.

While reading this, I realized that I don’t think I’ve seen too many stories on a generation ship where there is an actual art gallery. I feel like I’ve seen more of other arts in these spaceship stories–theatre, singing, gardening. Yarn bombing. And I mean, I’m sure there are other ship stories I’ve forgotten. But regardless, it makes sense that space for physical, tangible art would be at a premium when everything has to be weighed and calculated. So I can easily imagine the justifications for NOT having an art gallery. But this is a lovely story about its importance for people, for heritage, and for family.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

How do you share it, you ask? Well! In addition to your social media of choice, consider rating and/or reviewing us on podcast listening sites, such as Apple or Google. More reviews makes for more discoverability makes for more Escape Pod for you.

Escape Pod relies on the generous donations of listeners exactly like you. And remember that Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where you can chat with other fans as well as our staff members. I do always love seeing what you have to say. So! If you enjoyed our story this week then consider going to escapepod.org or patreon.com/EAPodcasts and casting your vote for more stories that take on important apprenticeships.

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Ossie Davis, who said:

“Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.”

Thanks for listening! And have fun.