Every morning at six, ship's time, Old Abernathy read the weather.

He did it over the all-decks speaker from a little booth off the hydroponics bay, in a voice like gravel in a coffee can. "Good morning," he'd say. "Here is the weather." And then he'd read it: Chicago, forty-one degrees and windy. Lagos, ninety, humid, chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Reykjavik, light snow. Lima, overcast. He read thirty cities every morning, in the same order, and he never missed a day.

The weather he read was two hundred and eleven years old.

It came out of the archive, which held a century of daily records from before the ship left, and Abernathy simply started at the beginning and went forward one day at a time. Nobody had asked him to. Nobody remembered who had done it before him, or whether anyone had. It was simply what happened at six, like the lights coming up to morning brightness and the smell of bread from the galley.

Pim was eight when she finally went to the booth and asked him why.

Abernathy thought about it for a while. He was the oldest person aboard, a hundred and four, and he thought about everything for a while.

"Do you know what rain is?" he asked her.

"Water that falls out of the sky," said Pim, who was good at school.

"That's what it is. That's not what it's like." He turned his chair to face her. "Nobody on this ship has ever been rained on. Nobody ever will be. The people who land, a hundred and forty years from now, might be, if the planet is kind. But you and I won't, and your mother won't, and your children won't."

"So why do you read it?"

"Because somebody should remember that it was cold in Chicago," he said. "That's all. That once upon a time, on a particular Tuesday, some fellow in Chicago had to go back inside for a heavier coat, and he was annoyed about it. It seems like a small thing to carry across all this dark. But I think the people at the other end will want to know it happened. I think they'll want to know what we were for."

Pim didn't understand him. She said so. Abernathy laughed and said that was fine.

He died four years later, in his sleep, on a day when it was snowing in Montreal.

The next morning, at six, there was a long silence over the all-decks speaker. People stopped in the corridors. People looked up from their bread.

Then a girl's voice, a little shaky, a little too close to the microphone: "Good morning. Here is the weather."

Chicago, thirty-three degrees, clearing.