The song began with a fairly conventional bluegrass arrangement, a lot like the 1950 recording, Pat thought, but then the instruments dropped, and their voices rose in a capella discord, the guitarist’s baritone, the bassist’s tenor. A full octave higher, Lily Gibbs carried a lonesome countermelody.
Then the bottom of the stack dropped out as well, and it was only Lily repeating the question: Where does that water run? Where does that water run?
The last long vowel lengthened into a drone, so pretty soon there weren’t any words, just a restless sort of pain. It was like the sound had found some sympathetic resonance inside Pat at a confluence of bone, and so her eardrums shuddered like she was resting her head against an overdriven speaker. The sound conjured darkness, a limitless space on whose edge she perched, and there was nothing but Lily’s half-gone voice, and a feeling inside like a rupture. There might have been a trickle of blood in her ear. Burst vessels in the whites of her eyes. The vertigo of a sudden change in blood pressure as she found herself standing.
She felt like she was looking up into the black. Or maybe it was down into an equally black abyss. It didn’t matter which, because the black surrounded her. She might sense other things—a shitty underground club in Vancouver, the streets around suffused with cut grass, or blooming trees, the cold snap of winter ozone—but it was the black that mattered, empty black with all the tiny windows of the world lit like stars. Above them sailed moon after moon, through the entombing black, a darkness so vast it stilled her beating heart, slowed her mind to a tick like a clock, then slower even than that.
PAT MAKES A MIXTAPE FOR HER DAUGHTER, 1991
There’s the sound of audiotape first, that familiar low hiss. There’s a crackle, then what might be a mandolin. Someone, somewhere, a long time ago, resets the turntable from 45 to 33 ⅓, and there’s the skirl of sound decelerating. Then Lily Gibbs:
Where does tha— tha— tha—
Sometime, long ago, Pat nudged the turntable’s needle.
—that water run?
IN THE BLACK, 31 YEARS AFTER EGRESS, 2068
What do I miss? Gravity, mostly. I miss gravity and oranges and baths. I miss outside, as an operative concept. We’re never outside in any meaningful way.
I miss information, which in retrospect is the biggest surprise. If you’d asked me when I was a kid I’d’ve thought, you know, interstellar travel, generation ships, they must know everything. I miss the old kind of Faustian, compulsive collection of stuff that used to happen because there was always room for more. I’m old enough to remember Google and how many terabytes of data I kept just because I could.
But it’s amazing how vulnerable information is when your resources are limited and the infrastructure is disintegrating around you. It seemed absolute at the time. Like, Wikipedia, you know? How could something so big be so fragile? It would have survived better if it had been written on those clay tablets you read about from Mycenae, the kind that tell you how many bushels of barley they grew. The kind of tablets that got accidentally baked in some apocalyptic fire, and survive because they’re stone.
It’s not that we’ve lost everything. It’s just—there are gaps.
Like, for example, there was this song my mother used to sing. It was just a folk song. I never thought to look for it until it was too late. I don’t even know where she heard it. Maybe some old mixtape from Grandma, the kind you used to sing along with in the car.
Anyway. I still remember part of it: Where does that water run, poor boy, where does that water run? I sang it to my own grandkid and she said that water runs into the purification system. It took her a while to understand that running water meant something different on a planet, where water runs away into the dark somewhere.
Lily Gibbs. That was the singer’s name. Lily Gibbs. I can almost hear her voice. Almost. I can hear Mom singing, too.
When it makes me lonesome, I like to remind myself that it’s still out there, running into the dark. The song would have been broadcast, right? Mom or Grandma heard it on the radio, so the signal isn’t lost, it’s just out of reach, traveling outward in this kind of envelope, a slight disruption of the aether.
So even though my mom is dead, and the audiotape my grandmother played in her car is at the bottom of some flooded city street—even though it’s all gone Lily Gibbs is still careening through space along with every other sound we’ve ever tossed out there. And the basic message, whether it’s Lily or Marconi, is always the same: We are here.
Somewhere out there someone—a sort of person we can’t imagine—could raise their hand or whatever into space and use the same sort of tech to catch the thin, ancient hiss of a human voice, stretched to nothing by distance, but persistent in the darkness. We’re so far gone now, out past the planets, in the emptiness between home and the nearest stars, and it’s comforting to think of that woman, outracing us all into the black. Where, she’s still asking, does that water run? Lily, high and lonesome, spilled out past the dark rim of the solar system, and into the emptiness beyond.
KEN’S NEPHEW REMEMBERS HIS UNCLE, 2026
We found them in the basement exactly where Kenny left them in like 2013, in his place in Richmond. It’s all sand there. You know how bad the floods hit Steveston. We were lucky we recovered any of it, really.
It took me a while to get parts for his old TEAC TASCAM. 60 series. Those were awesome machines. Uncle Kenny took that shit pretty seriously, even if he was kind of a cokehead. He must have got it in ’74 or something. Anyway. I had to source parts from all over, and we finally got it working and you should’ve seen the collection: John Prine, Tim Buckley, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
I was just listening to them, thinking, Oh, this is cool. But then I get to Lily Gibbs. There was some nice work from Jimmy Staples on mandolin, but it all didn’t hit me until the end.
I mean, I knew “Where Does That Water Run?” from when I was a kid messing around with an acoustic guitar. It’s an old song.
You’ve heard it? No? Yeah, a lot of her work was destroyed for the shellac during the Second World War, and the masters were all recycled. But that was pretty standard back in the day. Anyway—this live performance. At first it’s just ordinary stuff, you think. The microphone is a bit wonky, and maybe there was some chunkiness in his gear that night, a rough edge, even though he wasn’t that bad of a tech.
But when she drops the Autoharp, and loses her stack, so it’s just her voice, the drone, then a keen, then a drone, you can’t help but feel something, something physical. I don’t think there’s a word for that sound.
I met a guy doing sound art once in, like, Sweden. The performance he did seemed really familiar, like the tonal qualities he was trying to produce, something rough but kind of like hypnotic, and jarring. I spent the whole night trying to place it, and then afterward I go up to him and say, “Where does that water run?” And his face changed in that way you sort of recognize. Because that’s the question, isn’t it? The closest you can get using words. The closest you can get to Lily Gibbs dropping her Autoharp and singing, because what good are words at that point?
I made .flacs if you want them.
TORRENT DEMONZ, 2018
Lily.Gibbs.11-14-1975.Exit.Club.torrent
Readme.txt
LilyGibbsExitClubPoster1975.jpg
1. IWishIWasAMoleintheGround.4.17.flac
[…]
11.WhereDoesThatWaterRun.13.55.flac
Seeders: 0
Leechers: 37
3 comments
Seed pleeeeaaaase!
Seeders? My mom put this on a mixtape for me!! I haven’t heard it in twenty years!
Does this actually even exist?
A CRYSTAL RADIO SET, 1966
It was Chris who got the sixty-five-in-one electronics kit for Christmas, but he didn’t finish making anything, so after New Year’s Pat quietly adopted it. She opened it up on the kitchen table, kneeling on a chair and reading the instructions and tracing her finger over the di
agrams, trying to understand capacitor and space age integrated circuit and wondering if she could really truly make a lie detector. She put the radio together that night thinking about how, if you were lucky, you might hear a signal from the moon, maybe. If there was a signal, you might. If you were lucky and could tell the difference between static and aliens.
The first time she put the little beige plug in her ear she held the radio in one hand and put her other hand on her lamp, and it was magical to hear the signal change, until—in among the hushing and hissing sheets of static—she began to hear something like a voice. It got even better when the sun went down. That was okay for a while, but then the lamp wasn’t enough and she thought about the maple tree outside her window, too far for an exit, but she could climb it with a spool of copper wire borrowed from her father’s workbench, and string it in her window.
Many nights she listened to sounds from so far away they had bounced over the ocean and against the upper atmosphere, then ricocheted down from the nighttime sky, and found their way to her ear. Sometimes just a voice saying, Goodnight folks or Looks like another hot one. Sometimes Spanish and Portuguese—so she guessed—and the sounds of Pacific Islanders, the nasal accents of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Stations down the coast in Washington and Oregon that ran The Shadow all night. Once she heard the theme from The Third Man, but static swamped the zither before the radio play began. Sometimes a thin, high tenor. Long interviews and commentaries in Russian and Cantonese and who knew what else.
Then, through the veiling static, a woman’s voice.
At first all she could hear was the melody, but then she could make out the refrain: Where does that water run, poor boy? Where does that water run?
She knew she was listening not to the music alone, but also to the luminiferous aether—the phrase she had seen in the World Book Encyclopaedia entry about space. It was the substance in which planets and radio waves all sailed, the deep and the black.
FREDDIE WEYL IN TORONTO, 1954
Freddie sometimes heard songs he’d written, or songs he might have written. Maybe from the speakers outside a record store. Maybe on the radio set on the windowsill of an apartment overhead as he took his evening walk. They’re often in new and peculiar arrangements: “Waiting For You, My Dear” became the signature song for a local dance band and when they broadcast Saturday Night from the Starlight Room, he sometimes heard it by accident, their closing waltz.
“Where Does That Water Run?” was not so common, but he thought he had heard it on the radio once or twice. Unlike “Waiting for You, My Dear,” which grew more elaborate with each iteration, until it needed a thirty-piece orchestra, “Where Does That Water Run?” seemed to have become a folk song. He heard for the last time while he was sitting in a coffee shop unable to sleep, smoking and eating butter tarts. The kid who worked late Tuesday nights that spring had a taste for folk music, and tuned to a station out of Buffalo, all ballad stanzas and old race music and banjos.
He didn’t recognize it until the first chorus because it seemed to have collected new lyrics, but the song still asked: “Where does that water run?” from the cheap Bakelite setup beside the cash register. It was an unfamiliar arrangement, though as he reached through the composition in his mind and felt the rightness of its discordant harmonies, the thud of a guitar, the manic fiddler with the cheap bow, the woman’s nasal and remarkable voice, Freddie approved.
Paying his bill, he considered telling the kid who worked late Tuesday nights that the song he was singing along with? It was one of his own. Though it wasn’t, really, because it was one of F. Wilde’ compositions. And who was F. Wilde?
“That song, you know,” he began, then he didn’t know what else to say.
“I know, it’s something,” the kid with the beard explained. “I have it at home—it’s a re-release from OKeh Records.”
“Yeah?”
“The thing about folk songs is they always sound,” the kid said, confidentially, as though he’d often rehearsed the thought, “like they’ve always been here, and they’ll always be here. You know?”
And it felt true, even if it wasn’t, so Freddie just said, “Yeah, that’s right,” and left.
LILY GIBBS, AGE SIX, 1904
When she was very old it seemed to Lily Gibbs that she had spent her childhood in a house without lamps, set in the winter dark between narrow hills, where the rain pattered constantly at the little windows in the parlour.
She remembered the parlour most clearly because it was where her adoptive great-aunt kept the pianola—the huge one, flying on the elaborately carved wings of many wooden angels—that sat untouched until she found it. On the walls around it there were pictures made of wool, Lily remembered. Bible verses. Lambs and heartsease and doves.
In the enormous and melancholy dark of the parlour loomed the pianola and she felt her way toward it, following its gleam and hulk in the rainy twilight of November. There were three pieces of music in the parlour, dusted weekly, but which remained otherwise untouched on the music rack: a collection of hymns; a march; and “Where Does That Water Run?” on a huge, ivory sheet dated 1902, illustrated with hollyhocks and willow trees, a stream at inky sunset.
Lily was not allowed into the parlour except on rare and special days, or when—as was the case today—she was alone and slipped in to set her fingers on the untuned keys. Somewhere inside the wheeze and thunk might be music, and on that day she kept playing until Aunty found her and chased her back to the kitchen.
As she played she sensed outside the window a world so huge it slowed her thinking, where lightlessness was a substance in which she seemed to drift, as she drifted in the parlour on the sounds the pianola made. Somewhere the rain was falling, and the drops raced down the panes of glass. Somewhere the water was running, though she did not know where it went. West, she thought, or just—in the manner of a child—to a hazy place called far away, that was emptiness itself. Out in the dark, she thought, where does that water run?
Beyond her ken, in the empty stretches of the sky, rolled all the moons she could not see, filling the deep with light.
About the Author
Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer and academic. Her work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interfictions Online, and Interzone. NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013. You can sign up for author updates here.
Copyright © 2016 by Rebecca Campbell
Art copyright © 2016 by Linda Yan
They bury you at the bottom of the gardens—what’s left of you, pathetic and small and twisted so out of shape it hardly seems human anymore. The river, dark and oily, licks at the ruin of your flesh—at your broken bones—and sings you to sleep in a soft, gentle language like a mother’s lullabies, whispering of rest and forgiveness, of a place where it is forever light, forever safe.
You do not rest. You cannot forgive. You are not safe—you never were.
After your friends have gone, scattering their meager offerings of flowers, after the other archivists have left, it’s just your mother and your master, standing over your grave. Your mother looks years and years older, hollowed out by grief, but your master stands unchanged—tall and dark, with light shining beneath the planes of his face, his skin so thin it might be porcelain.
“Was … was there pain?” your mother asks. She clutches your favorite doll—so well-worn it’s going to pieces in her hands. She doesn’t want to let go because, when she’s knelt in the blood-spattered mud of the gardens, she will have to get up, she will have to go back, to move on, as though everything she does from now on does not stand in the shadow of your death.
Your master’s smile is a hollow thing, too; white and quick, perfunctory. “No,” he says. “We gave her poppy. She felt nothing.”
It’s a lie, of course. There was poppy; there were opiates, but nothing could alleviate the pain of being torn apart—of the house gnawing at your innards; of claws teasing open your chest, splitting ribs
in their hurry to lick at your heart’s blood—of struggling to breathe through liquid-filled lungs, lifting broken arms and hands to defend yourself against something you couldn’t reach, couldn’t touch.
“I see.” Your mother looks at the earth again; hovers uncertainly on the edge of your burial place. At length she lays down the doll, her hands lingering on it, a prayer on her lips—and you ache to rise up, to comfort her as she’d always comforted you—to find the words that would keep the darkness at bay.
You are dead, and there are no words left; and no lies that will hold.
And then it’s just you and your master. You thought he would leave, too, but instead he kneels, slow and stately, as if bowing to a queen—and remains for a while, staring at the overturned earth. “I’m sorry, Charlotte,” he says at last. His voice is melodious, grave, as impeccably courteous as always—the same one he had when he told you what needed to be done—that it was all for the good of the house. “Better the weak and the sick than all of us. I know it doesn’t excuse anything.”
It doesn’t. It never will. Beneath the earth, you struggle to push at what holds you down—to gather shattered flesh and glistening bones, to rise up like the dead at the resurrection, raging and weeping and demanding justice, but nothing happens. Just a faint bulge on the grave, a slight yielding of the mud. Voiceless, bodiless, you have no power to move anything.
“You keep us safe,” your master says. He looks … tired, for a moment, wan and drained of color in the sunlight, his eyes shot with blood. But then he rises, and it’s as if a curtain had been drawn across his face, casting everything in a sharper, merciless light; and once more he is the dapper, effortlessly elegant master of the house, the man who keeps it all together by sheer strength of will. He stares at the blackened water of the river, at the city beyond the boundaries of the house—the smoke of skirmishes and riots, the distant sound of fighting in the streets. “Your blood, your pain is the power we rely on. Remember this, if nothing else.”
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016 Page 10