Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

Finally he said, “She was old. Terribly old and dying. I thought I told you.”

  I said, yeah, I guess you did.

  “Millions and millions of years old, and used to think she’d never die. But it was all over for her, and she knew it. We never wanted to help her. We never wanted to save her, and now we couldn’t if we wanted to. It’s too late. Too late …”

  After that he started to cry. I listened to it and sort of tapped his shoulder and talked to him for as long as it took to finish my caff. But he didn’t say anything else that day.

  The next day he sort of motioned to me to come over and sit with him. He’d never done that before. So I did.

  “She could make pictures in your head.” He was whispering. “Show you things. Did I tell you about that?”

  He never had, and I said so.

  “They’re trying to make me forget the leaves. Billions and billions of leaves, all sizes and shapes and shades of green, and the rising sun turning them gold. Sometimes the bottom was a different color, and when the wind blew the whole tree would change.”

  I wanted to ask what a tree was, but I figured I could just look it up and kept quiet.

  “She used to show me birds, too. Wonderful birds. Some that could sleep while they flew. Some that sang and flew at the same time. All kinds of colors and all kinds of shapes. You know what a bird is?”

  Naturally I said I didn’t.

  “It’s a kind of flying animal. Some of them made music. A lot of the little ones did. Singing, you know, only they sounded more like flutes. It was beautiful!”

  I said, did they know “Going to Bunk with You Tonight,” because that’s my favorite song. He said they didn’t play our music they played their own, and he sang some of it for me, looking like he was going to kiss somebody. I didn’t like it much, but I pretended I did. I wanted to know how she had showed him all this and made him hear it, because I think it would be really nice if I could do that, and useful, too. He said he didn’t know, and after that he was pretty quiet till I’d finished my caff.

  Then he said, “You know how a man puts part of himself into a woman?”

  I said sure.

  “It’s like that, only in the brain. She puts part of herself into your brain.”

  Naturally I laughed, and I said was it as good for you as it was for her, and did you feel the ship jump?

  And he said, “It wasn’t good for her at all, but it was wonderful for me, even the time I watched the last bird die.”

  There was a lot of other stuff, too, some of it happy and some really, really sad. I will remember it, but I don’t think you would want to hear about all of it. Finally he told me how sick she had been, and how he had sat beside her night after night. He would pick up her hand and hold it, and try to think of something he could say that would make her feel better, only he could never think of anything and every time he tried it was just so dumb he made himself shut up. He would hold her hand, like I said up there, and sort of stroke it, and after a while it would melt away and he would have to look for it and pick it up all over. I didn’t understand that at all. I still don’t.

  But finally he thought of something he could say that didn’t make him feel worse, and he thought maybe it had even made her feel better, a little. He said, “I love you.” It seemed like it worked, he said, and so he said it again and again.

  And that is all I remember about him except for when we set down and he left the ship. Only I want to say this. I know he was crazy, and if you read this and want to tell me I was crazy too to hang out with him in the break area like I did for so long, that’s all right. I knew he was crazy, but he was somebody new and it was kind of fun to pull it out of him like I did and see what he would say.

  Besides, he was a lot older than I am and his face had all these lines because of being down there so long and practically starving, so he was fun to look at, and the other thing was the color. The ship is all white, the walls and ceilings and floor and everything else. That makes it easy to spot fluid leaks and sometimes shorts that start little fires someplace. But all that white and the white uniforms and so on seem like they just suck the color out of everything except blood.

  Only it never sucked the color out of him, and that made him special to me. Nice to look at, and fun, too. I remember seeing him walking along Corridor A the last time. He was headed for the lock and going out, and I knew it from the old, old dress blues and the little bag in his hand. And I thought, oh shit that’s the last color we had and now he’s going and this really licks.

  And it did, too.

  So I ran and said good-bye and how much I was going to miss him and called him Mate and all that. You know. And he was nice and we talked a little bit more, just standing there in Corridor A.

  Of course I put my elbow in it, the way I always did sooner or later. I said about the woman that had been dirtside with him, was she still alive when we took him off, because he’d said how sick she was and I thought he wouldn’t go off and leave her.

  He sort of smiled. I never had seen a smile like that before, and I don’t ever want to see another one. “She was and she wasn’t,” he said. “There were things inside her, eating the corpse. Does that count?”

  I said no, of course not, for it to count they would have to have been part of her.

  “They were,” he said, and that was the real end of it.

  Only he turned to go, and I wanted to walk with him at least till he got to the lock. Which I did. And talking to himself I heard him say, “She had been so beautiful. Just so damned beautiful.”

  All right, his mind had blown, like everybody says. But sometimes I can almost see him again when I’m in my bunk and just about asleep. He smiles, and there’s somebody standing behind him, but I can’t quite see her.

  Not ever.

  The Fat Magician

  May 3, 2000

  Franklin A. Abraham, Ph.D., Chair

  Comparative Religion and Folklore

  U. of Nebraska Lincoln

  Lincoln NE 68501

  Amerika

  Dear Frank,

  I have quite a tale to tell. It is not exactly folklore. Not yet, but it is fast becoming folklore. It is a mystery story if you will, and centers about a man in league with the Devil, who was on the side of the angels. It is also a story of murder, though there is no mystery about the murder. Most signally, it is a horror story, by far the most horrible I have ever been made aware of.

  And it is a ghost story, on top of everything else. You will have to accept my own testimony as regards the ghost; so let me say here that everything I am about to tell you is true to the best of my knowledge. I am going to stretch nothing, because there is nothing that requires stretching. I am not, however, going to tell you the whole truth. I cannot do that without betraying the pledge I gave this morning to a most attractive woman who has been exceedingly kind to me. I know, Frank, that is not a thing you would wish me to do.

  As you will probably be able to tell from the postmark, I am not yet in Vienna. Trains do not break down—or so I have always thought. It turns out I was wrong. I am not sorry, but I am very glad that I allowed myself a few days in Vienna before the opening of the WFC.

  In brief, I woke up this morning and found my train at a dead stop between two flower-spangled mountain meadows when it ought to have been in the Vienna station. I have my demotic, as you know, and fair command of Spanish. My German, I fear, is merely amusing. Amusing to me, I mean. Actual Germans and Austrians are inclined to burst into tears.

  By jumping up and down and shouting, I was able to make the conductor (“Herr Schaffner”) understand that I wished to know why we were not in Vienna. Herr Schaffner, by shouting back, stamping, spitting in my face, and wiping his own with his handkerchief, was able to convey to me that ein gross Herr Shaft (I suppose the crankshaft) of our engine had broken. In all fairness, I must admit Herr Schaffner’s English is better than my German. Say, about ten percent better.

  Soon we were joined by a handsome
young guy called Heinz, a grad student who speaks English a good deal better than I shall ever speak German. Heinz conferred with Herr Schaffner, and explained to me that the Austrian State Railway would not be able to spare us a new engine for a day or so. We were welcome to stay on the train until the new engine arrived, eating such food as there was in the dining car. Or we could walk three kilometers down the tracks to R———, where there would be restaurants and so forth. When the new engine arrived, the train would pull into the station at R——and stay there for an hour or more collecting its passengers.

  Heinz and I conferred and decided to walk to the village and perhaps take rooms there, I promising to buy his breakfast if he would interpret for me. We fetched the overnight bags that were all we were permitted to have in our compartments and off we went, hurrying along before the rest of passengers (they were still yawning and dressing for the most part) came along to overwhelm the village facilities.

  “I myself am living not so far from this place when I was a child in Freistadt,” Heinz informed me. “This R——, it is where the famous and terrible Ernst S—lived.”

  Naturally I wanted to know what made Herr S——famous and terrible.

  “He is a Hexenmeister.” Heinz grinned and made magical gestures.

  “A master of bad luck?”

  Heinz laughed. “He will make you a dog or a toad, Herr Cooper. This is bad luck enough, ja? Only we do not worry now. He is dead. When I am little, the older kinder scare us with him, the big children.”

  After that I wanted to know a great deal more, as you can imagine; but Heinz could only tell me that “Fat Ernst” (this was the name used to frighten children, apparently) had been a giant, that he had disappointingly boasted but a single head, and most surprisingly that he had been a living, breathing man in Heinz’s grandparents’ time. Heinz’s great uncle, a traveling salesman, had met him more than once; Heinz thought that he had died during World War II, and that he had probably been killed by a bomb.

  We got to the village and soon found a snug das Café, where Heinz quizzed our waitress on my behalf. She called “Fat Ernst,” Ernst the Great (which interested me), agreed that he had been a bad man, but seemed to feel a secret sympathy for him. An older man with a bristling mustache stopped at our table on his way out and snapped something in German that I could not understand, at which our waitress colored. When she had gone, Heinz explained in a whisper that the other patron had called Fat Ernst a liar and a thief.

  Our Frühstücks came (bread, butter, pastries, cold cuts, three kinds of cheese, and the wonderful Austrian coffee), and with all the other things an old man who had been drinking his coffee at a table in the back, speaking a German so slow and simple that even I could understand most of what he said: Fat Ernst had been a friend of the Devil’s. It was better not to talk, or even think, about such people.

  Properly chastened, Heinz and I confined our conversation to the excellence of the food and the length of our delay for the remainder of the meal.

  When I paid our bill, the owner of the cafe said in halting English. “Quick you will want das Mittgassen, ja? In R——we have ein fine Gasthaus.” He pointed. “Der Romantik Hotel S——. Sehr alt. Sehr in-ter-es-ting. Gutes Speise.”

  Well, Frank, I have never claimed to be the sharpest knife in the drawer; but even I could not help noticing that he was—yes, earnestly—recommending a place other than his own, and that the name of the “Romantic Hotel” he recommended was also that of Fat Ernst.

  In retrospect, we should have found a cab. As it was we assumed that der Romantik Hotel S——was in the village; and when we found out (by asking directions on a street in which all the houses seemed to be been modeled on cuckoo clocks) that it was not, that it was nearby. As, alas, it was not. Frank, the Chinese are right. Uphill miles are longer. So are uphill kilometers. By the time we had gone wrong, and found the right road again, and stopped a couple of times to rest and hold lengthy conversations concerning job opportunities in American universities, and Austrian folklore, and American folklore (poor Heinz thought that Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan were legitimate, but had never heard of the Boss in the Wall), and German and Russian and Polish folklore, to say nothing of the opportunities awaiting an unmarried man in Vienna … Well, it was nearly lunchtime when got there; and I honestly think I could have sat down, taken off my shoes, and eaten Heinz’s lunch as well as my own.

  Now I’m going to describe Gertrun’s hotel. Pay attention, Frank. This stuff is important.

  Although the setting is lovely, the building itself is not. What it is, is old. It was built (Gertrun says) in 1757 as a hunting lodge. Her family, the S——s, took it over in 1860 and have operated it as a hotel ever since. It is of weathered gray stone, is as square as a bouillon cube, and has three stories, with one of those high, pointed roofs you see everywhere here and (I suppose) a good-sized attic underneath it. Parlor, dining room, kitchen, hotel office, et cetera on the ground floor, with a wine cellar and other cellars underground. High ceilings in all the rooms. Go up the stairs and you find a square landing on which you might drill troops, with a massive carved railing. This landing gives access to the twelve rather old-fashioned bedrooms on the floor. The stair continues to the floor above where there are more rooms; I did not bother to count those, but Gertrun says those are smaller, so sixteen up there, possibly.

  Gertrun owns and runs the place. Picture a substantial woman between thirty-five and forty, very blond, with a round, smiling face, a toddler’s complexion, and truly beautiful clear blue eyes. She showed us into a dark-paneled dining room ornamented with the antlers of deer that had died before any of us were born, assured us that lunch would be ready in a minute or two, and stayed to chat with us. At first I supposed, as I think anybody would, that she was an employee; I asked if there were any members of the owner’s family about.

  “I am here, Mein Herr. I am Gertrun S——.”

  I apologized, and we introduced ourselves and explained about the train.

  When I mentioned Ernst S——, I unleashed a flood of information. He had been Gertrun’s grandfather. A giant? Oh, ja! She rose on tiptoe and stretched a hand as high as she could reach to indicate his height, and embraced an imaginary barrel show his girth. Three hundred kilos—four hundred. She did not know, but he had been sehr gross, huge.

  Heinz asked several questions I was too dense to understand; Gertrun replied in German, but I caught the word Jude.

  Heinz turned to me, smiling. “He hid people from the Nazis when they took power in our country, Herr Doktor. Jews—”

  Gertrun interrupted in German.

  “She says he had a Jew, a priest, and a man that wore dresses in his secret room at the same time once.” Heinz roared with unfeigned delight. “What a rumpus that must have been!”

  “They wished to send them to the camps,” Gertrun explained. “Mein Grossvater did not like.” She shook her head violently. “He was before on die stage, ein performer.”

  I said that I had thought the Nazis sent only Jews to their concentration camps, at which Gertrun became very somber. “It does not matter what they say, Herr Doktor Cooper. When such mans have authority, they send to their camps what they do not like. They send Jews und the priest does not like that, und so they send the priest. A man which does Lippenstift.” Her finger signaled lipstick. “He …” (She groped for a word, one hand on her own soft stomach.) “They grow sick from seeing it. So him auch. Him also. Mein Grossvater hides him like those other mans.”

  I asked whether the Nazis had found them.

  “Nein! To Schweiz they go.” Gertrun’s eyes, which were very round already, became rounder still. “Again und again der Nazis come! All night almost for many, many … Mein vater ist a little boy, Herr Doktor. He hears them up und down die steps, in den cellars, everywhere. Into his room they come, und under his bed look. If him they frighten, mein Grossvater will show wo ist das Geheimzimmer. This they think, but they make der mistake.”

  “The
secret room,” Heinz translated.

  “Never! Never his secret room he shows! Kommen mit, I show you his chair.”

  She led us back into the parlor. It was an enormous chair, like a throne. The seat was as high as a table and four feet across, and the legs looked sturdy enough to support a small house. “‘Search!’ he tells them. ‘I sit till you are done. You leave, you close mein door.’ So they think the secret room it is he sits on. They make him get up. They move his chair.” She showed us a nick in the sturdy oak back that the Nazis had supposedly made. “They take up der carpet. They drill through our floor, but ist der Weinkellar they searched every night. There they find ein klein Judsch Mutze,” she touched the back of her head, “und mein Grossvater laughs.”

  Naturally Heinz and I wanted to know where the secret room was.

  Gertrun’s face went blank. “I do not know, Herr Doktor. Nobody knows but mein Grossvater. I see in die Kuche. You will be hungry, ja?” She hurried away.

  “She knows,” Heinz told me.

  “Of course she does,” I said. “What I’d like to know is why she doesn’t want us to.”

  From that time until our lunches arrived, Heinz tapped panels and moved pictures, and ran up the stairs to the floors on which the guest rooms were located, without finding anything. He went back to the train after lunch, but I decided to rent a room at the Romantik Hotel S——, enjoy a good dinner (there is excellent food all over Austria, but our lunches had been superb) and a good breakfast today before Ire-boarded.

  “In Juni will be full,” Gertrun told me. “Ist when young people ist married. They come then to hike und climb. Now you have mein best.”

  It was indeed a large room, and beautifully furnished with antiques. I have seen more dramatic views than the one afforded by its four wide lacecurtained windows, but few if any that were lovelier.

  “There und there ist dem doors for des rooms next door.” Gertrun pointed them out to me. “Sometimes two ist rented together. For this die Hotelrechnung for number two ist half. But you have die Bolzen. Chains mit locks die handles of them both holds, you see?” She demonstrated, shaking the handle of one of the bolts. “Here ist keys to der locks for dem chains. So you know nobody comes und bother you. You must give back to me mit der key of das room when away you go. If you not, I must telfonieren der Schlosser from R——.” She pantomimed cutting the shackle.