by Gene Wolfe
“It is a great loss to science,” Dr. Hayes added, “but it is not my science. Besides, we would be accused of faking our evidence—the inevitable result of such discoveries.”
Dinah said, “They shut the door on us, Bill, and barred it, and piled all that stuff in front of us. Shall we kill them?”
He shook his head.
The four of them went up the stairs and out onto the athletic field, past the volleyball court and the tennis court, and onto the field on which the football team would practice after school.
“It’s so g-good to be o-outside.” Sue was trembling. “Look! There’s good old Juniper Street. It—it d-doesn’t look the way it did, not to me. It looks like a toy under somebody’s Christmas tree. B-but it’s Juniper and I love it. I always will, after—after that. Don’t you love it too, B-Bill?” Her eyes had filled with tears.
“I do,” he said, though he was not looking at it. “See the hardware store? And Philips Fabrics?”
As Sue nodded, Dinah whistled shrilly; a huge black bird plummeted toward earth at the sound of that whistle, a minute dot that became a hurtling thunderbolt. They watched it land (barked at by Shep), watched Dinah mount, and waved good-bye.
“Who is she, Bill?”
He shrugged. “Who am I? Who are you?”
“Bill’s girl,” Sue replied.
Repeating those words to himself, he turned to look at her. Her eyes were of the blue light he had seen upon his sword, her disheveled hair the gold of the towers; the tilt of her nose and the curve of her smudged cheek filled him with a longing so intense that he dared not kiss her.
“Are you sure, Sue?” He had struggled to control his voice, and failed.
She nodded without speaking.
“Then I want you to look higher than the hardware store and the fabric store.”
He watched her. “No, higher. Off into the distance. What do you see?”
“Mountains!” Her eyes were wide. “Bill, those are mountains! There aren’t any mountains around here. There aren’t any mountains like those for a thousand miles.”
“That’s right.” He began to walk again.
“You’re going?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m going,”
“Then I’m going with you.”
Once they had left the town behind, the mountains were no longer impossibly distant. “One thing for sure,” Sue said, “nothing will ever scare me after what happened today.”
Shep wagged his tail in agreement. “Me too! Right, Chief?”
William Wachter shrugged. “I have a feeling that this was the easy part,” he said.
STARWATER STRAINS
Copyright Acknowledgments
“Introduction,” copyright © 2005 by Gene Wolfe; appears for the first time in this volume.
“Viewpoint,” copyright © 2001 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Redshift.
“Rattler,” copyright © 2004 by Gene Wolfe and Brian Hopkins; first appeared in Realms of Fantasy.
“In Glory like Their Star,” copyright © 2001 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in the October/November 2001 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
“Calamity Warps,” copyright © 2003 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Realms of Fantasy.
“Graylord Man’s Last Words,” copyright © 2003 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Asimov’s.
“Shields of Mars,” copyright © 2002 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Mars Probes.
“From the Cradle,” copyright © 2002 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Shelf Life.
“Black Shoes,” copyright © 2003 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in 13 Horrors.
“Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?” copyright © 1999 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Moon Shots.
“Pulp Cover,” copyright © 2004 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Asimov’s.
“Of Soil and Climate,” copyright © 2004 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Realms of Fantasy.
“The Dog of the Drops,” copyright © 2002 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in 3SF.
“Mute,” copyright © 2002 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in the 2002 World Horror Convention Program Book.
“Petting Zoo,” copyright © 1997 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Dinosaur Fantastic II.
“Castaway,” copyright © 2003 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared on scifi.com.
“The Fat Magician,” copyright © 2000 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Such a Pretty Face.
“Hunter Lake,” copyright © 2003 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in the October/November 2003 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
“The Boy Who Hooked the Sun,” copyright © 1985 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared as a Winter Solstice chapbook from Cheap Street.
“Try and Kill It,” copyright © 1996 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Asimov’s.
“Game in the Pope’s Head,” copyright © 1988 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Ripper!
“Empires of Foliage and Flower,” copyright © 1987 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared as a limited-edition chapbook from Cheap Street.
“The Arimaspian Legacy,” copyright © 1987 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared as a Winter Solstice chapbook from Cheap Street.
“The Seraph from Its Sepulcher,” copyright © 1991 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Sacred Visions.
“Lord of the Land,” copyright © 1995 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Cthulhu 2000.
“Golden City Far,” copyright © 2004 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Flights.
BY GENE WOLFE FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
THE WIZARD KNIGHT
The Knight
The Wizard
THE BOOK OF THE SHORT SUN
On Blue’s Waters
In Green’s Jungles
Return to the Whorl
THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN
Shadow and Claw
(comprising The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator)
Sword and Citadel
(comprising The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch)
THE BOOK OF THE LONG SUN
Litany of the Long Sun
(comprising Nightside of the Long Sun and Lake of the Long Sun)
Epiphany of the Long Sun
(comprising Caldé of the Long Sun and Exodus from the Long Sun)
NOVELS
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
The Devil in a Forest
Peace
Free Live Free
The Urth of the New Sun
Latro in the Mist
(comprising Soldiers of the Mist and Soldier of Arete)
There Are Doors
Castleview
Pandora by Holly Hollander
NOVELLAS
The Death of Doctor Island
Seven American Nights
COLLECTIONS
Endangered Species
Storeys from the Old Hotel
Castle of Days
The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories
Strange Travelers
Innocents Aboard
Starwater Strains
Praise for Gene Wolfe
Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, as well as the Nebula Award (2), the World Fantasy Award (2), the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Prix Apollo
“If any writer from within genre fiction ever merited the designation Great Author, it is surely Wolfe … [who] reads like Dickens, Proust, Kipling, Chesterton, Borges, and Nabokov rolled into one, and then spiced with all manner of fantastic influences from H. G. Wells to Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft to Damon Knight … Gene Wolfe has taken science fiction to its highest artistic pitch, transcending genre, creating a literary monument unlike any other. He is SF’s greatest novelist, and overall one of America’s finest … . Modernist or postmodernist, formal allegorist or anatomist of the deepest complexities of the human soul, he is a wonder, yes, a genius.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Gene Wolfe is as good a writer
as there is today … . I feel a little bit like a musical contemporary attempting to tell people what’s good about Mozart.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
Praise for Wolfe’s previous collection, Innocents Aboard
“Wolfe doesn’t just write stories. He tells wondrously imaginative tales that weave reality with dream and fit so comfortably, or with intentional discomfort, within the psyche that they surely must have dwelt there all along with the other great fables and folk tales, lore and legends, that are part of our collective cultural unconscious. Wolfe ranks with the finest writers of this or any other day.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Wolfe, who has been publishing excellent stories since the 1960s, is the Old Master … still very much in his prime.”
—Locus
“It is easy … to appreciate Wolfe’s versatility in choice of subjects, the depth of the knowledge he brings to bear on developing them, and the magisterial excellence of his prose. Short fiction doesn’t often get better than this in the English language.”
—Booklist
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
STARWATER STRAINS
Copyright © 2005 by Gene Wolfe
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Edited by David G. Hartwell
An Orb Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
eISBN 9781429915557
First eBook Edition : January 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolfe, Gene.
Starwater strains / Gene Wolfe.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 0-765-31203-4
EAN 978-0-765-31203-7
1. Science fiction, American. I. Title.
PS3573.O52S73 2005
813’.54—dc22
2004060115
First Hardcover Edition: August 2005
First Trade Paperback Edition: May 2006