Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

  Well, sir, Rattler hadn’t had a lot of practice workin’ cattle back then but he made me proud. He never blowed his horn or nothing that would get the calf stirred up. No, sir! And he never bent. You can’t with cattle. You bend, and they’ll walk all over you. He showed that calf what he wanted, and he let down his tailgate and sort of pulled in the back shocks so his back set so low his tailgate dragged.

  The calf, he turned and went off, you know how they do, only Rattler was out in front of him fast, still low, still got his tailgate down and talkin’ quiet with his engine. That went on for about five minutes. Coulda been ten. Then the calf give in and walked up into the back. Rattler shut his tailgate—you know how you do when you’re headin’ back home? He just shut it and shut it pretty quiet, but there was a world of satisfaction in it. He’d done the job, and he knew he’d done it. He come back to where we was waitin’, and he showed off a little then. Flashed his headlights at us, you know. It was broad daylight, too. I reckon he couldn’t help it, he just felt so good.

  And so’d I. I turned to Junior and I says that’s fetch, and it’s pretty easy to teach. He went off without another word, and that suited me fine. Every time he opens his mouth I hear more than I want to, even if it’s just hello.

  So that was that for about a month. Only one day I had to ride Junior into town to get his truck back from the OK Auto Repair place. He got to talking about how tough them pickemups was to train. “Junior,” I says, “we got to face the facts, and the fact is you don’t know nothin’. You get you a good truck, and it’s instinct. It’s born in a good pickemup, and you oughter know that. All you got to do is get a good’un to start and bring the instinct out. I never seen a good coonhound that would point birds, and neither have you. Neither has anybody. Now you take ol’ Rattler here.” And then I leaned back like I was a passenger, you know, and laced my hands behind my head the way you do.

  He kept right on a-goin’ about ten miles, and then he come to where a coon’d crossed the road, and he got the scent. He follered it off into the woods, and you could hear that gearbox bayin’ and then the muffler comin’ in deep where the J-B Weld had got scraped off. It was as pretty a music as you ever heard.

  Ol’ Rattler treed that coon, too, and right there I would say is where the real trouble come in. I oughter have stopped him right there and me and Junior got out and had a look at the coon—from the ground is what I mean—and got back in and drove away. Only I wanted to show off. I never touched the wheel nor the brake nor the clutch. I give him his head, you know.

  And he started up the tree after that coon, goin’ to run him over even if it was fifty feet up in the air.

  It ain’t easy for a pickemup to climb a tree, no more than for a hound, and they got the same trouble—their tires ain’t sharp. Rattler’d get up a ways, and hook his front bumper on a limb, you know how they do, probably. And he’d feel around with his front wheels trying to get traction. He’s got front-wheel drive, naturally. If he hadn’t had that we’d still be tryin’ to get up that tree. Front-wheel drive and all it still took quite a time.

  Finally he got pretty close and I got out my ol’ Ruger Bearcat and put a long rifle in the coon where it would hurt, and he fell out of the tree. Rattler come down then, a lot faster than what he went up. Junior was a mite shaken up, you know.

  I got out and threw the coon in the back and off we went, me feelin’ right proud and Junior sort of lookin’ out the window and swearin’ to hisself. I wouldn’t let him do it where I could hear. It’s bad luck to hear a fool cuss—I guess you know.

  I’d pretty much forgot about all that when Midge phoned me up. Midge’s Junior’s wife and a nice girl. I never did figure out why she married him ‘less she felt sorry for him, and after that the rest of us felt sorry for Midge. “You got to do somethin’,” she says. “He’s tore up his truck three times since the picnic. He keeps gettin’ it fixed and there’s no money for anythin’.”

  Well, sir, that picnic had been on the fourth of July, it wasn’t August by a week, so I could see the thing was serious. I phoned up Junior that night and I says I’d heard he’d been teachin’ his truck and maybe he could come by and show me. He hemmed and hawed just like I’d been scared he would, and we went’round a few times on it, him talkin’ five to my one like usual. I’d hol’ the phone away from my ear, you know how you do, till it got quiet, then I’d come back. And all the time I was thinkin’ how I could hook him. Them that won’t go for a night crawler will bite on a shiner sometimes. You know how that is.

  Pretty soon it come to me that what with Midge not gettin’ the house money the table was likely pretty poor over there. So I says why don’t you and her come for dinner? Sarah’s baked, and we’ll barbecue and have us a slap-up good feed. So he come just like I knew he would and Midge too.

  After we et I got him in the truck, said I wanted to go into town and get more ice cream. I knew that’d fetch him, which it did; he jumped into that new truck of his and strapped hisself in like he was going to the NASCAR. Soon’s we were out on the county road I says, I hear you been learnin’ this pickemup of yours, Junior. What does it do?

  Well, he just shook his head.

  Maybe you got it to sit up and beg, I says. That’s a real pretty trick when a truck does it, and lets you get the oil filter off easy, too.

  “I been talkin’ and talkin’,” he says—which I believed, you bet!—“and showin’ it how every which way, and the only thing I’ve learned it is to roll over.”

  That’s a good trick too, I says, only if you don’t mind I’m going to get out before you show it, and I’m sure you’ll get out too ‘cause you’re a big man and that seat belt you’re wearin’ can’t take but just so much.

  “It won’t do it unless I’m inside and hol‘in’ the wheel,” Junior says, “and I ain’t goin’ to do it anyhow’cause it tears up the cab too bad.”

  That had me scratchin’ and whistlin’. Not that I didn’t know what was wrong. I’d knew before we ever got off my property. Midge was the puzzler, do you see? I’d promised I’d help out all I could, so I couldn’t just tell Junior flat out,’cause it’d probably make him worse. I thought and thought, and finally I says, you know, it ain’t only the student that learns. I noticed that myself and probably you have too. Sometimes the teacher learns as much as he does. More, now and then. Have you learned anything from teachin’ this here pickemup, Junior?

  “I have,” he says. “I’ve learned that this here is the dumbest derned truck ever come off a assembly line.”

  I keeps my voice real gentle when I says, now that ain’t so. This here truck has a automatic transmission, Junior. You don’t have to tell it what gear. It knows. Can’t nobody say a truck like that’s dumb.

  “You mean it’s teachin’ me,” he says.

  That’s for you to say, Junior, I says real gentle-like. Only I don’t believe anybody’s ever goin’ to teach a pickemup that has a automatic anythin’.

  We got the ice cream real quiet and come back real quiet, too, and I kept tellin’ myself how nobody’d ever got anythin’ through that thick skull of Junior’s but I’d promised Midge and done the best I could.

  Well, sir. Come Thanksgivin’ we had the whole family over, and Junior, he got to talkin’ about a cattle auction that was coming up in about a week and what might be good to buy now, and what might be good to sell, and what to look for dependin’ on who came. For a while he was flappin’ along pretty fair like always. Then he sort of spaced out the words more and give a little time between orations where somebody else might speak a word if they was inclined, which he never done before. I noticed pretty quick, and I seen there was somethin’ in his eyes that I’d never seen there before in the whole time since I started courtin’ his sister. It took me a while to read the brand, you know,’cause I kept thinkin’ I had to be wrong. Then he said somethin’, and I knew for certain sure. It was thoughts. There was somethin’ goin’ on behind those eyes, and the eyes knew it like they always do.<
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  Junior, I says, that’s plumb smart, and I notice you’re takin’ your time with it more than usual, if you don’t mind me sayin’ it.

  “Well,” Junior says, “that auction’s a long grade and a steep’un, and sometimes a feller needs to shift down.”

  That was all the other man said, and the bird-dog man held his peace, trying to digest everything just as we were. Soon the waitress brought checks to both booths. We paid—and so did they—and started out.

  “To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.”

  Brian looked around at Gene and said, “Did you say that?”

  “No,” Gene said, “I think it was Robert Blake.”

  When we got outside, the two men who had been in the next booth were already there. One shouted, “Here, Rattler!” and we heard an engine start in the parking lot.

  A small pickup truck, old and red, drove up to the door and stopped.

  “Not like that you derned fool,” one man said, “I got to get behind your wheel.”

  The truck pulled away, and returned with its left side toward the curb. The door opened, and the driver got in. “You’ll have to open your own door,” he told his friend. “He ain’t learned that yet.”

  We stood watching until the small red truck pulled out onto the highway, and it appeared to us that when it did the driver was still fumbling in his pocket for his keys.

  In Glory like Their Star

  We dined last night before seven skun of natives who had built a stone table for us. They heaped it with wood, set the wood ablaze, and cooked our food by throwing it into the fire. We pulled out the parts we wanted and in the end ate nearly all of it, though it was scorched here and raw there. (The hard, white parts are rich in calcium.) How is it that we can eat their food when it is not vegetable in origin? I must ask the others.

  They revere our ship and us. We talked with them about it. They speak for a very long time when they have begun (and do not like to be interrupted), saying the same things over and over in the same words, or at times with changes in wording. They want us to be kind to them, to destroy their enemies, and to make their crops grow. It seems senseless to me, and I do not believe the others understand better than I. Why should we be kind to them when they are unkind to each other? If we are to understand them—and they, us—we must act as they. So much is manifest. Are not their enemies in no regard different from themselves? If we were to destroy these natives instead, the same result would ensue with less difficulty and less chance of error. I may propose it. Of what benefit are the crops to them? This place swarms with food untended. The desert people, who grow none, eat as well as they and with less trouble. These crops they ask us to encourage only encourage their own gluttony. If there is another result, it can be but small.

  When they had sung and talked and sung and talked until they and we were tired, we spoke together for a time almost sensibly. We told them something of our home, and though we told them very little it was more than they could understand. Our long voyage through space impressed them. I doubt they grasped its length, for their concepts of the five they call “time” are muddled, and so erroneous that they cannot be termed primitive with any precision. They will be primitive, perhaps, when sunlight reaches them on this place.

  Someone told them that I was in the scout first sent from our ship. That impressed them too, although they can have had little notion what my mission was or why I chose to perform it. They asked many questions, of which a few were sensible. They could not understand (I cite an example where I might cite many) why I went alone. Even the youngest soon grasps that where there are two they must often look at each other and not at the place they have been sent to see, and that three will be worse than two, and four worse than three. That those in a crowd see nothing, save its other members. Some may be acute observers. Often some are. But they will observe (acutely) those before and behind, and to one side and the other, and the crowd as a whole will always see less than any member has.

  I told them how I had landed in the desert lands. I was unable to control my loquacity once I had begun and tried to tell them how those lands had appeared to me. The wind that was never still, and the sand that whispered and whispered under my foot, speaking of great trees and beasts, and fair meadows that had vanished only a moment before we came. The flaming lights that filled the night sky, the cold of night and the heat of day. Cities and forests and mountain ranges and vast lakes of tossing water that seemed not so far away that a shout might not reach them, but vanished too as I approached them on my machine. No matter how swiftly I rode. They nodded, as I had expected, and looked at one another; but they did not understand. Less even than those who share our ship did they understand me.

  Perhaps I said also how lonely a place the desert is. Perhaps it was my saying it that prompted them to ask why no one had come with me. That would be logical and so must be true—or as the pedants would have it, must be accepted as true until the truth be found.

  Was it for truth’s sake that I rode across the desert? Was it for truth’s sake that I pursued my melting cities and the lakes that evaporated as I approached them? Inarguably. Across that desert—I will never forget it, and because I will not, I will never forget this place, which the large subspecies (that is, those without tails) call Earth—I rode for truth, rising before their star and riding onward, always on so long as I could be certain my way was clear, after it had fallen beneath the horizon.

  In that desert the horizon is larger than a place of this size can produce. I think it clear that this place is not a true sphere (though most are) but has a flat spot: its desert. I must mention this to the others. Some may agree.

  If it is so, the level desert must appear to one near its center to rise all around, so that he moves only with augmented effort in every direction, since each step carries him farther from the center. Walking upon level ground, he nonetheless ascends its gravity pit. A flat pit, this, which tires and bewilders. That is exactly how it seemed to me, and if my theory does not embrace the physical facts (though I am sure it does) it embraces the subjective ones. This in itself may be a new discovery.

  Every theory is true in some discipline.

  The beauty of this is that it carries its own confirmation. It ravishes me.

  When I had begun to tell of my time alone, some of the others tried to explain what knowledge is, and how it is to be valued. The natives could not understand, saying again and again in many different ways that knowledge is a thing one uses. We sought to explain by the Great Disciplines that such things have nothing to do with its value. We spoke much of our ship, because they themselves had spoken of it again and again, saying (with many voices) that our great knowledge had permitted us to build it. That is so, but who would labor to gain knowledge for such a purpose? It is the interior change that suffices, the transformation that rewards. I know that you know this, but they could not understand.

  At last I spoke again of the desert. Not because I felt I could add to their understanding, but because I myself had understood that they would have to gain much more knowledge than they possessed, and undergo many interior changes by its power, before they themselves could understand. The little ones with tails would never. Of that I am certain. But the larger subspecies may, in time.

  It is not easy for me to speak of the desert. Still less easy is it for me to scribe it as I do. There is so much that might be said; and yet no one who reads this will have understanding of the desert. Not even those who share this ship with me have it. One must go.

  I say again: one must go. I went.

  Perhaps there can be too much understanding. I have so much now, and that is why I will never forget this place. My companions understand nothing of that. The whisper of the sands, and the night silence when the sands no longer spoke. Although I had homeair, I found it difficult to breathe when the sands fell silent.

  Yet the homeair never failed me. If it had I would be dead. I would be dead and not he.

>   So much failed me. My companions first of all. The people of this place were correct tonight. One must not see too much, and never is that more true than it is when sight shows only how little there is to be seen. The emptiness. The sand, mountains of sand that move like water animals. The black rocks, uncovered by the wind. Covered by the wind. Uncovered by the wind once again. The wind itself, a thing that spins and strides.

  My navigator failed. I do not mean that it would no longer indicate a direction for the scout that had carried me down. It did. I rode and rode. I would sleep on the couch, I told myself. I would eat from the little coldcloset under the work flat. At last, when I was so weary that I feared I would strike a rock and fall, I stopped and ate the last of the food I had carried, and slept (as I had before) upon the sand. When I woke the navigator indicated a direction for the scout indeed, but it was a new direction. My machine no longer pointed as the navigator pointed. They had come for me, I thought. They had come for me, and for some reason—no doubt for the best of reasons—they had moved the scout to a new location. To a better landing place, and a place nearer me than the place where I had at first landed, for the distance was very short now. I rode as the navigator directed, and the distance increased. When I rode as I had the previous day, it increased also. I endeavored to find a direction in which it would decrease, and the direction indicated by my navigator changed again.

  Of the next days, I will not speak. On the third, I found a person of this place. My reflector deceived him, and he made the beast he rode halt for me and lie upon the sand. He gave me water; and I told him of my plight, the useless navigator, my machine broken when it collided with a stone. He told me where he was going. I begged to accompany him, for he had water.

  That night we camped at a spring, a tiny place but very beautiful, where plants grew green. Dried fruits were his food, with another food like small stones that grew soft when boiled. I could eat none of it, but was glad to see him eat of it, for I knew I would perish if he died. He told stories of desert spirits that night, stories filled with knowledge though none were true. I heard him in awe, and begged that he speak on, until at last it came to me that he believed me one. I turned off my reflector then, and he abased himself.