Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

  Do you know what it says on the tea boxes? The ones with the man with the cap on them? It says honest tea is the best policy. I know what that means, and I think that cranky old Roy T. Laffer knew it too.

  He gave big boxes full of paper to the school Junie worked for, and Junie was the one that went through them and that was how she found out about White Cow Moon. He had a lot of stuff in there about it and Junie saw her name and read it even if his writing was worse even than mine. He had been there and taken pictures and she found those too. She showed me some.

  It goes slow. Junie said that was the greatest secret in the world, so I guess it is. And there were pictures of a big old rock that Roy T. Laffer had brought back.

  One picture that I saw had it sitting on a scale. The rock was so big you could not hardly see the scale, but then another picture showed the part with numbers and that big old rock was only about a quarter ounce. It was kind of a dirty white like this one cow that we used to have.

  Maybe that was really why they call it that and not because a cow jumped over it like those Indians say. That would make a lot more sense only I did not think of it till just now.

  I ought to tell you things about me here so you understand, but first I want to tell more about Junie because I am looking for her but I know where I am already, which is here in Florida at the Museum of the Strange and Occult. Only it is all big letters like this on our sign out front, THE MUSEUM OF THE STRANGE AND OCCULT ADMISSION $5.50, CHILDREN $2, CHILDREN IN ARMS FREE, SENIORS $3 OR $2 WITH ANOTHER PAID ADMISSION. The letters are gold.

  Junie had been to college and everything and was a doctor of physic. When she got out, she thought she was the greatest since One Mug. That is what she says it means only it is German. I do not remember the German words.

  So she went to work at this big laboratory in Chicago where they do physic, only they had her answer the phone and empty the wastebaskets and she quit. Then she went back home to Oklahoma and that is why she was at the big school and was the one that went through Roy T. Laffer’s papers. Mostly I do not much like Oklahoma people because they think they are better than Texas people, only Junie really is.

  So if you see her or even just talk to somebody that has, you could come by and tell me, or write a letter or even just phone. I will be glad any way you do it. Dottie that works in our office here is putting this in her computer for me and printing it, too, whenever I have got a page done. She says you could send email too. That would be all right because Dottie would tell me. I would be very happy any way you did it. Dottie says www.Hercules@freakycom.

  My name is not really Hercules that is just the name I work under. My name is really Sam and that is what Junie calls me. If you know her and have talked to her and she said anything about Sam that was me. If you want to be really formal it is Sam Jr. Only nobody calls me that. Most people I know call me Hercules. Not ever Herk. I do not like it.

  Let me tell you how bad I want to find Junie. Sometimes there is a man in the tip that thinks he is stronger. I really like that when it happens because it is usually fun. I will do some things that I figure he can do too, like bending rebars and tearing up bottle caps. Then if I see the tip likes him, I will say something hard and let him win.

  A week ago maybe there was this one big guy that thought he was really strong, so I did him like I said. I threw him the two-hundred-pound bell and he caught it, and when he threw it back to me I pretended like I could not catch it and let it fall when I had my legs out of the way and everybody was happy. Only yesterday he came back. He called me Herk and he said I was afraid to go up against him again. The tip was not with him then. So I said all right, and when he could not lift my five-hundred-pound iron I did it with one hand and gave it to him. And when he dropped it I picked him up by his belt and hung him on this high hook I use for the pulley. I left him up there until everybody was gone too and when I took him down he did not say a word. He just went away.

  Well I want Junie back so bad that if he was to tell me where she was I would let him win anytime he wanted.

  I do not make a lot of money here. It is just five hundred a month and what I make selling my course, but they have got these trailers out back for Jojo and Baby Rita who is a hundred times fatter than Junie or anybody. So I have one too and it is free. I eat a lot but that is about all I spend much on. Some fishing gear, but I have got a real good reel and you do not need much else.

  Well, you do, but it does not cost the world.

  So I have a lot saved and I will give you half if you tell me where Junie Moon is and she is really there when I go look.

  This is the way she got to be my manager. I was in England working at a fair that they had at this big castle where King Arthur was born and Junie was in the tip. So when it was over and they were supposed to go see Torchy Junie would not go. The steerer said she had to but she kept saying she wanted to talk to me and I could tell she was American like me. So after a while I said she probably knew that if she really wanted to talk to me all she had to do was meet me out back. So then she went.

  When I went out back which was where the toilets were I did not expect to see her, not really, even if I had let her feel my arm which is something I do sometimes. But there she was and this is what she said, with the little marks around it that you are supposed to use and all of that stuff. Dottie help me with this part.

  “Hercules, I really need your help. I don’t know whether I was really one of the daughters of King Thespius, but there were fifty of them so there’s a pretty good chance of it. Will you help me?”

  That was the first thing Junie ever said to me, and I remember it just like it was a couple days ago. Naturally I said I would.

  “You will!?! Just like that????”

  I said sure.

  “I can pay you. I was going to say that. A hundred pounds right now, and another hundred pounds when I’m over the fence. I can pass it to you through the fence. Look.” She opened her purse and showed me the money. “Is that enough?”

  I explained how she did not have to.

  “You’ll be in danger. You might be arrested.”

  Junie looked really worried when she said that, and it made me feel wonderful, so I said that was okay. I had been arrested once already in England besides in America and to tell the truth in England it was kind of fun, especially when they could not get their handcuffs to go around my wrists, and then they got these plastic strap cuffs and put those on me and I broke six pairs. I like English people only nothing they say makes any sense.

  Junie said, “Back there, you threw an enormous barbell up in the air and caught it. How much did you say it weighed?”

  I said, “Three hundred. That was my three-hundred-pound bell.”

  “And does it actually weigh three hundred pounds?”

  I said sure.

  “I weigh only a little more than half that. Could you throw me, oh, fifteen feet into the air?”

  I knew I could, but I said I did not know because I wanted to get my hands on her.

  “But you might? Do you really think you might be able to, Hercules?”

  I sort of raised up my shoulders the way you do and let them drop.

  “We—if you failed to throw me high enough I would get a severe electric shock.” She looked scared.

  I nodded really serious and said what we ought to do was try it first, right now. We would measure something that was fifteen feet, and then I would throw her up, and she could tell me if I got her up that high. So she pointed to the temporary wires they had strung up for the fair, and I wanted to know if those were the ones. She said no. They were not fifteen feet either. Ten or twelve maybe. But I said okay only do not reach out and grab them or you might get killed, and she said okay.

  So I got my hands around her which was what I had been wanting to do and lifted her up and sort of weighed her a couple times, moving her up and down, you know how you do, and then I spun around like for the hammer throw, and I heaved her maybe ten feet higher than those
wires, and caught her easy when she came down. It made her really scared, too, and I was sorry for that, but I got down on my knees and hugged her and I said, “There, there, there,” and pretty soon she stopped crying.

  Then I said was that high enough? And she said it was.

  She was still shaky after that, so we went back inside and she sat with me while I waited for the next tip. That was when she showed me the pictures that Roy T. Laffer had taken up on the White Cow Moon and the pictures of the rock that he had brought back, a great big rock that did not hardly weigh anything. “He let a little boy take it to school for a science show,” Junie told me, “and afterward the science teacher threw it out. Mr. Laffer went to the school and tried to reclaim it the following day, but apparently it had been blown out of the Dumpster.”

  I promised her I would keep an eye out for it.

  “Thank you. But the point is its lightness. Do you know why the moon doesn’t fall into the Earth, Hercules?”

  I said that if I was going to throw her around she ought to call me Sam, and she promised she would. Then she asked me again about the moon and I said, “Sure, I know that one. The moon beams hold it up.”

  Junie did not laugh. “Really, Sam, it does. It falls exactly as a bullet falls to Earth.”

  She went and got a broom to show me, holding it level. “Suppose that this were a rifle. If I pulled the trigger, the bullet would fly out of the barrel at a speed of three thousand feet per second or so.”

  I said okay.

  “Now say that you were to drop that weight over there at the very same moment that the rifle fired. Your weight would hit the ground at the same moment that the rifle bullet did.” She waited for me to argue with her, but I said okay again.

  “Even though the bullet was flying along horizontally, it was also falling. What’s more, it was falling at virtually the same rate that your weight did. I’m sure you must know about artificial satellites, Sam.”

  I said I did, because I felt like I could remember about them if I had a little more time, and besides I had the feelingJunie would tell me anyhow.

  “They orbit the Earth just as the moon does. So why doesn’t the bullet orbit it too?”

  I sail it probably hit a fence post or something.

  She looked at me and sort of sucked on her lips, and looked again. “That may be a much better answer than you can possibly be aware of. But no. It doesn’t orbit Earth because it isn’t going fast enough. A sidereal month is about twenty-seven days, and the moon is two hundred and forty thousand miles away, on average. So if its orbit were circular—that isn’t quite true, but I’m trying to make this as simple as I can—the moon would be traveling at about three thousand five hundred feet a second. Not much faster than our rifle bullet, in other words.”

  I could see she wanted me to nod, so I did.

  “The moon can travel that slowly.” Slowly is what she said. Junie is always saying crazy stuff like that. “Because it’s so far away. It would have to fall two hundred and forty thousand miles before it could hit the Earth. But the bullet has to fall only about three feet. Another way of putting it is that the closer a satellite is the faster it must move if it is to stay in orbit.”

  I said that the bullet would have to go really fast, and Junie nodded. “It would have to go so fast that the curve of the Earth was falling away from it as rapidly as the bullet itself was falling toward the Earth. That’s what an orbit is, that combination of vertical and horizontal motions.”

  Right then I do not think I was too clear on which one was which, but I nodded again.

  Then Junie’s voice got sort of trembly. “Now suppose that you were to make a telephone call to your wife back in America,” is what she said. So I explained I did not have one, and after that she sounded a lot better.

  “Well, if you were to call your family, your mother and father, your call would go through a communications satellite that circles the Earth once a day, so that it seems to us that it is always in the same place. It can do that because it’s a good deal lower and going a great deal faster.”

  Then she got out a pen and a little notepad and showed me how fast the bullet would have to go to stay in orbit just whizzing around the world over and over until it hit something. I do not remember how you do it, or what the answer was except that it was about a jillion. Junie said anything like that would make a terrible bang all the time if it was in our air instead of up in space where stuff like that is supposed to be. Well about then is when the tip came in for the last show. I did my act and Junie sat in the front row smiling and cheering and clapping and I felt really swell.

  So after it was all over we went to Merlin’s cave under the big castle and down by the water, and that was when Junie told me how King Arthur was born there, and I told her how I was putting up at the King Arthur, which was a pub with rooms upstairs. I said they were nice people there, and it was clean and cheap, which is what I want anywhere, and the landlord’s name was Arthur, too, just like the pub’s. Only after a while when we had gone a long ways down the little path and got almost to the water I started to sort of hint around about why are we going way down here, Junie, with just that little flashlight you got out of your purse?

  Maybe I ought not say this right here, but it is the truth. It was scary down there. A big person like I am is not supposed to be scared and I know that. But way up on the rocks where the fair was the lights kept on going out and you could see the fair was just sort of like paint the old walls of that big castle. It was like somebody had gone to where my dad was buried and painted all over his stone with flowers and clowns and puppies and kitties and all that kind of thing. Only now the paint was flaking away and you could see what was underneath and he had run out with his gun when the feds broke our front door and they killed him.

  Here is what I think it was down there and what was so scary about it. King Arthur had been born there and there had been knights and stuff afterward that he was the head of. And they had been big strong people like me on big strong horses and they had gone around wearing armor and with swords and for a while had made the bad guys pay, and everybody had loved them so much that they still remembered all about them after a hundred years. There was a Lancelot room in the pub where I was staying, and a Galahad room and I was in the Gawain room. And Arthur told me how those men had all been this king’s knights and he said I was the jolly old green giant.

  Only it was all over and done with now. It was dead and gone like my dad. King Arthur was dead and his knights were too, and the bad guys were the head of everything and had been for a long, long time. We were the paint, even Junie was paint, and now the paint was getting dull the way paint does, with cracks all over it and falling off. And I thought this is not just where that king was born, this is where he died too. And I knew that it was true the way I meant it.

  Well, there was a big wire fence there with a sign about the electricity, only it was not any fifteen feet high. I could have reached up to the top of it. Ten feet, maybe, or not even that.

  “Can you pick me up and throw me over?” Junie said.

  It was crazy, she would have come down on rocks, so I said I could only she would have to tell why she wanted me to so much or I would not do it.

  She took my hand then, and it felt wonderful. “People come back, Sam. They come back from death. I know scientists aren’t supposed to say things like that, but it’s true. They do.”

  That made me feel even better because it meant I would see my dad again even if we would not have our farm that the feds took anymore.

  “Do you remember that I said I might have been one of the fifty daughters of Thespius three thousand years ago? I don’t know if that’s really true, or even whether there was a real King Thespius who had fifty daughters. Perhaps there was, and perhaps I was one of them—I’d like to think so. But this really was Merlin’s cave and Roy T. Laffer was Merlin in an earlier life. There were unmistakable indications in his papers. I know it with as much certainty as I know
Kepler’s Laws.”

  That got me trying to remember who Kepler was, because I did not think Junie had told anything about him up to then. Or after either. Anyway I did not say much.

  “I’ve tried to contact Laffer in his house in Tulsa, Sam. I tried for days at a time, but he wasn’t there. I think he may be here. This is terribly important to me, and you said you’d help me. Now will you throw me over?”

  I shook my head but it was really dark down there and maybe Junie did not see it. I said I was not going to be on the other side to catch her and throw her back, so how was she going to get out? She said when they opened in the morning. I said she would get arrested and she said she did not care. It seemed to me that there were too many getting arrested when she said that, so I twisted on the lock thinking to break the shackle. It was a pretty good lock and I broke the hasp instead. Then I threw the lock in the ocean and Junie and I went inside like she wanted. That was how she found out where White Cow Moon was and how to get on it, too, if she wanted to.

  It was about two o‘clock in the morning when we came out, I think. I went back to the King Arthur’s and went to bed, and next day Junie moved in down the hall. Hers was the Lancelot room. After that she was my manager, which I told everybody and showed her off. She helped me write my course then, and got this shop in Falmouth to print it up for us.

  Then when the fair was over she got us tickets home, and on the airplane we got to talking about the moon. I started it and it was a bad mistake, but we did not know it for a couple of days. Junie had been talking about taking pictures and I said how can you if it goes so fast?

  “It doesn’t, Sam.” She took my hand and I liked that a lot. “It circles the Earth quite slowly, so slowly that to an observer on Earth it hardly seems to move at all, which was one of the things Roy T. Laffer confided to me.”