Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

  I said I never had seen him, only the lady with the baby and the old man with the stick.

  “That was him, Sam. He told me then, and it was implied in his papers anyway. Do you remember the rock?”

  I said there had been lots of rocks, which was true because it had been a cave in the rocks.

  “I mean the White Cow Moon rock in the picture, the one he lent to the science fair.”

  I said, “It didn’t hardly weigh anything.”

  “Yes.” Junie was sort of whispering then. “It had very little weight, yet it was hard to move. You had to pull and pull, even though it felt so light when you held it. Do you understand what that means, Sam?”

  “Somebody might have glued it down?”

  “No. It means that it had a great deal of mass, but very little weight. I’m sure you haven’t heard of antimatter—matter in which the protons are replaced by antiprotons, the electrons by positrons and so on?”

  I said no.

  “It’s only theoretical so far. But current theory says that although antimatter would possess mass just as ordinary matter does, it would be repelled, by the gravitational field of ordinary matter. It would fall up, in other words.”

  By the time she got to the part about falling up Junie was talking to herself mostly only I could still hear her. “Our theory says a collision between matter and antimatter should result in a nuclear explosion, but either the theory’s mistaken or there’s some natural means of circumventing it. Because the White Cow Moon rock was composed of nearly equal parts matter and antimatter. It had to be! The result was rock with a great deal of mass but very little weight, and that’s what allows the White Cow Moon to orbit so slowly.

  “Listen to me Sam.” She made me turn in my airplane seat till I was looking at her, and I broke the arm a little. “We physicists say that all matter falls at the same rate, which is basically a convenient lie, true only in a hard vacuum. If that barbell you throw around were balsa wood, it wouldn’t fall nearly as fast as your iron one, because it would be falling in air. In the same way, a satellite with great mass but little weight can orbit slowly and quietly through Earth’s atmosphere, falling toward the surface only as fast as the surface falls away from it.”

  “Wouldn’t it hit a mountain or something, Junie?”

  “No, because any mountain that rose in its path would be chipped away as it rose. As light as the White Cow Moon must be, its mass has got to be enormous. Not knowing its orbit—not yet—we can’t know what mountain ranges it may cross, but when we do we’ll find it goes through passes. They are passes because it goes through them.”

  Junie got real quiet for a while after she said that, and now I wish she had stayed quiet. Then she said, “Just think what we could do, Sam, if we could manufacture metals like that rock. Launch vehicles that would reach escape velocity from Earth using less thrust than that of an ordinary launch vehicle on the moon.”

  That was the main trouble, I think. Junie saying that was. The other may have hurt us some too, but that did for sure.

  We were flying to Tulsa. I guess I should have written about that before. Anyway when we got there Junie got us a bunch of rooms like an apartment in a really nice hotel. We were going to have to wait for my bells to come back on a boat, so Junie said we could look for the White Cow Moon while we were waiting, and she would line me up some good dates to play when my stuff got there. We were sitting around having Diet Cokes out of the little icebox in the kitchen when the feds knocked on the door.

  Junie said, “Let me,” and went, and that was how they could push in. But they would have if it had been me anyway because they had guns. I would have had to let them just like Junie.

  The one in the blue suit said, “Ms. Moon?” and Junie said yes. Then he said, “We’re from the government, and we’ve come to help you and Mr. Moon.”

  My name never was Moon but we both changed ours after that anyway. She was Junie Manoe and I was Sam Manoe. Junie picked Manoe to go with JM on her bags. But that was not until after the feds went away.

  What they had said was we had to forget about the moon or we would get in a lot of trouble. Junie said we did not care about the moon, we had nothing to do with the moon what we were doing mainly was getting ready to write a biography about a certain old man named Roy T. Laffer.

  The man in the blue suit said, “Good, keep it that way.” The man in the black suit never did say anything but you could see he was hoping to shoot us. I tried to ask Junie some questions after they went away, but she would not talk because she was pretty sure they were listening, or somebody was.

  When we were living in the house she explained about that, and said probably somebody on the plane had told on us, or else the feds listened to everything anybody said on planes. I said we were lucky they had not shot us, and told her about my dad, and that was when she said it was too dangerous for me. She never would tell me exactly where the White Cow Moon was after that, and it traveled around anyway, she said. But she got me a really good job in a gym there. I helped train people and showed them how to do things, and even got on TV doing ads for the gym with some other men and some ladies.

  Only I knew that while I was working at the gym Junie was going out in her car looking for the White Cow Moon, and at night I would write down the mileage when she was in the living room reading. I figured she would find the White Cow Moon and go there at least a couple of times and maybe three or four, and then the mileage would always be the same. And that was how it worked out. I thought that was pretty smart of me, but I was not going to tell Junie how smart I had been until I found it myself and she could not say it was too dangerous.

  I looked in her desk for moon rocks, too, but I never found any, so that is why I do not think Junie had been up there on the White Cow Moon yet.

  Well for three days in a row it was just about one hundred and twenty-five on the mileage. It was one hundred and twenty-three one time, and one hundred and twenty-four, and then one hundred and twenty-six. So that was how I knew sixty-three miles from Tulsa. That day after work I went out and bought the biggest bike at the big Ridin’ th’ Wild Wind store. It is a Harley and better for me than a car because my head does not scrape. It is’ nearly big enough.

  Only that night Junie did not come home. I thought she had gone up on the White Cow Moon, so I quit my job at the gym and went looking for her for about a month.

  A lot of things happened while I was looking for her on my bike. Like I went into this one beer joint and started asking people if they had seen Junie or her car either. This one man that had a bike too started yelling at me and would not let me talk to anybody else. I had been very polite and he never would say why he was mad. He kept saying I guess you think you are tough. So finally I picked him up. I think he must have weighed about three hundred pounds because he felt about like my bell when I threw him up and banged him on the ceiling. When I let him down he hit me a couple of times with a chain he had and I decided probably he was a fed and that made me mad. I put my foot on him while I broke his chain into five or six pieces, and every time I broke off a new piece I would drop it on his face. Then I picked him up again and threw him through the window.

  Then I went outside and let him pick himself up and threw him up onto the roof. That was fifteen feet easy and I felt pretty proud for it even if it did take three tries. I still do.

  After that, two men that had come out to watch told me how they had seen a brown Ford like Junie’s out on this one ranch and how to get there. I went and it was more than sixty-three miles to go and Junie’s brown Ford was not there. But when I went back to our house in Tulsa it was sixty-eight. A lot else happened for about two weeks, and then I went back to that ranch and lifted my bike over their fence real careful and rode out to where those men had said and sat there thinking about Junie and things that she had said to me, and how she had felt that time I threw her higher than the wires back in England. And it got late and you could see the moon, and I remembered how she had said
the feds were building a place for missiles on the other side where nobody could reach it or even see it, and that was why they were mad at us. It is supposed to be to shoot at other countries like England, but it is really to shoot at us in case we do anything the feds do not like.

  About then a man on a horse came by and said did I want anything. I told him about the car, and he said there used to be a brown car like that parked out there, only a tow truck cut the fence and took it away. I wanted to know whose truck it had been, but he did not know.

  So that is about all I have got to say. Sometimes I dream about how while I was talking to the man on the horse a little white moon sort of like a cloud came by only when I turned my head to look it was already gone. I do not think that really happened or the little woman with the baby and the old man with the stick in the cave either. I think it is all just dreams, but maybe it did.

  What I really think is that the feds have got Junie. If they do, all they have got to do is let her go and I will not be mad anymore after that. I promise. But if they will not do it and I find out for sure they have got her, there is going to be a fight. So if you see her or even talk to anybody that has, it would be good if you told me. Please.

  I am not the only one that does not like the feds. A lot of other people do not like them either. I know that they are a whole lot smarter than I am, and how good at telling lies and fooling people they are. I am not like that. I am more like Roy T. Laffer because sometimes I cannot even get people to believe the truth.

  But you can believe this, because it is true. I have never in my whole life had a fight with a smart person or even seen anybody else have one either. That is because when the fight starts the smart people are not there anymore. They have gone off someplace else, and when it is over they come back and tell you how much they did in the fight, only it is all lies. Now they have big important gangs with suits and guns. They are a lot bigger than just me, but they are not bigger than everybody and if all of us get mad at once maybe we will bring the whole thing crashing down.

  After that I would look through the pieces and find Junie, or if I did not find her I would go up on the White Cow Moon myself like Roy T. Laffer did and find her up there.

  Pulp Cover

  My name does not matter. You have the name of the man I have gotten to tell my story. That’s all you need to know. I’m an American, and I live in a town big enough to call itself a city.

  I worked for Mr. Arthur H. East, as I’m going to call him. Furniture was our business—Mr. East owned three stores, two in our town and one in a neighboring town. We carried good quality and sold it at reasonable prices. Mr. East was sufficiently well off to have a big house in town and a vacation cottage on a good fishing lake. He hired me as a sales clerk, but promoted me to manager after six years. The promotion included an invitation to dinner, which I of course accepted. Up until that time, I knew no more of Mr. East’s family than that he had a plump and pretty daughter I will call Mariel. I knew that only because she had come into the store I called mine looking for her father, and smiled at me.

  I fell in love with Mariel at dinner that night. And she with me? I’d like to think so, but I don’t know. Since this is my story, let’s assume what I want so much to be true: she fell in love with me, but was too young to know it.

  She was only fifteen—ten years younger than I was. That was one of the things I learned that night. Others were that she had no brothers or sisters, and that her mother had been dead about eight years.

  “You’re wondering,” Mr. East said, “whether I plan to remarry. I won’t until my daughter marries. After that I might.”

  I tried to say something noncommittal.

  “I was raised by a stepmother,” he told me. “I will not let that happen to my daughter.”

  “It will be quite a while,” I said, “before Mariel finishes college.” I assumed, of course, that the daughter of such a wealthy man would go to college.

  Mr. East leveled his finger at me. “You didn’t finish college yourself.”

  I’d had to drop out at the end of my freshman year, when my parents could no longer afford it. I had been taking night classes ever since, switching my major from pre-law to business administration; it is a slow process.

  “Finishing college has nothing to do with getting married,” Mr. East declared. “Not for Mariel, and as far as I can see, not for anybody. There are plenty of married students, and plenty of successful people who never graduated.”

  By that time I realized, as you will have faster than I did, that I was under consideration. I got home that night without so much as bending a fender, although I haven’t the least idea how I did it or what route I followed. I would marry lovely Mariel. We might or might not inherit her father’s stores—it did not matter. Lovely Mariel would marry me. If her father left them to a second wife, she’d need somebody to run them, and I would be that somebody. Lovely Mariel and I would soon be married.

  If her father left them to us, we would be rich. If he did not, it would hardly matter. I’d have a good, secure job, doing work I liked and running a business I understood.

  And I would have Mariel.

  My whole life opened out before me, and it was a life of love and success. I was walking on air.

  A few days later a note from Mariel was in my mail. You will sneer when I say that my hands shook as I opened it, but that is sober fact. They did.

  She told me she had found out my address without asking her father, who wouldn’t have wanted her to write. She said she thought 1 might want to write to her, and gave me the address of a friend at school. If I would write to the friend enclosing an envelope with “Mariel” on it, the friend would pass it to her in study hall.

  I wrote, of course. I must have torn up a dozen letters before I finally wrote the one I sent. I told her how beautiful she was and (I will never forget this) I said that any man on earth would be attracted to her. I said that she could count on me to be a loyal friend and a protector whenever she needed one, and that I would never do anything to hurt her.

  After I had sealed the envelope, I wrote a note to her friend, thanking her for what she was doing for us and asking her to write whenever she had news of Mariel.

  Here I’m going to try to put three or four years into a couple of minutes. We wrote back and forth like that, generally two or three times a week. As often as she could, Mariel came by the store to see me, trying to time things so that she could stay until closing. I would drive her home, and she would tell Mr. East that she had been shopping at the mall and I had given her a ride home. That was all true. We held hands, and sometimes we kissed. She was more beautiful every time I saw her.

  She dated various boys at school. I knew none of them meant much to her because they changed every few weeks. I knew that I meant a lot to her because she told me all her deepest feelings in her letters. Her father was dating a woman from the town where our third store was. Sometimes he brought her home, and she stayed the night. Mariel didn’t think she was good enough for her father, and wrote a lot about her. Mariel herself wanted to get married right away—or didn’t want to get married until she was thirty. (I think “thirty” was forever to her, although I was near that age.)

  She wanted children. She wanted to be an actress who was a famous singer and dancer, and she wanted to be an astronomer and spend her whole life looking up at the stars—or else go to South America and study monkeys. All that stuff changed and changed, and pretty soon I saw that what she really wanted was pretty simple. She wanted security. She wanted people who would love her and take care of her, people who would love her always, no matter what happened. After that I knew what I had to bear down on, and I did. I told her over and over that what I wanted was a good marriage and children, and that I would always be faithful and loving. Even if my wife did things I did not like, I would always love her and be faithful to her I said, and I meant every word of it.

  It was early in May. I know that because my mother bought pansies
and violas in early May every year, and I was digging a new bed for them when my father came to tell me my boss was on the phone.

  Mr. East asked me to meet him at Wheeler’s for dinner, and I could tell from the way he said it that he had a lot on his mind. When we had eaten dinner together before it had always been at his house. He had a housekeeper, and she would make a company dinner for Mr. East, Mariel, and me. So this was different, and it was pretty obvious why: he wanted to talk to me without Mariel around or even knowing that we were talking. I was scared.

  He was already in a booth with a drink and a cigarette when I got to Wheeler’s. We ordered steaks, and after the waiter had gone, Mr. East said, “This isn’t about business, and I like to keep my office business-like. Besides, there are always phone calls. Here we won’t be interrupted.”

  I suppose I nodded.

  “You know my daughter Mariel. You’ve given her a lift a couple of times. Do you like her?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Very much. She’s a wonderful girl.”

  “She’s still just a kid.”

  I waited for him to go on.

  “She’ll do whatever I tell her to. I might have to jaw at her a little first, but she’ll do it. It’s a heavy responsibility.”

  I said that I realized that, and realized he would have to carry it until Mariel was twenty-one.

  “Or until she gets married,” he said.

  You can guess how I felt when he said that.

  “Oscar Pendelton was my roommate in college. We were close then, though we haven’t kept in touch the way we ought to. He’s been very successful—a lot more successful than I have. I founded a company and ran it. He’s founded half a dozen and sold them out. He has millions. You remember that big piece Furniture Trade did on us?”

  I certainly did, it had been a cover story with a lot of color photographs.

  “Oscar saw that and showed it to Jack. Jack’s his oldest, and the only son he’s got. I think there are a couple of girls, too.”