Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

  “Did I ever read your storybook?”

  She shook her head.

  “I didn’t think so. I was always going to, but I never got around to it. Was it good?”

  Seeing her expression, he put his arm around her. “It’s not gone forever, Jelly. Okay? Maybe they’ll send it.”

  When she had dried her eyes, the bus had left the road and was creeping up a narrow winding drive between trees. It slowed for a curve, slowed more. Turned again. Through the windshield she glimpsed a big house. A man in a tweed jacket stood in what seemed to be its back doorway, smoking a pipe.

  The driver coughed and spat. “This here’s your papa’s place,” he announced. “He’ll be around somewhere, and glad to see you. You be good kids so he’s not sorry he was glad, you hear?”

  Jill nodded.

  The bus coasted to a stop and its door opened. “This’s where you get out. Don’t you forget them bags.”

  She would not have forgotten hers without the reminder. It held all the worldly goods she had been allowed to take, and she picked it up without difficulty. Her brother preceded her out of the bus carrying his own bag, and the door shut behind them.

  She stared at the back door of the house. It was closed. “Dad was here,” she said. “I saw him.”

  “I didn’t,” her brother said.

  “He was standing in the door waiting for us.”

  Her brother shrugged. “Maybe the phone rang.”

  Behind them the bus backed up, pulled forward, backed a second time, and started down the drive. Jill waved. “Wait! Wait a minute!”

  If its driver heard her, there was no sign of it.

  “We ought to go in the house.” Her brother strode away. “He might be in there waiting for us.”

  “Maybe it’s locked.” Reluctantly, Jill followed him.

  It was not, and was not even closed enough to latch. There were leaves on the floor of the big kitchen, as though the door had stood open for hours while the wind blew. Jill pushed it solidly shut behind her.

  “He might be” (her brother’s voice cracked) “in front.”

  “If he was talking on the phone, we’d hear him.”

  “Not if the other person was talking.” Her brother had already seen enough of the kitchen. “Come on.”

  She did not. There was an electric stove whose burners glowed crimson then fiery scarlet, a refrigerator containing a pound of cheese and two bottles of beer, and a pantry full of cans. There were dishes, pots, pans, knives, spoons, and forks in plenty.

  Her brother returned. “The TV’s on in the front room, but there’s nobody there.”

  “Dad has to be around somewhere,” Jill said. “I saw him.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, I did.”

  She followed her brother down a wide hall with high, dark windows on one side, past the big door to a big dining room where no one sat eating, and into a living room in which half a dozen drivers might have parked half a dozen buses, full of sunshine. “A man did this,” she said, looking around.

  “Did what?”

  “In here. A man picked out this furniture, the rugs, and everything.”

  Her brother pointed. “Have a look over there. There’s a chair made out of horns. I think that’s hot.”

  She nodded. “So do I. Only I wouldn’t have bought it. A room is—it’s a frame, and the people in it are the pictures.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “No, I’m not.” She shook her head in self-defense.

  “You’re saying Dad got this stuff to make him look good.”

  “To make him look right. You can’t make people look good. If they don’t, they don’t. That’s all there is to it. But you can make them look right, and that’s more important. Everybody looks right in the right place. If you had a picture of Dad—”

  “I don’t.”

  “If you did. And you were going to get a frame for it. The man in the frame store says take any of these you want. Would you take a pretty black one with silver flowers?”

  “Heck, no!”

  “There you are. But I’d like a picture of me in a frame like that.”

  Her brother smiled. “I’ll do it someday, Jelly. Did you notice the TV?”

  She nodded. “I saw it as soon as we came in. Only you can’t hear what that man’s saying, because it’s on mute.”

  “So he could talk on the phone, maybe.”

  “In another room?” The telephone was on an end table near the television; she lifted the receiver and held it to her ear.

  “What’s wrong? Could you hear him?”

  “No.” Gently, she returned the receiver to its cradle. “There’s no noise at all. It’s not hooked up.”

  “He’s not on a phone in another room, then.”

  It was not logical, but she felt too drained to argue.

  “I don’t think he’s here at all,” her brother said.

  “The TV is on.” She sat down in a chair, bare waxed wood and brown-and-orange cushions. “Did you turn on these lights?”

  Her brother shook his head. “Besides, I saw him. He was standing in the door.”

  “Okay.” Her brother was silent for a moment. He was tall and blond, like Dad, with a face that was already beginning to discover that it had been made for seriousness. “I’d have heard the car if he went away. I’ve been listening for something like that.”

  “So have I.” She sensed, although she did not say, that there was a presence in this empty house that made you listen. Listen, listen. All the time.

  MUTE, said the screen, and made no sound.

  “I’d like to know what that man on the TV’s saying,” she told her brother.

  “It’s on mute, and I can’t find the remote. I looked.”

  She said nothing, snuggling back against the brown-and-orange cushion and staring at the screen. The chair made her feel that she was enclosed by some defense, however small.

  “Want me to change the channel?”

  “You said you couldn’t find the changer.”

  “There’s buttons.” He swung back a hinged panel at the side of the screen. “On and off. Channel up and channel down, volume up and volume down. Only no Mute button.”

  “We don’t need a Mute button,” she whispered, “we need an Unmute button.”

  “Want to change the channel? Look.”

  The next channel was a gray screen with wavy lines and the yellow word MUTE in one corner, but the next one after it had a pretty, friendly looking woman sitting at a table and talking. The yellow MUTE was in the corner of her screen, too. She had a very sharp yellow pencil in her hands, and she played with it as she talked. Jill wished that she would write something instead, but she did not.

  The next channel showed an almost empty street, and the yellow MUTE. The street was not quite empty because two people, a man and a woman, were lying down in it. They did not move.

  “You want to watch this?”

  Jill shook her head. “Go back to the man Dad was watching.”

  “The first one?”

  She nodded, and channels flicked past.

  “You like—” Her brother froze in mid-sentence. Seconds crept past, fearful and somehow guilty.

  “I—” Jill began.

  “Shhh! Someone’s walking around upstairs. Hear it?” Her brother dashed out of the room.

  She, who had heard nothing, murmured to herself, “I really don’t like him at all. But he talks slower than the woman, and I think maybe I can learn to read his lips if I watch him long enough.”

  She tried, and searched for the control between times.

  There had been no one upstairs, but there was a big bedroom there with two small beds, one against the east wall and one against the south, three windows, and two dressers. Her brother had wanted a room of his own; but she, terrified at the thought of lying alone in the dark, promised that the room would be his room and she would have no room—that she would sweep and dust his room for him every day, and
make his bed for him.

  Reluctantly, he consented.

  They ate canned chili the first night, and oatmeal the next morning. The house, they found, had three floors and fourteen rooms—fifteen, counting the pantry. The TV, which Jill had turned off when she had left the room to heat their supper, was on again, still on mute.

  There was an attached garage, with two cars. Her brother spent all afternoon hunting for the keys to one or the other without finding them. Indeed, without finding any keys at all.

  In the living room, the man who had been (silently) talking talked silently still, on and on. Jill spent most of her time watching him, and eventually concluded that he was on tape. His last remark (at which he looked down at the polished top of his desk) being followed by his first.

  That evening, as she prepared Vienna sausages and canned potato salad, she heard her brother shout, “Dad!” The shout was followed by the banging of a door and the sound of her brother’s running feet.

  She ran too, and caught up with him as he was looking through a narrow doorway in the back hall. “I saw him!” he said. “He was standing there looking right at me.”

  The narrow doorway opened upon darkness and equally narrow wooden steps.

  “Then I heard this slam. I know it was this one. It had to be!”

  Jill looked down, troubled by a draft from the doorway that was surely cold, dank, and foul. “It looks like the basement,” she said.

  “It is the basement. I’ve been down here a couple times, only I never could find the light. I kept thinking I’d find a flashlight and come down again.” Her brother started down the steps, and turned in surprise when a single dim bulb suspended from a wire came on. “How’d you do that, Jelly?”

  “The switch is here in the hall, on the wall behind the door.”

  “Well, come on! Aren’t you coming?”

  She did. “I wish we were back at that place.”

  Her brother did not hear her. Or if he heard her, chose to ignore her. “He’s down here somewhere, Jelly—he’s got to be. With two of us, he can’t hide very long.”

  “Isn’t there any other way out?”

  “I don’t think so. Only I didn’t stay long. It was really dark, and it smelled bad.”

  They found the source of that smell in back of a bank of freestanding shelves heaped with tools and paint cans. It was rotting and had stained its clothing. In places its flesh had fallen in, and in others had fallen away. Her brother cleared scrap wood, a garden sprayer, and half a dozen bottles and jugs from the shelves so that the light might better reach the dead thing on the floor; after a minute or two, Jill helped him.

  When they had done all they could, he said, “Who was it?” and she whispered, “Dad.”

  After that, she turned away and went back up the stairs, washed her hands and arms at the kitchen sink, and sat at the table until she heard the basement door close and her brother came in. “Wash,” she told him. “We ought to take baths, really. Both of us.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  There were two bathrooms upstairs. Jill used the one nearest their room, her brother the other. When she had bathed and dried herself, she put on a robe that had perhaps been her mother’s once, hitching it up and knotting the sash tight to keep the hem off the floor. So attired, she carried their clothes downstairs and into the laundry room, and put them in the machine.

  In the living room, the man whose lips she had tried to read was gone. The screen was gray and empty now save for the single word MUTE in glowing yellow. She found the panel her brother had shown her. Other channels she tried were equally empty, equally gray, equally muted.

  Her brother came in, in undershorts and shoes. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  “Later,” Jill said. “I don’t feel like it.”

  “You mind if I do?”

  She shrugged.

  “You think that was Dad, don’t you? What we found in the basement.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I didn’t know being dead was like that.”

  “I saw him. I didn’t believe you did, that time. But I did, and he closed the basement door. I heard it.”

  She said nothing.

  “You think we’ll see him any more?”

  “No.”

  “Just like that? He wanted us to find him, and we did, and that was all he wanted?”

  “He was telling us that he was dead.” Her voice was flat, expressionless. “He wanted us to know he wouldn’t be around to help us. Now we do. You’re going to eat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait just a minute and I’ll eat with you. Did you know there isn’t any more TV?”

  “There wasn’t any before,” her brother said.

  “I guess. Tomorrow I’m going out. You remember that gate we passed on the bus?”

  He nodded. “Poplar Hill.”

  “That’s it. I’m going to walk there. Maybe it will be unlocked to let cars in. If it isn’t, I can probably get over the wall some way. There were a lot of trees, and it wasn’t very high. I’d like it if you came with me, but if you won’t I’m going to anyhow.”

  “We’ll both go,” he said. “Come on, let’s eat.”

  They set out next morning, shutting the kitchen door but making very certain that it was unlocked, and walking down the long, curving drive the bus had climbed. When the house was almost out of sight, Jill stopped to look back at it. “It’s sort of like we were running away from home,” she said.

  “We’re not,” her brother told her.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I do. Listen, that’s our house. Dad’s dead, so it belongs to you and me.”

  “I don’t want it,” Jill said; and then, when the house was out of sight, “but it’s the only home we’ve got.”

  The drive was long, but not impossibly so, and the highway—if it could be called a highway—stretched away to right and left at the end of it. Stretched silent and empty. “I was thinking if there were some cars we could flag one down,” her brother said. “Or maybe the bus will come by.”

  “There’s grass in the cracks.”

  “Yeah, I know. This way, Jelly.” He set out, looking as serious as always, and very, very determined.

  She trotted behind. “Are you going into Poplar Hill with me?”

  “If we can flag down a car first, or a truck or anything, I’m going with them if they’ll take me. So are you.”

  She shook her head.

  “But if we can’t, I’m going to Poplar Hill like you say. Maybe there’s somebody there, and if there is, maybe they’ll help us.”

  “I’ll bet somebody is.” She tried to sound more confident than she felt.

  “There’s no picture on the TV. I tried all the channels.”

  He was three paces ahead of her, and did not look back.

  “So did I.” It was a lie, but she had tried several.

  “It means there’s nobody in the TV stations. Not in any of them.” He cleared his throat, and his voice suddenly deepened, as the voices of adolescent boys will. “Nobody alive, anyhow.”

  “Maybe there’s somebody alive who doesn’t know how to work it,” she suggested. After a moment’s thought she added, “Maybe they don’t have any electricity where they are.”

  He stopped and looked around at her. “We do.”

  “So people are still alive. That’s what I said.”

  “Right! And it means a car might come past, and that’s what I said.”

  A small bush, fresh and green, sprouted from a crevice in the middle of the highway. Seeing it, Jill sensed that some unknown and unknowable power had overheard them and was gently trying to show them that they were wrong. She shuddered, and summoned up all the good reasons that argued that the bush was wrong instead. “There were live people back at that place. The bus driver was all right, too.”

  The iron gates were still there, just as she had seen them the previous day, graceful and strong between their pillars of cut stone. The lions still snar
led atop those pillars, and the iron sign on the iron bars still proclaimed Poplar Hill.

  “They’re locked,” her brother announced. He rattled the lock to show her—a husky brass padlock that looked new.

  “We’ve got to get in.”

  “Sure. I’m going to go along this wall, see? I’m going to look for a place where I can climb over, or maybe it’s fallen down somewhere. When I find one, I’ll come back and tell you.”

  “I want to go with you.” Fear had come like a chill wind. What if Jimmy went away and she never saw him again?

  “Listen, back at the house you were going to do this all by yourself. If you could do it by yourself, you can stay here for ten minutes to watch for cars. Now don’t follow me!”

  She did not; but an hour later she was waiting for him when he came back along the inside of the wall, scratched and dirty and intent on speaking to her through the gate. “How’d you get in?” he asked when she appeared at his shoulder.

  She shrugged. “You first. How did you?”

  “I found a little tree that had died and fallen over. It was small enough that I could drag it if I didn’t try to pick up the root end. I leaned it on the wall and climbed up it, and jumped down.”

  “Then you can’t get out,” she told him, and started up a road leading away from the gate.

  “I’ll find some way. How did you get in?”

  “Through the bars. It was tight and scrapy, though. I don’t think you could.” Somewhat maliciously, she added, “I’ve been waiting in here a long time.”

  The private road led up a hill between rows of slender trees that made her think of models showing off green gowns. The big front door of the big square house at the top of the hill was locked; and the big brass knocker produced only empty echoes from inside the house no matter how hard her brother pounded. The pretty pearl-colored button that she pressed sounded distant chimes that brought no one.

  Peering though the window to the left of the door, she saw a mostly wooden chair with brown-and-orange cushions, and a gray TV screen. One corner of the gray screen read MUTE in bright yellow letters.