Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

  “But isn’t it dangerous?”

  “Just yesterday,” the Yellow Emperor explained, “I learned of a plot to kill me as I slept. So you see it’s less dangerous here than sleeping in my palace. More than a few of our august emperors have died in their beds, although not many were either old or ill. I find out everything that’s going on in Zant this way, and that’s a great deal less dangerous than not knowing.”

  He paused, his pale fingers fumbling the worn arms of his chair as he watched the child’s face. “Now may I ask what your business was with Prince Patizithes?”

  Spreading her hands helplessly, the child turned to Thyme, but he sat silent until she found her own anguished answer: “He let me talk to his father about peace. And he was my lover, at least for one night.”

  The emperor nodded. “Neither actually surprises me much. Your father said something about peace to the boy, and you’re still a beautiful woman. This was some years ago, I take it?”

  “No, only a few days—”

  “Yes,” Thyme told him.

  “Perhaps fifteen years or so?”

  “Yes,” Thyme said a second time.

  “I see.” The emperor sighed. “They have a certain look about them, all that line. They’re all a bit inbred, of course. I’m sorry, madame, but I can’t permit you to take your son out of my domains. He’s too valuable to me—too valuable even now, while Patizithes is still alive. If the prince dies, he’ll be invaluable.”

  “If he will bring peace …”

  “He may bring victory,” the emperor explained. “Or at least assist it.”

  “And after the victory, will there be peace?”

  “Of course. And I will be a generous conqueror, you may trust me for that. Why if—ah—”

  “Barrus,” she supplied.

  “If Barrus proves a faithful vassal, he may well wind up upon the throne of Vert. The Easterners would be more docile with someone of their own royal family to rule them, no doubt.”

  The child felt that she was choking, but she said, “Then you may keep him. Please—will you remind him, sometimes, of his mother?”

  “I will,” the emperor answered. “I pledge my word to it.”

  “Father … ?”

  “You have done well,” Thyme told her. “Is that what you wished to ask me?”

  His child shook her head. “No. In Vert you said that Vert might win when its men wore yellow clothes. Barrus will have a yellow uniform, I suppose. Is that what you meant?”

  “Perhaps. Or part of it.”

  The emperor arose, strode across the room, and stared into Thyme’s eyes. “You’re a prophet! A sage! I should have known. And I take pride in my penetration—bah! What was it you meant? The whole of it.”

  Thyme told him; and late on the following morning, when the rain had at last relented, and long after the cock crowed, Thyme and the charmed child set forth from that tottering, high house, and the straight old street in which it stood, and the gilded gate of Zant itself.

  While they walked, the child chirped, “I know this is very foolish, Father Thyme, but do you know I feel so happy! When I think back about it, I’ve felt sadder and sadder the whole time I’ve been with you. Now I’m happy again.”

  The old sage shrugged, and stroked his snowy whiskers, and whispered, “Such is life, child. Child, life is such.”

  So they proceeded, long league upon long league, the child chattering of the fields and flowers they passed, some pleasant pastures and their curious cattle. By the well-built bridges of the west they crossed its rushing rivers, the rivers that grind gold from their swirling sands. Soon they saw again the mighty mountains, standing like the walls of the world.

  At first, the climbing child feared for her hoary father, feeling him too feeble to face their steep screes and perilous paths; but Thyme seemed to straighten with every step, and the snowy beard he had brought to Zant grew grayer and grayer from glance to glance. Once they were waylaid by a brutal bandit who threatened them, frightening the child with a fusil. Thyme took it from him and grappled him to the ground. Only one rose, and the two went on.

  One morning, while they walked through a thicket of mountain laurels, the child lagged behind to look at them; for it seemed to her that some bore bright golden blossoms, and she had never seen laurels like them. Soon she found that the flowers belonged not to the trees, but to twining vines that choked them as they climbed. The child traced one down a trunk, ready to cut it at the root; but it grew from the eyes of a yellowing skull. She gasped and backed away.

  “That is the trumpet vine,” Thyme told her. “And that skull you saw once wore a green cap. Did you poke about the roots of the tree as well?”

  In silent horror, she shook her head.

  Thyme thrust aside the thick, tangled thorns with his stick, bent, and brought up a bone in a matted mass of mold. “Here is the rib of one who once wore yellow. You see, he has turned his coat, even though he has lost the back on which he used to wear it.” Gay green moss had indeed wrapped the rib.

  The child sighed, and sat herself upon a stone. “This is that place, isn’t it? This is the pass where we saw the armies fight. I should have remembered it sooner, but then we were up there.” Her eyes sought the spot along the snow line.

  “Yes,” old Thyme agreed. “This is the place.”

  “You said if each side tried to be more like the other, there might be peace. That’s what you told the emperor.”

  The sage did not sit (for Thyme rarely rests). “What you say is so, child. During the long years in which I have ringed Urth, I have seen that the more nation differs from nation, the more difficult it is for one to trust another. Thus I advised each empire to make itself more like its foe. Alas, they were too much alike already. Each saw my advice not as a road to peace but as a ruse to win. The master of the green armies who rejected my counsel so rudely did so only that I might not guess what he planned; and the Yellow Emperor dressed legions in green only that they might not be fired upon as they advanced.”

  The child shivered. “And now the laurels war with the vines.”

  The old man nodded and struck a tree trunk (or perhaps the trumpet vine that twined it) with his staff. “I have changed their uniforms,” he said. “But only they could halt their war.”

  Thus they came to green Vert, that great city, the Boast of the East; there they saw soldiers in argent armor standing guard at its gates, and a silver flag flying above the battlements of the bartizan. They did not stop. A gay girl the charmed child left the great green city, lissome and long-limbed, bright of eye and black of hair; but while she walked home with Thyme she dwindled, until such young men as they met on the way no longer stared but smiled. And ere old Urth turned her fair face from the sun, Thyme set her upon his shoulders.

  Small and sweet and soiled she was when their long walk was ended at a place where pease had rolled hither and thither across the road.

  “Good-bye for now,” Thyme told her. “You may play with these pease, for the present.”

  “Good-bye for now, Father Thyme,” she said. “I love pease.”

  “As do we all.” Thyme took up his staff. “But it is so late in the season.”

  She was picking up her pease when her fond brother, Barrus, found her. “I love you,” the child cried, and threw her chubby arms about him.

  He fended her off as boys must, fighting to leave the love out of his voice. “You’re a very bad girl,” he mumbled, and he led her back to their mother’s house.

  Often afterward she talked of Thyme, until at last her dear mother declared she must have seen the ghost of her grandfather, who had died that day. But though Thyme walked with her always, as he walks over all the world, his adopted daughter did not see him again; and this is his story.

  The Arimaspian Legacy

  It is among the Issedonians themselves that the strange tales of the distant north originate—tales of the one-eyed men and the griffins that guard gold; and the Scythians have passed th
em on to the rest of us …

  —HERODOTUS, THE HISTORIES

  Each year at about this time, I make the same resolution; but for you to understand, I must first tell you of my old friend David. I intend to employ that first name since it was his—there are so many Davids that no illintentioned person is apt to guess the David I mean. Certain members of David’s family are yet living however (an uncle, an aunt, and several cousins, I believe), so I shall assign to him the surname of Arimaspian. Its signification will become clear to you.

  David and I were (as I have said) old friends. I might as truthfully have called us boyhood friends, even though I lived on the southern edge of the city and David on the eastern. We were of an age. We were alike in being bookish but unstudious, and in being without sister or brother. We met at a chess club for boys in the YMCA, and though we both soon abandoned chess, we never quite abandoned each other.

  The truth is that each of us found the other useful. It was the custom in those days to require a boy to name his best friend. And then, cruelly, to investigate the matter with the boy named. Thus I specified David Arimaspian, and he me; and neither of us lost face.

  In part in support of our own testimony, we met regularly once or twice a month to talk, to trifle with chess or Monopoly or some other game, and to read in each other’s company. For the city was not so large in those days that a determined boy could not ride his bicycle twice across it in a single evening, and the distance between our homes was considerably less than the full diameter. Soon, indeed, I boasted a motor scooter in place of my bike; and in what now seems a short time, we both owned cars.

  I said we met to talk, but I might better have said we met to boast. David began it, I believe. He was always exceedingly proud of whatever he possessed: his geese were every one a swan, as the saying goes. You will protest that if his boasting were objectionable to me, I might have mentioned the matter to him or even ceased to visit him; and you will be correct. The fact was that I did not find it objectionable, though possibly I should have. His latest possessions were often of interest—for he was something of a collector even then—and he took so much innocent pleasure in producing each and recounting to me the way in which it had come into his hands that I enjoyed his crowing nearly as much as he did himself. How well I recall the dubiously ivory chess set—the magnifying glass whose ebony handle bore M.H. in faded gilt, whose chipped and foggy lens David employed to burn his own D.A. into the birch grip of an old Finnish knife!

  The years rolled by. With the triumphs and disappointments they brought to me, this brief tale has nothing to do; as for my boyhood friend, he became an astronomer—a discipline admirably suited to his largely nocturnal style of life—and an acquirer of old books.

  I do not call him a collector, for it seemed to me that he followed no plan. Like many professional men, he was attracted to accounts of his own profession, and it sometimes seemed to me that he had a baseless predilection for gold edging. Scientific conferences of one sort or another took him to distant cities, where he rarely missed the opportunity of rummaging through such shops as they afforded. I have heard that he sometimes bought whole stacks of volumes as you or I might a single book, paying a trifle more to have them mailed home; the boxes in which his acquisitions arrived might be stacked in his foyer, unopened, for years. In our city, he haunted garage sales and would buy any number of decayed volumes and toss them into his rusty van. As far as I am aware, that van was emptied only when it became too full to hold more. He had inherited his parents’ Victorian house, and it seemed to be his ambition to choke all its many rooms and hallways with old books, papers of his own, and the dusty instruments of science.

  At the time of which I speak, he had nearly succeeded. On my increasingly rare visits, we had to clear a chair so that I might sit; and on the last, he grudgingly yielded his own to me and stood. That was three years past, and I never came again.

  Thus I was astounded to find him at my apartment door so very early on the morning he died. His long sallow face seemed unchanged, as did his threadbare brown suit; but he carried a narrow carton embellished with golden foil—surely the kind that distillers of the best class provide at Christmas—and his eyes held such a light as I had not seen there since they had first met mine across a shabby chessboard.

  His knock roused me from sleep; but I opened the door, and he handed me the carton, announcing that we must toast the dawn. “Hah. In glass, too! No plastic. Not for us—crystal! May I? Sofa’s fine. Need a corkscrew? I could show you how to manage without one. No ice—it’s melted, and the mammoth lives!”

  I filled our glasses and said I was happy to see him, as quite suddenly I was.

  “Course you are,” he replied. “Hah! Lord! Have I ever lied to you?”

  “Frequently,” I confessed.

  “Good, good! Then you won’t flinch when I tell you I’ve fulfilled my life’s ambition—that I’m—hah! Potentially the master of the world.”

  I admitted it could use one.

  “Hah. Right.” He gulped half his drink and grew serious. “Know what I’ve been after? Do you? All my life?”

  I did not, yet I could see that he had found it.

  “The book. Lord, the book. Hah! What a book! The one no one buys. Know what I mean?”

  I shook my head.

  “The one you almost buy but don’t. The one you haven’t got money enough on you for, that’s too heavy to lug over to Seventh Street. The one you mean to come back for and don’t, hah! The one that’s gone, or somewhere else, when you get back.”

  “Oh,” I said weakly. “That book.”

  “Right! Didn’t know I was looking till I found it. Eight hundred and sixty-five thousand miles across, but I’ve reduced it to a little thing, so big.” (At this point he gestured with his glass. I think the size he indicated was roughly six inches by eight.) “Blue cover, I had the binder put on a gold griffin. Hah! Know about griffins?”

  “Certainly,” I told him. “Fabulous beasts with the head, wings, and legs of an eagle, and the hindquarters of a lion.”

  “Wrong! Not fabulous a bit. Spirits. Haven’t you visited Sumer? Hah! Or Akkad? What about Ur?”

  I shook my head. “No, David, and neither have you.”

  “All over the walls. Come midwinter, they fly from the sun with new strength for the Tree, get it? There’s the gold that griffins guard—sun—civilization—nuclear fusion, too. Hah! Tells everything you’ve wanted to know all your life. Remember the one-eyed men? Tried to steal the gold, half blinded by the sun. Hah! Spu’s eye, Armia’s one. Arimaspians, race of one-eyed thieves. Know about sunspots? Disturb the solar spectrum, in code. Lasted eighteen months once—long chapter. Chaldean, not English. Somebody left it there to get us started. Hah! I ran it through a computer at Rice, put the English in my book.”

  God forgive me, I thought it was a joke, a game. I asked, “But this book tells you the secrets of life?”

  He nodded solemnly. “Teaches you to read—thought I knew, hah! Didn’t. Music in your head, after you read that. How to tie shoes, write a check. How old before you learned?”

  “Seventeen, I suppose.”

  “Liar! Twenty-five at least. How to get the girl, easy as snapping fingers—all the ways. Make friends, influence people. Sports—quarterback—Olympics. Coordination and balance, that’s all—anything your body can do. Hah! Meditation and exercises. Easy, really.”

  I think my look must have pierced his soul; he was proud, like all lonely men. Lonely men must be proud or die.

  “Show you. Have to go anyhow. She’s waiting.” He stood, swaying a trifle.

  “Dave …”

  “Don’t fret.” He opened my window. I live on the seventh floor, and there is no ledge, no balcony or fire escape; yet he stepped over the sill as coolly as a man steps off a bus.

  I rushed to look out. A red Jaguar idled at the curb. The lovely woman standing beside it appeared to be waving to me.

  “Like it? Hah! Snap.” David’
s voice was at my ear. He was standing beside my window, upon nothing.

  “Got to go. Take care.”

  He descended on steps of air that only he could see; he had reached the third floor when dawn touched the sky and he fell.

  His house went to a cousin, but he left his library to me, “my best friend.” Was it merely a notebook, written by hand? Did he pay someone to set type, as he surely paid someone else to bind or rebind it? Or did he create his book himself by what is called desktop publishing? He seems to have owned equipment of that kind. His books are in storage now, for I lack the space for a tenth of them. Sometimes I go to the warehouse to open the crates and poke about—yes, still, especially at this time of year.

  And in my dreams I see him falling, and griffins bent upon vengeance, bearing the treasures of the sun.

  As when the gryphon through the wilderness

  With winged course, o’er hill or morry dale,

  Pursues the Arimaspian, who, by stealth,

  Had from his wakeful custody purloined

  The guarded gold; so eagerly the Fiend

  O’r bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare

  With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,

  And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.

  —MILTON, PARADISE LOST

  The Seraph from Its Sepulcher

  The inscribed prayer was to be recited at each landing,”Father Joseph explained.”The wrong turnings stand for miscalculations in life. They end in precipices, or become more and more steep until no one could climb them without falling, or else fade away altogether in screes of sliding stones.”

  “I took a couple of those,” his visitor admitted. He felt rather lost, although he knew precisely where he was.