Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

The Nebraskan returned to his room and shut the door firmly behind him. Whatever it was, it was most certainly none of his business. In the morning he would eat breakfast, listen to a tale or two from the old man, and put the whole family out of his mind.

  Something moved when he switched off the light. And for an instant he had glimpsed his own shadow on the window blind, with that of someone or something behind him, a man even taller than he, a broad-shouldered figure with horns or pointed ears.

  Which was ridiculous on the face of it. The old-fashioned brass chandelier was suspended over the center of the room; the switch was by the door, as far as possible from the windows. In no conceivable fashion could his shadow—or any other—have been cast on that shade. He and whatever he thought he had glimpsed would have to have been standing on the other side of the room, between the light and the window.

  It seemed that someone had moved the bed. He waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. What furniture? The bed, the chair in which he had read—that should be beside the window where he had left it—a dresser with a spotted mirror, and (he racked his brain) a nightstand, perhaps. That should be by the head of the bed, if it were there at all.

  Whispers filled the room. That was the wind outside; the windows were open wide, the old house flanked by stately maples. Those windows were visible now, pale rectangles in the darkness. As carefully as he could he crossed to one and raised the blind. Moonlight filled the bedroom; there was his bed, here his chair, in front of the window to his left. No puff of air stirred the leafburdened limbs.

  He took off his robe and hung it on the towering bedpost, pulled top sheet and comforter to the foot of the bed, and lay down. He had heard something—or nothing. Seen something—or nothing. He thought longingly of his apartment in Lincoln, of his sabbatical—almost a year ago now—in Greece. Of sunshine on the Saronic Gulf … .

  Circular and yellow-white, the moon floated upon stagnant water. Beyond the moon lay the city of the dead, street after narrow street of silent tombs, a daedal labyrinth of death and stone. Far away, a jackal yipped. For whole ages of the world, nothing moved; painted likenesses with limpid eyes appeared to mock the empty, tumbled skulls beyond their crumbling doors.

  Far down one of the winding avenues of the dead, a second jackal appeared. Head high and ears erect, it contemplated the emptiness and listened to the silence before turning to sink its teeth once more in the tattered thing it had already dragged so far. Eyeless and desiccated, smeared with bitumen and trailing rotting wrappings, the Nebraskan recognized his own corpse.

  And at once was there, lying helpless in the night-shrouded street. For a moment the jackal’s glowing eyes loomed over him; its jaws closed, and his collarbone snapped … .

  The jackal and the moonlit city vanished. Bolt upright, shaking and shaken, he did not know where. Sweat streamed into his eyes.

  There had been a sound.

  To dispel the jackal and the accursed, sunless city, he rose and groped for the light switch. The bedroom was—or at least appeared to be—as he recalled it, save for the damp outline of his lanky body on the sheet. His suitcase stood beside the dresser; his shaving kit lay upon it; Gods Before the Greeks waited his return on the cane seat of the old chair.

  “You must come to me.”

  He whirled. There was no one but himself in the room, no one (as far as he could see) in the branches of the maple or on the ground below. Yet the words had been distinct, the speaker—so it had seemed—almost at his ear. Feeling an utter fool, he looked under the bed. There was nobody there, and no one in the closet.

  The doorknob would not turn in his hand. He was locked in. That, perhaps, had been the noise that woke him: the sharp click of the bolt. He squatted to squint through the old-fashioned keyhole. The dim hallway outside was empty, as far as he could see. He stood; a hard object gouged the sole of his right foot, and he bent to look.

  It was the key. He picked it up. Somebody had locked his door, pushed the key under it, and (possibly) spoken through the keyhole.

  Or perhaps it was only that some fragment of his dream had remained with him; that had been the jackal’s voice, surely.

  The key turned smoothly in the lock. Outside in the hall, he seemed to detect the fragrance of Sarah’s perfume, though he could not be sure. If it had been Sarah, she had locked him in, providing the key so that he could free himself in the morning. Whom had she been locking out?

  He returned to the bedroom, shut the door, and stood for a moment staring at it, the key in his hand. It seemed unlikely that the crude, outmoded lock would delay any intruder long, and of course it would obstruct him when he answered—

  Answered whose summons?

  And why should he?

  Frightened again, frightened still, he searched for another light. There was none: no reading light on the bed, no lamp on the nightstand, no floorlamp, no fixture upon any of the walls. He turned the key in the lock, and after a few seconds’ thought dropped it into the topmost drawer of the dresser and picked up his book.

  Abaddon. The angel of destruction dispatched by God to turn the Nile and all its waters to blood, and to kill the firstborn male child in every Egyptian family. Abaddon’s hand was averted from the Children of Israel, who for this purpose smeared their doorposts with the blood of the paschal lamb. This substitution has frequently been considered a foreshadowing of the sacrifice of Christ.

  Am-mit, Ammit, “Devourer of the Dead.” This Egyptian goddess guarded the throne of Osiris in the underworld and feasted upon the souls of those whom Osiris condemned. She had the head of a crocodile and the forelegs of a lion. The remainder of her form was that of a hippopotamus, Figure 1. Am-mit’s great temple at Henen-su (Herakleopolis) was destroyed by Octavian, who had its priests impaled.

  An-uat, Anuat, “Lord of the Land (the Necropolis),” “Opener to the North.” Though frequently confused with Anubis—

  The Nebraskan laid his book aside; the overhead light was not well adapted to reading in any case. He switched it off and lay down.

  Staring up into the darkness, he pondered An-uat’s strange title, Opener to the North. Devourer of the Dead and Lord of the Land seemed clear enough. Or rather Lord of the Land seemed clear once Schmit explained that it referred to the necropolis. (That explanation was the source of his dream, obviously.) Why then had Schmit not explained Opener to the North? Presumably because he didn’t understand it either. Well, an opener was one who went before, the first to pass in a certain direction. He (or she) made it easier for others to follow, marking trails and so on. The Nile flowed north, so An-uat might have been thought of as the god who went before the Egyptians when they left their river to sail the Mediterranean. He himself had pictured An-uat in a boat earlier, for that matter, because there was supposed to be a celestial Nile. (Was it the Milky Way?) Because he had known that the Egyptians had believed there was a divine analogue to the Nile along which Ra’s sun-boat journeyed. And of course the Milky Way actually was—really is in the most literal sense—the branching star-pool where the sun floats … .

  The jackal released the corpse it had dragged, coughed, and vomited, spewing carrion alive with worms. The Nebraskan picked up a stone fallen from one of the crumbling tombs, and flung it, striking the jackal just below the ear.

  It rose upon its hind legs, and though its face remained that of a beast, its eyes were those of a man. “This is for you,” it said, and pointed toward the writhing mass. “Take it, and come to me.”

  The Nebraskan knelt and plucked one of the worms from the reeking spew. It was pale, streaked and splotched with scarlet, and woke in him a longing never felt before. In his mouth, it brought peace, health, love, and hunger for something he could not name.

  Old Hop Thacker’s voice floated across infinite distance: “Don’t never shoot anythin’ without you’re dead sure what’tis, young feller.”

  Another worm and another, and each as good as the last.

  “We will teach you,” the wo
rms said, speaking from his own mouth. “Have we not come from the stars? Your own desire for them has wakened, Man of Earth.”

  Hop Thacker’s voice: “Grave worms, do you see?”

  “Come to me.”

  The Nebraskan took the key from the drawer. It was only necessary to open the nearest tomb. The jackal pointed to the lock.

  “If it’s hungered, it’ll suck on a live person, an’ he’s bound to fight it or die.”

  The end of the key scraped across the door, seeking the keyhole.

  “Come to me, Man of Earth. Come quickly.”

  Sarah’s voice had joined the old man’s, their words mingled and confused. She screamed, and the painted figures faded from the door of the tomb.

  The key turned. Thacker stepped from the tomb. Behind him his father shouted, “Joe, boy! Joe!” And struck him with his cane. Blood streamed from Thacker’s torn scalp, but he did not look around.

  “Fight him, young feller! You got to fight him!”

  Someone switched on the light. The Nebraskan backed toward the bed.

  “Pa, DON’T!” Sarah had the huge butcher knife. She lifted it higher than her father’s head and brought it down. He caught her wrist, revealing a long raking cut down his back as he spun about. The knife, and Sarah, fell to the floor.

  The Nebraskan grabbed Thacker’s arm. “What is this!”

  “It is love,” Thacker told him. “That is your word, Man of Earth. It is love.” No tongue showed between his parted lips; worms writhed there instead, and among the worms gleamed stars.

  With all his strength, the Nebraskan drove his right fist into those lips. Thacker’s head was slammed back by the blow; pain shot along the Nebraskan’s arm. He swung again, with his left this time, and his wrist was caught as Sarah’s had been. He tried to back away; struggled to pull free. The high, old-fashioned bed blocked his legs at the knees.

  Thacker bent above him, his torn lips parted and bleeding, his eyes filled with such pain as the Nebraskan had never seen. The jackal spoke: “Open to me.”

  “Yes,” the Nebraskan told it. “Yes, I will.” He had never known before that he possessed a soul, but he felt it rush into his throat.

  Thacker’s eyes rolled upward. His mouth gaped, disclosing for an instant the slime-sheathed, tentacled thing within. Half falling, half rolling, he slumped upon the bed.

  For a second that felt much longer, Thacker’s father stood over him with trembling hands. A step backward, and the older Mr. Thacker fell as well—fell horribly and awkwardly, his head striking the floor with a distinct crack.

  “Grandpa!” Sarah knelt beside him.

  The Nebraskan rose. The worn brown handle of the butcher knife protruded from Thacker’s back. A little blood, less than the Nebraskan would have expected, trickled down the smooth old wood to form a crimson pool on the sheet.

  “Help me with him, Mr. Cooper. He’s got to go to bed.”

  The Nebraskan nodded and lifted the only living Mr. Thacker onto his feet. “How do you feel?”

  “Shaky,” the old man admitted. “Real shaky.”

  The Nebraskan put the old man’s right arm about his own neck and picked him up. “I can carry him,” he said. “You’ll have to show me his bedroom.”

  “Most times Joe was just like always.” The old man’s voice was a whisper, as faint and far as it had been in the dream-city of the dead. “That’s what you got to understand. Near all the time, an’ when—when he did, they was dead, do you see? Dead or near to it. Didn’t do a lot of harm.”

  The Nebraskan nodded.

  Sarah, in a threadbare white nightgown that might have been her mother’s once, was already in the hall, stumbling and racked with sobs.

  “Then you come. An’ Joe, he made us. Said I had to keep on talkin’ an’ she had to ask you fer supper.”

  “You told me that story to warn me,” the Nebraskan said.

  The old man nodded feebly as they entered his bedroom. “I thought I was bein’ slick. It was true, though,’cept’twasn’t Cooper, nor Creech neither.”

  “I understand,” the Nebraskan said. He laid the old man on his bed and pulled up a blanket.

  “I kilt him didn’t I? I kilt my boy Joe.”

  “It wasn’t you, Grandpa.” Sarah had found a man’s bandanna, no doubt in one of her grandfather’s drawers; she blew her nose into it.

  “That’s what they’ll say.”

  The Nebraskan turned on his heel. “We’ve got to find that thing and kill it. I should have done that first.” Before he had completed the thought, he was hurrying back toward the room that had been his.

  He rolled Thacker over as far as the knife handle permitted and lifted his legs onto the bed. Thacker’s jaw hung slack; his tongue and palate were thinly coated with a clear, glutinous gel that carried a faint smell of ammonia; otherwise his mouth was perfectly normal.

  “It’s a spirit,” Sarah told the Nebraskan from the doorway. “It’ll go into Grandpa now,’cause he killed it. That’s what he always said.”

  The Nebraskan straightened up, turning to face her. “It’s a living creature, something like a cuttlefish, and it came here from—” He waved the thought aside. “It doesn’t really matter. It landed in North Africa, or at least I think it must have, and if I’m right, it was eaten by a jackal. They’ll eat just about anything, from what I’ve read. It survived inside the jackal as a sort of intestinal parasite. Long ago, it transmitted itself to a man, somehow.”

  Sarah was looking down at her father, no longer listening. “He’s restin’ now, Mr. Cooper. He shot the old soul-sucker in the woods one day. That’s what Grandpa tells, and he hasn’t had no rest since, but he’s peaceful now. I was only eight or’bout that, and for a long time Grandpa was’fraid he’d get me, only he never did.” With both her thumbs, she drew down the lids of the dead man’s eyes.

  “Either it’s crawled away—” the Nebraskan began.

  Abruptly, Sarah dropped to her knees beside her dead parent and kissed him.

  When at last the Nebraskan backed out of the room, the dead man and the living woman remained locked in that kiss, her face ecstatic, her fingers tangled in the dead man’s hair. Two full days later, after the Nebraskan had crossed the Mississippi, he still saw that kiss in shadows beside the road.

  Golden City Far

  This is what William Wachter wrote in his spiral notebook during study hall, the first day.

  “Funny dream last night. I was standing on a beach. I looked out, shading my eyes, and I could not see a thing. It was like a big fog bank was over the ocean way far away so that everything sort of faded white. A gull flew over me and screeched, and I thought, well, not that way.

  “So I turned north, and there was a long level stretch and big mountains. I should not have been able to see past them, but I could. It was not like the mountains could be looked through. It was like the thing I was seeing on the other side was higher than they were so that I saw it over the tops. It was really far away and looked small, but it was just beautiful, gold towers, all sizes and shapes with flags on them. Yellow flags, purple, blue, green, and white ones. I thought, well, there it is. I had to go there. I cannot explain it, but I knew I had to get to that city and once I did nothing else would matter because I would have done everything I was supposed to do, and everything would be OK forever.

  “I started walking, and I was not thinking about how far it was at all, just that it was really nice that I had found out what I was supposed to do. Instead of thrashing around for years I had it. It did not matter how far it was, just that every step got me closer.

  “Cool!”

  He could not think of anything else to write, but only of the golden towers, and how the flags had stood out stiffly from them so that he had known there was a hard wind blowing where the towers were, and he would like that wind.

  Someone passed him a note. He let it fall to the floor unread.

  Mrs. Durkin took him by the shoulder, and he jerked.

 
“Billy?”

  It was hard to remember where he was, but he said, “Yes, ma’am?”

  “The bell rang, Billy. All the other kids have gone. Were you asleep?”

  Thinking that she meant when he had seen the towers and the flags, he repeated, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Daydreaming. Well, you’re at the right age for it, but the period’s over.”

  He stood up. “I should have done my homework in here. I guess I did, some of it. I want to get to bed early.”

  The sea was to his left, the ground beneath his feet great stones, or shale, or soft sand. The mountains, which had appeared distant the night before, were so remote as to be almost invisible, and often vanished behind dunes covered with sparse sea oats. There was a breeze from the sea, and though the scudding clouds looked threatening, it did not rain or snow. He was neither hungry nor thirsty, and was conscious of being neither hungry nor thirsty. It seemed to him that he had been walking a long while, not hours or days or years, but simply a long while, time as it had been before anyone had thought of such things as years or centuries.

  He climbed dunes and rough, low hills, and beyond the last found an inlet blocking his progress; long before he reached the point near which she lay, he had seen the woman on the rock in the water. She was beautiful, and naked save for her hair; and her skin was as white as milk. In one hand she held a shining yellow apple.

  He stopped and stood staring at her, and when a hundred breaths had come and gone, he sat down on a different rock and stared some more. Her eyes opened; each time he met her gaze, he felt lost in their depths.

  “You may kiss me and eat one bite of my apple,” she told him. “One bite, no more.”

  He was frightened, and shook his head.

  “One bite will let you understand everything.” Her voice was music. “Two bites would let you understand more than everything, and more than everything is too much.”

  He backed away.

  The sun peeped from between clouds, bathing her with black gold. “What color is my hair?”