Starwater Strains

by Gene Wolfe

“I wasn’t looking. I should have been looking, but I wasn’t. It’s my own fault. I might as well say that right now, because it’s the truth and I’ll never be at peace until I admit it. I hate stupid, careless people. But I was stupid and careless. Do you try to tell the truth?”

  “Mostly, yes.”

  “I try constantly, but I lie and lie. It’s my nature.” She smiled again. “I have to keep fighting it, and though I fight it all time, I don’t fight hard enough.”

  He recalled something his biology teacher had told him. “DNA is destiny.”

  “You’re a wizard, aren’t you.” It was more accusation than question.

  “No,” he told her. “No, I’m not.”

  “Oh yes, you are.” The smile teased her mouth; it was a small mouth, and its perfect lips were very red. “You’ve cast a spell on me, because I lie and lie but when I said you were a wizard that was the truth. How old are you? Really?”

  He could not remember.

  “You wizards can make yourselves young again. I know that, but I don’t care. You’re my wizard, and you saved me, and I love you. Now you look modest and say you love me too.”

  He tried.

  She gave her ankle a final rub. “I wish this mark would go away. I know it won’t, but I wish it would.”

  Rising, Shep licked it once, shook his head, and backed away.

  “Your name is … ?”

  “Bill.”

  She cocked her head. “Are you making fun of me, Bill?”

  “No,” he told her. “I wouldn’t make fun of you. Not ever.” He meant it.

  “My name is Biltis.” She rose effortlessly, and he stood up hurriedly. She took his hands in hers. “They’ll want to know who my lover is, and I’ll say Bill, and they’ll laugh at me. Don’t you feel sorry for me? Look! I’ve lost a slipper! Am I not richly deserving of your pity?”

  “Maybe it’s still down in there,” he said, and knelt, and was about to thrust his hand into the hole.

  “Don’t!” She seized his shoulders, pulling him back. “I was only joking! Y-y-you …”

  Surprised, he turned to look at her. Her crimson lips were trembling, the great, dark pools moist with tears.

  “You mustn’t! They’re down there. You mustn’t reach into holes, or go into caves or—or go down in wells or cisterns. Nothing like that, ever again. They never forget and they never forgive. Oh, Bill!”

  She was in his arms. He clasped her trembling body, astonished to find it small and light. He kissed her cheek and neck, and their lips met.

  “Come in and sit down, Billy.” The woman behind the desk was dark, heavy, and middle-aged, with a warmth in her voice that made him want to like her.

  “Are you really the psychologist?”

  “Uh-huh. You were expectin’ Dr. Gluck, I bet. She left at the end of the last term. I’m Dr. Grimes.” Dr. Grimes smiled broadly. “Why don’t you sit right there? I don’t bite.”

  He did, on the edge of a chair more comfortable than most school chairs.

  “Do you like bein’ Billy? Would you rather be William?”

  “Bill,” he said. “I like people to call me Bill. Is that all right?”

  “Sure, Bill. Bill, I’m goin’ to start right off tellin’ you somethin’ I ought not to tell you at all. I like havin’ you here. I been counselin’ for close to twenty years now. That’s what I do, I’m a counselor. And it’s almost always drugs or liquor. Or stealin’. Here at this school, it’s been drugs, up to now. Nothin’ else. Let me tell you, Bill, a person gets awfully, awfully tired of drugs. And liquor. And stealin’. So I’m real glad to see you.”

  He waited.

  “I got this notebook they took away from you.” She opened the file folder on her desk and held it up. “I read it. Probably you mind, but I had to or else I wouldn’t have known what was bein’ talked about. You see? I wouldn’t have known what kind of things to say, either. Maybe you’d like it back?”

  He nodded.

  She put it down in front of him. “I’ll tell you what I thought when I was readin’ it. About that dog and the li’l bird singin’ and all. I thought, why, this boy’s got a real imagination! I told you about those drug people I got to talk to all the time. And the liquor people, too, and the stealin’ people. All them. They haven’t got—You know why people steal, Bill?”

  He shrugged. “They want the stuff, I guess.”

  “You guess wrong. You ever see stuff you wanted? In a store or anythin’?”

  “Sure.”

  “Uh-huh. You steal it?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

  “They do. They take it. They take it ‘cause they can’t imagine anythin’ will happen. They do that maybe a hundred times, and then they get caught. Only next time they can’t imagine they’re goin’ to get caught this time. Why are you smilin’?”

  “You reminded me of somebody. Not somebody real.”

  “On the TV?” She was watching him narrowly.

  “No.” He sensed that he had been cornered and would be cornered again. It would be best, surely, to tell the truth to this friendly woman and try to get her on his side. “In a dream I’ve been having. That’s all.”

  “You like her. You wouldn’t have smiled like that if you didn’t. Is she pretty?”

  He nodded.

  “’Bout how tall?”

  “Up to my chin.” He touched it.

  “That’s in real high heels, I bet.”

  “No, ma’am. Barefoot.”

  “Uh-huh. Hasn’t got no clothes?”

  It was going to be complicated. He said slowly, “She wasn’t barefoot to start with. She had slippers, like. Really beautiful slippers with jewels on them. Only she lost one, so she took the other one off. She has on a—a dress with a long skirt. It comes down nearly to her feet. It’s gold and red, and has jewels on it, all over.”

  He waved his hands, trying to indicate the patterns. “It’s really, really pretty.”

  Dr. Grimes was nodding. “I bet she smells good, too.”

  He was glad to confirm it. “You’re right, she smells wonderful.”

  “You smell things in this dream?”

  He hesitated. “Well, I smelled her. And I smell the wind sometimes, the freshness of it. Or the ocean, when it was blowing off the ocean.”

  “You ever kiss this girl?”

  “Biltis.” He felt himself flushing. “Her name’s Biltis. We laughed about it.”

  He waited for Dr. Grimes to speak, but she did not.

  “I didn’t really kiss her. She kissed me.”

  “Uh-huh. What happened after?”

  “She whistled. I didn’t think a girl could ever whistle that loud, but she did. She whistled, and this big bird came down. It looked like an eagle, kind of, but it was bigger and had a longer neck. It had a bridle and reins. You know? Those long leather things you steer with?”

  Dr. Grimes nodded. “Uh-huh, I know what reins are.”

  “And she got on it and it flew away.” He closed his eyes, remembering. “Only it talked to me a little first.”

  “This big bird did.”

  “Yeah. It said I better not hurt her. But I wouldn’t. Then it flew away, and she waved. Waved to me.”

  “I see. That was real nice, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded. “I won’t ever forget it.”

  “Maybe you’ll see her again.” Dr. Grimes was watching him closely.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to, Bill?”

  “I don’t know that either. She scared me, a little.”

  Dr. Grimes nodded. “Sure. You ever see her when you weren’t sleepin’?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Only you’re not sure?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I haven’t.”

  “All right. I want to talk about awake now, Bill. Funny things happen to everybody, sometimes. I know funny things happen to me. Like just last Wednesday I saw a li’l boy that looked just like a c
ertain li’l boy I had gone to school with—like he never had grown up, and here he was, just the same. Anythin’ like that happen to you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Oh, I bet. You know there was somethin’. Tell me now.”

  He cleared his throat. “Well, I had walked over to somebody’s house, and I was coming back. Shep and me.”

  “Shep.”

  He nodded.

  “Can I ask why you walked over to this house, Bill?”

  “Well, it seemed like I ought to. She got off at my stop. Off the bus.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So I had walked her over to her house. We talked. You know?”

  Dr. Grimes chuckled. “She likes you, Bill. If she didn’t like you, what’s she gettin’ off at your stop for? And you like her. If you didn’t, what you walkin’ her home for?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Well, I was coming back home, and Sue’s—this girl’s aunt Dinah come out of her house and stopped me. She’s an old lady, and she’s not really this one girl’s aunt. She was a friend of this girl’s grandmother’s.”

  “I got it. What she say, Bill?”

  “She said she needed a big, big favor. She said she owed me already, but she needed another favor, a big one. Shep didn’t like her.”

  Dr. Grimes leaned forward, her face serious. “Did she want you to do somethin’ bad, Bill?”

  “I don’t think so. She just said that this girl’s family probably has some pictures of her when she was young. Of Aunt Dinah. Now she’d like to have them, and would I see if I could get them for her. As many as I could. I said all right, but Shep says—I mean he doesn’t like her. I don’t think he likes me being mixed up with her.”

  “Shep’s your dog?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “But he’s a dog. Does he really talk, Bill?”

  It was easier because he had just said it. “No, ma’am.”

  “You goin’ to try to get the pictures?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I asked this girl, and she said she’d look and bring them to school today, any she found. If she’s got any, I’ll take them over after school.”

  “That’s not a bad thin’ you’re doin’, tryin’ to help out a old woman like that.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, “but I thought it was pretty weird. Why didn’t she just phone Sue’s mom?”

  When they got off the bus that afternoon, he dropped his books at his house and put on Sue’s backpack for the walk over to hers. The pictures, faded black-and-white snapshots, were in a white envelope in the pocket of his shirt, under his sweater.

  There were more leaves on the sidewalk today; the maples had turned to scarlet and gold, and a bush in somebody’s yard to a deep, rich crimson. “In my dream,” he said, “where I’ve got that sword?”

  Sue looked at him sidelong.

  “It’s beautiful. It’s just so beautiful I can’t hardly stand it sometimes. But it’s just brown hills and purple mountains way, way off. And the blue sky, with the white clouds moving fast across it. What makes it so pretty is the way I feel about it. I see everything, and I see how great it is. The big bird with the girl riding him, and her hair and her scarf blowing out behind her. She waved, like this, and she had a gold bracelet on her wrist. The sun hit it, and it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life.”

  “I don’t think I like her,” Sue said.

  “Aunt Dinah?”

  “This girl in your dream.”

  “Oh. I’m not sure I do either. But what I started out to say was that I’m getting to see things here the same way as there. That’s really, really beautiful, like I said. But here it’s beautiful, too. More beautiful than there, really. Biltis is beautiful. She really is, and her dress is really pretty, and her jewelry didn’t just cost a lot, it’s like looking at stars. But you’re more beautiful than Biltis is.”

  Quickly, Sue turned again to look at him.

  “If your dress was as pretty as hers and you had jewelry as nice as hers is, you’d be homecoming queen and she’d be a maid of honor. You know what I mean?”

  Sue took his hand, and that was answer enough.

  “So I’ve been thinking. Pretty soon I might be able to do that. Give you a dress that was so beautiful people would just stop and stare, and jewelry.”

  Shep said, “Good!” though Sue seemed not to hear him.

  “I’ve been thinking about other stuff, too.”

  “Have you, Bill?”

  “Yeah. Lots of things.” He took the white envelope from his pocket. “Like I’d like to show her to you. Show you Biltis, if I could. If I was good in art, the way you are, maybe I could draw her. I’m not, but I can show you pretty close, just the same.”

  He took out a photograph.

  “Like this. The sharp chin, and the little mouth. The big eyes, especially.”

  “That’s Aunt Dinah,” Sue told him. “Aunt Dinah, when she was about twenty.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Anyway, she can’t really be dead, can she?”

  Shep growled softly, deep in his throat.

  “I figured it out,” Sue continued, “while I was looking for those pictures. See, my mother didn’t want me going over there, so she told me Aunt Dinah was dead so I wouldn’t. We went to some funeral, some old lady’s, and when we got home she told me it was Aunt Dinah. I think I was in kindergarten then. Doesn’t that make sense, Bill?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I mean, you said she came out and stopped you on the street. Ghosts don’t do that.”

  “I guess not.”

  “She didn’t want to talk to me, because she knew my mother was mad. And she couldn’t phone the house.”

  He said, “Right.”

  “But maybe you could get them for her. See? That’s the only way everything fits.”

  He said, “We’ve still got to take her the pictures.”

  Sue nodded. “Yes, we do. That’s why I brought them. I don’t know what my mother was so mad about, and it was a long time ago anyway. You ought to forgive people after a while, unless it’s something really bad. Dogs are good at that. We ought to learn from them.”

  She leaned down to pet Shep. “What about the big social studies test tomorrow? Have you been studying?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “only I missed class today. I had to talk to the shrink.”

  “It wasn’t bad, we just reviewed Europe. Would you like me to fill you in a little, when we get to my house? I mean, I’ll just tell my mother you weren’t in class today, so I’m going to tell you what we talked about.”

  “Sure!” He smiled. “I’ve been hoping I could get you to do that. Boy! Am I lucky!”

  “Okay. Suppose you got to go to Paris. Give me three or four things you’d like to see there.”

  He was silent for a moment, concentrating. “The big art museum.”

  “The Louvre. Ms. Fournier will give you a lot better grade if you use the French name. She teaches French, too.”

  “I know,” he said.

  They had reached the house. Still holding the snapshots Sue had brought to school, he climbed four steps to the porch and rang the bell.

  “Maybe she won’t be home,” Sue said from the foot of the steps. “You could just leave them in the mailbox, Bill.”

  “I’m going out for football.” He looked back at her, grinning. “Football players don’t just leave them in the mailbox.”

  He rang again, hearing heavy male footsteps from inside the house.

  Sue joined him on the porch. Her deliciously rounded chin was up, but she took his left arm and held it tightly.

  A rumpled man opened the door and asked what they wanted.

  “My mother had these …” Sue’s voice faded away. “Tell him, Bill.”

  He nodded, and held them out. “There’s an old lady living with you, I think her name’s Dinah?”

  The rumpled man shook his head. “There’s no old lady living here, son. Forget it!” His face was hard and a
trifle stupid, the face of a man whom life had defeated, who could not understand why he had been defeated so easily.

  Bill said, “But you know who I mean. I promised her I’d bring her these pictures if I could, and—”

  “Do you know her? You knew her name, so you’ve got to. You tell her to get out of my house and quit bothering me and my family.”

  Sue’s grasp tightened. “Bill …”

  “It’s her house,” he told the rumpled man, “or anyhow she thinks it is. She thought it was hers, probably, a long time before you were born, mister. I’ll tell her what you said if I ever see her again, but I’m going to give you some advice right now. Take these pictures and don’t tear them up or anything. Leave them someplace where they’ll be easy for her to find. On the mantel or someplace like that. Let go of my arm for a minute, Sue.”

  He turned over the white envelope, took a pencil from his pocket, wrote “Dinah/Biltis” on the front, and handed the envelope to the rumpled man in the doorway. “That might help. I don’t know, but it might. I’d do it if I were you.”

  After supper that evening, Ray Wachter asked his son why he was studying so hard, saying, “You’ve been at those books for a couple of hours now. Is it anything I can help you with?”

  “Just social studies.” He closed the book and looked up. “But I’m going out for football—”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah. It’s sort of too late. Almost too late, but I just decided today. You’ve got to keep your grades up, or they won’t let you play.”

  Ray Wachter tried to conceal the pride he felt; he was a simple man, but not an unintelligent one. “They might not let you play a lot anyway, Bill. You’re not a junior, you know. Don’t get your hopes too high.”

  “Well, this is the first big test in social studies, and I’m not too hot in that.” Two words from the scabbard popped into his mind, and he pronounced them almost automatically.

  “What the hell was that?” Ray Wachter took off his glasses, as if their lenses could somehow block hearing.

  “What language, you mean?” Bill tilted his chair back, yawned, and stretched. “No language of this world, sir, nor do I know its proper name. I suppose it’s nearer to Chaldean than anything else we have here.”