The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 1

When they knocked me out I regressed like a shot to my childhood on Earth and stayed there in a kind of wakeful dream for two months. At times I would become aware of the throbbing of the ship’s engine, of the sleek tubes that fed me, of the machines that exercised my body and of the soft voice of my trainer, but for most of the voyage I was back in my father’s house in Ohio with the smells of his cigar smoke and of his books and the awe I had felt as a child toward the certificates and diplomas on the wallpapered wall over his desk. There were faded blue flowers on that paper; it seemed I could see them more clearly from captain’s quarters on my interstellar ship than I had as a child. Forget-me-nots. There was a brownish stain near the ceiling over a framed diploma that read DOCTEUR DE L’UNIVERSITÉ HONORAIRE. I sat on the green-carpeted floor and stared silently at the stain. My father, silent also, read from an old book in German or French or Japanese, stopping every now and then to make a note on a three-by-five card or light a cigar. He never looked at me or acknowledged my presence. Mother was out; Father was stuck with keeping me. I felt guilty: Father was busy, his work was important, I was a trouble to him. I must have loved him terribly—his rare, shy smile, his quietness. I did not even hope that he would someday explain his work to me. When he died I still knew nothing about that ancient history he spent his life brooding over. I have never read his books. I had him buried in a fine cemetery, glad to be old enough and with money enough to do it right and well. I was twenty-three when he died and already rich. My father was a scholar—world-famous I was told by Mother—and his style was genteel poverty. I loved him ardently, in silence.

I nearly awoke once here on the ship, when my trainer had allowed his attention to lapse and one of the exercise machines was straining the muscles of my abdomen. I found myself for a moment lying on my back on a red leather bench, groaning upward against steel springs in the ship’s gym and with hot tears flooding my face. I had just come from my dream trip to Father’s study, awakened fleetingly by pain. The trainer’s face was tight with anxiety. As if through a partition I heard his alarmed voice saying, “Sorry, Captain Belson,” and I muttered something about love and fell back into my chemical sleep. The astonishing thing was the tears. I had not cried at my father’s funeral. I had never mourned him. I had hardly thought of him for thirty years. And here I was at the age of fifty-two, somewhere out in the black reaches of the Milky Way, weeping copiously for him. In sleep I returned to his study and sat cross-legged on his floor, silent. I watched his concentration at his desk. Somewhere outside of me I heard the hum of the ship and exulted, propelled beyond the speed of light toward constellations totally outside my father’s understanding.

They woke me two weeks before planetfall. There was a crew of seventeen. I owned the ship; I had bought it a year before. We were heading toward an unexplored planet of the star Fomalhaut, known as FBR 793. It was my first voyage away from Earth.

I have always come awake quickly. There is something feral in me and I welcome it when I awaken. I was on my back in my stateroom and the ship’s doctor and navigator were standing by my bed. The doctor was holding a cup of coffee out to me. I ignored it for a moment while I looked around. The room had been painted a pale blue as I had instructed; I could dimly remember the smell of fresh paint in my sleeping nostrils. There was a porthole to my right and one crystalline star, blindingly bright against velvet black, was almost centered in it. I stretched my arms, my legs, twisted my head on my neck. There was strength in my body; I could feel it in my pectorals, my biceps, the muscles of my thighs; the sense of power went through me like a quiet euphoria. I felt my belly; the paunch was gone.

I looked back toward the doctor, reached out steadily and took the cup. There was a white porcelain vase with red roses in it on the desk by my bed.

“Thank you for the flowers,” I said.

“Glad we could grow them,” the doctor said. “How’s your head? Any hangover?”

“Not a bit, Charlie,” I said. It was true. I felt wonderful. I sipped the coffee and felt it penetrate the raw emptiness of my stomach.

“For god’s sake don’t drink it fast,” Charlie said. “Bad enough to drink it at all.”

I had told them to have coffee ready. “I know myself well enough,” I said, and continued sipping.

“It’s a new self,” the doctor said.

I looked at him over the edge of the cup, over the little red stripe that went around its porcelain edge. “Charlie,” I said, “it’s a new self but it still likes coffee.” I finished half of it and set the cup down. Then I got out of bed, a bit slowly. I was naked and tanned. I looked good. The blond hair on my arms and legs had been bleached a pale yellow by the ultraviolet lamps. “Let’s go to the bridge,” I said.

“Okay,” the navigator said, startled.

“And while I’m dressing, see if you can find me a sandwich.”

We were still too far to see the planet. I could have slept another week, since there was very little for me to do when awake. There was little for anyone to do on the ship. But two months’ sleep had been enough to get me into shape and to avoid serious boredom. I wanted to do some reading. I wanted the feel of being the owner-captain of a spaceship. I was the first man in history ever to own one and I wanted to savor the experience.

The bridge was a semicircle twenty feet across, at right angles to the ship’s acceleration. The acceleration was continuous at one-fifth G even in spacewarp, and it gave us enough weight to walk. For exercise I used springs over cams—zero-gravity Nautilus equipment. There was no such thing as an intergalactic Olympics; had there been, these machines would have prepared the athletes. I felt ready to go for a gold medal.

The sandwich turned out to be Virginia ham and gruyère. With all the cold and the vacuum around us, food-keeping was easy and we had plenty. It was a good sandwich, but half of it filled my shrunken stomach. I gave the other half to the navigator. “How’s the uranium?” I said.

“Fine,” he said. “Exactly as computed. We could repeat the voyage without refueling.”

The bridge was mostly empty deck, carpeted in beige. Its heart was a pair of red computer consoles and a panel of switches. Nothing more complicated than a locomotive. There were six rectangular portholes, and the stars seen through them were splendid, but after a while boring. I had seen them before my sleep and was impressed, but only briefly. The first sight is spectacular; there is no cold mountain sky on Earth that reveals the stars so brilliantly. But I find the sea on an ocean voyage more continuously interesting. It has life in it, while this interstellar panorama, however dazzling, has none. If it should really be, after all, the visible manifestation of a god, I refuse to be awed. I have no need for an inscrutable deity; my father’s inscrutability was sufficient. I have enough to do with my life. I need no gods too distant to reveal themselves to me, no presence behind the stars’ glitter.

I am no mad Ahab. I am a businessman, looking for uranium. The Earth had wasted almost all she had. I gathered together what I could to power this old Chinese ship and was staking half my fortune on a Schliemann-like hunch that a planet of Fomalhaut would have uranium. “Belson’s Bubble” was what the Chicago Tribune had called it. Well, to hell with the Chicago Tribune.

“Captain,” the navigator said, “a message arrived when you were asleep.”

I nodded. “Later. How’s the garden?”

“Even better than we planned. You saw the roses. It came during the third week out…”

I stared at his chubby body, his balding head. “Bill. I said later.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Let’s look at the garden.”

We went across a catwalk and down a silky ladder with skid-resistant rungs. In the low gravity and with my splendid new muscles I felt like a youthful spider descending a spoke in her new web. I was wearing faded blue jeans and a gray tee-shirt, with gum-soled gym shoes. In low gravity it is easy to slip, and though your weight is slight your mass can bruise you.

It was breathtaking to see. There were tiers upon tiers of lush greens and yellow and red roses spotted among the food-bearing plants, far more dazzling to me than the stars outside. “The hanging gardens of Babylon” my mind said, almost aloud. There were heavy avocados and oranges and grapevines and potatoes in bloom and peas with blue flowers and great trailing vines of Kentucky Wonder Beans. The air was moist and pungent, hot on my cheeks. As we walked, in floating strides, through an airsealed doorway, warm air caressed our bodies. It was like a damp twilight in the tropics. Greenery and flowers and warm, moist air; my heart leaped up at it all. All of it mine.

I picked a tangerine from a heavy-laden tree in a copper pot, and peeled it. It was delicious.

“Okay, Bill,” I said. “I’m ready now to read that message.”

“What’s the date?” I asked Bill.

“October ninth, two thousand sixty-three.”

I was seated in the Eames chair in my stateroom. Bill stood silently by, waiting to see if there would be an answer.

I tossed the paper on my desk. “Tell them we’re sorry but we can’t turn around. Say the retros are malfunctioning.” There was a lacquered Chinese table by my chair. I set my coffee cup on it. “Nothing from Isabel?”

“Isabel?”

“Isabel Crawford. In New York.”

Bill shook his head. “No, Captain.”

“Thanks, Bill. I’d like to be alone for a while.”

“Sure, Captain,” he said, and left.

On my right was a deck-to-overhead bookshelf, curved with the slight curve of the ship’s hull. It was filled with books: novels, histories, biographies, psychology, poems. Way up on the top shelf, bound in leather, sat the seven volumes of American history written by my father, William T. Belson, Professor of History (ret.), Ohio University. I had owned them thirty years and had opened each of them once, for about a minute. I stared at them then, from my captain’s stateroom on this preposterous voyage of discovery, for a long time. But when I rose to pick a book it was The Ambassadors by Henry James.

FBR 793 became visible the day before planetfall. I first saw it as a small half-moon a hundred million miles from Fomalhaut. There was no real thrill; it was just there, another uninhabited celestial body, a planet called “near-dead” on the charts. No one had ever set foot on it; it had been studied from a ship in orbit around forty years ago. The ship that photographed it lacked fuel for landing and takeoff, even back in those uranium-rich days.

FBR 793 was the twenty-third extrasolar planet discovered, and, like all the rest, it was without advanced life forms. Whatever the official reasons for the explorations conducted by the United States, the People’s Republic of China and the Japanese, there had been only two real ones for sending ships out to interweave the Milky Way. One was the insane desire to find intelligent life somewhere other than on Earth—as if there wasn’t enough of it on Earth, and mostly in trouble! The other was the hope of cheap fuel.

Well. Nobody found life, intelligent or otherwise. And there weren’t many planets. Most stars didn’t have any. And nobody found uranium, or anything other than granite, limestone, chert, and desolation. The whole thing was a failure and it had been abandoned. I picked it up again in my middle age—in what they called a midlife crisis in the times my father wrote of. A geologist told me at a beach picnic once, while spitting watermelon seeds onto coral sand and stroking the brown arm of a languid woman, that he had seen photos of FBR 793 somewhere and they looked like safe uranium to him.

“What’s this ‘safe uranium’?” I said.

“Somebody at M.I.T. worked it out,” he said. “If uranium is formed under a gravity lower than Earth’s it would have different characteristics. It wouldn’t be radioactive except in a magnetic field.” He looked at me. “No meltdowns.”

“Jesus!” I said, “there’d be money in that.”

“You’d never be able to count it.”

I lay there and thought about that for a while. The tide was going out into the tranquil bay on which we lolled. It was about three in the afternoon and sunlight blazed on us. It was Jamaica, I think. I had worked at my desk in a hotel apartment that morning, had been unsuccessfully fellated at lunchtime, was bored with working out mergers, with pineapples and papayas, with Caribbean music, blow jobs that didn’t work, Blue Mountain coffee, counting my wealth. I was fifty and worth three billion. What the hell, I thought, space travel might be more fun than this. It beats suicide too. I started phoning geologists and the people who knew about the few mothballed spaceships that hadn’t been scrapped by the governments that owned them. That was how it started—Belson’s Bubble. Had that girl been more effective at lunchtime, it might not have happened.

In some ways I suppose my ambitions are stupid. I have more money than I can spend—have had that much since I was thirty-five. I own country homes, villas, a yacht, a mansion in New York; yet I want to call no place “home”; the last thing I want is a home. Often I stay in hotels or sleep in my car. I do not want a study like my father’s, some mute terrain of intellectual combat, some preserve of self-justification. I will flee from life in my own fashion, will slip around reality in whatever ways suit my temperament. I can afford it. I make my money in coal, the stock market and real estate, and I know the realities. Money does not follow fantasies, except in show business; and I am not in show business.

I looked at the planet—my planet—half-outlined by its sun, half dark, and I said, “We’ll call it Belson.” Why not? I’m getting on in years.

Belson it is, that big, smart, spherical marvel. When we got closer I saw it had rings. That hadn’t been in the reports, and was quite a surprise. My heart leaped up to see them through the windows of the bridge, red and lavender: the rings of Belson. I was really getting interested. We were a few light-hours away now, and Belson was huge on the screen, its surface a greenish-gray. I loved the rings.

The ship had begun decelerating the day before and our gravity had ceased, then reversed and increased to a little more than Earth-normal; we were slowing down fast. What had been up before was now down, since we had shifted polarities. The ship was rotated 180 degrees, while we were all strapped to cots. It was hectic for a while and a few small, unnoticed things like paperclips and the ship’s cat floated around crazily while we spun in the changing gravity. That yellow cat drifted, back arched in alarm, by my face. We stared at each other. Its eyes seemed to blame me for its condition. “Sorry,” I told it.

The other people in the crew were supposed to have been using the gym but probably hadn’t. They were clearly bothered by the sudden increase in weight. But my muscles were ready for it and it felt good to have heft for a while again. I did a lot of walking that last day in transit, through the engine room, the garden, across the bridge, through the storage and equipment and research rooms. Whenever I passed a port I looked out to see my enlarging planet, Belson. I spoke to no one. The landing would be done by automatic equipment, with the pilot at ready to override if necessary. The pilot was a middle-aged woman with red hair; I had hired her with the possibility of sex in mind—there was something motherly about her and I am drawn to that.

I had no real ambitions for Belson, and I had come to see that. If I found uranium it would be a pleasure, but what the hell. Maybe I had really come all this way to give the place a name, to stake out an unworldly home for myself. Belson had a breathable atmosphere and mild temperatures; a man could live there if he had food and water enough. But the image of myself as the first extraterrestrial hermit had no appeal then and I shook it off.

It was my accountant, a gentle and paunchy Jew named Aaron, whom I first told of my plan to hunt uranium in space. “What for?” he said. He was drinking a Perrier. We were at P. J. Clark’s and it was November and already snowing heavily outside the windows.

I looked at him and finished my rum and Coke. “Money.”

“You need more money?” Aaron said.

I laughed wryly. “Adventure.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “A man can have adventure easier.”

“The world needs energy,” I said. “Nobody’s going to solve the nuclear-fusion problem. The oil’s gone—except for what the military has stashed away. They’ve shut down the fission plants because the uranium’s dangerous. And we may be headed into an ice age. Somebody’s got to find power somewhere, Aaron, or we’ll all freeze.”

“Four bad winters don’t make an ice age,” Aaron said. “There’s wood enough to keep us warm. The population’s going down, Ben. It’ll work out.” He fished the lime from his Perrier and licked at it speculatively. “They tried going out in ships when we were kids and they gave it up. Experts. Now they’ve made it against the law. There’s nothing in space but grief.”

I liked Aaron. He was solid, and serious, and smart. He liked playing devil’s advocate with me. And he had made me think. “Okay,” I said, “it isn’t adventure.”

“What is it then?”

I smiled at him. “Mischief.”

He looked at me and frowned. “I’m having a hamburger,” he said, and waved for a waiter. “Mischief I can believe. We’ll call it exploration for mineral resources and I’ll try for tax credits. Let’s eat our lunch and talk about something cheerful.”

I ordered a rare steak and a chocolate mousse and a mug of beer. That night I called Isabel and took her to see Così fan tutte at Lincoln Center. At intermission I told her I was planning to try space travel. She took it in, but with astonishment. We were in my box on red velvet seats, and I was half drunk. The music was grand. During the second act I turned toward her, planning to reach my hand gently up her gorgeous dress, and saw that she was furious.

“What’s wrong, honey?” I said.

She looked at me as though she were looking at a disorderly child. “I think you’re running away.”

I left New York the next day, to begin my search for a ship. Sometimes the city depresses me, now that there are so few taxis and cars and no trees in Central Park and half the restaurants I knew in my twenties have gone out of business. Lutèce and The Four Seasons are gone, but there’s a midtown wood-stand where Le Madrigal used to be. And the stores! Bergdorf-Goodman is gone, and Saks and Cartier; Bloomingdale’s is a Greyhound bus depot. Everybody travels on bus or train because you can’t run an airplane on coal. I’ve never felt that anyplace in this world was really my home. Why not try another world?

The landing was perfect, with only slight help needed from the pilot. We came down at a spot where it was morning, as light as a feather. Outside the portholes Belson’s surface gleamed a shiny grayish-black. Obsidian. At a distance was a field of something resembling grass. The sky was a musty green and had clouds like Earth clouds. Cirrostratus and cumulonimbus, high and white. It looked good to me.

The pilot shut off the engine. The silence was overwhelming. No one spoke.

I looked across the bridge at Bill, the navigator. He was recording the landing in the ship’s log. That seemed only proper; I felt traditional, and wished for a ship’s orchestra to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

After a few moments Bill said, “I’ll put on a helmet and step outside.”

“Hold it,” I said. “I’m going to be the first man to step out there. The readings on the gauges are all right by me; I’m not wearing a helmet.” I was shocked by the energy in my voice after the calm I had felt while landing.

Isabel told me that night after the opera, “Ben, I wish you knew how to take it easy. I wish you didn’t rush around so much,” and I said, “If I didn’t rush around I wouldn’t have so much money and I wouldn’t have you here by this marble fireplace taking off your clothes.” Isabel was wearing a blue half-slip and blue stockings. Her naked breasts were like a little girl’s and my heart went out to them while the big logs flickered and I still heard Mozart tingling in my ears. We didn’t live together anymore, but we were still close at times.

What I’d said made her angry. “I’m not with you because of your money, Ben.”

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I know you’re not. It’s just that I’m in some kind of hurry all the time, and I don’t know how to stop. Maybe this trip is what I need.”

She looked at me hard for a moment. Her face was beautiful in its concentration and her skin glowed in firelight. Isabel is a Scot and it was that Scottish skin of hers—and her lovely voice—that had drawn me to her years before. “I hate you for wanting to risk your life,” she said. “You don’t need to risk it, Ben. There’s nothing to prove.”

Oh Jesus, she was right. There was nothing to prove then and there’s nothing to prove now. And I knew it. I think I’m addicted.

So I rushed out the hatch of that spaceship onto the dark obsidian surface of Belson in the morning and slipped and broke my right arm. While my seventeen subordinates watched from the big portholes on the bridge, I did a slip and a slide and a cartwheel and was flat on my ass with my right arm under me bent like a paperclip and me screaming. It hurt like hell. The air of Belson was clear and it smelled pleasantly musty; I savored the smell even over the horrible goddamned pain. “Son of a bitch,” I said.

Charlie got to me with a hypodermic of morphine. He helped me back to the ship and into my stateroom before X-raying and then setting the arm. It was compound and broken in two places. What a fucking mess! But the morphine felt wonderful.

I hadn’t thought of obsidian being slippery. The reports hadn’t said anything about it. But it sure was. Belson was a glass planet. And who needed that?

I had a fever the next day while my six geologists and four engineers started seismic testing for uranium ore. Toward evening, huge booming explosions began to rock the ship while I lay dazed with morphine, and spooned myself full of vichyssoise and lemon mousse. Boom! My small Corot fell from the wall. After dark I invited Ruth, the pilot, to watch the movie with me. She accepted graciously enough and I kept my hands to myself. Chemical euphoria was my real companion.

I’d never had morphine before and something in me knew, the minute it began to diddle my nervous system, that this was heavy magic indeed. I felt the thrill of danger in it. There was a sufficiency to it, a filling of empty spaces in the soul, that had snagged my bewildered spirit instantly, right out there on the dark slippery surface of a brand-new planet. It was splendid chemistry; when I awoke the next morning not giving a damn for the world I had come to explore but only wanting my fix, I was suddenly frightened. When Charlie came into my stateroom with his syringe I was even more frightened. I told him to forget it, to find me some aspirin. It took him half an hour to find some. That’s the modern world for you. Here we were on a spaceship with the most advanced geologic and exploratory equipment and with a sick bay to rival Johns Hopkins. We had a drug synthesizer; we had a computer that could take out your appendix; and the doctor had to borrow aspirin from the man in charge of the engine room. I felt my destiny was trying to force me into becoming a morphine addict.

The aspirin helped the pain a bit, but I was edgy. What the hell, I thought, and told Charlie to give me a half dose of morphine. Oh yes.

There are few things in this world that do what they promise, and fewer still that deliver more than you expected. Morphine is one of those; it promised only relief and it carried heart’s ease in its wake. It was chemical bliss for my cluttered soul. I felt the hook. What the hell. You could go the route of De Quincey and Coleridge and all those other sad losers. But I had controlled a lot of things in my life before, and I figured, Few things are as good as this chemical. I’ll ride it for a while. I knew enough to suspect it might be riding me, but I felt I could handle that too. There would be a piper to pay. But that would be in due time.

I found soon enough I could lower the dose and still get what I wanted. The mornings of the next three weeks I rode a low morphine euphoria and roamed Belson in a nuclear jeep, my arm in a sling and Ruth at my side, playing music on the little ball recorder. It was Così fan tutte mostly. I think people who record live performances are jerks; still, I do it myself sometimes for the hell of it. It gives me something to think about during the dull passages, with the little meters and the tone controls to check. I had recorded Così fan tutte that night with Isabel at the Met. I kept to one shot of morphine a day; in the afternoons, when it wore off, my price was a headache, for which the remaining aspirin served until it ran out. I would visit the seismic sites, driving across the slick obsidian, listening to arias composed light-years away in Austria, and even when my soul was not singing along from the alkaloid chemistry at work on my brain, it still greeted the strangeness of a new planet with thrilling of the nerves. There wasn’t much to see on Belson, but I had come to love the place.

The first time I found the grass and drove on it, it screamed like a tormented woman under the jeep’s tires. And when I stopped and got out I found the grass I had crushed was bleeding, bleeding on my shoes and on the tires of the car. It was the red of real blood and enough to disconcert the most euphoric of men. I was shocked deeply. I got the jeep off it as gently as possible.

That night after dinner I found out from the chief engineer, who was also a biophysicist, that the grass was nothing like Earth grass and was incomprehensible to him. It was brown, about a foot high, and did not grow on the surface at all. It was the upper ends of some long, tenuous filaments that went down through the obsidian miles beneath the surface, far below our powers of investigation. No man on board and no equipment either was strong enough to uproot a blade of it. Nor could it be severed. It screamed and bled when crushed, but no one had the foggiest idea why or how. And crushing it did not kill or break it. If it was alive, that is. The biophysicist’s name was Howard. He said the grass was some kind of a polymer. Big deal. So is nylon.

And then one twilight, when we were all on board ship eating leg of lamb together, we began to hear something faint and musical coming from outside. For a moment we all froze. I got up and opened the hatchway. It was the sound of singing, coming from a field of grass that began a few hundred yards west of the ship. I went out with the doctor and we walked carefully on the slippery surface, under the light of Belson’s setting sun, toward the grass. The grass was singing. It came from all around us.

And the weirdest thing, the thing that raised the small hairs on the back of my neck, was that the voice and the melody were human—as human as any of us. You could not distinguish words, yet what it sang sounded like words. It sang loudly and it sang softly and the melody kept changing. For a moment, startled, I thought I heard strains from Così fan tutte. Sometimes the grass undulated as it sang, and sometimes it was still. When it moved, the long shadows on it from the low sun rippled with the music. I had never seen anything more beautiful, had never heard anything so moving. For a moment I feared it was the effect of that morning’s morphine, but I looked around me at the crew members—at the other six men and the eleven women—and I saw they were transfixed by it too. They were astonished and as moved as I.

Howard fell on his knees by the grass, holding his head close to the sound. I could see that he was crying. Ruth stood by me, staring ahead of herself. Nobody spoke. I was weeping too.

Then the sun set and a moment later the music stopped. Someone turned on a flashlight. We walked silently back to the ship, and when we got there some of us got drunk. There was little to say. It had been the most powerful esthetic experience I had ever felt and was in itself worth the voyage, if anything could be. I had my recorder with me and had had the presence of mind to record part of it, erasing most of the precious Così fan tutte in the process. But the grass was better than Mozart, and besides, I was tired of Italian arias. I told no one that night of my recording, since no one was talking much.

The next morning one of the engineers found a scraggly plant growing in a fissure in the obsidian near the ship. That area had been studied closely before and nothing had been found growing. The plant was not like the grass. It did not bleed and you could pick it. Howard took it to his lab for analysis. I was curious; had the singing made it grow?

I played the recording in my stateroom while eating my breakfast croissant, but the music wasn’t the same. It was good, but the resonance was gone. It sounded like a big choir and that was all.

By afternoon Howard had analyzed the sample as far as he could. Howard is a thin, stoop-shouldered man, with nicotine stains on his fingers. I found him in his lab, reading a printout. He was smoking a cigarette and looked tired. I asked him what he had found out.

“Well,” he said,” it’s a salicylate, like one of the organics you find in willow bark and that we’ve been synthesizing on Earth for centuries. But there’s something I don’t understand about the molecule.”

“What’s a salicylate?”

“Aspirin’s one,” he said. “That’s the one in willow bark. Different from this…” He held out a fragment of the plant. “But close to it.”

“Aspirin?” I said. I was shocked. I had carried music with me, and aspirin. Last night the planet had made both.

“It would probably cure a headache.”

“Is it safe?”

“I suppose so,” he said. “Safe as willow bark.”

“I’ll take some,” I said. My head was aching anyway, since that morning’s fix had worn off.

He figured out a rough dose and I took it. It was bitter, like aspirin. Howard protested that we should try it on some lab mice first, but I went on ahead.

My headache vanished in three minutes. Vanished completely and stayed vanished. It was then that I began to believe the planet was intelligent and that it had goodwill. Belson spoke my language. The music had spoken to my heart as directly as that plant had spoken to my nervous system. That kind of a fit cannot be accidental; the odds against it are too strong.

I developed my theory of an intelligent planet and tried it on Ruth. She was polite but clearly didn’t buy it. I dropped the subject. Ruth had been having dinner with me since the first week on Belson, but we didn’t sleep together and we didn’t talk much. She was busy with her scientific thoughts and I with my mystical ones. And my morphine. And I had sex problems.

I named the little shrub endolin. It turned out there was a lot of it around, growing out of cracks in the obsidian. I had come to Belson looking for power; instead I’d found music, euphoria and relief from pain. I was beginning to love this place.