The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 16

The elevator had been double-checked. Workmen had taken it up and down a dozen times. But there was a lot of embarrassed tension among us. Then there were rumblings beneath our feet, a sturdy whine overhead, and we began moving upward.

“Well, for one thing,” the Deputy Mayor said, trying to break the tension, “the Maintenance Workers’ Union is solidly Democratic.”

The rest of us said nothing, but as we approached the top floors the ride began to smooth out and I started feeling an exhilaration like blasting off for Fomalhaut two years before. I stood with the four of them silent in the middle of that freshly painted car with its polished brass handrails and its gray floor, and the old rush of fast travel expanded my soul for a moment. As we slowed near the top I felt Isabel’s hand take mine and squeeze it. The car stopped, the door hummed open and we stepped out onto a red carpet laid on a floor still covered with scuffmarks from the last group of tourists to leave, thirty years before. Someone had opened a few windows, but the air was still musty. There were graffiti on the walls—one could have been an imprecation from a hidden tomb. DEATH TO INTERLOPERS it read, in spray-paint orange under a veil of dust. There was a crew of a half-dozen workmen cleaning up. I hoped they would get that one off soon. Heavy blinds covered the windows we faced; it was west that way, and the late-afternoon sun in June would be blinding. I started to head back around to where I could look out to the east, but Isabel put her hand on my arm and said, “Take it easy, Ben. Let’s wait a few minutes.”

“Okay,” I said, remembering my breakneck rush onto Belson. “Let’s get a drink.” A bar was being set up under the shaded windows and several bottles and some glasses were already out.

Isabel was looking around her, at the long-closed souvenir stand, the grimy coffee urns, the high-ceilinged room with metal girders overhead, and the yellowing photograph of Manhattan on the wall above the elevator—Manhattan as it was around 2025, with all the Japanese skyscrapers. Above this was written in faded letters: OBSERVATION DECK.

We went to the bar and she handed me a canape. As I gave her a drink I noticed the light on the window blinds wasn’t so bright anymore; the sun must be hidden by another tall building. I walked a few steps over and pulled the cord. There had been a lot of talking in the room, with the laborers and two foremen and the Deputy Mayor and his secretary and a holovision crew that was just getting their equipment out of the elevator. But when the blind began to go up a hush spread itself around me. Before I looked out myself I glanced around the room. Everyone was staring toward the window.

I turned and there it was: the New York skyline. The sun glowed from behind the cylinder of the Bank of Hangchow, and its light made quasi-silhouettes of the giant old buildings of the West Side—all of them empty but still astounding to see from this solid old masterpiece of a skyscraper: those solemn black shapes, pushed skyward in turn-of-the-century confidence, almost all of them taller than the one we stood on.

“My God,” Isabel said finally. “It’s New York City!”

Somebody laughed softly and the silence was swallowed again in chatter. More people kept coming from the elevator. Ice tinkled all over now. A five-piece band was setting up in a room behind us; above the other hubbub came the occasional spurt of a trumpet, the nervous clang of a cymbal. I walked around the tower several times, looking out toward the Hudson and the East River and the southern tip of the island. A few weak lights down near street level came on—the twenty-watt fluorescents we had all lived with for a third of a century, but all the upper stories remained dark. At the northern end of the deck, facing uptown, was a table draped with red, white and blue bunting and faced by rows of chairs. On it sat the black switchbox and a microwave transmitter dish like a tea saucer aimed toward New Jersey. The switch had been locked into the “off” position with a key. I looked at my watch; fifty more minutes. Booming male laughter was coming from the anteroom. I turned and walked in. Sticking up over the crowd was L’Ouverture’s shiny black head, his big toothy smile. He was stretching his long arms out and laughing while several other people looked up admiringly. He did look beautiful, in a pale-blue seersucker suit with a crisp white shirt and red tie.

Just then he saw me coming. “Benjamin!” he shouted. “Benjamin Belson, Intergalactic Pirate.”

People pulled away to let me pass. I walked up to him. “Piracy is as piracy does, L’Ouverture,” I said. I heard my voice. It sounded dangerous.

“Ben,” he said, his arms still out above heads, “I’m not even a senator anymore. You’ve got your spaceship and I’m in commerce. Let me congratulate you.”

I was right up to him now, looking up at his flawlessly shaved face, the bright silk of his necktie, smelling his cologne and hearing the rustle of his suit as he now brought his grotesquely long arms down from the gesture my arrival had attracted. “L’Ouverture,” I said, “I accept your congratulations.” Then I thought, What the hell. I handed my drink to someone and put my arms around Baynes. His arms came around me. We hugged hard for a long time and I could feel the warmth of his enormous hands across my shoulders. “Ben,” he whispered in my ear, lowering his head to say it, “you are a child of mine after all.”

I pulled back and looked up at him. “If I am,” I said, “I’ve left home for good.”

He smiled benignly. “What could be more in tune with the order of things?”

“I’ll get you a drink,” I said. The Mayor arrived and the holo filming began. During a lull in that he handed me a pair of Xerograms and I pressed them on. One was a formal thank you from President Weinberg with a White House logo glowing in gold on its projection; the other was in strong calligraphy: “I am pleased with my son,” it said. “Your journey has relighted the world.” The Mayor tapped my arm, ready to begin his speech. I followed him to the dais and stood at the bunting-draped table. Someone had unlocked the power switch. Isabel sat in the front row in her blue dress; she looked smart and strong.

The Mayor went on longer than I had expected and I began to get impatient. He talked about the simultaneous ceremonies in Boston, Dallas and Chicago, about the new electric heating that would soon be flowing into Montreal and Vancouver, about Juno uranium plants scheduled for Zimbabwe and Rio and Paris, about the new reciprocity in U.S. relations with China, while I stood with impatience, wanting to get on with it and occasionally slipping a look at my watch. For a moment I became appalled at myself. Did the road of excesses lead only back to this? Had I lost my impotence and quieted my rages only to become another impatient rich man with a distended ego? I looked down at myself. There was my Ralph Lauren cotton jacket of midnight blue, my Bert Pulitzer shirt, my blue silk Marley tie, my gray trousers gently resting their cuffs on English shoes. Under all this a body still firm and a set of genitals no longer in spiritual orbit. I looked up and there was Isabel with a light smile on her lips, looking not at me but at the dull man at my side. Had it all only come to this, then: the speech of a politician, expensive clothes, and boredom?

In a seat behind Isabel a relaxed-looking man whom I didn’t recognize shifted his weight in his chair. He glanced down toward his watch. I looked around the room, from well-dressed person to well-dressed person: others were restless too. L’Ouverture, the biggest man there, sat in the back row looking bored out of his skull.

My discomfort subsided and I became easy again with my clothes and my life. I thought of how well Isabel’s career was going, how she worked at her acting and at getting our home in order. I thought of the Isabel, now in the limbo of analogy travel from Belson with a load of endolin aboard and a crew ready to fill the empty holds on Juno. Ruth was captain this time, sleeping in my old suite with the porthole in the bathroom, but the Nautilus machines were at our home on Madison Avenue in the room with the pool table. Mourning Dove was presiding over installing new cores in the reactors of the Middle Kingdom. The world was not ready to wind down yet, and New York was not ready to become a memory like Samarkand or Constantinople.

While this verbal fugue was playing in my head, a part of my attention was picking up Mayor Wharton’s speech. He was praising the work of the Isabel and the abundance it had brought. Then he paused, turned to me and said, “With us now to close the circuit is the captain of the Isabel.” I took a step forward and spoke. “I am an impatient man and I want to throw this switch, but I want my wife with me when I do it.” I looked at Isabel. She stood up, walked around the table and took my arm. We gripped the heavy handle, hesitated a moment and pulled it together, looking toward the window behind the rows of chairs. The switch clicked into place and the microwave blipped its signal off to the power plants across the river. No more than a dozen windows lighted up outside. Isabel looked up at me. “Is that all?” she said. “Is something wrong?” People were standing and looking out and a few were murmuring; the ceremoniousness had evaporated.

“As we know,” Mayor Wharton was saying, “there will be a delay while the elevators are going up and people are entering the high floors.” I could picture those old offices and apartments. People with flashlights, people who were part of this big Manhattan party just now beginning, would be wandering about on dusty floors, putting bulbs into sockets and finding long-disused switches and trying to get them to work. The elevators had been checked out over the past months, but there had not been enough professionals to climb all the stairs and get all the rooms open. Now it would be mostly volunteers: clerks, actors, bankers and sanitation workers and their lovers. Children too. People with martinis or beer bumping around in musty old rooms and hallways, in executive washrooms with rusted plumbing and office suites with peeling walls and dust-covered light fixtures and musty carpets. Elevator shafts would be groaning and rumbling again with their cables, so long slack, now going suddenly taut. I thought of the remnants of final office parties, the empty champagne bottles and the uneaten cheese and canapes sitting on empty desks, there since the last office workers had left in 2031, when the legislators in Albany had stopped the use of elevators. In some rooms there would be napkins strewn about, unemptied wastebaskets, an occasional umbrella or a forgotten purse.

Isabel brought me out of this reverie. “Ben,” she whispered, “follow me.”

People had broken up into groups and were chattering, glancing from time to time toward the windows. A few more lights had come on in the lower stories, but the city was still dark. Isabel had me by the hand. She led me away from the crowd and out into the anteroom with the elevator. Behind us the band had started playing. To the right of the elevator was a door with a small table in front to keep it from being opened. Isabel pulled the table aside. “I checked this out a while back,” she said. She turned the knob and opened the door. Fresh air hit my face. “Come on!” she said.

We walked down a short hall into a cool breeze. It was dark and I nearly stumbled, but we had left the doorway open and enough light came from the room behind us that I could find my way with Isabel leading. The noise of the band behind us faded. I felt I was in a windy tunnel, now hearing only the purposeful clicking of Isabel’s heels. I was just starting to protest when I saw her stop in front of me by a black staircase. I blinked. It was an old escalator, not working. I looked up and saw a rectangle of black, with stars. “Come on up,” Isabel said, leading the way. I followed her and the starry rectangle above grew larger and the air windier.

We stepped out onto a dark metallic surface. I looked up; the mooring mast of the building, that useless tower intended as a home for dirigibles, loomed up over us. I looked outward. The panorama of a dark Manhattan was in front of us. We walked a few steps toward the edge of the platform, our steps clanging, and just as we arrived at the steel railings, with wind now blowing strongly in our faces, just as Isabel took my hand, a horizontal row of lights came on in a building in front of us. I caught my breath. More lights came on, to our left. Then to our right. We stood silently in the night air, staring.

Landing on Belson the first time, Ruth had slid the Isabel into a single orbit under the rings and I, standing on the bridge in gym shorts in my newly strong body, had felt my heart stop at the sight that wheeled before us: those magnificent rings in airless rainbow above a circle of void. Below them hung the gray curve of Belson itself. The Isabel moved from the sunless side of the rings to their illuminated side, and light suddenly filled the windows of the bridge and bathed our faces in a refulgence beyond all knowing. A small pale moon hung poised between the rings and the planets, shimmering as the Isabel must be shimmering in that splendor, poised in Newtonian certainty of hurl and granitic heft, floodlit by magic as we ourselves were. There is beauty in our galaxy that the human mind can only reach out for and brush against before recoiling. There is a sweep and color that our history upward from warm amoebic seas has hardly prepared eyes and nerves for. I had to look away.

Here in New York, as the lights of its own metropolitan scale came winking on randomly at left, at center, at right and up and down and middle in scrambled array, with the pale, limited incandescence of tungsten and of phosphors, filling in the pieces of the great architectural jigsaw, I did not this time turn away. I am not able to forget the Belson rings, nor do I ever want to. I am not one to forget either that this human world of ours has beauty that can stun the mind—the rain forests, the canyons, coasts, the gray skin of deep ocean, the grim antarctic mists. New York was built by pressure and noise, yet its beauty—far beyond the human noise that made it—penetrates to the marrow. I felt Isabel’s warm body beside me and heard her breath catch in her throat as we watched Manhattan create itself before us. I would have given my whole lovely fortune for Aunt Myra to be there with us and to have heard her own breath catch as she saw New York reawaken. I hugged Isabel to my side. It was good to be home.