The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 7

For what must have been a quarter of an hour, I stared at the empty sky overhead where the ship had disappeared from view. This was months ago. My neck was stiff from craning, gawking at the sky from which humanity had just disappeared. I was the only homo sapiens around, yet it wasn’t really a new feeling to me at all.

The cabin has a porch on it; I went over to it finally, sat down, and stared for a while at the obsidian plain in front of me with its field of Belson grass at a distance. The obsidian near the cabin is a grayish green, and evening light makes it appear blue. The sky was green, as it sometimes is at twilight. The rings were not visible. Fomalhaut was dropping toward the horizon. Feeling the silence I began to whistle.

One of the strangest things about this planet is the silence at sunset; I’ve never gotten used to it. Some part of me expects to hear the sounds of crickets and tree frogs in the warm air—or at least the buzzing of gnats. But the only sound I know of that Belson makes is the singing of its grass—those polymeric strands that go below the surface to some obscure molten intelligence at Belson’s center, to some hot old chaos like my own.

I got up finally and went inside. The cabin interior had two pieces of furniture: the Eames chair and a big moonwood slab sitting on four posts for a table. On it sat the drug synthesizer, a nuclear lamp, a pile of plastic sheets, a stack of legal notepads, a pair of ball recorders, and the computer.

There were two large windows with shutters on them to protect me if either beasts or weather should appear, although I expected neither. The light from them was weak. I turned the lamp on low. There was a pile of morphine crystals already accumulated in the receptacle of the machine; I ignored it and walked to the back wall where a moonwood shelf was my kitchen and made myself a drink of gin and water, with a little lemon juice in it. It struck me then for the first time that the cabin was familiar. I looked around me. I could have been in Isabel’s apartment in New York!

The kitchen was a space along the back wall and windowless, as hers was. The dimensions of the room were about the same. Where Isabel had a sleeping loft I had a sleeping porch. Aunt Myra’s little Corot hung on a side wall exactly where Isabel had hung a Malcah Zeldis. For a moment déjà vu made the hairs on the back on my neck tingle. What was I trying to do here across the Milky Way from New York? Keep alive the memory of five months of fighting and impotence?

I sighed aloud at that thought and then walked across the bare floor of the room and out the door. I had spent a week building the place, cutting the balsa-light moonwood with a hot molecular wire and then fitting slabs of it together to make a cabin. Yet in all the time of construction it had never occurred to me I was making a simulacrum of Isabel’s New York apartment.

I walked outside, going carefully on my gumsoled shoes, past my little cluster of wet springs with their purity meters and along my hydroponics troughs with their accelerated seeds. Those seeds were already coiling under the brown medium in the troughs, ready to spring up green in a few Earth days. I was feeling much better. I took another swallow of gin. It was getting dark now. I walked slowly across the green-gray plain, away from the setting sun and toward the grass.

There was a field of it as broad as a Kansas wheat plain, a few hundred yards from my garden-to-be. I walked slowly toward it. The surface underfoot was now striated with cloudy bands of purple.

After a moment I passed a patch with cracks. In the cracks grew endolin; I could see it there, the color of heather. I bent and pulled a pinch of it. My neck was still sore from staring at the takeoff and after. I chewed and swallowed the endolin and as I continued walking the pain eased. Wonderful stuff, when fresh. If only it could speak to the soul the way morphine does. The way the grass had done.

I stopped at the end of the field. At nighttime there is usually a breeze here; one had just sprung up. The light was weak, and the grass looked gray and silky. The sky was a deep emerald. I stood at the edge of the rippling grass, finished off my drink and said, “Hello. I’m your new neighbor.” The grass waved silently in the wind but said nothing.

I stood there alone for a long time while the sky turned black and the stars came out. There was a pink light from the only moon up, off to my left. And then for a minute I was seized with loneliness. I missed Isabel. I wanted her looking at that black sky with me. I did not want to make love to her, not even necessarily to kiss her. I just wanted her with me.

I turned and went back to my cabin, had another drink, and played the part of Così fan tutte that was left on my recorder. I’d had the machine on the seat arm between us; at several points on the recording I could hear the rustling of Isabel’s dress, there at the Metropolitan Opera.

For the next few days I busied myself making simple pieces of furniture. The moonwood came from an outcropping about a hundred yards to the south of my cabin. I cut boards from it with a hot wire slicer, much like using a cheese knife on gruyère, and then nailed them together into a chair and two small tables and a set of shelves. The nails were pieces of heavy wire cut in the Isabel’s machine shop and fed into a forming machine that gave them a point and a head.

Every few hours I would take a break from the carpentry, not because it was difficult but because I wanted to stretch the project out. I would shoot a little morphine and then go out looking for endolin. There was a lot of it. At least once a day I would go stand at the end of the grass and speak to it, but it never spoke back to me.

I discovered something important about endolin. I had accidentally gotten a few twigs of it wet once while checking the irrigation flow in my hydroponics. I’d set the twigs on a two-day-old lettuce plant so I could use both hands to tighten a plastic fitting. Some water sprayed the endolin. Later, when it dried out in the sun, I saw it had changed color, from heather to a dark brown. When I picked it up, a fine grayish dust sifted down from the twigs onto my hand and onto the ground.

The drug synthesizer has an electronic analysis device as a doublecheck precaution. You can read out the formula for the drug you just made. A person wouldn’t want the machine to slip up and make strychnine by mistake. I used the analyzer to check out the gray dust from the endolin and found it was the pure alkaloid, just as Howard had written it down for me. The rest of the plant turned out to be mostly cellulose. So the gray dust was concentrated endolin. Very concentrated; its weight was less than a fiftieth that of the twig.

It occurred to me immediately that the stuff might keep better in this form. I spent a few hours gathering a bushel and a half of the twigs. Then I wet them down thoroughly and spread them to dry in the next day’s sun. When they had dried out I picked them up a few at a time and shook them carefully over a large plastic bowl. Eventually there was a half cup of gray powder in the bowl. I checked it on the analyzer, saw that it was indeed the alkaloid, sealed it into a folded-up square of plastic, and irradiated it just as I was prepared to irradiate lettuce and peas for preservation. In the nearly two months since I tried that, it has worked perfectly. A three-milligram pinch of the dust, stirred into water and swallowed, will cure the worst morphine hangover in about a minute. There are no side effects. My health here on Belson is perfect. Ben Belson, pharmacological researcher. With a patent on this stuff, back on Earth, a smart man could get a 15 percent interest in Parke-Davis, or Lao-tzu. It’s a business I’ve never fooled with, but what the hell.

So that added another project to my daily rounds: preparing concentrated endolin. The analyzer’s scales have a beam, so that whatever gravitation I’m in will give constant readings. I now have fifty-three pounds, Earth weight. That’s almost all the plastic bags I can spare. It’s enough to cure all the hangovers in Japan. They can stir it into their tea.

What a narrow, limited life this is! And how it has grown on me, how I take to it so easily! I am not homesick and I am not lonely anymore. Or if I am lonely I don’t know it. Sometimes I think I swim in loneliness the way a fish swims in water, unaware that it is wet.

In my third month I began to shoot dope in dead earnest. My veins swelled with morphine and my brain became a hot fog, burning with euphoria. Sometimes there were nightmares. I saw in sharp detail De Quincey’s three old women, constructing themselves with gold knitting needles, their bodies self-knitted and self-purled for me. One resembled Aunt Myra, but when I spoke her name she looked away. Eventually all three burst into white flame and I heard myself screaming.

At the start of the fourth month I stayed on my back in bed for over four days, until the Shartz machine’s morphine reserve was gone. When I finally got out of bed I fell to one knee and thought for a while of never getting up. I might have stayed there and died if I hadn’t been hungry. There was a large pail of water by my bedside, but no food. I hadn’t eaten in four days. My stomach felt stuck together and my head was primarily a pulse.

I pulled myself up and slowly walked outside, like a sleepwalker. It was midday and I squinted. At first I thought I was seeing another hallucination: the plants in my garden were black. I blinked and stared and scratched my funky armpits. Hair came out and stuck under my nails. For some reason the soles of my feet were sore. It was no dream. My garden had died. Black as sin. I fell once on my way to the lettuce—my dear lettuce. The leaves were like huge flakes of ash and they became powder in my trembling hand.

I stooped to my carrots and dug three up with my fingernails; what was beneath the ash leaves were brown crumbly shafts with a sour smell to them. I sat in the center of my garden, surrounded by ash and bad smells, and I remembered lying on my bed in chemical bedazzlement and looking out the door to see a black rain falling from the lavender sky and smoke rising from my garden as the rain hit my beloved plants. I had taken it for hallucination, on a par with the three self-knitted maiden aunts—the kind of thing that goes away. It didn’t go away.

I lit a cigar and continued sitting. My hands still shook but my head was beginning to clear. What I needed was a dozen raw eggs and a bottle of whiskey, but I let the cigar be my pacifier while I added it up. Clearly there was more to this planet than met the eye. It had pulled a fast one on me, with its death rain. What would have happened to my body had I been outdoors during the rainfall? Would my skin have gone the way of the lettuce? Must I now escalate my imitation of Robinson Crusoe and make myself an umbrella out of what was available? I dropped that for a while and thought of food. The Isabel would not be back for months. I had four boxes of irradiated meat behind the cabin and two dozen cartons of dried food by my sink. There was a large supply of vitamin pills and protein tablets.

I had a frightening thought, bit down on my cigar and pushed myself up. I padded back to the cabin and then around it, to where the meat was stored in sealed plastic cartons. My premonition was right; the rain had eaten through the cartons, turning them gray. Inside each, where lamb chops and steaks and pot roasts had lain ready for cooking in molecular suspension, now lay stacks of individually wrapped hockey pucks—dark and shriveled and smelling to high heaven or whatever it was above the inscrutable Belson sky. I stepped back from the smell and stared upward for a long while with an Old Testament feeling, wondering what celestial visitation this perverse planet had prepared for me. In my mind were the words spoken to Job: “I alone am escaped to tell thee.” Son of a bitch.

Nothing fell from the sky on me and I did not become covered from sole to crown with sore boils, although I was ready.

I thought of a fissure in the obsidian nearby and walked over to it. I grabbed a handful of endolin and crunched it down raw, without a chaser. The taste was bitter and clean in my dry mouth. Then I went back into the cabin, opened up my one window to let some of the bad air out and then washed my face with the water left in the bucket. That felt better, and by then the endolin had eased my head.

Along the far wall of the cabin was a long moonwood shelf with over a dozen plastic cartons of dried food. I took a deep breath and walked over, a part of me thinking that surely nothing could have happened to my dried beans and potatoes and synthetic protein. But another part of me knew exactly what was going to be the case. I broke the heavy seal on one of the cartons and lifted out a plastic pouch of what should have been dried eggs. Inside was a light-brown mush—a kind of compost.

I ripped open the pouch and let the stuff fall into my left hand. It felt like rotten leaves and burned my skin lightly. I touched a bit of it to my tongue. It tasted like acid. I shouted a Chinese imprecation I’d learned as a student and hurled the mess out the front door. The hairs on the back of my neck were prickling. I was going to starve to death, and soon. I was already four days into it.

It was no way to go, and I knew it. I went over to my Eames chair, trying not to think about my stomach and the way it was beginning to come back to life, and seated myself slowly. I put my naked and dirty feet up on the ottoman. There was a distant humming in my ears. I clasped my sweaty hands behind my neck the way I had learned to in the Great Orbach’s office and played his sturdy old Viennese voice in my head: “Relax, Ben. The first thing is to relax.” I concentrated on my scalp and forehead, relaxing them. It didn’t work. I was tense as hell, as though I were made of stiff, vibrating wires. I looked across the room toward the drug synthesizer and saw a small white mound of fresh morphine powder sitting in its hopper. I quickly averted my eyes. There was not enough yet for an overdose anyway. I knew that I could, if push came to shove, make hydrocyanic acid—or for that matter nicotinic—and erase myself in a half minute. The modern world makes death one of the easiest things in life. If only it worked as well for sex, love and work.

I tried again to relax, concentrating on my calves and thighs. They felt in need of nourishment. There were flaky spots—my grim vegetable ashes in miniature—before my eyes. There was acid in my stomach. The humming in my ears grew louder. I remembered my near-suicide in Mexico, fifteen years before.

I was in my mid-thirties and so empty inside, so disappointed with life and with all the money I was making, that I began over a long number of sterile weeks to focus my attention on euthanasia. I’d read about it in Scientific American and saw a segment on it on a TV show. The new pills had been invented in Germany. Naturally. They were illegal everywhere but Mexico and Bolivia. The Life-Arrest pill put you on hold for up to a thousand years, as long as your body was encased in a box or tube. No refrigeration needed. They had places in Mexico to store you, tagged and ready for revival in the century of your choice. You popped one and you were rigid in three minutes, with no pain, no consciousness. The antidote was a brief flash of high temperature and a massive electrical shock in the chest, like the Frankenstein monster. If you didn’t trust Mexican engineering—and who did?—you could be shipped back home in the suspended state without legal problems, as long as you had a birth certificate and some other I.D.—like VISA. There was a place in Brooklyn that would store you underground, safe from nuclear attack and the IRS, and bring you out of it at the appointed time. Nobody explained what course your resurrected self was to take if there had been an H- or R-Bomb attack during your sleep. Maybe there would be another pill and a glass of water on your bedside table.

The other pill was called Permanent Arrest, and differed from the pharmacopoeia of the Borgias only in its speed and lack of pain; it switched you off like a light bulb. Then they dropped you into the crematorium, or recycled you in a Mexican garden. It was the latter I had in mind when I took the train to San Miguel Allende. I had no interest in trying to resume my life in the twenty-eighth or thirtieth century; I would be happy to have my private collection of dancing molecules dance again as poinsettias.

When I got there a Oaxacan Indian in a blue jumpsuit showed me the storage chambers in an old pink church, with row after row of coffin-sized plastic cartons. “These are our Survivors,” he explained, in oleaginous English. There was a name stenciled in dark green on each box, a good many of them were Japanese. Hara-kiri?

“What about the dead ones? I mean permanently dead?”

“You mean our Terminates,” he said. He led me to a stone undercroft lined with bookshelves. These were about half filled with what looked like coffee cans, a name stenciled on each. I shuddered slightly. What a small space to contain a person! What compression of a body that it takes so long to grow and age and get comfortable in!

“What about the others,” I said, “the ones you plant?”

He took me up some stairs and out into a garden filled with flowers and trees, but my spirit did not rise at the sight. They were shabby trees and unkempt flowers, with a lot of insect damage and sunburn on their leaves. What a misuse of human resources! I decided immediately that I did not want to join that sad aggregation of cloistered plants. At least not yet. I would sweat it out for a few more years in human form and see what happened.

On the train back to Atlanta, where I was living at the time, I thought of how close I’d come to dying, and I felt relieved and clear in the head. I thought of how many people must kill themselves in midlife, by blade or chemical or leap, rather than give up their jobs or divorce their spouses or take up a wicked habit. It struck me that the thing to do was quit the job or slug the boss or whatever. If it didn’t work out, if you really fucked it up, then you could commit suicide. I went back to work in real estate and took up cigars and love affairs. The real estate did well for me and I doubled my fortune in eight months; the other two were less productive, but they did fill in some empty niches in my being and I forgot about suicide. Until now, on Belson, faced with starvation. What an outcome for a man who loves eating as much as I do!

I lay back in my chair and tried to relax, but my body was stiff with fear and anger and would not let go. A part of me wanted to die and another part was terrified of dying. I tried to generate Orbach’s voice in my mind, but nothing happened; there was nothing in my head but the fear of death.

And then I looked across the room and blinked. My mother was sitting near the far wall, on our old Ohio sofa. Her pink chenille gown was open at the top and her breasts were visible—waxy, shining with sweat. On each side of her, candles burned in Belson air. On her face was emptiness and despair. She looked up at me as I stared and her face broke into a weak smile.

Shockingly, I found myself drawn toward that couch, toward that ruined face and those breasts. Flesh of my flesh; that loosely tied chenille covered the belly where I had once dwelt. There was my first hotel, where I had begun as a coiled marvel of gestation. I sat and stared at her, feeling drawn toward her empty and lonely death, by alcohol and cigarette and self-hatred, wanting to throw my arms around her waist and lean my cheek against her breast. I reached a shaky hand toward her and then I heard myself shouting, “Goddamn you, Mother!” and I was out of my chair and running.

Where I ran to was the field of Belson grass half a mile from the shack. I stopped at the edge of it, out of breath and sweating in the noonday sun. I took off my shirt and pants, then my shorts. I was stark naked and covered with four days and nights of morphine perspiration. My muscles felt shriveled and my scalp itched powerfully with all the sweat in my hair.

The humming in my ears was loud now and it was no longer a humming in my ears. It was the grass. It was singing softly. To me. Who else? It was singing to me.

“Forgive me, Love,” I said, and walked gently on it. I looked down at my feet. The grass wasn’t bleeding. I walked farther, out into the middle of the field, surrounded by song. Tears were streaming down my face and my feet seemed to be damp with cool oil as they pressed the delicate flesh of the grass beneath them.

Without difficulty I found the place that was right for me, the center of the song and the heart of the field. I sat carefully at first, feeling the soft grass like a living carpet on my bare body; then I lay down on it, looking up at the hot blue spirit of Fomalhaut. The grass moved gently beneath my body, pressing my shoulders and back, my buttocks, calves and heels with a delicate massage. I felt a sensation of rocking and closed my eyes. Fomalhaut blazed on my body. The grass held and rocked me. I passed out.

When I awoke it was night and both moons were up. It took a few moments to realize that I was not hungry. Nor was I hung over, or sore, or frightened.

It was totally silent around me; the grass had stopped singing. At least it had stopped singing aloud; I felt that it might be singing in my veins—my healed veins. I felt awake, at peace, nourished, clean.

Eventually I raised my left arm to look at my watch, and as I did so I felt a series of tiny resistances against my skin and looked over at it by the moonlight: blades of grass had fastened their tips to the length of my arm, and as I raised it they fell away. I was like Gulliver with those Lilliputian ropes, except the grass did not really restrain me. When the arm was free I looked at it closely. There were little pink marks. I knew I had been fed that way, and cleaned out that way; my beloved grass had drawn the used morphine and all its attendant poisons from my bloodstream and replaced that detritus with nutrients of its own devising. I was clean. An interplanetary molecular wedding had taken place while I slept and the chemical soup that filled my veins had been filtered, strained, purified and replenished. It must have read my DNA like a helical braille with the fingertips of its filaments. This planet was a sentient being and it loved me.

Yet if Belson loved me, just who had wiped out my food supply in the first place? For a moment a shudder passed through me and I felt like the awakened Adam, not yet aware that both God and Satan watched his moves and laid their plans for him.

Fomalhaut had begun to rise and pale lavender spread itself across the sky above me. What the hell, I thought. I’m not going to die after all.

The feeding I’d received that night lasted me throughout the following day. I wanted to stay away from morphine but couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. I wound up shooting a half-dozen small fixes into myself during the day. I thought of taking my hammer and smashing the drug synthesizer, but I didn’t do that. I kept the machine turned on and myself too.

I did nothing to clean up the mess my hydroponic garden had become. I spent the day mostly sitting on my porch reading The Wings of the Dove, getting fuzzier in the head as the day wore on. I speak of a Belson day, which is a bit more than nineteen hours. Beneath the fuzziness was a kind of panic at my need for morphine. The way to quell that panic, of course, was to shoot more morphine.

When I became tired I took my clothes off, washed my face and hands, and walked out toward the field of grass. Suddenly I became frightened. What if that rain should fall again, while my naked body was stretched out to the night sky? I stopped, then turned and headed back to the cabin. I could get a bedsheet to throw over myself. I stopped again. What good would a bedsheet do to protect me against something that had eaten through the heavy plastic food bags? That had even gotten the food in the cabin somehow while I slept? It could have dissolved me then, in my morphine trance, had it been out to get me. I turned and headed back toward the field.

I slept on my back spread out naked. As I drifted off I felt the soft tips of grass blades caressing my body, sensed their penetration into my skin. They were finding my capillaries and veins, wedding my body’s life to their own. The intimacy of this connection hushed my unquiet soul.

That night I dreamed of my father’s study again, with the forget-me-nots on the wall and the silent ache in my youthful heart. I sat there in my dream for hours, waiting for my father to speak to me. He did not even look up from what he was doing.

Then, in my dream, I did something that felt monstrous and frightening. I willed it to end. I stood up and turned my back to my father and walked out of the room. I shut the door behind me. I was terribly, terribly frightened. I stood outside the room a few steps from the closed door and felt as though I were completely alone, fatherless and motherless, and I knew nothing. Nothing at all.

I awoke on Belson, with no moons up and the sky black except for stars, Sol among them. I was cold and I was crying.

I lay there and cried for hours. It seemed as though the grass were providing the fluid for my tears, that I was merely a channel for liquids that entered the skin of my back and my arms and legs and passed through my bloodstream to my eyes and then flowed out and across my face, hot and merciful. I was limp all over, as limp in my body as I have ever been, and the relief was like a muted continuous orgasm. It was a letting out of pressure that I had felt so long it seemed to be merely the human condition. I exhausted my tears. When I stopped crying there was no tension anywhere in me.

And then a remarkable thing happened. Belson’s rings came out, glowing across the entire sky in vast bands of lavender and blue and red, a colossal rainbow to my tears and a sign from heaven. I stared at the sky’s refulgence, the illumination this planet was providing me, and my heart leaped up with joy for a long moment. Then the rings and I both eased off into quiet darkness and I slept again.

I must have slept through the next Belson day, because it was twilight when I finally awoke. I sat up carefully, feeling the grass pull away from my body. Then I leaned forward on my face with my arms outspread and embraced the quiet grass. I held that position for several minutes in silence, and then pushed myself up and stood.

I walked to my cabin and smashed my drug synthesizer with a hammer, hitting it a dozen times with all my strength. I lifted the morphine from the hopper and carried it outside to a deep fissure in the obsidian that I used as a toilet. I threw it in. Then I made coffee, thanking Belson that my bags of coffee had remained untouched by the plague that had destroyed my food.

For weeks I kept busy. I cleaned up the mess of my garden and my ruined supplies of food. I cleaned the ash out of the hydroponic equipment, sorted through my remaining seeds-undamaged by the rain—and planted them. They sprouted and I tended them. I finished James’s novels and began to read Mark Twain, starting with Life on the Mississippi. What a remarkable book! It populated my empty world for me. I read it twice, then set it down and read Roughing It and A Tramp Abroad. The lettuce and potatoes grew fast. My spirit remained preternaturally calm, except for the occasional fits of morphine lust that would creep up on me. Gradually I reduced my cigars to a half dozen a day. I began to work out again on the Nautilus machines and my body, lean from the lack of food in my diet, toughened up. I spent most of my time naked—since the air on Belson was always a bit above seventy degrees. I read in the nude and slept on the grass in the nude. I became tanned and my hair bleached itself to a very light blond. Veins bulged on my arms and legs. I felt that I was all lean meat, as tough as jerked beef and as seasoned. There was a spring in my step. I thought little and felt little.

When my lettuce matured I began to eat salads, even though I was not hungry. I kept them small and perfect, mixing Bibb and leaf lettuce equally and tossing them in the sunflower oil I got from my big coarse row of those enormous flowers. When preparing the oil I would recite Blake’s poem:

After a few days my peas matured and I would steam them a few minutes and add them to my lettuce. The salads grew to include onions and Kentucky Wonder Beans. I welcomed these additions, but Belson was still my primary nourishment. No words passed between us, but my planet fed me like the infant I was.

One morning I awoke from a night on the grass with bright cobwebs of sexual dreams in my head and discovered with a kind of awe that my penis was pointing skyward there in the Belson dawn, as firm and erect as it had ever been in my life. I lay there with my brain half asleep and felt strength radiating throughout myself from that red, erect, sky-pointing marvel: my loving member, my true self, risen at last. Great, tingling physical pleasure suffused me. The pleasure grew and I let it grow and grew with it. And then, almost in a swoon, I willed for myself an orgasm. Immediately I felt it begin to happen with that lovely sense of inevitability at the crossing of the physical threshold, and I lay there and watched myself come, jetting upward in heartrending delight into the pure air of Belson’s dawn.

What glory, to relearn it. I relaxed and my whole body softened. I fell back to sleep.

When I awoke to a distant roar Fomalhaut was high in the sky and I saw descending, riding a bright silver flame, the Isabel. A moment later I felt the ground of my planet receiving her, with a profound subcutaneous shudder.