The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 8

Clearly the Isabel had landed several miles away in order not to cook me with her retros. It would be an hour before anyone showed up at my cabin. I felt resentful, knowing it was time to reenter the ordinary world—resentful even against Belson itself, whose timing was remorselessly accurate. I did not want to leave this placental grass and the stillness of my present life. I did not disturb my physical attachment to the grass, and fell back to sleep.

I awoke to shouting from the edge of the field. The voice sounded hollow and the words were indistinct, but I shuddered myself awake to the world of men. What a pain that is! What endless complications! I wished intensely for a moment that the grass could somehow absorb me into itself and fracture my body into a million blades so that I could lie there forever under the sun of Fomalhaut and when the time came, sing.

The voices kept up. Clearly the crew members did not want to walk out to me. Finally I pulled myself upright, breaking off the connections on my arms and back with little pops, feeling all those filaments severing themselves from my body.

“Okay!” I croaked skyward, “I’m coming.” My unused voice rasped in my throat. I sat silent for a full minute until my unease subsided.

Then I stood, slowly, and looked over toward them. Charlie the doctor, and Mimi, and three others stood by a green nuclear jeep.

I walked toward them cautiously. As I got near I saw a flicker of self-consciousness on several faces and remembered that I was nude. Wearing my birthday clothes, as they say.

“You okay, Captain?” Charlie said, with a kind of quaver.

“Did you find Isabel?” I said, hoarsely.

They just looked at me.

“Did you find her?”

“No, Captain. No we didn’t.” It was Charlie speaking again and his voice was soft. “Are you all right?”

I said nothing and walked past them toward my cabin. I could hear them following me, their gym shoes padding on the obsidian. They stopped at the cabin porch while I stepped up on it and walked in.

I crossed the room to my full-length mirror, taken from the Isabel’s gym. I looked at myself for the first time in months. I saw John the Baptist. My hair was wild and sweaty, and my beard was a bramble. I was all bone and sinew and deep tan—angular and as tough-looking as leather. The most startling thing was my eyes, which were piercing and prophetic—the eyes of a mad seer. My prick and balls were heavy, and the hair on my abdomen and my legs was curled like wires; my eyes were the eyes of some mad old Jew come straight from the desert with his brains permanently addled by the force of the sun and of Jehovah.

I liked the way I looked and I did not want to put on clothes. I had come into the cabin with the thought of dressing myself, but now I did not want to. I wasn’t ready to don civilization with blue jeans and Adidas. I might never be ready.

I walked outside and ignored the crew members who stood there silently waiting for me. I walked between Mimi and Charlie, looking at neither of them, and across the bare surface toward my field of grass. I kept walking, crossing the field and coming back onto obsidian and then walking to another field. I turned back. I could see them standing, looking in my direction. For a moment I was furious and waved at them to go away. But of course they didn’t. In agitation I lay on the grass and held myself rigid, waiting for its tendrils to take hold, waiting for the rocking motion. But nothing happened. There was no movement beneath my body. After a frustrating twenty minutes, I stood and began walking back, crossing my first grass field again. I stopped in its middle and lay down again, but there was no hope in me. I got nothing from the grass.

I got up and continued walking, a bit less angry and a bit reconciled, until I came back to the crew of the Isabel, still standing by the cabin porch. They looked at me strangely but no one spoke. I nodded roughly and went past them and back into the cabin. I got my jeans and put them on. I slipped my Adidas over my bare feet and then put on a gray tee-shirt. Then I went to my pitcher of water, poured some into the bowl and washed my face and the back of my sun-wrinkled neck. The skin was shockingly rough to the touch.

I ran my fingers through my hair several times, wincing as I pulled out tangles. Then I looked in the mirror again and lit a cigar. I was now John the Baptist, Chairman of the Board. I took scissors and hacked off some of the bushiness at the sides of the beard, letting bunches of hair fall on the moonwood floor, watching myself in the mirror as I did so until what I saw was less a prophet than Ben Belson himself. Then I stopped, before all prophecy and mysticism had left my face. I did not want to forget how my bloodstream had been fed for two months, nor how my sexual self had spurted a seminal fountain that very dawn.

I stepped out onto the porch. They were standing around silently. When they saw me come out looking near-civilized and dressed again, I could see the relief on their faces. Mimi’s thin features lit up and Charlie smiled gently at me, clearly glad to find me more recognizable.

Mimi was carrying what looked like a gym bag. She set it on the edge of the porch, unzipped it, and brought out two bottles of Mumm’s and some champagne glasses. We all watched while she undid the wires around the corks and then blasted them out of the bottles like miniature Isabels. She poured mine first and handed it to me. I held it and watched the way Fomalhaut’s blue light sparkled on its fizz. When the others all had glasses I held mine aloft for a toast. “To the United States,” I said. “Hear, hear,” Charlie said, and we drank them off. The taste was strange to my subdued tongue, acquainted of late mostly with salads. The fizz in my throat brought back New York, the opera, and women with white shoulders.

“Well,” I said, “how did they like our uranium?”

At first nobody answered. Finally Charlie spoke up, a little grimly. “They didn’t, Captain.”

“Call me Ben,” I said. “What do you mean they didn’t like it?”

“It’s still on board.”

I stared at him.

“That’s right,” Charlie said. “They wouldn’t let us take it off.”

I permitted myself a quiet explosion. “Son of a bitch,” I said.

“The uranium was classified as a dangerous import,” Mimi said. “We were lucky to stay out of jail.”

I could see it. The energy lobbies, and Baynes in the Senate. I tossed off the rest of my champagne and held my glass out to Mimi. As she filled it I looked over her shoulder toward the field of Belson grass and gritted my teeth. Biting the umbilical cord. It had to be.

I drank off the second glass of champagne and then I said to Charlie, “Do you have a fresh cigar?”

“I sure do, Ben,” he said, and gave me a Sacre Fidel.

I nodded thanks to him and saw relief on his face and the faces of the others. It can be a cause of tension to find a naked madman greeting you right after planetfall. “Still on board,” I said. “Son of a bitch.”

“You’ll be arrested when you go back, Ben,” Charlie said. “The only reason we’re not in jail is we had to come get you. They couldn’t leave you out here to die.”

“Who’s they?”

“The U.S. District Court,” Mimi said. “In Miami. The hearing took a week.”

“Someone was on board the ship, with some experts,” Charlie said, “while we were in court. There was talk of unloading the Isabel into a government warehouse, but the Sons of Denver started picketing. We were in custody awhile.”

“What about my lawyers?” I said. “What about Mel and Met Luk…?”

“We couldn’t even see them,” Mimi said. “They were under an injunction.” She shook her head angrily and finished her champagne. “I got in touch with Howard’s lawyer and he told me there was nothing he could do. He said you were clearly in violation of the law. Then I got Whan and Summers on the phone…”

“What did they say?”

“They couldn’t touch it.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking, Baynes got to them. He would have plugged the holes. I lit my cigar. Things were serious. I was warming to the fight.

“What about my other people?” I said. “I told you to call Earth the minute you got into the warp.”

“We did,” Charlie said. “We sent your message to Dolum and Flynn and this is what we got.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to me:

“Piracy!” I said. I have to admit it was kind of a thrill. I had grown a beard just in time.

But my citizenship! What in hell had happened to all my friends?

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“I didn’t believe it at first,” Charlie said.

“Let’s go inside,” I said. “I’ve got to pack.” I believed it. I had just underestimated Baynes and whoever was on his side.

“You know, Captain,” Charlie said, “driving over here from the ship was… wonderful. Bad as our news is, it’s great to be here again. Back on Earth I would think about the sky here, and the quiet…”

“Are you trying to tell me something?” I said.

“You could stay,” he said. “On Earth they’ll put you in prison. Belson is a whole lot better than that.”

“We could drop you off at Juno,” Mimi said. “That place is an Eden…”

“Crew,” I said, “I’m getting back to New York.” I chomped down on Charlie’s cigar and inhaled deeply. I was making plans. I felt totally human again. I puffed the cigar and stroked my beard. “Let’s get my stuff back on board. Let’s do it fast.”

Getting those Nautilus machines onto the jeep and back to the ship was a nuisance, but I wasn’t going to leave them behind. I wanted to be in top shape when we landed at Islamorada. For a moment I pictured myself wearing a tee-shirt in Washington when I started knocking on doors. I wanted them to see my muscles, those whey-faced charlatans. Make the bastards walk the plank.

We got the machines bolted back in place in the ship’s gym and I had Annie take charge of harvesting what she could of my corn and beans and the other stuff. It was sad to see a strange face as pilot, but Ruth was gone, along with her brother, Howard. The new pilot was a quiet little Japanese named Betty. She looked competent enough, but I missed Ruth.

After the ship was ready for takeoff, I told everyone else to stay on board and I went out of the ship one last time. I walked slowly over to my field of grass and stood by its edge. Then I squatted down and held the palms of both hands against the tips of the blades. I felt them touch me back.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for feeding me.”

The grass was silent.

“I have to leave you now, Love,” I said. “I may never come back.”

I got up and walked to the ship.

We were strapped down and lifting off in ten minutes. I had my endolin concentrate in the little gym bag that Mimi had brought the champagne in. My red computer was back on my stateroom desk, ready to continue with this memoir. My head was clear. I felt ready to move.