The Steps of the Sun Read online

  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.

  Chapter 2

  Why did I buy this ship in the first place, this small portable universe? Well, for one thing I had gone impotent. My once enthusiastic and catholic member had become shy, sullen, and would not serve me. Would not serve my lady friends either. There were quarrels, recriminations; I tried resorting to masturbation and, to my dismay, found that was out of the question too. My joint had taken leave of its senses and my senses had taken leave of my joint. It went on like that. I began to feel disgraced. I wanted to kill someone. My therapist said Mother; he was probably right, but Mother was already dead.

  Isabel was my eventual port in this storm and kept me from going completely bonkers. She worked with me physically for a few days—and it was indeed work—and then abandoned that, sensibly saying,” It’s best to wait awhile, Ben.” I moved in with her, into her little studio apartment on East Fifty-first Street, and slept with her and her two big chunky cats in the little loft bed that she had built with her own pale, esthetic hands. Isabel was a good carpenter; she had worked on theater sets for years before developing the courage to try acting. God, what a tiny place that was! And you could never escape the street sounds from
the windows: the shoutings of drunks and mad bombers and all-purpose crazies at two in the morning; the steam-powered garbage wagons at four, and the screeching wood vendors at seven-thirty. Wood was seven dollars a stick in midtown, and Isabel had a fireplace. It was the worst winter in forty years; on most mornings the water in the toilet would be frozen solid. I tried enormous bribes on the super for heat; he would give me his shy Yugoslav smile and pocket my hundreds, but the heating pipes remained silent. I tried, one frostbitten morning when the weight of three blankets was suffocating me, to bring Isabel to her senses and get her to sail to Yucatan with me for the winter. But she was adamant. She held the covers up to her chin and said, “You know I’m in a show, Ben.”

  I could feel the little hairs in my nose as stiff as icicles. “Honey,” I said, “you’ve got six fucking lines in that show, and one of them is, ‘Hello.’” I couldn’t see outside because ice had formed on the windowpanes. And we had a fire in the grate; I had thrown some sticks on it at four in the morning, shaking so much from the cold that I’d almost missed. What would all the poor people downtown be doing, the ones who couldn’t afford wood and insulation and storm windows? The Red Cross gave out blankets, but there were never enough. I made a mental note to give a quarter million to the Red Cross. Or maybe a sheep ranch, so they could grow their own. It was seven in the morning and I could hear the wind howling around the corner from Third Avenue.

  “Sweetheart,” Isabel said, “I’m not going to be your dependent. And I’m warm enough.” Isabel slept in long woolen underwear, hiding all that radiant skin of hers and those girlish breasts under scratchy BVDs. I slept wrapped around her warm body, dressed in a flannel nightgown and gym shorts.

  We’d had that argument enough times before, so I gave it up. Isabel wasn’t about to take advantage of my wealth. That afternoon I hunted around and found a big old coal stove at a blackmarket shop on Seventh Avenue and got the name of a dealer. Burning anthracite for private heat was illegal, under the Nonrenewable Resources Act; it took hard-coal trains to move the food and other essentials around the country, and the enforcement was pretty tough. But I had connections and was willing to take the chance. After all, I was in the business: Belson Mines. I managed after three phone calls to get two dozen cabbage-sized lumps of anthracite and promise of another delivery in five days. Isabel and I were warm enough after that. My dealer, a skinny little fellow in a pea coat, tried to sell me some cocaine along with those black lumps, but in those days I had no interest in drugs. It took a voyage to the stars to get me hooked.