The Steps of the Sun

by Walter Tevis

  “I’ve been thinking…,” I said, groping. “About what kind of work I’ll do.”

  He nodded again, still silent. I felt cosmic pressures in my skull.

  “I mean I should study something in college…,” I said with a lameness that bordered paralysis, suddenly aware that college was two years away. Why was I asking such dumb questions of a man so clearly occupied with universals?

  He spoke, and his voice came as if from the bottom of a well. “What talents do you have?” he said.

  I could think of nothing. I felt as ungifted as a tree stump. Actually, I could play the piano very well, was a whiz at mathematics and physics, had a passable singing voice, had written a two-act musical comedy for my high-school drama class, and could read poems in Chinese. I managed to forget all this in the presence of my father’s clear unawareness of any of it. “I don’t know,” I said. Thinking of those words now, I still wince with embarrassment.

  “Well,” he said, with a distance as great as that of the broad gray Atlantic, “what can I say?” And he turned back to his book.

  My mother was equally helpful. I popped the same question to her after she had just come back from a bridge party and was pouring herself a screwdriver in the kitchen. The sink was full of chipped dirty dishes; a Picasso clown hung askew over the stove, with grease on the frame. “Benny,” she said, “I am not a vocational counselor. And your hair needs combing.”

  With that kind of help I decided to take my instructions in life from the outer world. And the outer world, shrinking into itself as it was in those sad, cold days, had this advice for me: make money. It seemed like a good idea. And it was; in the stock market I found my authentic talent.

  And yet somehow here on Belson, when the Isabel was still my home, I didn’t stop to think of what a money-maker endolin could be. It is remarkable stuff—the genuine anodyne. But I was wrapped up in my morphine highs then and in my theory of the planet’s intelligence and in brooding about Isabel and in the strange soothing my spirit was given just in riding a jeep across vast plains of obsidian in the afternoons, skirting fields of Belson grass and drinking in the musty smell of the warm Belson air.

  The grass never sang again for us. The seismic studies revealed no uranium but a lot of lead. I was getting out of shape again, even though I worked out on the machines every now and then. It was time to head back to Earth, to have myself put to sleep again. So I thought. We gathered a couple of crates full of endolin and about eighty large slabs of moonwood. The navigator and I worked out a route home, planning to pop out of our self-generated spacewarp at a different set of stars from the ones we had drawn energy from on the way out; I gave instructions to be awakened a day before we arrived at one called Aminidab, a never-visited star that had looked right to some people at M.I.T. I told the doctor to jettison the rest of his morphine. I would go cold turkey the easy way: unconscious. I could have wept. Not for the morphine, which I knew I would have to give up soon anyway if I didn’t want to addle my life forever, but for Belson. I loved Belson and didn’t want to leave.

  The night before we left was a bright one, with both moons up and full. I gave myself a double injection of morphine and went out for a final barefoot stroll. I walked along the edge of the grass in a fine euphoric high for miles. The grass was silver in the moonlight, and the vast, dry, serene emptiness was like the desert in an Henri Rousseau painting. The obsidian felt warm beneath my feet. Sometimes the grass sighed gently and I sighed back at it. I felt as I had never felt before the warm spiritual presence of that lonely planet, the only one of its sun. I had become ecstatic with morphine and with my sensitivity to impending loss. My neck tingled. I began to talk to the grass. I told it how I felt. It seemed to sigh in response. I told it about Isabel and about my impotence with her and it sighed with me. I told it about my daughter Myra and her arthritis, about her poor, painful life. I talked about how my world was growing cold and empty after millennia of vigor and bounce. I became higher, more mystical, moved by what I was saying and by the splendid isolation I had here in my far corner of the Milky Way. I forgot the people back on the ship and felt alone with Belson, my Belson. It seemed to me then that Belson was the finest and biggest thing I had ever known. The rings came out in the night sky and glowed on my body.

  After a while I lay drunkenly in ring light on the grass, gently so as not to bruise it or make it bleed. It seemed to embrace me with a million small fingers. In my head I began to hear something like words. At first they made no sense, but after a while they became clearer. It was the grass speaking to me: I could tell by the cadence, which was the same as the singing. The words were both in my head and outside, murmured by the grass. What they said was, “I love you.”

  ***

  They had to come and find me in the morning and they carried me back to the ship. The doctor said I must have overdosed. I told them nothing but asked if anyone had heard the grass speak the night before. No one had.

  We delayed leaving for a day while Charlie gave me some psychological and motor tests. I did fine on them. I knew I had had no overdose and I knew that Belson had said it loved me, but I also knew to keep my mouth shut about it. The next day we brought the coils around the ship to within a half degree of zero Kelvin, and when superconduction was in effect we generated the field and slipped into our warp. We popped out fifty hours later, two light-years away, and soaked up energy from a nearby sun. You cut the uranium bill in half that way. It was a reddish sun with no planets and had none of the zip of Fomalhaut. I was already homesick for Belson. I could have cried again. I had the doctor put me to sleep. All the way to Aminidab I dreamed of New York and Isabel and of the voice of the grass saying, “I love you.”

  The way I felt about Belson’s intelligence was something like the way I feel about the stock market. The market is a dumber entity; it is blown around by half-baked gusts of emotion. The way to handle it is to learn everything you can about it and then depend on intuition. The intuition may feel mystical; but, in my case anyway, it isn’t. I know what I’m doing with the market and I have the bank accounts to testify to that. I never developed a profession for myself after those consultations with my parents, but I’m not a fool. I trust my mystical feelings. I believe that Belson loves me.

  When I was about twelve I played an old game called Monopoly with a kid I knew. My father had given me the game for Christmas; it was something from his collection of memorabilia from the twentieth century. And maybe it was a subliminal nudge toward the robber-baron capitalism I was eventually to espouse for myself, to fill in the time. The kid’s name was Toby. We played in the living room of his house for a dollar a game. Toby was a rich kid by my standards of the time. My family lived in a permoplastic bungalow near the campus; his had a fourteen-room stone mansion. Toby’s father was a judge and owned an alcohol-powered car. Toby himself was a ferocious competitor, more so than I; but I always won. I picked up all the necessary principles of the game the first time around. The basic philosophy was to go for broke, take every sensible risk you could. It was a solemn lesson for me. It was that philosophy that helped send me to Belson, and it was that philosophy that made me overrule my navigator and choose a potentially wasteful stopover at Aminidab. All I knew about Aminidab was that it was a sun of the same spectral type as Sol. No one had ever gone near enough to see if it had planets, but the astronomy people at M.I.T. had picked it as a good risk. After all, for all the exploring that had been done in the twenty-first century, not one star in a million, in the Milky Way alone, had been observed closely enough to see planets. Computers had decided on the ones to look at. There are a whole lot of stars out there. They haven’t been counted yet. It is gratifying to think they never will be.

  Well. When they woke me up they were clearly excited. Nineteen planets had been spotted and we were still quite a distance away. You can’t pop out of a warp near a star; you pull out a few thousand million miles away and then creep up on it. We were still creeping.

  I felt
fine and saw I was back in shape again. I drank my coffee and headed for the bridge. There was Aminidab, and there, like specks of light, were its planets. They looked like dust motes by a light bulb.

  Aminidab turned out to have, all told, thirty-four. I was exultant and gave orders to work out a path for a quick photographic circuit of each.

  “That’ll take a lot of time,” Ruth said. “And fuel.”

  “I know it,” I said. “But, Ruth, there’s going to be uranium on one of them or more. Come on. Let’s go for it.” For the time I had forgotten Earth and Isabel. I could smell success and it was turning me on. I wanted uranium. Of course I wanted uranium for the money it could make me and for the simple success of my voyage and to confound my enemies back on Earth. But I wanted, more importantly, to provide the world with safe and easy power again; in the days before leaving I had daydreamed of finding trillions of tons of it on some far-off planet. It was possible. It didn’t have to be as scarce, even with its half-life, as it was on Earth. There were younger planets. There might be vast mountains of it somewhere—mountain ranges even. Yet it was, I knew, a daydream of an impotent man: endless potency.

  The third planet we photographed looked so good to me and to the geologists that I ordered a landing right there. It was a dense little world, half under water and with a lavender sky. We skimmed over part of its surface, in low orbit, gawking. There was plant life all over. The oceans were pink. I liked it. Not with the deep affection I felt for Belson, but I felt sanguine about this planet. It looked young. It had energy.

  We found a kind of mossy plain and landed. This time Ruth did the landing herself and made a good, simple job of it. My respect for her doubled. Ruth was a good woman; she just didn’t have much to say. Her red hair had gotten very long on the trip and I liked the way it fell over her competent shoulders. But when I praised her for the landing she seemed cool when she thanked me. Something was going on there, and it must have gotten worse during my long sleep.

  Before opening up we checked the atmosphere. There was a lot of oxygen—twice that of Earth. The rest was nitrogen and traces of inert gases like argon and xenon. We had better be careful about fires, the doctor said, and not breathe too deeply. You could addle your brains with too much oxygen.

  The plain we were on was about ten miles from a place that had photographed out as mildly radioactive. There was a lot of water on this world, and if the uranium turned out to be there we could stay indefinitely. I liked the idea of exploring. What the hell, it looked a little like Jamaica, except the colors were all wrong. Orange tree trunks, for instance. The gravity was eight-tenths Earth-normal and there were heavy pink clouds in the sky. We touched down in a storm of warm, tropical rain. It kept up for two days. How it all drained off I don’t know. It was a furious, drenching downpour and it pounded on the ship’s hull like hail on a plastic roof; the noise was almost deafening. It was frustrating. We didn’t dare go out for fear of being drowned. Here we were on this lively planet, ready to get our jeeps out and throw ourselves into the explorer’s dream of a lifetime, an adventure beyond the childhood imaginings of any of us, and we had to stay inside because of rain.

  I finished The Ambassadors, had a morose and silent dinner in my stateroom with Ruth, who excused herself right after the mousse, and lay on my bunk, listened to the rain and thought about my early days in Athens, Ohio.

  When I was a kid in Athens there were horses everywhere. The Energy Acts of those days classified burros and horses as solar—since they ate vegetation—and a person could have as many as he could afford. Athens was a hilly place, with its small university built two hundred years ago in the Appalachian foothills; and although people had bicycles, horses were the best way to get around. It’s a lovely little town still, I suppose, although I haven’t been there for twenty years. We had a sweet-tempered chestnut mare named Juno, and some nights when Father was reading in his study and Mother was asleep on the living-room couch I would go out to the garage and sleep with Juno, lying on her moist and tickly straw, soaking in her body warmth and her body smells, listening sometimes to the fluttering and groaning noises she made in her sleep. Juno died when I was fifteen, and I mourned her more than I would mourn either of my parents.

  My father supplemented his professor’s income by having Juno serviced and selling the foals. She never failed to produce, bless her heart. She gave birth to a succession of colts in deep, rich, glossy browns and blacks, and she nursed them with love and patience, watching them grow and urging them on. Her grief when Father sold them was, to me, palpable. I could feel her mourning. I made a special point of sleeping with her on the nights after a colt of hers had been taken away, regardless of how cold it might be in the garage, and she would nuzzle me in her sleep sometimes and the garage would fill for a moment with the resonance of her doleful, motherly voice in its sad whinnying. I knew how she felt. I would have whinnied along with her had I known how.

  When Juno died she wasn’t replaced. My father had taken an early retirement to do research, and the three of us were on a reduced income and couldn’t afford a horse. Father hardly went anywhere anyway, and Mother had undergone two bad falls from Juno. Juno’s body was sold to the recycling plant on the edge of town and I retreated farther into myself and my dreams of wealth. There was no one left in that grim household to love.

  I remember my mother coming out to the garage one night when Juno was still alive and I was lying against her flank half-asleep, dreaming already of stock-market quotations and of the killings I would make. Mother was wearing a pink chenille bathrobe. She had a candle in her hand and her face was as puffy as bread dough and her hair wild. “My God!” she said, seeing me. “You fool. That horse could roll on you and kill you. Or kick you to death.”

  I opened my eyes and stared at Mother. I could have stood up, easily, and beaten her senseless. Juno wouldn’t hurt me. I stared at Mother and said nothing.

  Mother suddenly seemed to weaken and become confused. She put a hand to her forehead, and even in candlelight I could see the blue veins in it and the trembling. She looked at Juno and spoke as if to her. “What’s going to become of me?” she said. Juno was silent. So was I. Mother turned and went back to the house. About a half hour later I got up from the straw and went through our vegetable garden to the living-room window and looked in. There sat Mother on the sofa with her robe open and a drink in her hand, staring at the gray floor of our living room. The study candles were out; my father was in bed. It was about three o’clock in the morning; I could tell that by the stars. In those days we still were allowed electric light until 10 P.M., but it was far later than that. Mother had lit six candles and was sitting there as though hypnotized, the flesh on her cheeks sagging, her breasts exposed, sagging, her arms sagging at her sides. Whenever I hear the phrase “spiritual bankruptcy” I think of Mother sitting there, an empty woman.

  Mother was dead within a few years, and shortly afterward my father died. I was thirty before I found out that my father was not a famous scholar at all but just another university hack, his whole lifetime worth at most a couple of footnotes in the work of a real historian. What fools they were, with their unlived lives! What cowards! I have tried to erase them from memory but I cannot completely; something in me can still, in the dark of night, ache for a parental touch that I cannot even remember, ache to be held by them. At such times I force my memory back to Juno, and Juno, as always, comforts my hungry spirit.

  It was Ruth who asked me, in a kind of shy, distant way, if we shouldn’t give our rainy planet a name. I didn’t hesitate. “We’ll call it Juno,” I said. My heart was gratified at the thought. I looked out the window at the heavy rain and the shadows of strange trees burgeoning up from the wet soil. What a fecund place, what life!

  ***

  When the rain stopped I was the first one out the hatchway, walking more soberly this time but my heart exultant. The air smelled of wet grape leaves and was as moist as in a greenhouse. There was a breeze; I could hea
r rustling, paperlike, from the distant forest. The grass had a rich green hue and was spongy underfoot. What a place, what a splendid place! I was high with the thought that this could go on forever, with thirty-three more planets around this sun alone! Actually it was a pair of suns; Aminidab had a small red twin called Casca and I could see it just above the distant horizon.

  I turned back toward the ship. Ruth was standing in the doorway looking out, her face morose.

  “Come on out, Ruth!” I shouted, and she smiled faintly and walked out and stood for a minute. I jogged over, put my arms around her and gave her a hug. Then I pulled back a bit and waved at the others inside. “Come on out!” I shouted. “Bring some wine and we’ll have a picnic!” I looked back at Ruth. She was shaking her head at me, in a kind of motherly mock-alarm. Her face had brightened considerably. It suddenly occurred to me that I had never told Ruth I was impotent, and I immediately realized she must be miffed at me for not even trying to get in her pants. Jesus, I can forget the simplest social obligations sometimes when I get wrapped up in myself, as I was on Belson.

  Well, we had the picnic there in our first few hours outdoors on Juno and we had a great time—all eighteen of us. When I had awakened a few days before from my long nap, I noticed a certain coolness in the crew and interpreted it as pique at the way I could sleep away most of the trip, while they had to contend with the tedium. Probably bitching at one another too, and getting into sexual complications the way people will. The idea of a picnic was an inspired way of getting past hard feelings and inaugurating a new camaraderie in this new world of ours. It worked splendidly. One of the seismic engineers, a normally quiet woman named Mimi, produced a guitar and began singing old twentieth-century songs. “Downtown” and “Let It Be.” Howard and another engineer brought out bottles of red wine, a wheel of cheese, some cans of tuna fish and six loaves of rye bread; we found a dry place on the spongy ground and sat around together and sang along, with our mouths full of food. We kept passing wine bottles. It was delightful. Nobody was worried about dangerous life forms, and there really wasn’t any need to worry. If there were any animals—which was very unlikely—they could hardly have homo sapiens on their diets. We drank the wine and watched the suns move across the sky at a merry clip—since Juno’s rotation took a little less than eight Earth hours—and then were entertained by a night with five moons and the twinkling of about a dozen of our nearby fellow planets. Despite the brightness of the sky, I could spot Sol as it rose, looking nondescript, just another Spectral Type G, Main Sequence, star. That little pinpoint flicker in Juno’s purple sky was the sun of my old Earth, the blazing god of its ancient religions; from here I saw it as just another distant rhinestone among handfuls of them thrown across the night sky. Ninety million miles from Sol would be Earth, too small to see, where Isabel lived. I waved toward Isabel, a bit sadly, and fell asleep for a while on the grass.