The Steps of the Sun

by Walter Tevis

  But she had not said anything to prepare me for what happened next. We had gotten off the plane still wearing the dressup clothes from the wedding. She came abruptly out of her bathroom now, with her white blouse still on and with some kind of godawful sexless rubber girdle on her bottom. She walked over to the bed in her matter-of-fact way, planted her feet like a shortstop, turned her back to me and said, “I can’t get this thing off.” I was sort of spellbound by all this. It was Anna’s way of behaving all right, but I had expected something different for a wedding night. I sat up in bed, reached over and unhooked a little steel hook at the top of the thing. It felt to my fingertips like Rubbermaid.

  “That’s better,” she said and then proceeded to loop her thumbs under the waistband of that damned rubbery white garment, pull it down an inch and then, abruptly, let it go with a loud pop. She breathed an audible sigh of relief. She took it off an inch at a time that way. Pop, pop, pop, I can still hear it.

  I had not expected Anna to act like a courtesan. But, Jesus, she seemed to be trying to tell me something awful with this.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “what’s going on?”

  Her voice was taut. “I just couldn’t get the thing off,” she said.

  “Why did you wear it in the first place?” She didn’t need a girdle. Her ass was fine.

  Then she began to cry.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” I said. That must have been the first of a million times I was to say that. I’m sorry, honey. Christ! I should have read the handwriting on the wall right then and bolted back to New York. Let my lawyers handle the annulment. But, as usual, I thought it over and figured I was in the wrong. If only I could trust my feelings with women the way I do with money! I’d be as fulfilled as a fat Japanese Buddha floating on a lotus leaf.

  “The lady at the store told me I needed something to wear under the suit, and I bought it. I wanted to look right for you.”

  I shook my head. She turned to look at me, standing there with a white Synlon blouse on and that big dumb rubber thing lying on the floor like a discarded chastity belt. Chastity belt is right. I’ve learned since that there are nuns everywhere.

  “Well, she should have sold you a pair of scissors to get it off with.” I was trying to be amusing. But it wasn’t funny. Goddamn it, it was terrible. I felt like a son of a bitch for being angry. I had loved her for her plainness, hadn’t I? What did I expect? Poor girl—how could she know how to be graceful on her bridal night?

  Anna looked devastated. “I’m sorry, Ben,” she said. “I guess I don’t know how to be a bride.”

  “Honey,” I said, “it’s okay. Just throw that thing away and get yourself naked and come back. If you feel self-conscious naked, wear something. Just something that isn’t made of rubber.”

  She smiled. “Okay,” she said, and went back into her bathroom.

  She came back after a while wearing a white gown. She had put on perfume. She lay in bed by me and we talked and both of us got to feeling better, but something in me was apprehensive. We didn’t make love until the morning, after breakfast. She bled a little on the sheets. When I walked out of the shower afterward I saw that she had the sheets off the bed and was in her bathroom grimly rinsing the blood out. My stomach sank. But I said nothing to her. What the hell, I thought. She’ll change. But she didn’t.

  After two hours or so of eating pears in the living room, I went into a bathroom and threw up. Then I went to the phone and called Arthur Freed, one of my lawyers, got him out of bed, and told him I wanted to get a divorce and I was willing to pay substantial alimony.

  I still felt sick and my mouth was full of a sour-sweetish taste from all the pears. But something in my heart felt lighter. I had been putting off that divorce for fifteen years.

  I’d been seeing Isabel from time to time, ever since I’d backed a revival of a play she had a small part in. I waited until sunup and called her and asked her to have breakfast with me. She agreed, sleepily. By nine that morning I was in her apartment and we got into her loft bed together, while her two big, loutish pussycats watched me fumble, moan and fail. I had become impotent. Son of a bitch!

  ***

  In a cover article a few years ago, Newsweek called me “a scrappy child of the times” and went on to speak of those “times” as being “the orphan offspring of the twentieth century.” In its half-assed way Newsweek was right. My father buried his life in the past; I live very much in my own century. I was born in 2012, when population in the industrial societies was plummeting. It’s a wonder I was born at all. The last gas station in America closed when I was four. Faster-than-light travel was perfected when I was seven, and when I was in high school the frenetic search through the stars for uranium was on, with hundreds of ships like the Isabel scanning the Milky Way for what the Tribune called “the galactic Klondike.” Fuel for that venture reduced the world’s supply of enriched uranium by half. God knows how much was thrown into the stratosphere during the Arab Wars, blowing up those half-empty oil wells and the spanking new concrete universities that dotted the sands of the Persian Gulf.

  If my century is the “orphan” of the twentieth, it is the 1990s that conceived my times. More precisely, the year of conception was 1997, when Fergusson invented his pill.

  Fergusson was a cranky old celibate whose contraceptive had all the necessary characteristics: it was cheap, easy and safe, and you didn’t have to remember to take it more than once. It was also nonsexist; a man or a woman could get sterile with the same pill. The first Fergusson kits came out several years before my birth, and it is to my everlasting astonishment that neither my mother nor my father took one of the reds and prevented me and this account of them from coming into being. A kit was a small plastic bottle with two pills—one red and one green. If you swallowed the red you were sterile and you remained that way until you took the antidote—the green pill. You were sterile for a weekend in Mexico City or for your lifetime, as you chose. A Fergusson kit cost almost nothing to manufacture; they sold for the price of a Pepsi-Cola—two dollars. The World Health Organization gave them out free in Latin America and India. The Roman Catholic Church nearly strangled on its apoplexy; the Pope crinkled his wise old Japanese eyes in pain. The press and pulpit were full of talk about God-given procreation and the warmth of families. People nodded agreement sagely and took the pill. Minority groups shouted “chemical genocide” and maternity wards closed down. Bantu tribesmen gave their young reds as part of traditional puberty rites. No igloo in the Arctic was without them. And everywhere the greens were left over. They seldom got taken. “Collective suicide” Osservatore Romano called it. A few dutiful Irish had broods of sulking babies; the rest of mankind breathed a sigh of relief. The price tag had finally been removed from copulation. The next generation was half the size of the previous one.

  Myra was born from my deliberate taking of a green on a Friday night. At the first sign of Anna’s pregnancy, I popped a red.

  During the nine months I lived in that mansion and tried to be a family man I would, from time to time, feel guilty about my style of life and about all the money I had. I have always been a Communist manqué, perhaps even more so than Isabel. And Isabel was born in a Communist country and went to Maoist schools. My parents seldom spoke at the dinner table in more than grunts; when they did speak it was usually to remind me that a family of six in India could have been fed on the vegetables I didn’t want to eat. I silently wished in those days that I had a postpaid jiffy bag by my plate, into which I could dump my uneaten Spam and mail it off immediately to some address in New Delhi. I still pay a dole in guilt for my affluence.

  Sometimes I would roam through the long hallways and parlors of my big house and find myself thinking, “What a waste!” I would decide glumly to turn the place into a shelter for homeless drunks or a hospital, that I myself really needed no more than a single room. But then I would console myself, as one does at such times, by thinking of worse cases. If I looked across the street from my big
dining-room window I could see the facade of a mansion bigger than mine, with a brass plaque that read THE PENNY NEWTON MEMORIAL SHELTER. Penny, dead a dozen years, was the last of that family of oil barons and electronics wizards; she had put her hundreds of millions into endowing a five-story mansion to be used as a home for stray cats. There were about six thousand pussycats living across the street from me, and brigades of uniformed men searched the city for more, while a staff of veterinarians and nutritionists kept the residents glossy-coated and bright-eyed. There were still plenty of families in Harlem with rickets and frostbite. Ratbite too. What the hell, at least I had earned my money. Penny had done nothing in her entire life but attend the ballet, play whist and accumulate dividends from the fortune her father had cheated other people out of. My general feeling was that the wealth of most of my neighbors was as unearned and as trivially spent; Penny’s cat home was merely more blatant. Property is theft.

  ***

  After several days of it, the loading got to be routine, although some crew members continued to go around in a kind of protracted excitement. I was neither thrilled nor glum, but I realized my emotional distance from the ore that continued to pile up had separated me from the crew too, canceling the picnic as it were. I made the motions of supervising the work, but I gave no orders or instructions. It was Annie with her tanned, serious face and her quickness who ran the show. Under her supervision the raw Juno subsoil was fed into machinery that refined and compacted it and processed the pure uranium into heavy yellowish pellets about the size of a twenty-dollar coin but an inch thick. The Isabel had brought a supply of boron moderators just in case radioactivity had to be contended with, and these were, on Annie’s orders, placed between the pellets. Stacks of twenty pellets alternating with twenty moderators were then covered with transparent, high-density sheaths. The result looked like some kind of gargantuan candy roll or parfait; it would be placed carefully in a plastic case along with nineteen others of its kind. The cases were numbered and loaded into the Isabel’s storage by a crane.

  This was not a neat and smooth operation, as in a Japanese holovision factory. Nobody wore a white lab coat, and there was a lot of dust, noise, confusion and sweating. But the boxes, looking sturdy and potent, were stacking up in the holds at an exhilarating pace—exhilarating to the others, if not to me.

  I worked out in the gym every morning during these days. I took Artaud, my trainer, off the work crew for enough time to help me get the zero-gravity springs off the machines and replace them with weights, but I didn’t need his help in working out. The crew was invited to use the gym too; but I was usually in there alone, shortly after a light breakfast, putting myself through a pretty grueling sequence. It would be painful sometimes, doing repeated movements against those weights, but it accomplished something very necessary for my spirit.

  After working out I showered heavily, dried off with one of the Isabel’s heavy towels, dressed in jeans and lumberjack shirt, and went outside to make a show of being the captain of this busy and cheerful crew. Every now and then I lent a hand if one of the conveyor belts jammed or a slowdown cropped up along the line. In the afternoons I would go to my stateroom and spend some time trying to plan out my course of action when I returned to Earth with the Isabel’s cargo. I would try to concentrate on some of the basic decisions: should I set up my own power plants or try merging with businesses like Con Ed? Should I merely sell uranium, confining myself to the fuel market in the way I had started out, hauling coal in a wagon? Should I buy more ships and have a fleet of them ferrying fuel to Earth? Should I go into the electric-car business or even the lighting and small-appliance business, which would be booming as electricity became abundant again? I somehow could not really focus on these questions. It lacked substance. It all seemed foregone.

  At night I had supper at my desk and then played solo chess or read. I usually drank, alone.

  One morning in the gym, during the second week of loading, another person came in just after I had started working out. It was Howard, dressed in yellow shorts, looking skinny and embarrassed. Howard is an intellectual, he’d been a professor of biochemistry somewhere for years, and he looked comical standing in the hatchway.

  “Come on in,” I said, heaving my legs up against a hundred and fifty pounds.

  He seemed heartened by that. He came over and strapped himself into the hip-and-back machine, next to mine.

  “Did you warm up first?” I said.

  He nodded. “Stationary running, in the mess hall.”

  I grunted and continued. For a while we both worked silently. We unstrapped and changed machines; Howard moved to the leg raise I’d just left and I moved to the leg curl. He set the weights down to sixty and we began working our machines in unison. “Captain,” Howard suddenly said, panting, “do you have trouble sleeping here? With the short days and the two suns?”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t say that I was usually drunk by the time I turned in.

  He nodded. “One of those suns is always coming up just when I’m going to sleep.”

  “Close down the hatch by your bunk,” I said. “Put a pillow over your head.”

  “Yeah,” he said, unconvinced. “I could do that.”

  For a while there was silence except for the squeaking of the cams and the clunking of the weights in their tracks. When we got up to switch to the next machines he spoke again. “I keep thinking about my wives when I go to bed.”

  “Wives?” I said.

  “Six.”

  That was a serious number. But I didn’t want to talk about women just then. “Where are you from, Howard?”

  He lay down on the leg-curl bench and awkwardly got his heels under the lifter. “Columbus, Ohio.”

  “Isn’t that where Ruth’s from?”

  “Yes. Ruth’s my sister.” He strained to lift the weights but nothing happened.

  “I’ll get it,” I said. He was trying to do the hundred pounds I’d been using. I set it back to forty. I was a bit shocked to think of this skinny guy as the brother of Ruth, with her hefty build. “I didn’t know that,” I said. “You sure don’t look alike.”

  “I favor our mother.”

  I seated myself in the overhead press and began working.

  “Ruth’s a smart one,” he said.

  I didn’t reply. Howard annoyed me, as much in his tone of voice as anything. I knew that if some part of me had given up back when I was a dirty-kneed kid I could have grown up to be like him. I pushed hard at the weights, repeating fast until I could feel the sweat pop out and hear myself groaning with the effort. If my father had seduced me into imitating his aloofness and if my mother had hidden her chaos and self-hate better, instead of letting it all hang out there in the kitchen where gin bottles outnumbered spice jars…

  I finished, unstrapped and wiped the sweat off with a towel. The hatch was open and from outside came the muted shouts and grinding sounds of the loading operation. I waited for Howard to finish and then said, “I’ve had women troubles lately myself. How do you feel about marriage, after six tries?”

  He puffed heavily for a while. Then he said, “I’m not sure. Every time I do it I have high hopes. But then the fighting starts.”

  I took a towel from a hook on the bulkhead and handed it to him, for the sweat. “Over what?”

  “Money. Sex. The way she dresses. What we eat.” He dabbed at his chest and armpits. “You know.”

  “I know.” I wrapped my towel around my neck and did a few knee bends. Outside the porthole I heard Annie shouting orders to someone.

  “Are you married now?” I said.

  “No. But I think about trying again.”

  “Maybe that’s why you can’t sleep.”

  “Could be.”

  I finished my workout in silence and showered before Howard was through his. During my shower it occurred to me that I might not go back to Earth with the Isabel.

  ***

  The next morning I decided to go back to the valley by
our original landing site and pick some food. I wanted to get away from all the activity around the ship. Annie had worked out an improved system by then that didn’t require the smaller jeep. I had the earth-moving rig taken off it and invited Ruth to go along with me. She accepted, and we took off on the long drive. We didn’t talk much during the trip. I drove it at fifteen miles an hour and had to pay attention to the road.

  I parked at a place where Annie’s road came within a few hundred yards of the valley. We got out, carrying buckets for the food we were going to pick, headed into the forest, and began walking along one of the lanes between orange-trunked palms. “Ruth,” I said, “how’d you come to be a star pilot? Is it something you dreamed about when you were a kid?”

  She looked over at me. “I took it as an elective in college.”

  “An elective?” I said. “What kind of college gives electives like that?”

  “Ohio State. I was studying to be a railroad engineer. That was my dream when I was a kid. I wanted to pull the cord that blows the whistle.”

  I knew what she meant. “Have you ever done it?”

  “Nope.” There was a hint of melancholy in her voice. “I never have.”

  I started to say something else when she went on. She seemed looser now and eager to talk. “There was a course in astronavigation on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and it fit my schedule. I had thermodynamics and steam-power systems in the mornings, and I wanted something simple after lunch. I thought astronavigation would be easy, because nobody was piloting spaceships anymore.”

  “Why were they teaching it at all?”

  “Well, they still had the equipment. The Sony Trainer and videospheres from the days of the Uranium Bust. Their landing simulator was a dream. I made an ‘A’ in the course, and took another. It was still a glamour course.”

  “Really?” I said. “It must have been twenty years since anybody had flown a spaceship…”

  “You’re forgetting the TV shows,” she said. “Remember those space adventure stories?” She stopped walking for a moment and looked over at me, with her eyes just a bit wide. She looked very attractive that way. “You know,” she said, “we’ve actually done what they were doing in those shows. We’ve found uranium!” I thought Ruth was an unemotional type; this was the first time I had heard a thrill like that in her voice. It was a pleasure to see her like that. “We sure have,” I said.