I stayed with Myra six weeks that summer, and it was the finest time of my life. She was the zippiest person I’d ever met. I adored her. I could have cried when I left, even though she invited me back for the next summer. She gave me the chess set as a going-away gift, and I played against the computer at level four all the way back home. I never showed the set to my parents; they never knew I had taken up the game. As if it would have mattered.
I never saw Aunt Myra again. The following winter was the first New York was to undergo with no oil for heating. In February the temperature dropped to fourteen below zero, and Aunt Myra died of pneumonia, along with thousands of others. The world was getting grimmer.
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.