Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

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 hear 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.

Later that night I found myself briefly alone with Ruth and almost told her about my sexual problem. I wasn’t sure that I was still impotent; I just had, then, a lack of interest that might have merely been desuetude—a kind of “solitary confinement blues,” as some of my friends in prison used to call it. I spent two years in a prison in New Jersey, back when I was young and in too much of a hurry to assemble my first ten million. It had to do with price-fixing. Alleged. I managed to get market reports in my cell and found ways of sending out buy-and-sell orders. I was worth about twelve million when I got out, so the experience paid off well enough, although I did get restless in jail. When I left I had managed to corner the marijuana market in the prison; it had been done largely in a spirit of play. That was the only real price-fixing I ever did: I got it up to three hundred an ounce for mediocre Jamiacan and passed my holdings on to a friend—a murderer and there for life—who was grateful to take over. He sends me Christmas cards and an occasional moody letter. Eduardo had murdered two wives; I knew how he felt.

Most of us didn’t sleep that short night, our first in the open for some time. The first sun, the little one, was back up three hours after the big one had set, and it made a pleasantly soft light to explore by.

The forest was made up of those trees with slim orange trunks. The trunks were warm and leathery to the touch; the leaves were membranous and translucent, with a kind of ivory-colored Spanish moss hanging from some like old lace; they rustled pleasantly in the grapey wind. We looked for fruit but there was none. The forest was large and the trees were all alike. We kept on walking through it. There was little chance of getting lost, but just to be sure I marked our path occasionally with a page from The Ambassadors , which had somehow wound up in my jacket pocket. After a while the second sun came up, the light changed from red to yellow, and it began to get warm. The spongy grass became harder underfoot as its moisture evaporated. I was getting hot and sticky and was thinking about going back to the ship for the nuclear jeep when we came up over a slight rise and Ruth, who was the first up there, shouted, “Wow!” and we all came up alongside her and gaped. Below us stretched a broad valley all the way to the horizon, with trees and bushes and plants: brown and crimson and mauve and yellow. The small hairs on the back of my neck prickled.

We were all still a bit high from the picnic and from being up all the brief night; we rushed down the hill and started looking at the different plants, first in childish delight and then trying to find things that seemed edible. I found some long pods growing from a yellow bush and picked them; they were slippery and smelled grassy in my hand. Ruth found something that looked like an avocado, and Howard found stalks like celery. We began gathering in earnest, shouting at one another when we found something that looked good. You could move fast and easily in that gravity and we were all over the place. Nobody dared bite into anything yet; it all had to be tested first for poisons and digestibility. We loaded ourselves with this astonishing harvest, laughing and joking. It was a profound release after the long trip from Belson and the days of waiting in the rain.

We found a lot of things that looked like food. Howard and Sato, our biophysicist and our physiologist, checked them out with beakers and computers and lab mice and found that half of them were indeed edible. Protein, carbohydrates, fats. Just like Earth. My yellow pods had little orange peas in them that tasted like almonds. Howard’s stalk was as crisp as celery but tasted like fish. And someone had picked mushrooms that looked suspiciously like Earth mushrooms and in fact tasted like mushrooms. Sato muttered something about “interstellar spores” and I shrugged. I didn’t really care if they were fungoid cousins of what grew on Earth, carried here by astral winds or by the hand of God; they were nearly as good as morels and they would be splendid on steaks or in an omelet. The big orbiculate leaves of the orange-trunked trees were edible but tasted like kerosene. There was a plant that was like wheat, and I later got some kernels from it and ground them up and made a few passable loaves of bread. I had learned to bake during those morose days at the Pierre. The flavor was slightly acid but it worked out fine with the mushrooms when you fried them and made a mushroom sandwich.