Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

There was a kind of anteroom to the stateroom, and it was much larger. The Chinese had used it as a captain’s mess and boardroom for staff meetings. Since I either ate with the crew or with one guest in my stateroom and since there were no staff meetings, that room was the ship’s gym. During my long sleep I had been carried from my bed daily, worked out and returned; I had had the gym installed next door to simplify that maneuver. There were five Nautilus machines in there; after I was wakened I would work out for an hour each morning and then shower back in my head. It was a good routine. It was good to be away from the Earth and without a telephone, to eat breakfast alone and then move my bowels and then build up a sweat on the equipment. I especially liked working my pectorals and quadriceps until they bulged and hardened. I still work out here on Belson and the machines are better; they have regular weights now instead of springs. But sometimes I miss that little gym on the Isabel ; I’ll be working away at leg curls, say, and my mind will go back to those days, to my scrambled eggs eaten at my stateroom desk, to the satisfactions of the journey I am still taking, into myself. Looking back on it, now I feel that my decision to come to Fomalhaut was inspired. The Belson grass and all the things that happened on Juno, even the dreams of my father’s study, were important in bringing about change; and yet sometimes it seems that my mornings on the Isabel alone, my breakfast, my shit, the stars, the Nautilus machines and the sweat that covered my hardening body and the cold shower afterward were what really changed me and began to thaw the glacier that was crushing my soul.

Many middle-aged men can’t seem to change their lives at all. The more scrubby and dour things get, the less rewarding the compensatory pleasures become, the more we tend to hang on and to fear attempting a new bargain with life. I felt that way before I bought the Isabel . The only thing was that I damn well knew my life was getting worse. I wasn’t moving anywhere, and the price for staying where I was was going up. Much of this was invisible to me; but the same voice that could tell me to sell a company no matter what the stock was going for was telling me to pull out. Good ratios all around. Good performance record too. But time to unload nonetheless. Time to sell, move, get out.

I saw my father die. He was the age I am now—fifty-two. Somebody had taken out his false teeth and his mouth closed up like a fist; a sound, half gag and half rattle, came from somewhere inside. It was as though whatever soul he owned had shrunk like a handful of dried peas in a never-opened pod and it was rattling around inside him now. Too late , I thought, too late! He needed a shave. It was the only time I had ever seen him in need of a shave. Somehow for once he looked like a man, in that last grim spasm. The son of a bitch. That was his price for staying where he was. One long soul-shaking shudder and down the tubes. Well. If there’s a life after death he’s probably avoiding it now.

As, come to face it, I am avoiding my own life.

Well, to hell with my life for now. That mess back on Earth. Isabel and money; money and Isabel. Anna! Some nagging voice in me tells me to feel guilty because I am lying on my ass on a barren planet and shooting dope. Because I am not engagé . Because I am shunning relationships. Because I have become asexual and detached. Well to hell with that voice. It’s the one I ignore when I want to make money. I am going to lie on my foam mattress and listen to the grass when it chooses to speak to me or sing to me. I have been a sick man lately; I need respite. I need to do what I need to do to get well. My father decided to die when he was my age; I decided to come to Belson. It beats death. And I can go back.

And that’s how I got to where I am now, tending the seedlings in my hydroponic garden, twenty-three light-years from New York and as alone as the prisoner of Chillon. The Isabel left for Earth three months ago and I fell into my routine here on Belson as though I were born for it. It has been a spare and nearly empty time and one my soul has needed. For some reason during the last week—I count by Earth time on my Chinese watch—each Belson day at twilight the rings have come out for about a half hour and glowed like a giant and perfect rainbow in the green sky. That is the climax of my Belson day; I feel the rings do it because I’m here. Belson’s first resident. I take no morphine after ringtime; I lie on the hard foam mattress on my moonwood porch and stare up at the sky. Sometimes I look at my former sun, Sol. From here it is an undistinguished speck of a star, and because of its distance I see it as it was twenty-three years ago, as I saw it when I was thirty and afraid of love.

Sometimes I fall asleep while staring at the sky. Sometimes I read by the light of a little nuclear lamp, or dictate into my red computer as I am doing now, writing this. I am never lonely here. Sometimes the grass sings to me. Often I lie on it, but it has never again said, “I love you.”

As the ship left Belson, first trembling, then roaring and howling its way upward to and immediately beyond the clouds, great fissures appeared in the obsidian plain around me; the Isabel disappeared upward with an alacrity that was astonishing. I had never watched a spaceship take off before and it was spectacular to see all that power unleashed. The air smelled electric—some mixture of ozone and of the unburned residue of the Isabel’ s solid fuel, used only for takeoff and landing. She had vanished from the sky with Ruth and Howard and Mimi and all the others aboard, and the smell remained. She would go into orbit, then go nuclear and, after a half hour or so, when her capacitors were charged, into spacewarp, somewhere both within and outside the knowable universe, shimmering, taking that nondimensional road back to Sol and Earth and her landing pad in the Florida Keys. And I was here alone, as far from home as a man had ever tried to live. For a few moments my arms and knees trembled. I was scared shitless.

I stood there and then I looked around me at the glass planet where I stood and where I had elected to live for six months completely alone. Alone without even the cockroaches famed for friendship with Devil’s Island prisoners, growing their cave beards in solitary; alone without the consolation of a bird, a snake, a distant rustle of tree limbs. What in the name of God was I doing? What was I doing to myself? And the word jumped into my head as alive as Athena when she sprouted from the brow of the Cloudmaster himself: masochist . Ben Belson, masochist.

Oh, yes. The cat is out of the bag, the cards are turned face up on the dirty green cloth, and the Devil has come out from behind his disguise as Dolly the Chambermaid. I could have left Anna in a flash, with her rubber girdle at her feet. Divorce is awfully easy. I’m rich. I did not leave Anna, not for all those years of berating myself for being the wrong kind of husband for her. What a goddamned painful tango we danced. Well. You marry a woman like Anna when you’re afraid.

Afraid of love. I might as well face it. That’s the truth of it. I was afraid of Isabel and that’s why I moved out of her apartment and into that suite at the Pierre. That’s why I came chugging halfway across the cosmos in this Chinese spaceship— Flower of Heavenly Repose . Oh yes. Look here, Officer, my name is Ben Belson, the celebrated millionaire financier, friend to famous and beautiful women, theater buff, prowler of the galaxy and closet Marxist. Big hands, big feet, big prick and a booming voice. And a big, throbbing, empty hole in my heart.