Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

I pressed “Chess” and “Rules and Instructions.” The print vanished and was replaced by a large chessboard, with green and ivory squares. A soft voice from the board said, “ Voici le Jeu d’Échecs …”

“English,” I said, aloud.

“Yes,” the board said. “This is the game of chess, invented in India and modeled on warfare. It is played with thirty-two pieces, or men , as follows: Here is a pawn…” and the silhouette of a pawn appeared in the middle of the board. “Each player has eight pawns, placed on what is called the second rank .” The pawns appeared, black and white, in their starting positions.

I began to get interested. I could hear Aunt Myra banging pans around in the kitchen. I got up and went to get a beer before continuing. She had the duck in a pan and was slicing an orange for the sauce. I’d never eaten duck before. “What do you think of chess?” she said.

“Looks interesting.”.

“No sex and laser rays,” she said. She was referring to the kinds of pocket games people generally played, with 3-D visuals and all the screams and curses.

“That’s all right with me.” I took a liter of Nairobi beer from the refrigerator and a glass from a cabinet.

“Enjoy it, then,” she said. “But go easy on beer. You’re young.”

“I’ll never be an alcoholic,” I said, thinking of Mother.

“That’s good,” Aunt Myra said, putting her sliced orange around the duck. “Addiction is a pain for everyone concerned. I understand your mother is a lush.”

I’d never heard anyone talk that way before. “She drinks a lot of martinis,” I said.

“Mmm,” Aunt Myra said. She took down a mixing bowl and began making some kind of dressing in it. “I advise you to stay away from home as much as you can. Your father’s a cold fish and your mother drinks.”

“I work a lot,” I said.

“Do you like money?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That’s a start. You need a love affair.”

“Maybe.” I didn’t say I was terrified of girls. Terrified. I also didn’t say I’d discovered sex on the bus coming to New York.

I took my beer back to the table and went on with the lesson. Outside the window late sunlight shone on the facades of old mansions across the street. I thought for a while about sex and money and what Aunt Myra had said about staying away from home. I wished she would invite me to live with her; I was crazy about Aunt Myra and crazy about New York. I drank down a long glass of beer, feeling the spiritual warmth it gave my belly, and went on with chess. You moved the pieces by touching the silhouette with your finger; the piece vanished and reappeared on the square you touched next. The opponent’s pieces moved on their own. The voice gave instructions and recommendations, and after a couple of practice games where it showed me what I’d done wrong, I told it to be quiet and played against the board in silence. I was using the first level of the board’s flexible computer—built, I suppose, into the molecular structure of the plastic—and on the third game I beat it by queening a pawn. I was playing at level two when Aunt Myra brought in her blue Spode platter with a golden duck a l’orange on it. We ate with our fingers and played chess. Myra beat me thoroughly, and gave me some advice that was a lot more helpful than the machine’s. We played fast games until two or three o’clock in the morning; she won them all. It turned out Myra was a rated player and had won tournaments when young. I was hooked on chess.

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.

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.