Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

Where I ran to was the field of Belson grass half a mile from the shack. I stopped at the edge of it, out of breath and sweating in the noonday sun. I took off my shirt and pants, then my shorts. I was stark naked and covered with four days and nights of morphine perspiration. My muscles felt shriveled and my scalp itched powerfully with all the sweat in my hair.

The humming in my ears was loud now and it was no longer a humming in my ears. It was the grass. It was singing softly. To me. Who else? It was singing to me.

“Forgive me, Love,” I said, and walked gently on it. I looked down at my feet. The grass wasn’t bleeding. I walked farther, out into the middle of the field, surrounded by song. Tears were streaming down my face and my feet seemed to be damp with cool oil as they pressed the delicate flesh of the grass beneath them.

Without difficulty I found the place that was right for me, the center of the song and the heart of the field. I sat carefully at first, feeling the soft grass like a living carpet on my bare body; then I lay down on it, looking up at the hot blue spirit of Fomalhaut. The grass moved gently beneath my body, pressing my shoulders and back, my buttocks, calves and heels with a delicate massage. I felt a sensation of rocking and closed my eyes. Fomalhaut blazed on my body. The grass held and rocked me. I passed out.

When I awoke it was night and both moons were up. It took a few moments to realize that I was not hungry. Nor was I hung over, or sore, or frightened.

It was totally silent around me; the grass had stopped singing. At least it had stopped singing aloud; I felt that it might be singing in my veins—my healed veins. I felt awake, at peace, nourished, clean.

Eventually I raised my left arm to look at my watch, and as I did so I felt a series of tiny resistances against my skin and looked over at it by the moonlight: blades of grass had fastened their tips to the length of my arm, and as I raised it they fell away. I was like Gulliver with those Lilliputian ropes, except the grass did not really restrain me. When the arm was free I looked at it closely. There were little pink marks. I knew I had been fed that way, and cleaned out that way; my beloved grass had drawn the used morphine and all its attendant poisons from my bloodstream and replaced that detritus with nutrients of its own devising. I was clean. An interplanetary molecular wedding had taken place while I slept and the chemical soup that filled my veins had been filtered, strained, purified and replenished. It must have read my DNA like a helical braille with the fingertips of its filaments. This planet was a sentient being and it loved me.

Yet if Belson loved me, just who had wiped out my food supply in the first place? For a moment a shudder passed through me and I felt like the awakened Adam, not yet aware that both God and Satan watched his moves and laid their plans for him.

Fomalhaut had begun to rise and pale lavender spread itself across the sky above me. What the hell , I thought. I’m not going to die after all.

The feeding I’d received that night lasted me throughout the following day. I wanted to stay away from morphine but couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. I wound up shooting a half-dozen small fixes into myself during the day. I thought of taking my hammer and smashing the drug synthesizer, but I didn’t do that. I kept the machine turned on and myself too.

I did nothing to clean up the mess my hydroponic garden had become. I spent the day mostly sitting on my porch reading The Wings of the Dove , getting fuzzier in the head as the day wore on. I speak of a Belson day, which is a bit more than nineteen hours. Beneath the fuzziness was a kind of panic at my need for morphine. The way to quell that panic, of course, was to shoot more morphine.

When I became tired I took my clothes off, washed my face and hands, and walked out toward the field of grass. Suddenly I became frightened. What if that rain should fall again, while my naked body was stretched out to the night sky? I stopped, then turned and headed back to the cabin. I could get a bedsheet to throw over myself. I stopped again. What good would a bedsheet do to protect me against something that had eaten through the heavy plastic food bags? That had even gotten the food in the cabin somehow while I slept? It could have dissolved me then, in my morphine trance, had it been out to get me. I turned and headed back toward the field.

I slept on my back spread out naked. As I drifted off I felt the soft tips of grass blades caressing my body, sensed their penetration into my skin. They were finding my capillaries and veins, wedding my body’s life to their own. The intimacy of this connection hushed my unquiet soul.

That night I dreamed of my father’s study again, with the forget-me-nots on the wall and the silent ache in my youthful heart. I sat there in my dream for hours, waiting for my father to speak to me. He did not even look up from what he was doing.

Then, in my dream, I did something that felt monstrous and frightening. I willed it to end. I stood up and turned my back to my father and walked out of the room. I shut the door behind me. I was terribly, terribly frightened. I stood outside the room a few steps from the closed door and felt as though I were completely alone, fatherless and motherless, and I knew nothing. Nothing at all.

I awoke on Belson, with no moons up and the sky black except for stars, Sol among them. I was cold and I was crying.

I lay there and cried for hours. It seemed as though the grass were providing the fluid for my tears, that I was merely a channel for liquids that entered the skin of my back and my arms and legs and passed through my bloodstream to my eyes and then flowed out and across my face, hot and merciful. I was limp all over, as limp in my body as I have ever been, and the relief was like a muted continuous orgasm. It was a letting out of pressure that I had felt so long it seemed to be merely the human condition. I exhausted my tears. When I stopped crying there was no tension anywhere in me.

And then a remarkable thing happened. Belson’s rings came out, glowing across the entire sky in vast bands of lavender and blue and red, a colossal rainbow to my tears and a sign from heaven. I stared at the sky’s refulgence, the illumination this planet was providing me, and my heart leaped up with joy for a long moment. Then the rings and I both eased off into quiet darkness and I slept again.

I must have slept through the next Belson day, because it was twilight when I finally awoke. I sat up carefully, feeling the grass pull away from my body. Then I leaned forward on my face with my arms outspread and embraced the quiet grass. I held that position for several minutes in silence, and then pushed myself up and stood.

I walked to my cabin and smashed my drug synthesizer with a hammer, hitting it a dozen times with all my strength. I lifted the morphine from the hopper and carried it outside to a deep fissure in the obsidian that I used as a toilet. I threw it in. Then I made coffee, thanking Belson that my bags of coffee had remained untouched by the plague that had destroyed my food.

For weeks I kept busy. I cleaned up the mess of my garden and my ruined supplies of food. I cleaned the ash out of the hydroponic equipment, sorted through my remaining seeds-undamaged by the rain—and planted them. They sprouted and I tended them. I finished James’s novels and began to read Mark Twain, starting with Life on the Mississippi . What a remarkable book! It populated my empty world for me. I read it twice, then set it down and read Roughing It and A Tramp Abroad . The lettuce and potatoes grew fast. My spirit remained preternaturally calm, except for the occasional fits of morphine lust that would creep up on me. Gradually I reduced my cigars to a half dozen a day. I began to work out again on the Nautilus machines and my body, lean from the lack of food in my diet, toughened up. I spent most of my time naked—since the air on Belson was always a bit above seventy degrees. I read in the nude and slept on the grass in the nude. I became tanned and my hair bleached itself to a very light blond. Veins bulged on my arms and legs. I felt that I was all lean meat, as tough as jerked beef and as seasoned. There was a spring in my step. I thought little and felt little.