Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

She just looked at me. “You can be made to tell us where it is from. Chemicals…”

“I know. But they aren’t reliable.”

“Torture,” she said, as if mentioning a stock option.

I shuddered. “Oh, I know. You could do that and it would work. But it wouldn’t give you what’s on the Isabel . That’s in Washington, and L’Ouverture Baynes is no fool.”

She had finished her tea but was still holding the cup. She leaned over now and set it on the table beside the basket. “L’Ouverture Baynes will be out of office next week. He was defeated in November, Benjamin.”

I stared at her and said, “Mattie…?”

“Miss Hinkle campaigned with tales of the Isabel’ s uranium, claiming the needs of employment in Kentucky. She will be sworn in in January. You will be able to recover the Isabel . I want it brought to Honshu.”

“Mourning Dove,” I said. “I can’t do that. I can let you have half of it. That’s thirty tons. You can replace all the U235 in China with thirty tons and it will keep you till I get more.” My heart had begun beating wildly again, thinking of how L’Ouverture had been defeated and that I could get hold of my spaceship again.

“Why would I want the United States to be powerful?”

I stared at her. “Oh Jesus, Mourning Dove,” I said. “Don’t do to us what the British did to you, with the opium and all that bullying. The world doesn’t have to be run that way.”

“There is danger in a house without a master.”

“Oh, come off it,” I said, exasperated with her. “That’s fortune-cookie wisdom and it sounds fascist.”

“It’s Confucius.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s still no good. Remember your mother? She was a master, wasn’t she? Who needs that?”

That seemed to touch her. She pursed her lips silently for a moment. I waited. “America will waste the fuel,” she said, “as it wasted the oil of Texas and of the Persian Gulf. America built tall buildings with sealed windows and burned oil to cool them in summer.”

“You sound like L’Ouverture. It doesn’t have to be that way anymore. America has changed. We’re more civilized, less crazy about dumb toys. Cheap power can permit a beautiful life as easily as a crass one.”

Her face had softened a bit, but now it hardened. “Benjamin,” she said, “the person who supported me as a child and comforted me after Mother’s beatings was my great-uncle, Too Moy. The boys who served us are his great-great-grandsons and my nephews. They are all the family I have left.”

“I’m glad you had someone to comfort you,” I said. “With me it was a horse named Juno.”

“One takes what one can find. Too Moy was very old and crippled. He had seen Mao himself. He was a peasant. In Wu our water power came from the power of human legs. A man or a woman sat astride a device like a wooden bicycle, across a stream, and pedaled the water into rice paddies. Sometimes for ten or twelve hours a day. There is slight fulfillment in such work and a great deal of pain. My great-uncle walked little and took much aspirin for the cramps in his legs. I was able to get medication for him, and it helped, but at times he would lie on his pallet in the room behind my mother’s house and groan. Paddling was all he ever did, and he did it for over fifty years. Yet he was an intelligent man, with a loving heart. I might have been a cruel person without his love.”

“It’s awful to spend a life like that,” I said.

Her face was rigid. “Yes,” she said. “All the labor that Too Moy did in his lifetime could have been done better by one of the motors Americans were cutting their lawns with when he was young.”

I nodded. I had nothing to say.

“You Americans did not create that oil you used for your cars, your air conditioners, your lawn mowers, or for the plastic films you wrapped toys and pens and vegetables in. The oil was made by the world itself, when great ferns covered Texas and the Persian Gulf. It took millions of years to make it. You and the Arabs threw it away in a century, on foolishness. With that oil, my great-uncle could have had a happier life. There were many like him all over China. When my great-uncle was young, people like you in America called such people the ‘yellow peril’ or ‘faceless millions.’” She leaned over toward me in quiet fury. “My Great-Uncle Too Moy was not a peril, was not faceless. He did not mope in impotence. He was a better man than you, Mr. Belson.”

I sat there stunned for a long while. I stared at the water, trying to spot the frogs. But they were out of sight now. Minutes passed in silence. I thought of counterarguments, thought of mentioning the cars and jets the Chinese had transported me in, the luxurious life that Party members like Mourning Dove herself lived, the red flag limousines and the graft in the military. But I could not get that great-uncle out of my mind. My vision had somehow become very clear; on an impulse I took off my glasses and slid them into my shirt pocket. I could see everything with a preternatural sharpness, every wrinkle in Mourning Dove’s impassive face, every leaf of the willow. Back at the other end of the pond were the eyes of a frog, just on the still surface of the gray water, looking toward me.

“Mourning Dove,” I said, “I would like to be your son.”

She did not look at me. “I have no son now.”

“I know. I would like you to adopt me.”

She raised her eyes slowly. “Why?”

“I need a mother.”

She kept looking at me for a long while. “Perhaps you are only trying to win an argument.”

“God, no! ” I said passionately. “I have let that go for now. I truly love you and want you to be my parent, the way Too Moy was yours and saved your soul for you.” I paused and looked at her, not crying now but feeling as though the slightest breath of air could bring tears. “I want my soul to be like yours. I want you in my memory to drive away the drunken fool who lives in there.” I kept looking at her.

She remained impassive for a long time. Then she reached out a fragile white hand and placed it on the back of mine, on the arm of the wicker chair. “Benjamin,” she said. “Benjamin. You may keep half of the uranium.”

I felt as I had felt when, naked to Fomalhaut, I had slept on the grass that fed me and awakened to the magnificent yet distant rings of Belson.

The theater occupied the bottom floors of a hideous new office building—one of dozens along Chang An Avenue a mile east of Tien An Men Square. We drove up to it in a chauffeured limousine. It was I who arranged the demolition of Mitsubishi Tower in New York twenty years before; this Chinese abomination resembled that Japanese one, except for the statues. Flanking the doorway were massive bronzes of a peasant and a soldier, shirtsleeves rolled, staring tight-lipped toward the future. What in hell is so holy about the future? Anyone who feels that way about it should be forced to read history at gunpoint. The crowd was mostly young; they wore blue jeans or quilted Synlon pants, and bright foul-weather jackets. They were probably students from the Institute of Life Enrichment and Managerial Skills, a few blocks away. Some stared as the theater manager led us past the ticket queue and into the lobby. Conspicuous as I was with my height and blond beard, it was Mourning Dove who attracted the stares; she responded with a thoughtful frown.

A flunky had rushed ahead of us, and when we were ushered into our box he was hanging a painting of Chairwoman Chu, arms folded in her turn-of-the-century black jacket. He left the picture crooked for a moment, held Mourning Dove’s chair for her obsequiously, murmuring praises as she seated herself, then quickly straightened Madame Chu and left.