by Walter Tevis
“I’m going to roast a duck,” she said, “and then change for dinner.” She had just come home from shopping and was wearing her striped coveralls. “This will teach you the game. Learn it and we’ll play during supper.” She handed me the thing. “Unfold it on a table somewhere and press the red spot.” Then she went into the kitchen.
It was made of some kind of rough old plastic and it looked well-worn. I took it into one of the living rooms where a walnut refectory table sat by a window, pushed a few ginger jars, paperweights and African violets aside to create a space, and then unfolded it. It turned out to be a big white square about the size of a Monopoly board with a red dot at the lower left-hand corner. I pulled up a chair, seated myself in front of the board, and pressed the dot.
The surface was immediately covered with print, like a menu. Backgammon, Checkers, Chess, Go, Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, Bridge, Poker, Canasta, Casino and so on, were listed down the left side, with a red dot to the left of each. On the right, in capital letters, were three options: 1. RULES AND INSTRUCTIONS, 2. PLAY, and 3. OPPONENT PLAY (CHOOSE LEVEL). This last was followed by the numbers one through twelve. At the bottom right-hand corner, in gold letters, was written MYRA BELSON.
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.
Chapter 7
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.
After a moment I passed a patch with cracks. In the cracks grew endolin; I could see it there, the color of heather. I bent and pulled a pinch of it. My neck was still sore from staring at the takeoff and after. I chewed and swallowed the endolin and as I continued walking the pain eased. Wonderful stuff, when fresh. If only it could speak to the soul the way morphine does. The way the grass had done.
I stopped at the end of the field. At nighttime there is usually a breeze here; one had just sprung up. The light was weak, and the grass looked gray and silky. The sky was a deep emerald. I stood at the edge of the rippling grass, finished off my drink and said, “Hello. I’m your new neighbor.” The grass waved silently in the wind but said nothing.
I stood there alone for a long time while the sky turned black and the stars came out. There was a pink light from the only moon up, off to my left. And then for a minute I was seized with loneliness. I missed Isabel. I wanted her looking at that black sky with me. I did not want to make love to her, not even necessarily to kiss her. I just wanted her with me.
I turned and went back to my cabin, had another drink, and played the part of Così fan tutte that was left on my recorder. I’d had the machine on the seat arm between us; at several points on the recording I could hear the rustling of Isabel’s dress, there at the Metropolitan Opera.
***
For the next few days I busied myself making simple pieces of furniture. The moonwood came from an outcropping about a hundred yards to the south of my cabin. I cut boards from it with a hot wire slicer, much like using a cheese knife on gruyère, and then nailed them together into a chair and two small tables and a set of shelves. The nails were pieces of heavy wire cut in the Isabel’s machine shop and fed into a forming machine that gave them a point and a head.
Every few hours I would take a break from the carpentry, not because it was difficult but because I wanted to stretch the project out. I would shoot a little morphine and then go out looking for endolin. There was a lot of it. At least once a day I would go stand at the end of the grass and speak to it, but it never spoke back to me.
I discovered something important about endolin. I had accidentally gotten a few twigs of it wet once while checking the irrigation flow in my hydroponics. I’d set the twigs on a two-day-old lettuce plant so I could use both hands to tighten a plastic fitting. Some water sprayed the endolin. Later, when it dried out in the sun, I saw it had changed color, from heather to a dark brown. When I picked it up, a fine grayish dust sifted down from the twigs onto my hand and onto the ground.
The drug synthesizer has an electronic analysis device as a doublecheck precaution. You can read out the formula for the drug you just made. A person wouldn’t want the machine to slip up and make strychnine by mistake. I used the analyzer to check out the gray dust from the endolin and found it was the pure alkaloid, just as Howard had written it down for me. The rest of the plant turned out to be mostly cellulose. So the gray dust was concentrated endolin. Very concentrated; its weight was less than a fiftieth that of the twig.
It occurred to me immediately that the stuff might keep better in this form. I spent a few hours gathering a bushel and a half of the twigs. Then I wet them down thoroughly and spread them to dry in the next day’s sun. When they had dried out I picked them up a few at a time and shook them carefully over a large plastic bowl. Eventually there was a half cup of gray powder in the bowl. I checked it on the analyzer, saw that it was indeed the alkaloid, sealed it into a folded-up square of plastic, and irradiated it just as I was prepared to irradiate lettuce and peas for preservation. In the nearly two months since I tried that, it has worked perfectly. A three-milligram pinch of the dust, stirred into water and swallowed, will cure the worst morphine hangover in about a minute. There are no side effects. My health here on Belson is perfect. Ben Belson, pharmacological researcher. With a patent on this stuff, back on Earth, a smart man could get a 15 percent interest in Parke-Davis, or Lao-tzu. It’s a business I’ve never fooled with, but what the hell.
So that added another project to my daily rounds: preparing concentrated endolin. The analyzer’s scales have a beam, so that whatever gravitation I’m in will give constant readings. I now have fifty-three pounds, Earth weight. That’s almost all the plastic bags I can spare. It’s enough to cure all the hangovers in Japan. They can stir it into their tea.
***
What a narrow, limited life this is! And how it has grown on me, how I take to it so easily! I am not homesick and I am not lonely anymore. Or if I am lonely I don’t know it. Sometimes I think I swim in loneliness the way a fish swims in water, unaware that it is wet.
In my third month I began to shoot dope in dead earnest. My veins swelled with morphine and my brain became a hot fog, burning with euphoria. Sometimes there were nightmares. I saw in sharp detail De Quincey’s three old women, constructing themselves with gold knitting needles, their bodies self-knitted and self-purled for me. One resembled Aunt Myra, but when I spoke her name she looked away. Eventually all three burst into white flame and I heard myself screaming.
At the start of the fourth month I stayed on my back in bed for over four days, until the Shartz machine’s morphine reserve was gone. When I finally got out of bed I fell to one knee and thought for a while of never getting up. I might have stayed there and died if I hadn’t been hungry. There was a large pail of water by my bedside, but no food. I hadn’t eaten in four days. My stomach felt stuck together and my head was primarily a pulse.
I pulled myself up and slowly walked outside, like a sleepwalker. It was midday and I squinted. At first I thought I was seeing another hallucination: the plants in my garden were black. I blinked and stared and scratched my funky armpits. Hair came out and stuck under my nails. For some reason the soles of my feet were sore. It was no dream. My garden had died. Black as sin. I fell once on my way to the lettuce—my dear lettuce. The leaves were like huge flakes of ash and they became powder in my trembling hand.
I stooped to my carrots and dug three up with my fingernails; what was beneath the ash leaves were brown crumbly shafts with a sour smell to them. I sat in the center of my garden, surrounded by ash and bad smells, and I remembered lying on my bed in chemical bedazzlement and looking out the door to see a black rain falling from the lavender sky and smoke rising from my garden as the rain hit my beloved plants. I had taken it for hallucination, on a par with the three self-knitted maiden aunts—the kind of thing that goes away. It didn’t go away.
I lit a cigar and continued sitting. My hands still shook but my head was beginning to clear. What I needed was a dozen raw eggs and a bottle of whiskey, but I let the cigar be my pacifier while I added it up. Clearly there was more to this planet than met the eye. It had pulled a fast one on me, with its death rain. What would have happened to my body had I been outdoors during the rainfall? Would my skin have gone the way of the lettuce? Must I now escalate my imitation of Robinson Crusoe and make myself an umbrella out of what was available? I dropped that for a while and thought of food. The Isabel would not be back for months. I had four boxes of irradiated meat behind the cabin and two dozen cartons of dried food by my sink. There was a large supply of vitamin pills and protein tablets.
I had a frightening thought, bit down on my cigar and pushed myself up. I padded back to the cabi
n and then around it, to where the meat was stored in sealed plastic cartons. My premonition was right; the rain had eaten through the cartons, turning them gray. Inside each, where lamb chops and steaks and pot roasts had lain ready for cooking in molecular suspension, now lay stacks of individually wrapped hockey pucks—dark and shriveled and smelling to high heaven or whatever it was above the inscrutable Belson sky. I stepped back from the smell and stared upward for a long while with an Old Testament feeling, wondering what celestial visitation this perverse planet had prepared for me. In my mind were the words spoken to Job: “I alone am escaped to tell thee.” Son of a bitch.
Nothing fell from the sky on me and I did not become covered from sole to crown with sore boils, although I was ready.
I thought of a fissure in the obsidian nearby and walked over to it. I grabbed a handful of endolin and crunched it down raw, without a chaser. The taste was bitter and clean in my dry mouth. Then I went back into the cabin, opened up my one window to let some of the bad air out and then washed my face with the water left in the bucket. That felt better, and by then the endolin had eased my head.
Along the far wall of the cabin was a long moonwood shelf with over a dozen plastic cartons of dried food. I took a deep breath and walked over, a part of me thinking that surely nothing could have happened to my dried beans and potatoes and synthetic protein. But another part of me knew exactly what was going to be the case. I broke the heavy seal on one of the cartons and lifted out a plastic pouch of what should have been dried eggs. Inside was a light-brown mush—a kind of compost.
I ripped open the pouch and let the stuff fall into my left hand. It felt like rotten leaves and burned my skin lightly. I touched a bit of it to my tongue. It tasted like acid. I shouted a Chinese imprecation I’d learned as a student and hurled the mess out the front door. The hairs on the back of my neck were prickling. I was going to starve to death, and soon. I was already four days into it.