The Apotheosis of Myra

Out Beyond the French windows during the day's second sunset, the grass began singing. It had begun as a hum and as it gained in strength, quickly became song. Edward pushed the French windows farther open and stepped out onto the terrace. Lovely there now, with a dark blue like an earth sky. And frightening though it was, the singing, too, was lovely. Melodic, slow-tempoed, a sort of insistent lullaby. In three years here, he had heard about it; this was the first time he had ever heard it. He sipped from the glass of gin in his hand. He was half-drunk and that made it easier to take than it might have been. An enormous plain of dark grass lay before him in twilight, motionless, singing. No one knew the language. But it was clearly a language.

After a few minutes, Myra came out from the living room, moving stiffly and rubbing her eyes. She had been asleep on the couch. "Goodness!" she said. "Is that the grass?"

"What else?" he said, turning away from her. He finished his drink.

Myra's voice was excited. "You know, Edward, I heard a recording of this...this grass. Back in college, years ago. It was before anybody had even heard of Endolin." She was trying to make her voice sound lively, but she could not override the self-pity in it. Myra, Edward felt, swam in self-pity as a goldfish swam in water. It was her own transparent medium. "It was in a course called The Exploration of our Galaxy, I think. Dull as dishwater. But the professor played some records of life forms, and I still remember Belsin grass." Belsin was the name of the planet. "There was a question about it on the mid-term. What are you drinking there, Edward?"

He did not look at her. "Gin and tonic. I'll get you one."

He walked along the moonwood deck past her and into the house. The liquor was in the kitchen. During the past year, he had taken to bringing a case at a time out of the storage room, where supplies from Earth were kept. There was the half-empty last case of gin and a nearly empty one of Scotch side by side on the kitchen counter next to a stack of unwashed dishes. The dishwasher had broken down again and he hadn't felt like trying to fix it. He grinned wryly, looking at the pile of dirty Haviland that Myra had insisted on bringing with her out to this godforsaken part of the galaxy. If he could get her to do the dishwashing, he might not kill her. Fat chance.

The idea of killing her was fairly recent. Originally, he had thought the arthritis and the self-pity and the booze would do it for him. But Belsin had worked for her far better than he had expected, with the fresh Endolin that had made her demand to come here in the first place. Endolin was a scraggly little plant and the finest painkiller and anti-inflammation drug ever known. It grew only on Belsin and although it lost about half its potency in travel, it was the painkiller of choice for millions. But used fresh, it was a miracle. Myra was rich and her family was powerful; she had provided the money and her grandfather the power to get Edward the job here. She was 34 and had had violently painful arthritis since the age of six. Her life had been spent trying to avoid the pain.

He made her drink, as usual, stronger than his own. There was no ice, since that wasn't working, either.

She had seated herself on the moon-wood bench when he got back out onto the terrace and was looking at the stars, her head slightly inclined toward the singing of the grass. For a moment, he paused; she was really very beautiful. And the look of self-pity had gone from her face. He had loved her, once, when she was like this. He hadn't married her only for her money. The singing had become softer. It would end soon, if what he had heard about it was true. It happened so rarely, though, that everything about it was uncertain and no one had the foggiest notion of how the grass did it in the first place, let alone why.

Myra smiled at him, not even reaching for the drink. "It sings so...intelligently," she said, smiling. "And feelingfully." She took the drink, finally, and set it on the moonwood bench beside her. Moonwood was not really wood; it was sliced from quarries and outcroppings near Belsin's north pole. You could drive nails into it and even build houses from it. Their house, though, was a prefab, cut from steel and glass in a factory in Cleveland and shipped out here, for a king's ransom.

"And nobody knows why it sings?" she said.

"Correct," Edward said. "How are your hands?"

She smiled dreamily toward him. "Very good." She flexed them. "Hardly any pain at all. And my neck is easy tonight. Supple."

"Congratulations," he said, without feeling. He walked over to one of the deck chairs and seated himself. The problem with killing her was not the killing itself. That would be very easy out here, on a planet with only a few hundred settlers. The problem was in making it totally unambiguous, clear and simple and with himself blameless, so he could inherit. The laws concerning extraterrestrial death were a mess. One little snag could keep it in court for 30 years.

"You know what I'd like to do, Edward?" she said.

He took a swallow from his drink. "What's that?"

"I'd like to get out the EnJay and take a ride to the orchids."

"Christ!" he said. "Isn't it pretty late?" She had not ridden in the EnJay for a year or more. "And doesn't the bouncing hurt your legs? And back?"

"Edward," she said, "I'm better. Really."

"OK," he said. "I'll get a bottle. And some Endolin."

"Forget the Endolin for now," she said brightly. "I'll be all right."

The nuclear jeep was in a moonwood shed at the back of the house, next to the dark-green Mercedes and the two never-used bicycles. He backed the jeep out, shifted gears and scratched off around the house. In the low gravity of Belsin, scratching off was difficult to do, but he had learned the trick. He pulled up to the turnaround in front of the house where Myra's elevator normally let her out and was astonished to see her walking down the stairs, one hand on the banister, smiling toward him.

"Well!" he said as she got into the jeep.

"Pretty good, huh?" she said, smiling. She squeezed his arm.

He drove off with a jerk and across the obsidian surface of their front yard. Much of Belsin was obsidian; it was in fissures in that glasslike surface that the Endolin grew. At the end of the yard, a winding path, barely wide enough for the jeep, went through the Belsin grass, which was still singing but much more softly. He liked driving the path, with its glassy low traction and its narrow and often wrongly banked curves. There was hardly any way to build a real road on Belsin. You could not cut Belsin grass--which wasn't grass at all and seemed to grow out of the granitic rock beneath it like hair--and if you drove on it, it screamed and bled. Bringing from Earth the equipment to grade and level the obsidian would have been almost enough to bankrupt even Myra's family. So when you drove on Belsin, you used a car with a narrow axle and you followed the natural, veinlike pathways on the planet's surface. There weren't many places to drive to, anyway.

The singing, now that they were driving with the grass on either side of them, was remarkable. It was like a great chorus of small voices, or a choir chanting at the edge of understanding, alto and soprano. It was vaguely spiritual, vaguely erotic, and the truly remarkable thing about it was that it touched the numan feelings so genuinely. As with Endolin, which magically dovetailed so well with the products of terrestrial evolution, producing a molecule that fit a multichambered niche in the human nervous system as if made for it, the grass seemed to have been ready for humanity when humanity first landed on Belsin 60 years before. Captain Belsin himself had heard it during the first explorations. The grass had sung for that old marauding tycoon and he had written in his journal the now-famous words, "This planet speaks my language." When Endolin had been found, years later, it had seemed fitting that the planet, able somehow to touch human feelings with its astonishing surface growth, could also provide one of the great anodynes. Endolin was hard to come by, even in the richest obsidian fields, but it was nearly perfect when fresh. It could all but obliterate physical pain without affecting the reason or the perceptions. And there was no hangover from it. Myra's life on Earth had been hell. Here, it was passable.

"Boy, do I feel good!" Myra said. "I think I could dance till dawn."

He kept his eyes on the road, following it with the wheel. "In an hour, you'd be screaming from the pain. You're forgetting how Endolin burns out." That was its great drawback, and he was glad to remind her of it. That, and the fact that you couldn't take it constantly. If you did, it paralyzed you.

For a moment, she sounded crushed. "Honey," she said, "I haven't forgotten." Then she brightened. "But lately my bad hours between pills have been easier." She had been lying on the sofa at sunset during one of those hours that she had to get through, and would have taken a pill before getting up to join him on the terrace.

"That's good," he said. He tried to put conviction into it.

After a while, they were driving along a ridge from which they could see, far off to the right, the lights of the Endolin Packing Plant and the little spaceport beside it.

"I didn't know they worked at night," Myra said.

"For the past six months, they have."

"Six months Earth time?" There was Belsin time, with its 17-hour day and short year, and there was Earth time. Edward had a way of shifting from one to the other without warning.

"Earth time," he said, as if talking to a child.

"You almost never tell me about your work, Edward," she said. "Have orders gone up?"

"Yes," he said. "Business is booming. We're sending out a shipload every month now." He hesitated and then said, "Earth time."

"That's terrific, Edward. It must make you feel...useful to be so successful."

He said nothing. It made no difference to him how well the business did, except that more shippings meant more supplies of gin and of television tapes and things like peanut butter and coffee and caviar from Earth. Nothing on Belsin could be eaten. And the only business--the only real reason for humanity to be here at all--was Endolin.

"Will you have to increase the number of workers?" Myra asked. "To keep up with bigger harvests?"

He shook his head. "No. The equipment has been improved. Each man brings in two or three pounds a day now. Faster vehicles and better detectors."

"That's fascinating!" Myra said, sitting upright with a slight wince of pain. "I had no idea what was going on."

"You never asked," he said.

"No," she said, "I suppose I didn't."

They drove on northward in silence for a long time, listening to the grass. Edward himself, despite his hidden anger and his frustrations, became calmed by it. Finally, Myra spoke. "Listening to that singing is...is amazing," she said softly. "It seems to go very deep. You know"--she turned abruptly in her seat, to face him--"the more I take Endolin, the more...mystical my feelings are. Or spiritual." She looked a little self-conscious saying it, probably because she knew how impatient he was with her interests in poetry and music. And in reincarnation.

"It's bound to affect your mind...." he said.

"No," she said. "I know that's not it. It's something I've had since I was a child. Sometimes after the arthritic pain, I'd have a...a burned-out feeling in my nerves and a certain clarity in my head. I would lie in my bed in the hospital or whatever and I felt I knew things just the other side of the edge of knowing."

He started to speak and glanced over at her. He saw that she had not finished the drink she was carrying. Which was unusual, since Myra was close to being an alcoholic. Something he encouraged in her. He decided to say nothing.

"I lost those feelings when I got older," she went on. "But lately I've been getting them back. Stronger. And the grass, singing like that, seems to encourage it." She stopped for a minute. "You know," she said, "the grass is giving me the same feeling. That something on the other side of knowledge can really be known. If we could only...only relax somehow and clear our minds and grasp it."

Edward's voice was cool. "You can get the same effect from two martinis on an empty stomach."

She was unperturbed. "No, you can't, Edward," she said. "You cannot."

•

They were silent again for several miles. Past the plant, the road broadened for a while and became straighter. Edward speeded up. It was late and he was getting bored. The grass's singing had become quieter. He was focusing on the road when he heard a sharp intake of breath from Myra, and then he saw that somehow there was more light on the road. And Myra said softly, "The rings, Edward," and he looked up and there they were: the lavender and pale-blue rings of Belsin, normally invisible but now glowing in a great arc from east to west above them. Fairy rings. Rings of heaven.

Then the grass seemed to crescendo for a moment, in some kind of coda, and then became silent. The rings brightened. The effect was stunning.

"Stop the jeep," Myra said. "Let's look."

"Haven't time," Edward said, and drove on.

And Myra did something she had never done before because of the pain her unlucky body could cause her: She pushed the lever on her seat and leaned in it all the way back and looked up at the beautiful rings in the sky. She did it with care and lay back and relaxed, still holding her unfinished drink, now in her lap. Her dark hair blew behind her in the jeep's wind. Edward could see by the light of the rings that her face was glowing. Her body looked light, supple, youthful in the light. Her smile was beatific.

He noticed the unfinished drink. "God," he thought, "she may be getting well."

•

The orchids grew down the sides of the only cliffs on Belsin. Belsin was a nearly flat planet with almost nothing to fall from. That and the low gravity made it a very safe place, as Edward had noted early in his life there.

The orchids were not orchids, were not even plants, but they looked somewhat like orchids. They were the outward flowerings of some obscure life form that, like the grass, seemed to go down to the center of the planet. You could not uproot an orchid any more than you could pull a blade of the grass loose from the surface; a thin but incredibly tenuous filament at the base of each of them went through solid obsidian down to a depth far below possible exploration or investigation. They were stunningly beautiful to see.

They glowed in shades of green and yellow with waving plumes and leaves shaped like enormous Japanese fans. They were both luminous and illuminated and they shifted as they moved from transparent to translucent to opaque.

When he stopped the jeep near the orchid cliffs, he heard a small cry from Myra and looked over to see her features in the familiar grimace of pain; riding that way had almost certainly been too much for her, even with Endolin.

Yet she sat up easily enough, though very slowly, and got out of the jeep. He did not offer to help; she had told him years before that she preferred (continued on page 234)Apotheosis of Myra(continued from page 100) doing things by herself when she could. By the time she was standing, she was smiling again. As he came around to her side of the jeep, he saw her casually emptying her drink on the ground at her feet, where it made several pools in the obsidian. She set the glass in the jeep.

They walked forward slowly. Both wore gum-rubber soles on their shoes, but the surface could be treacherous. She appeared to have recovered from the pain in the jeep; her walking was as certain as his own. Possibly steadier. "Myra," he said, "I think you're getting better." His voice was flat.

Abruptly, she stopped and turned to him. Her face, lighted by the rings in the sky, was radiant. "Edward," she said, "I think I may be getting well." She felt of her elbows, squeezed them. "I haven't told you this before. I wasn't sure. But I've cut my Endolin in half over the past month. And I feel better than ever." Suddenly and impulsively, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. It was all he could do to pretend a slight responsiveness; he was appalled by the whole thing.

"It would be really something, Edward, not just to be a sick rich girl. To be able to do something besides lie around and take pills and try to get around the pain. It would be great to work."

"Work?" he said. "At what?"

"I don't know," she said. "At anything. I could learn to be a pilot, or a librarian. You know, Edward, I'm not terribly smart. I think I could be very happy doing housework. Having children. Just being busy for the rest of my life, instead of living in my mind all the time."

"It's good to see you thinking about it," he said. But it wasn't. He hated the whole idea. A sick Myra was bad enough; he did not want this chipper, nearly well one around to clutter up his life.

And the more well she became, the harder it would be to kill her and to blame her death on the arthritis.

He looked toward the orchid observation platform. There was another couple standing there, and as they came closer, Edward could see that the man was an engineer named Strang--one of the steadier, more reliable people from the plant. The girl was somebody from Accounting.

And it began to shape up for him then. The situation was really good. He had long suspected that the orchid cliffs were the best place for it. And here were the perfect witnesses. It was dark and everyone knew the orchid cliffs were dangerous at night. Myra had been drinking; the autopsy would show that.

It began to click off for him the way things did sometimes. He embellished it. As they approached the other couple enough to be overheard, he said, "Myra, it's really strange of you to want to come out here like this. Maybe we shouldn't go to the cliffs. We can come back in daylight tomorrow...."

She laughed in a way that he hoped would sound drunken and said, "Oh, come on, Edward. I feel marvelous."

"OK, darling. Anything you say." He spoke to her lovingly and then looked up to greet the other couple.

"Nice seeing you. Mr. MacDonnel," the engineer said. "The orchids are really fine by ringlight."

"I'd still rather be in bed," Edward said amiably. "But Mrs. MacDonnel wanted to come out here. She says she could dance till dawn."

Myra beamed at Strang and Strang and his girl nodded politely at her. Myra never saw people on Belsin. Arthritis had made her life sedentary, and even though Endolin had relieved the pain greatly, she had never learned to be sociable. Most of her time was spent reading, listening to music or puttering around the house.

"More power to you, Mrs. MacDonnel," Strang said. And then, as they went out on the ledge toward the staircase, "Careful out there, you two!"

There was a meandering walkway, partly carved from obsidian, partly constructed from moonwood, that ran along the cliff face toward a high waterfall. The steps were lighted by hidden electric lights and there was still ringlight from above. There was a safety rail, too, of heavy moonwood, waist high. But it was only a handrail and a person could slip under it. The thing could have been done better, but there was only so much human labor available on the planet for projects of that kind.

The two of them went slowly along the staircase, still in view of Strang and his girl. The light on the orchids was gorgeous. They could hear the sound of the waterfall. It was very cool. Myra was becoming excited. "My God," she said, "Belsin is really a lovely place. With the grass that sings and the orchids." She looked up at the sky. "And those rings."

"Watch your step," he said. He looked back at Strang and waved. Then they went around the edge of a cliff and along a wet obsidian wall where the light glared off the wetness and was for a moment almost blinding and for an instant he thought of pushing her off there. But they were too close to Strang; if there were a struggle, it might be heard. They walked along a level place for a while. Myra would look across at the orchids on the other side, with their fans gently changing color in the night air, and would gasp at the beauty of them. Sometimes she squeezed his arm strongly or hugged him in her excitement. He knew it was all beautiful, but it had never really touched him and it certainly wasn't touching him now. He was thinking coolly of the best way to kill Myra. And some part of him was second-guessing, thinking that it might not be bad to go on living with Myra if she got well, that it was cruel to think of killing her just when she was beginning to enjoy her life. But then he thought of her dumbness, of her innocence. He thought of her money.

Suddenly, they came round a turn in the walkway and there was the waterfall. Part of it reflected the colors of the rings above. There was spray on his face. He looked down. Just ahead of them was a place where the obsidian was wet. The moonwood railing had been doubled at that point, but there was still a distance of at least two feet from the bottom where a person could easily slip under. He looked farther down--straight down. The chasm was half a mile--the highest drop on Belsin.

He looked behind him. They could not be seen. OK, he thought. Best to be quick about it.

He took her firmly by the arm, put his free arm around her waist.

She turned and looked at his face. Hers was calm, open. "You're going to kill me. Aren't you, Edward?" she said.

"That's right," he said. "I didn't think you knew."

"Oh, I knew, all right," she said.

For a moment, he was frightened. "Have you told anyone? Written anyone?"

"No."

"That's stupid of you. To tell me that. You could have lied."

"Maybe," she said. "But, Edward, a part of me has always wanted to die. My kind of life is hardly worth the effort. I'm not sure that getting well would change that, either."

They stood there like that by the waterfall for a full several minutes. He had her gripped firmly. It would be only a matter of putting one of his feet behind hers, tripping her and pushing her under the railing. She looked very calm and yet not passive. Her heart was beating furiously. His skin seemed extraordinarily sensitive; he felt each drop of spray as it hit. The waterfall sounded very loud.

He stared down at her. She looked pathetic. "Aren't you frightened?" he said.

She did not speak for a moment. Then she said, "Yes, I'm frightened, Edward. But I'm not terrified."

He had to admit that she was taking it very well. "Would you rather jump?" he said. He could let go of her. There was no way she could outrun him. And he wanted no bruises from his hands on her arms, no mark of his shoe on her legs. Her body--what was left of her body--would be studied by the best criminologists from Earth; he could be sure her family would see to that. She'd be kept frozen in orbit until the experts got there.

Thinking of that, he looked up toward the sky. The rings had begun to fade. "No," Myra said. "I can't jump. It's too frightening. You'll have to push me."

"All right," he said, looking back to her.

"Edward," she said, "please don't hurt me. I've always hated pain."

Those were her last words. She did not fight back. When he pushed her off, she fell silently, in the low gravity, for a long, long time before smashing herself on the obsidian at the bottom of the chasm.

As he looked up, the rings appeared again, but only for a moment.

•

Getting her out with a helicopter and then making the statement and getting Strang and his girl to make their statements took all night. There was no police force and no law as such on Belsin, but the factory manager was acting magistrate and took testimony. Everyone appeared to believe Edward's story--that Myra was drunk and slipped--and condolences were given. Her body was put in a plastic capsule from a supply that had sat idle for years; she was the first person ever to die on Belsin.

Edward drove back at daybreak. His fatigue was enormous, but his mind was calm. He had almost begun to believe the story himself.

As he approached the now-empty house across the broad plain, a remarkable thing happened: The grass began to sing again. Belsin grass was only known to sing in the evening. Never at dawn. But there it was, singing as the first of the planet's two suns was coming up. And somehow--perhaps because of the clarity in the fatigue he felt--it seemed to him that the grass's song was almost comprehensible. It seemed to be singing to him alone.

•

He spent half the next day sleeping and the other half sitting in various rooms of the house, drinking gin. He did not miss Myra, nor did he feel guilty, nor apprehensive.

He thought for a while, half-drunkenly, about what he would do, back on Earth, as a rich, single man. He was still under 40; if he were lucky, he would begin to inherit some of Myra's millions within a year.

There were still a few things to decide upon now and as he drank, he thought about them from time to time: Should he continue running the Endolin plant while waiting for the inquest into Myra's death and for the ship that would take him back to Earth? If not, there was very little else to do on Belsin. He could spend some time exploring down south, where the obsidian was a light gray and where no Endolin had been found. He could sit around the house, drinking, listen to some of Myra's records, watch TV from the tape library, work out in the basement gym. None of it really appealed to him and he began to fear the dullness of the wait. He wanted to be on Earth right now, at the heart of things, with bright lights and variety and speed and money. He wanted his life to start moving fast. He wanted travel: loose and easy nights on gamier planets with well-dressed women, guitars playing. He wanted to buy new clothes on Earth, take an apartment in Venice, go to the races in the Bois de Boulogne. Then see the galaxy in style.

And then, as twilight came, he moved out onto the terrace to watch the setting of the second of Belsin's two small suns, and realized that the grass was singing again. Its sound was very faint; at first, he thought it was only a ringing in his ears. He walked, drink in hand, to the railing at the end of the big moonwood terrace, walking softly in bare feet across the silvery surface, cool as always to the touch. Belsin, bare and nearly devoid of life as it was, could be--as Myra would say--lovely. He remembered Myra's falling, then, as in a dream. At one half Earth gravity, her body had fallen away from him slowly, slowly decreasing its size as it had lazily spun. She had not screamed. Her dress had fluttered upward in his direction as he stood there with his hands lightly on the wet railing of the orchid chasm.

Suddenly and surprisingly, he began to see it from her falling-away point of view; looking up at himself standing there, diminishing in size, seeing his own set features, his tan-cotton shirt, his blue jeans, his rumpled brown hair. His cold, unblinking eyes looking down on himself, falling.

The grass was not really singing. It was talking. Whispering. For a shocked moment, it seemed to him that it whispered, "Edward. Edward." And then, as he turned to go back into the house for another drink, "Myra is here. Edward, Myra is here."

Another very strong drink put him to sleep. He dreamed of himself in lines of people, waiting. Long, confusing lines at a cafeteria or a theater, with silent people and he among them also silent, impatient, trapped in an endless waiting. And he awoke sweating, wide-awake in the middle of the Bel-sin night. Before his open eyes, Myra fell, at a great distance from him now, slowly spinning. He could hear the sound of the waterfall. He sat up. He was still wearing his blue jeans.

It was not the waterfall; what he heard was the grass, whispering to him.

He pushed open the bedroom window. The grass was clearer now. Its voice was clearly speaking his name: "Edward," it said. "Edward. Edward."

Into his mind leaped the words from the old poem, studied in college:

Why does your sword so drip wi' blood Edward, Edward?

The fuzziness of liquor had left him. His head was preter-naturally clear. "What do you want?" he said.

"I want to talk," the grass said. Its voice was lazy, sleepy.

"Can't you be heard everywhere?"

"Do you fear overhearing?" The voice was fairly clear, though soft.

"Yes."

"I'm speaking only near the house." That was what he thought it said. The words were a bit blurred toward the end of the sentence.

"Near the house?" He pulled the window open wider. Moved closer. Then he sat on the edge of the bed by the window and leaned out into the night. Two small moons were up and he could see the grass. It seemed to be rippling, as though a slight thin-aired wind were stroking it. The grass grew about two feet high and was normally a pale brown. The moonlight was like Earth moonlight; it made it look silver, the color of moonwood. He sat with his hands on his upper thighs, his bare feet on the floor carpeting, listening to the grass.

"Near the house, Edward," the grass said.

"And you're Myra?"

"Oh, yes, I'm Myra." There was a tone of gaiety in this, a hushed joyfulness in the whispering. "I'm Myra and I'm Belsin. I've become this planet, Edward."

"Jesus Christ!" he said. "I need a drink. And a cigarette."

"The cigarettes are in the kitchen cabinet," the grass said. "Come out on the terrace when you get them. I want to see you."

"See me?" he said.

"I can see with my rings," the voice said. Myra said.

He got up and padded into the kitchen. Strangely, he did not feel agitated. He was on some ledge somewhere in the middle of the quiet night, hung over and a wife murderer, yet his soul was calm. He found the cigarettes easily, opened them, took one out and lit it. He poured a small amount of gin into a glass, filled it the rest of the way with orange juice, thinking as he did so of how great a distance from California that juice had come, to be drunk by him here in this steel kitchen in the middle of the night on a planet where the grass had become his wife. The whole planet was his wife. His ex-wife. He took a swallow from the glass, after swishing it around to mix the gin. The glow from it in his stomach was warm and mystical. He walked slowly, carrying his glass and his cigarette, out to the terrace.

"Ooooh!" the grass said. "I can see you now."

He looked up to the sky. "I don't see the rings," he said. "Your rings."

And then they appeared. Glowing pink and lavender, clearly outlined against the dim-lit sky. They disappeared.

"I'm only learning to show my rings," Myra said. "I have to thicken the air in the right place, so the light bends downward toward you." There was silence for a while. The grass had become clearer when it last spoke. It spoke again finally and was clearer still, so that it almost seemed as if Myra were sitting on the terrace next to him, her soft voice perfectly audible in the silent night. "There's a lot to learn, Edward."

He drank again. "How did it happen?" And then, almost blurting it out, "Are you going to tell people about what I did?"

"Goodness, Edward, I hadn't thought about that." The voice paused. "Right now, I don't know."

He felt relieved. Myra had always been goodhearted, despite the self-pity. She usually gave the benefit of the doubt.

He sat silent for a while, looking at the vast plain in front of his eyes, concentrating on his drink. Then he said, "You didn't answer me, Myra. About how it happened."

"I know," the grass said. "I know I didn't. Edward, I'm not only Myra, I'm Belsin, too. I am this planet and I'm learning to be what I have become." There was no self-pity in that, no complaint. She was speaking to him clearly, trying to tell him something.

"What I know is that Belsin wanted an ego. Belsin wanted someone to die here. Before I died and was...was taken in, Belsin could not speak in English. My grass could only speak to the feelings of people, not to their minds."

"The singing?" he said.

"Yes. I learned singing when Captain Belsin first landed. He carried a little tape player with him as he explored and played music on it. The grass learned...I learned to sing. He had headaches and took aspirin for them and I learned to make Endolin for him. But he never used it. Never discovered it." The voice was wistful, remembering something unpleasant. "I couldn't talk then. I could only feel some of the things that people felt. I could feel what happened to Captain Belsin's headache when he took aspirin and I knew how to improve on it. But I couldn't tell him to use it. That was found out later." The grass rippled and was still. It was darker now; one of the moons had set while they were talking.

"Can you bring up some more moons? So I can see you better? See the grass?" There were four moons.

"I'll try," Myra said. There was silence. Nothing happened. Finally, she said, "No, I can't. I can't change their orbits."

"Thanks for trying," he said dryly. "The first person to die here would become the planet? Or merge with its mind? Is that it?"

"I think so," Myra said. He thought he could see a faint ripple on the word think. "I became reincarnated as Belsin. Remember the rings' lighting after you pushed me over?"

"Yes."

"I was waking up then. It was really splendid for me. To wake into this body. Edward," she said, "I'm so alive now, and vigorous. And nothing about me hurts."

He looked away, back toward the silent house. Then he finished his drink. Myra's voice had been strong, cheerful. He had been calm--or had been acting calm--but something in his deep self was disturbed. He was becoming uneasy about all this. Talking with the grass did not disturb him. He was a realist and if grass could talk to him in the voice of his dead wife, he would hold conversation with grass. And Myra, clearly, wasn't dead--though her old, arthritic body certainly was. He had seen it as they brought it in from the helicopter; even in low gravity, falling onto jagged obsidian could lacerate and spatter.

"Do you hate me for what I did?" he said, fishing.

"No, Edward. Not at all. I feel...removed from you. But then, I really always did. I always knew that you allowed only a small part of yourself to touch my life. And now," she said, "my life is bigger and more exciting. And I need only a small part of you."

That troubled him, sent a little line of fear across a ridge somewhere in his stomach. It took him a moment to realize that it was her word need that had frightened him.

"Why do you need me, Myra?" he said, carefully.

"To read to me."

He stared. "To read to you?"

"Yes, Edward. I want you to read from our library." They had brought several thousand books on microfilm with them. "And I'll want you to play records for me."

"My God!" he said. "Doesn't a whole planet have better things to do?"

The grass seemed to laugh. "Of course. Of course I have things to do. Just getting to know this body of mine. And I can sense that I am in touch with others--others like the Belsin part of me. Now that I have an ego--Myra's ego--I can converse with them. Feel their feelings."

"Well, then," he said, somewhat relieved.

"Yes," she said. "But I'm still Myra, too. And I want to read. And I want music--honest, old-fashioned Earth music. I have this wonderful new body, Edward, but I don't have hands. I can't turn pages or change records. And I'll need you to talk to, from time to time. As long as I remain human. Or half human."

Jesus Christ! he thought. But then he began to think that if she had no hands, needed him even to run microfilm, that she could not stop him from leaving. She was only a voice, and rings, and ripples in the grass. What could she do? She couldn't alter the orbits of her moons.

"What about the other people here on Belsin?" he said, still careful with his words. "One of them might want to read to you. A younger man, maybe...."

This time, her laughter was clearly laughter. "Oh, no, Edward," she said. "I don't want them. It's you I want." There was silence for several long moments. Then she continued, "They'll be going back to Earth in a few months, anyway. I've stopped making Endolin."

"Stopped...?"

"When you were asleep. I was planning things then. I realized that if I stopped making Endolin, they would all go away."

"What about all those people on Earth who need it?" he said, trying to play on her sympathies. He did not give a damn, himself, for the pains of other people. That was why living with Myra had not really been difficult for him.

"They'll be making it synthetically before the supplies run out," she said. "It's difficult, but they'll learn. It would make people rich to find out how. Money motivates some people strongly."

He said nothing to that except "Excuse me" and got up and went into the kitchen for another drink. The sky was lightening; the first little sun would be up soon. He had never known Myra to think as clearly as she could think now. He shuddered and poured himself a bigger drink. Then, through the terrace doors, he heard her voice, "Come on back out, Edward."

"Oh, shut up!" he said, and went over and slammed the doors shut and locked them. It was triply thick glass and the room became silent. He walked into the living room, with its brown-enameled steel walls and brown carpet and the oil paintings and Shaker furniture. He could hear the grass from the windows in there, so he closed them and pulled the thick curtains over them. It was silent. "Christ!" he said aloud, and sat down with his drink to think about it.

Myra kept several antique plates on little shelves over the television set. They were beginning to vibrate. And then, shockingly, he heard a deep bass rumbling and the plates fell to the floor and broke. The rumbling continued for a moment before he realized that it had been an earthquake. He was suddenly furious and he hung on to the fury, covering up the fear that had come with it. He got up and went through the kitchen to the terrace doors, flung them open into the still night. "For Christ's sake, Myra," he said, "what are you trying to do?"

"That was a selective tremor," the grass said. There was a hint of coyness in its tone. "I pushed magma toward the house and let a fissure fall. Just a tiny bit, Edward. Hardly any at all."

"It could have fallen farther?" he said, trying to keep the anger and the sternness in his voice.

"Lord, yes," Myra said. "That was only about a half on the Richter scale." He suddenly remembered that Myra had studied geology at Ohio State; she was well prepared to become a planet. "I'm pretty sure I could go past ten. With hardly any practice."

"Are you threatening to earthquake me into submission?"

She didn't answer for a minute. Then she said, pleasantly, "I want to keep you here with me, Edward. We're married. And I need you."

The earthquake had been frightening. But he thought of the supply ships and of the ship that would be bringing the people for the inquest. All he would have to do would be to lie to her, act submissive, and then somehow get on board the ship and away from Belsin before she earthquaked.

"And you want me to read aloud? Or run the microfilm for you?"

"Aloud, Edward," she said. "I'll let the others leave, but I want you to stay here. Here in the house."

"I'll have to get out every now and then."

"No, you won't," Myra said.

"I'll need food."

"I'm already growing it for you. The trees will be up in a few days. And the vegetables: carrots and potatoes and beans and lettuce. Even tobacco, Edward. But no liquor. You'll have to do without liquor once the supply is gone. But this place will be lovely. I'll have a lake for you and groves of fruit trees. I can grow anything--the way I grew Endolin before. This will be a beautiful place for you, Edward. A real Eden. And you'll have it all to yourself."

He thought crazily of Venice, of women, guitar music. Venice and Rome. Panicked suddenly, he said, "I can run away with the others. You can't earthquake us all to death. That would be cruel...."

"That's true enough," Myra said. "But if you leave this house, I'll open a fissure under you and down you'll go." She paused a long moment. "Just like I did, Edward. Down and down."

He began to talk faster, louder. "What if they come to take me away, to force me to go back to Earth?"

"Oh, come on, Edward. Quit it. I won't let them ever get to the house. They'll go away eventually. And I'll never let anyone land again. Just swallow them up if they try it."

He felt terribly weary. He walked out onto the terrace and slumped onto the moonwood bench. Myra remained silent. He had nothing to say. He sipped his drink, letting his mind go blank. He sat there alone for a half hour. Or not really alone. It was beginning to dawn on him that he might never be alone again.

Then Myra spoke again, softly. "I know you're tired, Edward. But I don't sleep. Not anymore. I wonder if you would read to me a while. I was in the middle of The King's Mistress. If you'll switch the microfilm machine on, you'll find my page."

"Christ!" he said, startled. "You can't make me read." There was something petulant in his voice. He could hear it and it disturbed him. Something of the sound of a small boy trying to defy his mother. "I want to have another drink and go back to bed."

"You know I don't like insisting," Myra said. "And you're perfectly right, Edward. I can't make you read. But I can shake the house and keep you awake." Abruptly, the house shook from another tremor, probably a quarter of a point on the Richter scale. "And," Myra said, "I can grow food for you or not grow food for you. And I can give you what you want to eat or not give you what you want. I could feed you nothing but persimmons for a few months. And make the water taste terrible."

"Jesus Christ!" he said. "I'm tired."

"It'll only be a couple of chapters," Myra said. "And then maybe a couple of old songs on the player, and I'll go back to contemplating my interior and the other planets around here."

He didn't move.

"You'll be wanting me to grow tobacco for you. There are only a few cartons of cigarettes left." Edward smoked three packs a day. Three packs in a short Belsin day.

He still didn't move.

"Well," Myra said, conciliatory now. "I think I could synthesize a little ethyl alcohol. If I could do Endolin, I suppose I could do that, too. Maybe a quart or so every now and then. A hundred ninety proof."

He stood up. He was terribly weary. "The King's Mistress?" he said.

"That's right!" the grass said, sweetly, joyfully. "I've always liked your voice, Edward. It'll be good to hear you read."

And then, before he turned to go into the house, to the big console that held thousands of books--thousands of dumb, gothic novels and books on gardening and cooking and self-improvement and a few technical books on geology, he saw everything get suddenly much lighter and looked up to see that the great rings of Belsin were now fully visible, bright as bands of sunlight in the abruptly brightened sky above his head. They glowed in full realization of themselves, illuminating the whole, nearly empty planet.

And Myra's voice came sighing joyfully in a great, horizon-wide ripple of grass. "Ooooooh!" it said happily. "Ooooooh!"