The Steps of the Sun

  She looked at me for several moments. Then she said, in English, “You are calm now, Mr. Belson.”

  “Yes. A lot has happened since we first met. Some of the experiences have been calming.” I wondered if she knew what I had been doing in that room back in Peking. “I hope your life has been a pleasure for you.”

  “It has not been,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, truly feeling sorry. “Is it the endolin?”

  “I am not concerned with endolin,” she said. “Would you like tea?”

  “Yes. And food too, if I may?”

  “You were not fed in Peking?”

  “Not since last night.”

  She nodded. “That would be Major Feng. I told her to treat you well, but she believes I do not care anymore. I will remind her eventually.” She pressed a button on the arm of her chair, and I heard a soft buzz in another room. A boy of about twelve came in, dressed in a black robe like Mourning Dove’s. He stood before her and bowed slightly.

  “Bring us food from the kitchen, Deng,” she said gently, in Chinese. Then to me, in English, “There will be no meat, Mr. Belson, since I do not eat it. But what we have is good.”

  I said nothing and watched Deng as he walked across the gravel and left. When he was gone I said, “Mourning Dove, I am very seldom calm. All my life I have been in a hurry and I’m not even sure what for.”

  “You make the simple difficult,” she said. “Perhaps because the difficult is simple for you.”

  A voice in me was saying Fortune-cookie wisdom. Yet if anyone on Earth was wise, it was this woman. I could feel wisdom around her presence like a magnetic field. “I’ve been bored with making money,” I said. “But when I stop I just seem to crash around and hurt other people, like Isabel.”

  “Miss Crawford is a strong person and can profit from the experience.”

  “You know Isabel!”

  “I had your history examined when I learned of your cargo.”

  “The uranium?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know where Isabel is now?”

  Mourning Dove nodded, stroking her cat. The cat stretched itself and yawned.

  “Mourning Dove,” I said in agitation, “I’d be relieved if you’d tell me where she is.”

  “Mr. Belson,” she said, “I do not wish to play cat and mouse with you and I wish you well in life. But I am not ready to tell you that. Maybe later.”

  I stared at her. “Mourning Dove, I love her. I need to know where she is.”

  She looked at me calmly. “Mr. Belson,” she said, “China needs safe uranium. Our sources of power have caused far more pain than you feel for your Isabel.”

  The way she said it gave me pause. “Has something happened?” I said.

  She took her hand from the back of the cat and laid her thin arms on the arms of the chair. “While you were crossing the Pacific there was an accident in the North, near the village of Wu. Thousands of cubic feet of radioactive gas were emitted and many died. Wu is my home village and it was I who ordered the reactor built forty years ago, to show good faith in my policy.”

  “Your policy?”

  “I am one of the sponsors of the use of nuclear fission in China, Mr. Belson. I agreed that the price in lives would be worth the profit—in the contribution to China’s future.”

  I could feel her pain, even though her face didn’t show it. “And you had family members in Wu?”

  “Yes. My daughter and three sons. Seven grandchildren. They are dead now, or in hospitals dying.”

  “That’s unbearable,” I said. I wanted to hold her and try to comfort her. “Do you blame yourself?”

  She looked at me. “Who else is to blame?” she said. “I championed nuclear fission. I had the plant built near Wu.”

  I just looked at her. What could I say? “What are you going to do?” I said, eventually.

  “I am going to have lunch,” she said.

  Deng had come back from the kitchen carrying a flat basket and a low table. He set the table between us and put the basket on it. It was full of fruit and vegetables. Another boy, who might have been Deng’s brother, followed with a ceramic teapot and two cups. He set the cups down and poured.

  “I don’t see how you stand it,” I said, watching the boy pour the steaming tea and thinking of those corpses and of a provincial hospital somewhere, with the ruined faces of the dying.

  “The big things are simpler than the small. One doesn’t complicate them. I went to a monastery in Tibet and fasted. Necessities arrive unbidden, like dreams. It was necessary to grieve properly and I have grieved.” She handed me a cup of tea. “I planned to greet you in Peking, Mr. Belson, to buy your uranium. I am sorry to have caused you a long wait.”

  “That’s unimportant. I too underwent a kind of… purgation. I hope your pain will relent. I wish I could help.”

  “I see that you do,” she said calmly and sipped her tea. “The broccoli is nourishing. It has been steamed in ginseng.”

  I took a bite. It was delicious and my appetite returned in a flash. “Did you visit Wu afterward?”

  “Yes,” she said, drinking tea. “I took endolin to the survivors. They are not in pain.”

  “I’m glad it helped,” I said. I finished a floret of broccoli and then took a big peach and ate in silence, looking at the water of the pond and at the green ferns that surrounded it. I thought of Juno, of all that safe uranium there, enough to power our world forever. “Mourning Dove,” I said, “I still love America, even though it has treated me badly. And I’m crazy about New York. I don’t want my country to be an outpost of a Chinese empire.”

  “Your country is China now.”

  “By adoption. And I think I could be a Confucianist. But right now I would like to settle in New York, with Isabel if she’ll have me, and devote the rest of my life to making it into a great city again.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Crashing around?”

  “Maybe I can do it calmly.” I said this with surprising passion. “I’ve learned a lot in the last year, Mourning Dove. I may be ready to enjoy the rest of my life.” My head was feeling very clear, and there were no more spots in front of my eyes. This was one of the loveliest rooms I had ever been in and I felt I was with the oldest and best of friends.

  She nodded. “‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’”

  “That’s William Blake!” I said. “I hope it’s true.”

  “It is true. I was excessive when young, as you are, Mr. Belson, and I have become wise. I believe that in my case one brought about the other.” She returned her attention to the cat. “I read Blake in college, in London. I desired to know everything when I was young, and to be infinitely rich and to become a member of the Central Committee of the Party. I have had four husbands and alienated them all. They are all dead now and I have forgotten them. But I got what I desired.” She looked at me. “I have not forgotten my mother and my father. My mother would beat me for nothing…” Suddenly her old face tightened alarmingly. “For nothing, Mr. Belson. She has been dead fifty years and I hate her still. I hate my father for letting her do it, and he too is long dead.”

  “Jesus!” I said. “It sounds familiar.”

  “It is not uncommon. The thing is to rule it and not to let it rule.” She paused. “One cannot attract the attention of the dead, though many try.”

  “Oh yes,” I said, blinking, “many try.” My voice sounded strange.

  “You are crying,” Mourning Dove said. “As much as I hate my mother I also love her. With a mother it is hard to do otherwise. Perhaps you love yours still.”

  Orbach had tried to tell me that, but I wouldn’t listen—not in my stomach or heart or wherever it is. I looked at Mourning Dove through tears. They were pouring out, some of them slopping down on my big hairy right hand that held a half-eaten peach. I could see my mother’s face, lost in self-regard. Grief suffused my body, starting in my stomach and spreading to my chest and
shoulders and heaving the muscles of my abdomen and my face.

  Gradually it subsided. I heard the pond waterfall again. I leaned back and stretched. I could feel the strength of my limbs, the soundness of my heart. My beard was wet. I took a bite from the peach, letting the juice mix with tears.

  “You are a remarkable man, Mr. Belson,” Mourning Dove said.

  I nodded and swallowed. “Would you call me Benjamin?”

  “Benjamin,” she said, “I want your uranium.”

  I nodded. “You can have half of it.”

  Her voice was quiet. “No. All. China needs it.”

  I looked at her. Her face was unshakable. “I can’t do that. There will be enough to go around. I can send the Isabel back.”

  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.

  Chapter 15

  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.

  When we were alone I said, “Some of those looks downstairs were mean.”

  She lit a Lucky Strike with a stainless-steel Zippo and held the closed lighter in her frail hand for a moment. I saw with surprise that the hand was trembling. She put the lighter in the pocket of her gown and said, “The accident near Wu has affected my standing with the people.”

  I remembered my agitation at being hanged in effigy on Madison Avenue. “Are you in any danger, Mourning Dove?”

  “I have enemies.”

  “I bet you have.” I thought of White Heron.

  The play had been running for two months; it would close in a week. We had been driven into Peking that afternoon, had gone to the People’s Hall of Records for a brief ceremony and then, at Mourning Dove’s instructions, were driven here.

  While we waited for the curtain, people kept looking up at us from time to time. Some seemed only curious to see a Party official and her blond escort, but some showed open hostility. I settled back into my Victorian opera chair, rested my elbow on one of its little antimacassars, and lit a cigar. It was like a box in a movie Western: the chairs were upholstered in dark-purple velvet; the oil painting of China’s first Party Chairwoman hung over velvet draperies behind us; there was a brass railing in front of us with yet more purple velvet hanging from the rail to the floor. But it was comfortable and spacious. And I knew that what you pay for in China is privacy and space. China may be down to half a billion souls, but it still teems. I chewed nervously on my cigar and left Mourning Dove to her thoughts, almost bursting with impatience for the curtain to rise. By the time it went up I had cleaned my glasses twice and my cigar was a mess. I ground it out in the ashtray and leaned forward toward the stage below.

  The witches were adequate but no thrill. They were got up as Japanese Shinto priests and their English was more comical than scary. But their old faces did look like something to be reckoned with, and the blasted heath they stood on made me think of those vast acres of obsidian I had lived on so long: