He looked back to Mother, who was now translucent. “I loved him, Mother,” he said. “I still love him.”

She smiled at him flirtatiously. “What we did in the kitchen was naughty,” she said. She winked at him.

“Damn you,” he said. “It’s him I love. It’s Daddy.”

She was hardly visible now, and her voice was faint, far away. “It’s not for you to have him, Barney,” she said. “Daddy’s mine.” And they were both gone.

***

After twenty minutes, Barney stopped crying. Something had ended for him. He stayed in his chair for the rest of the afternoon, tremulously, testing his new life. Toward suppertime, when Isabel would be coming home from work, he began to whistle.

From time to time he looked up at the Hotel Pierre, which rose with great clarity into the New York sky.

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 sky 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 midterm. 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 last 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 Gordon’s gin and a nearly empty one of Johnnie Walker 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.