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 pain-killer and anti-inflammation drug ever known. It grew only on Belsin and did not travel well even in total vacuum. Myra was rich and her family was powerful; she had provided the money and her grandfather the power to get him the job here. She was thirty-four and had had violently painful arthritis since the age of six.

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 moonwood bench when he got back out on 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 feeling-fully.” 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 thirty 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?”