“Edward,” she said, “I’m better. Really.”

“Okay,” 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, vein-like 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 human 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 sixty 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 feeling with its astonishing music, 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.