***

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 began to happen: 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 of it 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 forty; if he was 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.