That works great.  Now I have defined a global numeric

N:=8;

in \startMPinclusions ... \stopMPinclusions at the be beginning of my
document.  All of my \startMPpage ... \stopMPpage environments understand
this N, but how do I reference this value as the start value for
\dostepwiserecurse?  That is, I would like to do something like

\dostepwiserecurse{N}{0}{-1}{ ... <some code> ... }

Troy