Stopping at Slowyear Page 12

  "There's a player in the cab of the tractor, you know."

  "I didn't know."

  "Well, it's there. And I think there are disks. Mostly they'd be technical stuff on taking care of the sheep, you know, but there might be some others.

  Anyway, you might want to learn more about sheep."

  * * *

  She did learn more about sheep-more than she had ever wanted to know about sheep-but what saved MacDonald's sanity was that there turned out to be quite a few disks on other subjects, too. Some had evidently been left behind by that gawky adolescent, Petoyne, Blundy's former helper.

  Those were school work: math lessons, accountancy lessons, grammar lessons. They were not in any particular order, and some had been spilled out of their container and wedged their way under the seats or behind forgotten tools. None of the school lessons were really exciting for Mercy MacDonald, but in among the lesson disks were some recorded episodes from Blundy's video drama, Winter Wife.

  Those interested Mercy MacDonald quite a lot. Not just because Blundy was the guiding spirit behind them, but because those particular episodes had been selected for a purpose. She did not need to be told that they had been Petoyne's. They mostly had Petoyne herself in a leading role, but a younger, skinnier Petoyne than the young woman MacDonald had met, and MacDonald studied them with a good deal of interest.

  So she spent most of her afternoon hours watching vid disks there in the tractor cab, while Blundy did whatever he did with his writing machine; he did not want to show her any of it, and she stopped asking. And they ate, and slept, and did their chores, and made love. And sometimes (but not often) swam in the very cold stream. And sometimes picked wildflowers.

  And sometimes, on clouded nights when there wasn't even much starshine to guide them, went out scogger-hunting in the velvet dark (stumbling over bushes and hillocks, with ultraviolet lights that made the grubs' epicuticles fluoresce so they looked like neon-lit cockroaches in the night) and broiled their catch for breakfast. And made love. And sometimes MacDonald sat by herself out of Blundy's sight and stared thoughtfully into space, wondering just what she was doing there, on this planet, with this stranger.

  That took a lot of thinking. There was no doubt in MacDonald's mind that she was fond of Blundy-she had not yet decided to entertain the word "love"-or that Blundy was an attractive man, most so because he was a brand-new one, but that didn't answer her main question, which was: was there a future with him? She wondered what he would be like in the long term (assuming there was a long term, assuming his wife conveniently evaporated while they were gone.) Of course that wouldn't happen. Of course (there were so many "of course"s) she could change her mind and leave with the ship. Leave without him-of course-or, alternatively, she considered the possibility that he might want to come along in Nordvik.

  The beauty part of that was that Murra certainly never would. So that part of the problem would solve itself-But Blundy wouldn't go either.

  It wasn't enough for her to be sure of that in her mind, she had to hear it from Blundy himself. When she broached the subject, joking seriously, he shook his head. "Nobody from Slowyear will ever leave," he said positively.

  "Why?"

  He took her hand in his, kissing it while he thought for a moment. "We wouldn't be welcome," he said at last, and then his kisses moved up her arm, and naturally they made love again. To change the subject, she was pretty sure. And why were there so many subjects he kept on changing?

  * * *

  The last disks she found were the most disturbing.

  They turned up when she had abandoned hope of discovering any more, forgotten under a seat cushion, and they were additional episodes from Winter Wife. She played one of them over and over, until it made her weep. When she could watch no more the sun was almost setting, and she stumbled to the tent and Blundy.

  He looked up in startlement from his machine. "Mercy!" he cried, alarmed, jumping up to take her in his arms. "What's the matter?"

  "Winter Wife," she said, trying not to sob. "The part where the little girl dies-like your little nephew, Porly."

  "Oh," he said, beginning to understand. "yes. That episode. You found a copy? That was one of the best ratings we got, when the baby died."

  "It was horrible," she said. "They called it 'Essie,' or something like that."

  He held her silently for a moment before he answered. "It's the letters, SE," he said. "Stands for spongiform encephalopathy. Like we said.

  The brain turns all loose and fluffy, and they die."

  She let him stroke her hair while he told her again about spongiform encephalopathy. Known as a disease of animals on Earth-it was called "scrapie" when sheep got it, "Mad Cow Disease" when it infected cattle-on Slowyear it was a kind of failure of the human body's auto-immune systems.

  The brain deteriorated-fast-and stopped being any kind of a useful brain.

  Adult Slowyearians were generally safe from it. Babies weren't. Their immune systems were incompletely developed, so they were at severe risk . . . and four out of ten of them died of it. So were old people, as their immune systems begin to break down, putting them at risk. "If you survive past the first twenty months," he explained, "you're almost always all right until you're almost three-"

  "Three Slowyears," MacDonald said, doing the arithmetic in her head.

  "Almost fifty standard years?"

  "I suppose so."

  "Oh, Blundy," she said woefully. "I don't think I could stand it."

  He said soberly, "A lot of people can't."

  She didn't answer that, because a thought had struck her. What she was thinking was that accounted for Murra's childlessness. Then she made herself stop crying. She sat up straight, rubbing the last damp from her cheeks, and said the other thing that was on her mind: "That was really moving," she said. "The show, I mean. It made me cry."

  Blundy didn't answer, unless looking modestly pleased was an answer, so MacDonald pressed on with her thought. "What I mean," she said, "is that you could sell those disks. To the captain. I'm sure there'd be an audience for them on other planets."

  He didn't answer that, either, but the way he didn't answer surprised her.

  His face suddenly went still, no expression at all. She waited to see if he would speak. When he didn't, she ventured, "Is something wrong?

  You don't have to do it if you don't want to."

  He stirred and got up. "I do want to," he said. "Mercy, what do you think I am? I'm a writer-part of the time, anyway-and when I write I write for people. I'd love to have an audience-a big audience, the biggest there is-people I don't even know, maybe even people who aren't born yet-"

  "Well? So then will you give the captain the disks?"

  "Sure," he said, in a tone that was not intended to be believed, and turned away. She looked at him, puzzled. He seened to have forgotten the matter. He was going about the simple household business of turning on the lights, and when that was done he went to the cooler and pulled out a bottle of wine.

  It took the lighting of the lamps to make MacDonald realize that it had become dark outside. "Oh, my," she said. "We're forgetting about dinner."

  He nodded agreement, pouring wine for both of them. She accepted hers willingly enough-they generally had some wine with their dinners, why not a glass before? But it wasn't going to be just one glass, for as soon as the first glasses were down he was pouring more.

  Well, MacDonald told herself, she wasn't that hungry. If Blundy felt like having a few drinks, why should they not have them? She sat companionably next to him in silence, thinking about the things she hadn't really wanted to think about before, until the wine emboldened her to speak.

  "It is pretty awful, isn't it? I mean knowing what might happen to your babies, if you had them?"

  "Awful enough," he agreed.

  "And knowing that it's going to happen to you, too, I mean even as a grownup, if you live long enough," she went on thoughtfully. "Is that why you-ah-"

  "Why w
e what?" he demanded, pouring again.

  "Well, I mean the poison pills. I mean, sentencing people to take poison for doing things that really aren't so bad, you know? I mean, on other planets they have laws, too, but mostly they just put people in jail if they break them."

  He thought it over. "Maybe so," he said.

  "Because dying of a poison pill is better than the, ah, the SE thing?"

  He had to think about that, too. "Maybe," he said. "Well, I guess it is, but that's not the only thing. Everybody dies on all the other planets, too, don't they?"

  "You do seem to have a different attitude on Slowyear, though."

  "Yes," he agreed, "I guess we do have a different attitude on Slowyear.

  On Slowyear I don't think we'd ever put anybody in jail. Maybe we don't have jails because we're all in jail all winter long-twenty months. Fourteen hundred days. And it doesn't matter if you're guilty of anything or not."

  "Poor Blundy," she said, kissing his cheek, and Blundy said:

  "Finish your wine, then let's go to bed."

  * * *

  When Mercy MacDonald woke up the next morning she knew she'd gone to bed pretty tipsy-both times; because she had a memory of Blundy and herself stumbling out into the warm night, sometime or other, just to breathe a little fresh air before sleeping. She even remembered that he had pointed out the glimmer of light on the western horizon that was Nordvik, high enough above the planet to be caught in the last of the sunlight before it entered Slowyear's shadow, and that he had been crying.

  She remembered that, for some reason, that had seemed funny to her at the time.

  What she hadn't expected was that, although her head hurt with a serious hangover, it seemed funny now, too. She giggled at the thought that she was still a bit tipsy.

  She got up, looking for Blundy to tell him that amusing fact. He wasn't far.

  He was right outside the door, feeding a piece of the scogger they hadn't remembered to eat for dinner to one of the dogs, and he looked up when he saw her. "Hi," he said, smiling because he saw that she was smiling.

  She giggled at him.

  "What are you doing that for?" she asked.

  He looked surprised. "I'm giving him a taste for it," she explained.

  "Come winter we use dogs to sniff out the larvae-on the slopes, sometimes, where the wind scours the snow away. We have to wear the heated suits to dig them up, but the dogs have to tough it out-" He broke off, smiling no longer. "What is it?" he asked sharply.

  "It's just that that's so funny," she gasped, laughing. "Digging up bugs.

  With dogs."

  It was quite annoying, though, that this man was not laughing with her.

  His look was serious-even frightened. "You don't see the humor of it," she said, pouting, "you- you-" Then she reeled. It was almost as though she were back on the ship, suddenly weightless, and it was embarrassing, too.

  She pulled herself together. "Do you know," she said, "it's a funny thing, but I don't seem to remember your name." And saw with astonishment that the man was crying.

  Chapter 10

  When they moved Deputy Captain Hans Horeger of the interstellar spaceship Nordvik to the adult terminal ward Murra went with him, though she could not have said why. By then there was no longer any chance that the man would regain consciousness again. He was in the deep sleep, or coma, or paralysis that marked the final stage of spongiform encephalopathy, and, though sometimes his eyes opened, she knew that there was nothing he saw. The eyes might work still, but that was the end of it. Horeger no longer had enough of a brain to know what they were seeing.

  Murra didn't tarry in that depressing place. Twenty of its thirty-two beds were occupied now. Another twenty of Nordvik's people had died already.

  By now they were smoke and ash in the crematorium, surviving only as some few harvested grams of cell cultures for the doctors to ponder over later. A handful were dead or dying on the spaceship itself, not worth the trouble of shipping down to planetside; and so Nordvik's long voyages were coming to an end.

  Murra took the flowers she had brought and arranged them in a vase by Horeger's bed. It was not a sensible thing to do, but, she was aware, it was a pretty one. Then she nodded to the attendant, drowsing in a chair by the door, and when she left the ward Deputy Captain Hans Horeger ceased to exist in her mind.

  At the desk a friend hailed her to say that Blundy's tractor had been sighted coming down the road from the pass. She accepted the news with thanks and, of course, a certain amount of pleasure, and decided to wait to see him come in. So she went to the hospital cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a bit of pastry, chatting with the others sitting around there. It was a more cheerful crowd there this day; after all, the influx of terminal cases were almost all from Nordvik, and it was not as though they were relatives, or friends. Across the long table from Murra a doctor who had just come down from the ship was holding court. He was tired, everyone could see that, but willing to indulge everyone's natural curiosity. Yes, every remaining Nordvik person in orbit was now terminal or gone; he'd given the last of them soporifics to ease their passing. No, he didn't think it was just as well to feed them a poison pill, as they did with babies in the last stages of SE; they were not in pain, they were very little trouble-and they would die on their own quickly enough. No, it didn't look as though any of Nordvik's people had been among the very lucky very few who were naturally immune; outsiders so rarely were. He held up one of the little dry-ice-cooled boxes he'd brought with him. "Still, I've brought down all the tissue samples. This one was a woman named Betsy arap Dee; she was one of the first to die, and I checked her out myself. She never did get down to Slowyear," he added, sounding almost sentimental.

  "Do you think you'll learn anything from the tissue samples?" one of the nurses on break asked. The doctor shrugged but didn't answer. He didn't have to. They all knew the answer was no-but that they'd study them as carefully as they could anyway, because what else was there to do?

  Then the conversation turned general. Yes, the doctor told them, the emptying of Nordvik was coming along on schedule. All the shuttles were busily going back and forth, bringing down everything that could conceivably be worth keeping; the hastily erected storage tents by the landing strip were already bulging with the loot. Yes, the instrument and control people were nearly finished with installing the automatic controls in Nordvik. No, there was nothing unusual about the way SE had struck the ship's people. It was just as it had always been. Every one of them had come down with the disease, and every one would die.

  It was an interesting conversation, but a little sad, too. Everyone was feeling a little of that end-of-the-party letdown. The arrival of Nordvik had been exciting. It was a once in a lifetime event-more than that, because many lifetimes came and went without the thrill of a visit from space-but now it was over. In a little while the last person from Slowyear would leave Nordvik, setting the automatic controls that would launch the old ship on its final trip, accelerating until the last of its fuel ran out, then going on endlessly, forever, never to be seen again by anyone.

  "It does seem a kind of a waste," a visitor said thoughtfully.

  The doctor bent a curious look on him. "Waste? But we're stripping everything out that we can possibly use."

  The visitor flushed. "I was just thinking-" he said. "I mean, that's a whole operating ship. We could refuel it, you know. The equipment's all there, and the operating material's in the datastores. Then we could send out an expedition-somewhere-"

  "But where?" the doctor said impatiently, looking around in an aggrieved way, and of course there was no answer for that one, either.

  By then Murra had finished her second cup of coffee. She glanced at her watch and decided it was time to look for Blundy. She gathered her robes around her, nodded a pretty good-by to the others at the table and walked gracefully to the admitting room.

  She had almost left it too late. Blundy had made better time than she expected. He was there before her, hal
f carrying the stumbling Mercy MacDonald, whose eyes were wildly glancing around, who was whispering gibberish too softly for anyone to hear, who had soiled herself, whose head lolled helplessly against Blundy's shoulder until the nurses eased her onto a gurney for her last trip.

  * * *

  Blundy hadn't seen her, and Murra decided to leave it that way. There was a question she wanted to ask Blundy-was he going to write something about Nordvik and its crew? And was there a part for her?-but she confidently knew those answers already. So inconspicuously she turned and went to the outside door, where she had no trouble finding a ride back to the summer city. He was, she thought kindly, entitled to his last moments alone with the MacDonald woman.

  For herself, there were things to do. She planned the rest of her day with care. She would go to their comfortable, charming home and prepare a nice meal for him. He would be tired when he got home, and frayed from what had to have been a distressing experience. Choosing the menu was a bit of a problem, she reflected on the way down the hill. It would have to be something that could be kept ready for serving to him at short notice.

  She didn't know just when he would get there, but there was no doubt in her mind that, sooner or later, he would; for where else was there for him to go?

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