Stopping at Slowyear Read online

  Captain Hawkins. . . .

  Yes, MacDonald decided, he was the one she needed to talk to. The problem was to find him. He certainly wouldn't be on the bridge; that was Horeger's territory now. When she stopped by the little suite he shared with his elderly wife, she was there but the captain wasn't. But Marjorie Hawkins, though not fond of Mercy MacDonald (or of any other single woman on the ship, her husband's advanced age notwithstanding), somewhat reluctantly told her he could be found in his workshop.

  He wasn't there, either, when MacDonald pushed open the door after a couple of minutes of fruitless knocking. She could see, though, that he wasn't far. Captain Hawkins's scrimshaw work was glass mosaics, assembled with painstaking care and a fair number of cut fingers. Pieces of the work were scattered all over the room, piles of glass chips of a hundred colors covering every flat surface in the room. For further indication that he was nearby, the wall screen was on.

  Confident that he was no farther than the nearest toilet, MacDonald sat down to wait for his return. She saw that the captain's screen, like Betsy arap Dee's, was displaying their next port of call. It was a different view, though; probably it was what was being seen, in real time, by Nordvik's bow cameras. Thousands of stars were visible, but there was no doubt which star was Slowyear's sun. Nordvik was still far away from Slowyear's star, much farther than Pluto was from its primary. All the same, Slowyear's star was far the brightest thing in that part of the sky. She squinted to see if she could make out the planet of Slowyear itself, but didn't expect success. It was still too faint, probably lost in its sun's glare.

  She knew well enough what Slowyear was going to be like. Like everybody else on Nordvik, she had pored over its statistics for hour after hour, partly out of generalized curiosity, partly looking for a reason to make it her home for the rest of her life-or for not.

  MacDonald knew that the bad thing about Slowyear was the very thing it was named after. Slowyear had a very slow year indeed. The planet was a good long way from its sun, and took a good long time to circle it-nineteen standard years, just about.

  Fortunately for the hope of any life on Slowyear, its orbit was nearly circular.

  "Nearly" circular still wasn't quite. The small difference between elliptical and round was critical. It meant that the planet had winters, and it had summers. And when you said "winter", she thought, biting her lip, you weren't talking about three or four chilly months. You were talking nasty.

  At aphelion the planet was moving slowly, like a yo-yo at the top of its climb, and Slowyear stayed at that distant point for nearly five standard years.

  Five bitter-cold Earth-time years of hiding underground to stay away from the surface snow and cold and misery. Mercy Macdonald, who had not experienced any real winter since she was eighteen years old, remembered the data table that said a typical night-time winter low on Slowyear was minus 70 degrees Celsius and a typical daytime winter high was only about minus ten, and felt herself shivering in anticipation.

  Of course, luck had been with the visitors on Nordvik. It wasn't winter on Slowyear now. The good part was that they would be reaching the planet in its late spring. There would be plenty of time to decide whether to stay or not before things got frigid.

  When Captain Hawkins found her waiting he gave her an apologetic grin.

  "It's nice to see you, Mercy," he said, pleased. "Sorry I missed you, but that's what comes with being an old man." He made a face to express the annoying problems of being old and male, then changed the subject.

  "How do you like it?" he asked, gesturing at the nearly finished scrimshaw wall plaque on his easel. It was a mosaic picture of their starship, made of thousands of bits of glass, carefully cracked and mounted on a plastic board, and under it he had assembled bright red letters to spell out a motto: Ad astra per aspera.

  "It'll sell," Macdonald said, giving her professional opinion. "What does it say?"

  The captain dreamily traced the words with a fingertip. "It's Latin," he said with pride. "It means, To the stars through difficulties." Macdonald snickered, and he looked up at her with shrewd humor, enjoying the patness of the motto with her. Then he sighed. "Of course, I don't suppose they'll remember Latin on Slowyear. We'll have to translate for them-but that just makes it more interesting, don't you think?"

  "I'm sure of it," she told him, glad to be able to say something kind to him that was also true. Macdonald liked the captain. He was old and feeble, sure, and she hadn't forgiven him for letting the reins of the ship fall into Hans Horeger's hands, but he was a nice man. If he had been just a little younger-But he wasn't younger. He'd been in his fifties when he took command of the ship, back in Earth orbit. Now that he was well past eighty his principal activities were scrimshaw and naps.

  He was already sitting before his scrimshaw, sorting through the pile of violet glass for just the right piece to make a background star. She cleared her throat. "Captain?"

  He looked up with a smile of reluctant resignation. "You didn't just come down here for my company, did you? I suppose something's the matter."

  "With Betsy arap Dee," she specified. "I don't know if you know about her problems-"

  "Of course I do," Captain Hawkins said, finding the right chip of purple and dabbing it with cement. "She's miserable. She didn't really want to have that baby, because Hans was the father and wanted to pretend he wasn't, and then it died. Now she hates everybody."

  "She doesn't hate me!" MacDonald protested, then amended herself.

  "Not really, anyway. She hates the whole ship, I guess. She's talking about jumping on Slowyear."

  "Yes," the captain nodded, carefully setting his new star in place.

  "And so am I," she finished.

  He looked up at her kindly. "Of course you are, Mercy. Did you want to ask for my blessing? You've got it. Betsy, too. There's no future for you here." He reached out and covered her hand with his lean, age-spotted one. "I'd do it myself," he said, "if I were a little younger. If Maureen would agree. As it is, I don't know if I'll even go down."

  That startled her. Never before had the captain failed to touch the soil of a new planet. "But you have to!"

  "Nonsense, Mercy. You don't need me. You can handle all the bargaining yourself, and anyway I'm going to have to stay aboard."

  "You mean for the refueling," Macdonald said, trying to understand. "But Horeger can take care of that-"

  "Not just the refueling. Rebuilding." He reached past her to the screen.

  "Look here, Mercy," he ordered as the schematics of Nordvik appeared to replace the starfield. The whole ship was outlined skeletally there, mostly white lines but with some components in yellow and green and a few flashing red. "Look at the air system. It's falling apart; we're going to have to rebuild it if we can-or buy one on Slowyear, if they have anything we can use. And water regeneration's almost as bad, and-well, Maureen tells me we're almost out of fabrics for clothes and bedding; we'll have to see what they can offer there, too. We need a lot of stuff. You'll have to make some good deals for us, Mercy."

  "And if I can't?"

  He considered for a moment, studying the engineering reports. "You will," he said. Then, wearily, he flicked the screen off. "You have to.

  Otherwise we don't go anywhere from Slowyear." He looked at her face and smiled comfortingly. "It won't be so bad for you down there. They eat bugs on Slowyear, did you know that? Oh, they raise sheep and eat them, too, but the only native land life forms they can eat are arthropods.

  Although there's a lot of native fish, or something like fish. They don't seem to have any cows or pigs, by the way. Your frozen genetic materials ought to be worth something. . . . And the place has a lousy climate, and it's a pretty backward world, I think, but you can make a life there, Mercy."

  She looked at him, suddenly apprehensive. True, she had been toying with the idea of jumping ship there in her own thoughts. . . . But that was when she had a choice. But if she didn't? If Slowyear was going to be her last stop, ever?
Make a life on a planet with a year nearly twenty years long? Bitter winters, burning summers, the only time the place would be bearable at all when freeze was melting toward burn, or sweat on its way down to chill. What kind of life would that be?

  Or (the question came uninvited to her mind), for that matter, what kinf of life did she have now?

  Chapter 4

  What Blundy knew for sure as he headed toward Murra's house was that Murra would be there waiting for him. She always was.

  He had to look around and finally ask directions, though, because he not only couldn't find Murra, he couldn't even find their house.

  Naturally she wasn't in the house they'd shared all the mean, long winter just past. That place hadn't even been a house at all, actually; it was a nasty, cramped three-room flat, not much worse than any other winter flat, but not much better, either. It had been in the winter city, dug into the caverns under the hill. No one would want to go back and live there again for many months now. Certainly not until summer drove them to it, maybe not until the next desolate winter came, when the babies born now would be getting close to puberty and just beginning to understand what they were in for when the cold came.

  As it turned out, Murra wasn't even in the house he'd left her in (that one hardly more than a tent), because while Blundy was out with the flocks the building boom had reached its peak. Most of the constructions of the year before, that winter ice had crushed and spring floods had washed away entirely, had now been replaced. Now they had a real house, he discovered. Murra had moved their things into it while he was out with the sheep. It was smallish but spanking new, all their own; and of course Murra was waiting in it for him, because she always was.

  What she was waiting for was to be kissed. He obliged her, wondering why a kiss seemed so much like a political statement, but she had no such reservations. She pressed herself against him as they kissed, confident she was welcomed.

  In a certain sense she was; Blundy could feel his body confirming it.

  Whatever Blundy's thoughts felt about his wife, his body found her powerfully attractive. Murra was a handsome woman: tall, ten centimeters taller than Blundy himself. She was big-boned and not exactly pretty, but very close to beautiful. Murra had a kind of Oriental cast to her face, with long, black hair and blue eyes, and when she moved it was with studied grace.

  More than any of that, she was Blundy's. She proclaimed it in everything she did. She was totally supportive of him in everything he chose to do, and let that fact be known to everyone. She had a soft, cultivated, well-articulated voice; for Blundy it was her best feature, and the one that made her the exact right choice to appear in his vid productions.

  All in all, she was ideal for him. He accepted that fact. It was an annoyance that he didn't always enjoy it.

  When they had finished their kiss she didn't release him but comfortably and whispered the latest bits of news against his lips to bring him up to date. "They're starting up the shuttles," she told him. "Ten-month infant mortality figures are up a little-around eleven point three per cent-but that's still in the normal range. I hope you like your new house; I only finished moving things in last week. And, oh, yes, the Fezguth-Mokorris have broken up, he's taken up with some two-year-old and Miwa simply can't stand it."

  She sounded proud. Blundy recognized the tone, because he knew what the pride came from. Both Kilowar Miwa Fezguth and Murra were among the few who could call themselves successful winter wives, the envied kind who had managed to keep their marriages going all through the cramped, everybody-in-everybody's-pocket months and months of the interminable winter. But Murra's pride was double now, because, of the two of them, it now transpired that only Murra had managed to stay married through the spring. "I feel so sorry for her," she added generously, smug in her own security. "They say if you can make it as a winter wife you can make it forever, but I guess they showed that isn't true for everybody. Just the lucky ones like us," she finished with pride.

  "Yes," he said, separating himself from her at last.

  She gazed at him fondly. "And do you like what I've done with your new house?"

  "Of course. Are they all in working condition?" Blundy asked, and she looked puzzled until she realized he meant the shuttles.

  "Oh, I think so. They've been kept in a good, sheltered valley ever since the last ship came. Of course, the ice covered them every year, but the roof held." She smiled at him affectionately. "Don't worry, they'll be ready to go by the time the ship gets here. And it'll be warmspring by then-a good time to come here, don't you think? Are you going to write something about it?"

  Since Blundy was used to his wife's uncanny ability to read his mind-though he was certain he'd never said anything to her about his plans-he didn't blink at that. "I've been thinking about it, yes."

  "I thought you might. Of course, you know best, dear, but isn't that sort of depressing subject?"

  "Tragic," he corrected her. "That's where real drama is, after all, and I'm tired of writing all this light stuff to keep people quiet during the winter."

  "I see. So you'll want to go up to the ship right away, won't you? Don't deny it, dear; who knows you as well as I do? And of course you should."

  He didn't deny it. He'd already decided to put his application in, and with his standing in the community there was every chance the governor's council would approve it. He had even told Murra when he'd done it.

  What he hadn't told her was who he proposed to take with him on that first mission to the starship, and so he was surprised when, without a break, she went on:

  "And how was Petoyne?"

  Blundy misunderstood her on purpose. "She's fine. She got away with it again."

  "No, of course she got away with it," Murra said, tolerant and sweet, and not in the least interested with the fact that once more Petoyne had escaped with her life, "or you would have said something right away.

  That's not what I mean. I mean how was she in bed?"

  He glared at her. "For God's sake, Murra, she isn't even one yet!"

  "I know," Murra agreed, her tone interested and a little amused. "Isn't it funny how men always like the very young ones? Is it because they're so skinny? Or so ignorant and unexperienced? Please don't be embarrassed to talk about it with me, Blundy. I've never been jealous, have I? And you know we always tell each other things like that." She smiled. "In pillow talk," she added, "because, do you realize, you haven't even looked at your new house yet? Not even at the new bed I just put in." And he knew what to do then, and wondered when it had begun to be a chore.

  * * *

  There were times while they were making love when Blundy's body managed to make Blundy's mind forget the fact that Murra was really a royal pain in the ass. At those times he pretty much forgot to think about anything at all, because Murra in bed was not at all like the Murra who let herself be viewed as she sat, perfumed, enrobed and regal, in her reception room. In sexual intercourse she was wild. She screamed and scratched, and she writhed and squeezed; she was everything any man dreamed of in the arts of intercourse. None of it was inadvertent, either.

  That had been of the most disillusioning of Blundy's slow discoveries about the woman he had married. It was all rehearsed. Murra made love by script, her skills quickly and thoroughly learned. "A lady in the drawing room, a harlot in bed," she said of herself, in that pillow talk that meant so much to her, and she had herself perfectly right.

  But then, when they had sufficiently worn each other out, she naturally had to spoil it all by talking.

  "I wrote you a poem, my love," she told him, serene again if sweaty.

  "Would you like to hear it?"

  "Of course," he of course said, but hardly listened as she pulled her notebook out of the nightstand and sat naked and crosslegged at the foot of the bed, reading. The poem was a typically long one. It had to do with ancient shepherds and the loving lasses they had left behind them, and it was full of graceful little turns of phrase and unexpected rhymes, but he d
idn't really listen. He was studying her. He observed, as though for the first time, that his wife had a wide-browed face that tapered to the chin, with large, pale blue eyes and the kind of bobbed hair that is usually seen in pictures of medieval squires. She smiled a lot as she read-faintly, enigmatically, frequently. It occurred to Blundy that Murra's smiles didn't seem to be related to anything she found humorous, only to an inner confidence that whatever happened next was bound to be nice.

  She didn't ask him if he liked the poem when she was done, she only sat there, regarding him with that smiling self-confidence. So naturally he said,

  "It's a fine poem, Murra. Your poems are always fine."

  She nodded graciously. "Thank you, Bludy, but what about you? Did you write anything while you were away?" That was the naked question he had known she would ask, so much an offense to hear. He shook his head. "Not even a political manifesto?" He shook his head again, resentfully now. Murra didn't let that put her off. She laughed, the silvery, loving, forgiving laugh that he had heard so often. "Oh, Blundy, what am I going to do with you? You don't write anything but puppet shows all winter because you need to be alone in order to do anything serious.

  Then you don't write anything at all when you're out in the boonies with all the room in the world because- Well, I don't know what the because is there, do I? Maybe then you're not alone enough out there, are you, with that pretty little Petoyne there to distract you?"

  "Good night," he said, and rolled over, and pretended to be asleep.

  Murra was not deceived. She snuggled down next to him, rubbing the small of his back in the way that he liked, or had once told her he liked.