Stopping at Slowyear

Chapter One

The ship was called the Nordvik (though no one aboard it remembered why), and it was a big one.

Even if you didn’t count the thrusters on the outriggers astern, or the projectors for the Bussard collection cone at the bow, it was more than a hundred meters long; if just the habitable part of Nordvik had set down on any football field on Earth it would have lapped over at both ends. That would never happen, though. It had been a good many centuries, Earth time, since Nordvik had been anywhere near its home planet, and there was very little chance that it would ever return.

It also wouldn’t happen because Nordvik, or any ship like it, could never set down on any planet anyway. All those ancient starships were built in space and lived all their lives in space mostly interstellar space, at that and sooner or later they all died in space.

More likely it would be sooner, thought Mercy MacDonald as she slammed her door in the face of Deputy Captain Hans Horeger. What MacDonald didn’t want to do was die when the ship did. She had lived aboard Nordvik for twenty-seven years, ship’s time never mind the time the outside universe went by; she didn’t want to think about that twenty-seven years and eight planetary systems, and it was time to find some comfortable place to settle down. With some suitable man, she hoped. But not just any man.

Certainly not with the fat and lecherous unselectively lecherous, which made it worse Deputy Captain Hans Horeger.

The first thing MacDonald did was make sure the door was well locked behind her, with Horeger on the other side. The second thing was unwrap the towel she had clutched around her as she dashed out of the shower stall and dab at her sticky body. The bastard hadn’t even let her rinse before he began grabbing. It wasn’t much use. She moistened a cloth in her washstand, but you never could get all the soap off with a cloth. She resigned herself to going around sticky until her next turn at the showers.

It wasn’t hard to do that. She’d had plenty of practice. The people who couldn’t resign themselves to aggravation didn’t last long on a tramp starship; and there were always plenty of tranks available in her medicine chest.

She swallowed one, sighed, and set to work.

Naked, she sat down at her desk to begin keying up the ship’s trade-goods manifest for the next planetfall.

Concentration came hard. Horeger had not given up.

She could hear him scratching at the door. She could even hear his voice; it was too low-pitched to carry, but that didn’t matter. She knew what he was saying, and the occasional words that filtered through “bitch” and “tease” and even that word he used as a final argument, “love” were all words she had heard from him before.

It made her laugh. She knew just what he was doing out there. She could picture him crouched at her door, lips close to the crack, hands cupped around his mouth so that the rest of Nordvik’s people wouldn’t hear. As though any of them failed to observe his unrelenting pursuit. Especially his wife, Maureen.

Mercy MacDonald stood up and dressed quickly in fresh clothes, not because there was anyone to see but because she intended to speak to Horeger and obscurely did not want to do so naked. She looked at herself in the mirror while she was pulling on the blue coverall. Figure still good, chin clean, eyes clear not bad for forty-five and a bit, she thought. The coverall, on the other hand, needed mending again at the shoulder seams; she would have to do a good deal of patching, she thought, to get herself ready for a planetfall. She listened at the door for a moment, then called, “Leave me alone, Hans. It’s over. If you’re that horny, go find Maureen.”

But he didn’t answer.

“Why, you bastard,” MacDonald said to the door, suddenly angry when she realized he had given up.

She didn’t have any legitimate reason for the anger.

She had certainly made it clear to him that furtive sex when his wife wasn’t looking didn’t satisfy her anymore, especially when she discovered she was sharing him also with her best friend…but why had he given up so easily?

One of the worst features of life aboard Nordvik was that among the fifty-six human beings who lived on the starship, adult males were a distinct minority.

There were only twenty-two of them, against thirty-one adult women adult enough, anyway. There were also three children (would be four in a week or two, MacDonald reminded herself, as soon as Betsy arap Dee delivered herself), but the ones already born were all girls, which would some day make the balance even worse. Would, that is, if no one else jumped ship, or if they didn’t recruit any new people at their next stop; but that was for the future. Meanwhile the oldest child, at eight, was still too unripe even for Hans Horeger’s attention.

Facing odds of that sort was a bad deal for the nine women without regular mates. Mercy MacDonald didn’t like being one of them.

She hadn’t always been. She’d had a husband for a good many years; in fact, both she and Walter were among the handful who were said to own a piece of Nordvik’s keel. Apart from the doddering old captain there was no one else left aboard who, like Mercy MacDonald, had signed on when the ship first launched from Earth orbit. Counting the three children, eleven of the ship’s complement were ship-born; all the rest had been picked up at one planetfall or another along the long, twisted way.

That was just one more injustice to swallow.

Seniority should have counted for something. Even not factoring in the datum that MacDonald was probably the smartest and most able person aboard; even not adding on the intangible fact that she was also just about the most loyal person in the ship’s complement, which she had proved by not jumping ship, not even at Hades, their last port of call, when twenty-three others were finally sufficiently fed up to pay off … including her own husband.

Neither brains nor loyalty had paid off for her, though. MacDonald was still no more than eighth or ninth down in the ship’s hierarchy. As “purser,”

whatever that ancient tide meant, she was head of the trading section, to be sure, but that meant nothing when the ship was between planets.

She thought for a moment about Hades. She had been tempted to leave with the others there; Nordvik was running poorer and less hopeful every year, and there was certainly no future aboard for anyone.

But Hades had been the wrong place. Hades didn’t have much good land. Most of the planet was rocky hills and desert, and everything good had been nailed down by the first settlers. For whom everybody else worked at low pay, when they could get any pay at all. All the promising planets were well in the past, MacDonald told herself. The longer Nordvik traveled, the worse the places it visited seemed to get. It was even possible that this new one they were coming up on would be even drearier than Hades.

It wasn’t the first time that notion had occurred to her. She had even thought it during the wretched weeks when they were orbiting Hades, with her husband and herself snapping at each other whenever they were in earshot. She might well have paid off there herself … if Walter hadn’t.

There had almost been a mutiny after Hades. A near half of the crew were urging tottering old Captain Hawkins to give up the whole idea of trading with future planets. They wanted either to settle down on one of the colonized worlds, or even to find some new one from the old robot-probe reports and start a colony of their own. That was when Hans Horeger had become the actual captain, in all but name. He was the one who stirred everyone up to go on.

Anyway, it wasn’t a good idea. Nobody was settling new worlds right now. There were at least a dozen that the robot probes had identified by now, and maybe more reports still coming in from stars still farther away. But by now everybody knew how hard it was to start a colony in a world where no human being, no creature from Earth at all, had ever lived before. The rage for colonizing had worn itself out centuries (Earth-time centuries, at least) before.

Oh, no doubt the pioneering spirit would blossom back to life again some time some later time, maybe a few centuries down the pike, when all the new worlds were themselves beginning to bulge at the seams and the adventurers and the malcontents would yearn to move on. But not just yet. And definitely not with the discouraged, tired, aging crew of the starship Nordvik.

Mercy MacDonald shook herself and got back to work. Maybe Slowyear would be better.

Maybe it wouldn’t, too, because tramp starships like Nordvik didn’t get to the better worlds. Ships like Nordvik didn’t have any real reason for being anymore.

Ships like Nordvik were fossils. The only reason their cooperative had been able to buy it in the first place was that whole class of starships had already been made obsolete by the new grid-function vessels that could actually land on a planet’s surface, at least when the planet was big enough and prosperous enough to afford a landing system. Nordwks were a disappearing breed, good for nothing but wandering around the poorest and least developed colony worlds, in hope of transacting a little business and replenishing their supplies so they could wander a little farther.

But as she patiently checked over the invoices, MacDonald wondered whether even a poor world would be poor enough to want to buy any of the things they had to sell. Some of the appliances and machines aboard Nordvik were ten or fifteen years old ship’s time and technology had progressed beyond them wherever they had gone. Their trade goods were almost as obsolete as the ship. There were 2300 pieces of “scrimshaw” the novelties the ship’s crew made for themselves, to sell and to pass the time between stars including poems, art objects, and knitted goods. There were eleven thousand, almost, varieties of flowers, fruits, ornamental trees, vegetables, and grasses, the most promising of them already setting new seeds in the refresher plots. There was a library of nearly 50,000 old Earth books in the datastore assuming anybody on this new planet read books anymore; at Hades that part of the cargo had been a total loss, which was one of the reasons why MacDonald thought the planet was so well named. (But they were good books! MacDonald had read six or seven thousand of them herself, one time or another, and they’d made the long travel times endurable for her.

Almost.) There were machines to sell to be copied (if ancient Earth machines had any value anymore) and, most of all, the huge store of data that covered every branch of human knowledge, from medicine to anthropology to combinatorial mathematics (also, sadly, subject to being deflatingly out of date).

If you put a cash value on all Nordvik’s wares (as MacDonald had to do, to figure out what to trade for what) that had to be easily thirty or forty million dollars’ worth of goods even after you discounted the holds packed with stuff that probably wasn’t ever going to sell to anyone, anywhere.

But the value of a commodity was what it would fetch in the market, and who knew what these Slowyear people would be willing to pay?

She was glad to be interrupted by the ship’s bell, less glad when it was Hans Horeger’s flabbily hairy face that appeared in the corner of the screen. “Oh, shit,” she said. At least it wasn’t a personal call; it was one of his incessant all-ship addresses.

That didn’t make it much better. She resignedly saved her worksheet and let Horeger take over the full screen. He had got dressed after their little interlude in the showers, anyway. Now he was wearing his public face, calm, self-possessed and not at all like the frantic breast-grabber whose sweaty hands had been all over her twenty minutes before.

“Shipmates,” Horeger was saying, yellow teeth gleaming between mustache and beard, “I have just received another communication from our next port of call at the planet of Slowyear. We’re still at long range, but reception is better now and the news from them is all good. They say they haven’t had a ship call in a long time. I don’t know how long, exactly, because they use their own calendar. But long. And they’re thrilled we’re coming. They’re a good size for us, too. They’ve got a world population of half a million or so. That’s kind of funny,” he said, in that chatty, endearing style that endeared nobody, “because they’ve had twelve or fifteen generations to build up their numbers, but it could have been a lot worse.” Of courser could have, MacDonald thought. It could have been zero. Slowyear wouldn’t have been the first planet to die out between visits, leaving the next wanderer to arrive that way high and dry. “Anyway that’s half a million customers.

Good ones, friends! They’re farmers. Farmers and stock raisers, and that means they won’t have a hell of a lot of industry so I’m counting on selling a lot of our machine cargo there. Let’s take a look at what Slowyear is like.”

He waved a hand, and under his chin the planet’s stats appeared: An F8 star; a planetary surface gravity very close to Earth normal; an atmosphere a little denser, but with a slightly lower partial pressure of oxygen. “See what it says about the primary?” he invited. “It’s bright. So those worrywarts among you can rest easy we won’t have any trouble refueling there.”

“Meaning worrywarts like me,” Mercy MacDonald told the screen, since she had been telling Horeger for months that if they didn’t refuel pretty soon their next stop would be their last.

She might have said more, because talking back to Horeger on the screen was one of the habits that had become standard for her and a lot less maddening than talking to Horeger when he could hear but it dawned on her that the faint tapping sound she heard was someone at her door.

For a nasty moment she feared it might be Horeger back again. Impossible, of course; there he was blithely pontificating away in real time on the screen.

When she opened the door she was pleased to see that it was little Betsy arap Dee, as close as she had to a “best friend” on Nordvik. “Hi,” she said, welcoming Then she got a better look at Betsy’s face. “What’s the matter?” MacDonald asked sharply, suddenly afraid.

Betsy was holding her swollen belly. “The baby,”

she sobbed. “I’m spotting, and I hurt. Can you help me get to the sickbay, please?”

By the time Mercy MacDonald got her friend to the room they used for a sickbay, Sam Bagehot, the closest thing they had to a nurse, had an obstetric bed ready and Danny de Bride, their approximation of a doctor, was fretfully studying the obstetric displays from their medical database.

De Bride wasn’t a real doctor, but he was the best Nordvik had left after the mass desertion on Hades, and he had at least long since read through all the gynecological section. “I hope I know what I’m doing,” he gritted to MacDonald as the nurse guided Betsy’s feet into the stirrups and he played with the fetoscope earphones in his hand.

“I hope so, too,” MacDonald said, but not out loud.

Out loud she only whispered encouragingly in Betsy arap Dee’s ear. Whether her friend heard her she could not say. Betsy’s eyes were closed, her forehead was cold and clammy and she was moaning.

De Bride was muttering something to his nurse, but MacDonald missed it. Over their heads Horeger was still prattling noisily away on the screen. “What?”

she demanded.

“I said she’s hardly dilated at all,” de Bride complained.

“And I’m not getting any fetal heartbeat,” said Sam, holding the metal disk on Betsy’s belly and watching the readout.

“Oh, shit,” said de Bride. “What do you think, Sam.?

Do I have to do a C-section? I’ve never even seen one!”

“You’ll see one now,” his nurse told him. “Mercy, give me hand. You take care of the instruments while I handle the anesthesia, will you?”

The “will you” part was only politeness. There wasn’t any real choice. If there had been, Mercy MacDonald would have been out of there long before the cutting started, but under the circumstances she was present for it all.

She had never seen anyone deliberately slice into the flesh of another human being before. There was less blood than she had expected, but still a great deal of blood; it went faster than she had imagined, but still a long business of de Bride muttering angrily to himself as he inexpertly pushed muscle walls and tissues out of the way and fumbled for the little scarlet gnome curled up inside Betsy’s abdomen. MacDonald was both horrified and fascinated yes, and something else, too. Almost even envious. For here was silly little Betsy arap Dee bringing a whole new person into existence. Marvelously! Wonderfully. Enviably….

For a moment MacDonald almost forgot the gore, didn’t hear de Bride’s steady muttering to himself or Horeger’s orating from the screen. She could do this, she told herself. She could have done it years earlier, when she still had Walter to be a father, could still do it, maybe, if she didn’t take too long getting it started

“Here,” said de Bride suddenly. “Hold it while I cut the cord.”

MacDonald found herself with that purple-red little creature in her unpracticed hands. She blinked down at it, wondering. It wasn’t until de Bride said, shamefaced, “I couldn’t save it, you saw that. Maybe it twisted in the womb, you know? And the cord strangled it” that she realized the baby she was holding was dead.

She stood frozen, until the nurse told her that she might as well put the tiny thing down. Then she did as she was told, and began to clean the bloodstains off the arms of her blue coverall (now really ruined, she thought regretfully) with a dressing. She didn’t look at Betsy arap Dee, now being sewn glumly back together. She was watching Hans Horeger’s face on the screen, listening as intently as if she cared about anything he might say.

“We’re still about two light-weeks away,” he was saying. “Call it three thousand a.u. We’ll be there in eight months, just about. Friends, I feel in my bones that this is going to be the stop that pays off for all the others. They’re going to be crazy about us!”

From behind Mercy MacDonald, Sam Bagehot said, “They’d better be.”