Stopping at Slowyear

Chapter Two

Actually, the people on Slowyear pretty nearly were going crazy over the approaching ship, or at least some of them were, though it would be many weeks before Nordvik entered orbit. Mostly it was the young ones who were working up steam on the subject, though even among them there were quite a few who had too many other things on their minds to get excited over the prospect of a visiting interstellar ship.

For instance, there was Blundy. Blundy had his mind full of other things, which not only weren’t the approaching Nordvik, but weren’t even the wife who was waiting for him in the summer city, much less the seventeen hundred things he was supposed to keep his mind on namely the long ambling column of sheep he was herding into town for shearing and slaughter. Hans Horeger had been right about that.

The people of Slowyear spent a lot of time farming their fields and tending their livestock, stocks, but where Horeger went wrong was that they didn’t stop there. To the people aboard Nordvik a word like “shepherd” meant a beardless boy or a doddering old man with a stick, not someone riding in a computer-guided, hydrogen-fueled crawler who led his flock with a radio beacon keyed to the receivers implanted in each nose. The people of Slowyear had their high technology, all right; they just didn’t show it off.

In that Blundy was like his planet, because he didn’t show off all his strengths, either. Blundy was short and broad, with a body that was all muscle and almost no fat. The muscle didn’t show. If you ever picked him up you would be surprised to discover how much he massed if he allowed you to take the liberty of trying to pick him up. There wasn’t much chance of that. Trying it would most likely turn out to mean that you were stretched out on the ground in front of him, gazing stupidly up as you wondered if anyone else had felt the earthquake.

What Blundy was thinking about on his home-bound trip was politics. He had plenty of time to think, of course, because what he was doing took very little of his attention. There was hardly any local traffic on the road this far from the city a few tractor-trailers on their way to and from the fishing villages on the coast and almost nothing else and anyway the crawler’s computer did most of the driving. Blundy could have been thinking about many things because he was many things not the least of them, a celebrated entertainer on the view screens. But what drew his imagination just then was his political planning.

Because he had been off with the flock for the four seventy-day months that were his taxtime he was beginning to feel eager to get back into his political incarnation again. He was trying to find a theme for a campaign. If he could work out the right subjects to talk about he would then, he calculated, do well to take the town auditorium for a speech the next night if the auditorium was finished, as his helper, Petoyne, had told him it would be when they talked on the radio; if Petoyne had been efficient enough to reserve it for him.

There remained the difficult question, which was what the speech should be about. It had to be important. His followers would expect no less.

But what could he say that would sound important enough to shock them all into life?

Because his mind was far from what he was doing, he almost missed the traffic warden standing in the road before him. The man’s hand was held sternly up and he was scowling.

Blundy slowed the crawler; he hadn’t noticed that they had just passed the highest point in the pass.

Other roads joined them there, and there was a tractor-trailer train of construction material waiting to cross before him. Blundy leaned out of the cab window to give the warden a quizzical look. Then the warden recognized him. He gave Blundy an embarrassed salute and waved him on.

Blundy waved his thanks to the warden and his apology to the other driver, who would now have a good long wait for the flock to clear the crossing. He didn’t refuse the courtesy, though. It was a real nuisance to try to halt a procession of seventeen hundred sheep.

Then, as they began their descent into town, on impulse Blundy opened the cab door and jumped out to stretch his legs. The computer would be quite capable of following its programmed route without him, and he thought better on his feet.

Blundy landed easily on the packed dirt beside the stock road. He stretched and took a deep breath, letting the tractor and its trailer crawl past him at their two-kilometer-an-hour trudge. The road itself had been repaved since the last time he had come by, four months earlier, with the much shorter line of sheep heading out to the eastern pastures. Now there were beginning to be an occasional high-speed vehicle passing by in both directions not at high speed here, though, not as they squeezed past the shambling line of sheep, careful of the occasional willful stray. There weren’t many strays, Blundy saw with satisfaction. The flock was obediently following the bellwether radio in the trailer; and the dogs were properly patrolling between sheep and vehicles to keep them off the paved road and on the grassy verge.

Then Blundy pressed two fingertips to his lips. It was what he did when he got an idea.

“Like sheep,” he said, half-voicing the words past his nearly closed lips. “Like sheep we stray in all directions, pointlessly and ignorantly, without a real goal, wandering until we die “

No. It was the right sort of note to strike, but certainly not “until we die.” There was too much dying going on all the time as it was. He scowled at the flock and tried again ” wandering without goal or direction. How can we find a goal worth attaining?

What can lead us as surely as the radio call leads the flock to “

No again, positively no. Wrong image entirely.

What the call led the sheep to was the shearers’ sheds for all and the slaughterhouse for most. He was getting back to death again, and that was no good.

Still, he had the feeling that there was something there that he could use. It was just the kind of quick, elucidating metaphor that his political audiences loved: the radio beacon that guided the sheep standing for the purpose that would carry the voters with him. And there was something more there waiting to be expressed. Something about sheep going astray was tickling his mind, some phrase he had heard once that had come out of some old book…

Murra would know. “The hell with it,” he said, meaning for now; he would ask Murra, out of her vast reading in the books that no one else bothered with, and then maybe it would all come clear.

He looked around, pleased at the sight, pleased to be going home again after taxtime. Looking down into the valley, he thought the broad Sometimes River had dropped a good deal since the last time he had passed this way. It was still well over its summertime banks, a hundred meters of flood rushing furiously downhill, but nothing like the raging torrents of first melt he had seen four months before. The glacier on the west wall was showing the signs of advancing warmth, too; it had retreated half a kilometer at least. He squinted at it until he thought he had found the spot under its lip where, at the end of the summer before, he had shared a cabin with the woman who had then been his new and brightest love.

That had been a long time ago.

Murra wasn’t new and bright anymore, and the intervening winter’s ice had planed away all trace of the cabin.

Then an eruption of yelping behind him made him turn. He took a good look at his flock and swore. The long line of sheep was breaking up into clots. Even though the dogs barked and nipped at their rumps the animals were tiring and so they were pausing to nibble at the fresh growth beneath their hooves. He touched the talk button on his lapel. “Give them a jolt to wake them up; they’re clumping,” he ordered Katiro, his replacement helper now drowsing in the trailer (and the boy was incompetent, too; why had Petoyne begged to go in early to take care of some undefined business and left him with this idiot?) A moment later Blundy heard a chorus of dismayed baaing from the flock as their radio collars gave them peremptory little electric shocks. Obediently they picked up their pace, but Blundy was annoyed. The radioman in the back of the tractor should have prevented that. If Petoyne had been in the trailer it wouldn’t have happened.

Petoyne would have kept an eye on the flock without being reminded. But Petoyne had had that private business that Blundy had decided he didn’t even want to know about and out of fondness for his chief helper Blundy had agreed.

It occurred to Blundy that his fondness for Petoyne was likely to become a liability.

He turned and walked after the trailer, trying to remember that glimmering of an idea about sheep, wasn’t it” But just as it was coming back to him he heard his name called. “Hey, Blundy!” A tractor pulling a flatbed loaded with protein supplement for the nursing ewes in the field had slowed and the driver was waving to him. “You’ve got a welcoming commit-tee!” the man shouted, jerking a thumb back down the hill toward the summer city. When Blundy craned his neck to see past his own tractor, already half a kilometer ahead, he saw that it was truth….

And that useful half-formed idea was irretrievably gone.

There were fifty people waiting for Blundy as he stepped aside and let the tractor proceed toward the pens people of all shapes and sizes, male and female, oldsters of four and even five years and children well, semi-children, like his quite nearly adult assistant Petoyne, who was waving violently to catch his eye.

Blundy gave them all a sober salute. He didn’t smile at them. Blundy did not mind at all when his partisans made a fuss over him, but he didn’t like to give the appearance of encouraging it. Petoyne was hurrying toward him, whispering urgently. “Blundy?

I need a favor, and you’re my best friend, so you’re the only one I can ask. Remember my dog that was getting kind of old? Well, I didn’t like the idea of lolling him just because he wasn’t a pup anymore, so I did a kind of dumb thing “

Blundy shook his head. “Oh, hell, Petoyne.

Another dumb thing? Talk to me later,” he said, not wanting to hear. He turned to the waiting crowd, marshalling his thoughts. There was a rock at the side of the road, thrown there by Sometimes River when it had rampaged through at icebreak. Blundy climbed up it to get a better look at his welcomers. Were they political or theatrical? A little of each, he decided, and settled on political, not on the evidence, but because what he really wanted was to convert some of the people who admired him for his theatrical work into the ones who followed his political lead.

So, “Citizens,” he said, improvising as he went along, “you know where I’ve been. I’ve been paying off my taxtime, and I ask myself: Why so much taxtime? What do the governors do with the taxtime? Is the winter city any bigger or more comfortable with all the taxtime work we put in? Are we ever going to start that other city on Deep Bay they’ve been talking about for years? Do they have a plan?”

He shook his head to indicate the answer, and there was a mutter of moderate agreement from the crowd they didn’t see quite where he was going, but they were willing to follow him far enough to find out.

“Then why so much taxtime?” he demanded. “Why should an ordinary citizen have to spend a twentieth of his life working off his obligations to the state, when nothing ever changes for the better? I’m not talking about money taxes; we all pay income tax, and that’s all right; no one complains about that. But to be required as well to put in long, weary hours at the state’s business and always in the best times of the year, when we could be enjoying ourselves why, that is slavery. ” Louder grunts of approval. Blundy was beginning to catch the rhythm of his own oratory, so he gave them the smile he had withheld. “But we can’t discuss that as fully as it deserves now,” he said.

“Tomorrow night ” he glanced at Petoyne, who nodded. “Tomorrow night I’ll be speaking at the assembly, and I hope I’ll see you all there. But now well, I haven’t been home for four months. So if you’ll excuse me?”

And he jumped nimbly off the rock, moving through them, shaking hands, kissing some of the younger women, with Petoyne tagging grimly behind.

It all took time. When he was well clear of the last of them Petoyne tugged imploringly at his blouse. “Please, Blundy. I need a favor.”

He didn’t stop, because he didn’t want any of the fans to catch up with him, but he looked down at her.

She was a small woman small girl, really; she hadn’t yet finished her first full year. She was undersized for her age and that made her even shorter than Blundy, though he was no giant himself. “Well?” he asked.

She hesitated. “Remember my dog?” she said, as though she hadn’t said it before. “They were going to put him down because of his age, you know. But he was a good dog, Blundy. I grew up with him. I thought if I could just switch him with one of the others “

“Oh, God,” he said, knowing what would come next.

It did. “They caught me,” she said simply.

“You keep doing really dumb things,” he said, shaking his head.

“I know,” she admitted. “But I need a witness for my sentence. Now. I’m supposed to be in the execution hall in about half an hour. I’ve been waiting and waiting for you, Blundy “

“They sentenced you already?” he asked, suddenly fearful for her.

She nodded. “They gave me another poison pill,” she said. “I have to take it today.”

It was, Blundy counted as he glumly accompanied his friend, the third time he had gone with Petoyne to the execution chamber. He was getting really fed up.

Not just with the nasty business of poison pills itself, but with Petoyne for her dumbness, for the demands she made on him when he had more important things to keep him busy. “But I just got back,” he complained to her as they walked, and, “I could be seeing Murra now instead of wasting my time on this crap,” and, “Can’t you just stay out of trouble for a while?”

Petoyne didn’t answer, not directly anyway. She just stretched to look up at him, shivering in the wind that came down from the ice, her face woebegone, with sorrowful eyes and trembling chin. She didn’t say that the law required her to have a witness for her execution date, because everybody knew that, or that they had long ago agreed that they were best friends, because she’d said that already. Instead she mentioned a fact: “You know you’re getting pretty tired of Murra anyway.” And she complained: “Who did it hurt if I just let Barney live a little longer?” And she mourned, a couple of times, in different ways, “But, Blundy, don’t you see what this means? If I die of this business I could miss the ship. I’ve never seen a ship.

By the time this one lands I could be dead.”

He didn’t respond. They walked in silence, Blundy nodding to people who recognized him, while the girl thought hard. Then an encouraging thought struck her. “One good thing,” she said. “People will see you on the TV.”

He gave her a scowl, intending to show that that wasn’t the kind of publicity he sought, and even more to show that he didn’t care what she said because he had one answer for all. “Quit complaining. It’s your own damn fault,” he told her judgmentally. Petoyne had known what the price was going to be, just as she had known all the other times she’d broken the laws the two times she’d been caught and the dozens of times she hadn’t.

All the same, Blundy knew how the kid felt.

Petoyne wasn’t just afraid of dying well, of course she was afraid of that. Who wouldn’t be? But worse than just the normal fear of dying was that nobody, not anybody, least of all an almost-one-year-old like Petoyne, wanted to be left out of that special once-in-a-lifetime excitement, both thrilling and bleak, that only happened when some wandering spaceship came along. And even “once in a lifetime” was an exaggeration. It wasn’t that often; ships didn’t usually happen along even once in a normal lifetime. There was hardly a soul alive on Slowyear who remembered the last time a ship had called, apart from the tiny and dwindling handful of five-and six-year-old dodderers.

You got to the summer execution chamber by a pebbled walk through a garden. Ribbonblossoms and roses were in bloom, thousands of them, already halfway up their two-meter trellises though spring was only five months old. The flowers didn’t quite hide the chamber from people going by on the summer town’s streets, but they at least kept it decently remote. Most people didn’t look, though a child of thirty months or so stopped as they passed, leaning his bike against the gate to follow them with his fascinated eyes.

The marshal at the door nodded respectfully to Blundy as they entered the hall. Inside, generic music was playing in the waiting room for the execution chamber, the kind of low-pitched whispery strings Blundy associated with funerals and his almost-wife, Murra. (Funny, at first he had loved Murra’s taste in music.) The waiting lounge smelled as flowery as the grounds outside. There was a pot of babywillows in the center of the room, honey-sweet, and minty greenflowers hung from ceiling baskets.

Blundy and Petoyne weren’t the only ones waiting.

There were four couples ahead of them, sitting quietly on the comfortable benches or pretending to be conversing with each other. They would have to wait, Blundy saw with resignation. The waiting was an extra burden, because Petoyne was getting nervouser and nervouser as she came closer to the deed itself, gripping tight Blundy’s hand even though she was still technically short of her first birthday, and thus was only going to take from the children’s jar.

They sat down in the waiting room, nodding politely to the ones ahead of them. The execution clerk wasn’t at his desk, but almost as soon as they sat he came back in, looking around impatiently. Petoyne clutched Blundy’s arm and took a quick breath, trying to read the man’s face. There wasn’t much on it to read, though, because the clerk was a hard-bitten old guy, easily five, maybe more, had seen everything and was surprised at nothing.

He did blink in recognition as he saw Blundy there, and quickly glanced at the monitor on his desk. Then he called a name and read a sentence: “Mossriker Woller Duplesset, for falsification of taxtime records, one in fifty.” A man not much older than Petoyne stood up, hanging his head. The woman with him was nearly three his mother, Blundy supposed and she was the one who was weeping as the executioner escorted them out of the chamber. He paused in the doorway to give Blundy a friendly nod, then closed the door behind them.

There was a moment’s silence, then the ones left began to talk. The old man got up from beside the woman who seemed to be a daughter. Wandering around the room, he paused and absently stroked the soft, downy pods of the babywillow. Then he looked more closely and frowned at what he saw. He got a cup from the water cooler and carefully moistened the roots of the plant. “They should take better care of their plants,” he said severely, to no one in particular.

Then his eyes focused on Blundy.

“You were just coming in this morning, weren’t you?” he asked politely. “I thought so. Those were nice-looking herds you brought in.” Blundy agreed that, for late spring herds, the sheep had fattened up nicely. Another a middle-aged woman, there with a younger woman who could have been her daughter what crime could she have committed to bring her here? said, “They’ve started taking the shuttles out of mothballs,” and then a couple of them began talking about what their parents, or their grandparents, had told them about the way it was the last time a ship came to call. What they did not talk about was why they were here.

Petoyne didn’t join in the conversation, but she was obviously beginning to get her nerve back.

“They’re all adults,” she told Blundy, looking around at the others in the room. “I guess they’ve really got something to worry about.”

“You’ll be an adult pretty soon,” Blundy reminded her.

“But I’m not now,” Petoyne said, managing a smile for the first time. “What I am is hungry. Are you?” And then, without waiting for an answer: “I bet you don’t want any more lamb chops, anyway. Listen, Blundy. Let me tell you what I had last night. I made myself a scogger-broiled; a big one, with plenty of melted butter, the way you like it. And I’ve got a couple more in the freezer, if you want to come over tonight I mean,” she added, glancing at the door, “if everything, uh, if everything goes all right here.” He shook his head. “Well, Murra’s expecting you, I guess.” She might have said more but then, much sooner than any of them expected, the clerk was back for another condemned and escort. The charge was assault this time, one in forty, and, surprisingly, the convict was the middle-aged woman.

“Looks like there’s life in the old girl yet,” Petoyne whispered, almost giggling.

Two other couples were coming in, but Blundy didn’t get a good look at them because the old man was standing up and coming toward them. “I guess it’s my turn next,” he said apologetically. “I didn’t recognize you before, but you are Arakaho Blundy Spenotex, aren’t you? I thought so. I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your show last winter, and, well, I might not get the chance to tell you later on.”

“Of course,” Blundy said, professionally warm.

“Nice of you to say it.”

The old man stood there, nodding like any fan who had made the approach and didn’t really know what to say. “My wife really loved it. It was about the only thing that kept us going, the last couple of months,” he said.

“Well, that’s what it was supposed to do,” Blundy said politely. “Do you recognize Petoyne here? She played Liv on Winter Wife. The younger daughter, remember?”

“Really?” The man seemed quite interested as he studied the girl up and down. “I wouldn’t have known her,” he marveled, “but then, I guess everybody says that, don’t they? The augmentation and all. Well, I’m sorry to see you here, Petoyne, but you’re still under age, aren’t you? So it won’t be so oh,” he said in a different voice, as the door opened, “I guess it’s my turn. I hope I see you again.”

And as the door closed behind him, the executioner and his witness, Petoyne said, “Hopes to see you again! I bet he does! Did you hear that? He got a one in five! For murder. Do you know what I think, Blundy? I think it was probably his wife he murdered, don’t you think? Who else would an old guy like that kill? So maybe the show didn’t keep him going all that long, after all.”

Then there was another wait.

The wall screen was showing a musical group, which was getting on Blundy’s nerves. He got up.

“Mind if I try to get some news?” he asked. No one seemed to care, though they all looked docilely at the screen when it came on. The oil wells on Harbor Island had been successfully uncapped, the pipelines to the refineries on the continent checked and reopened but Blundy already knew that, because he’d seen the smoke on the horizon. The warmspring census, taken after the first crop of post-winter babies had had a chance to be born, showed a planetwide population of 534,907, the highest for that season in nine years. The water temperature in Sometime River was up to 3.5 C, and there was an 80% chance of rain And then the woman came back in. She was alone.

She looked very sober as she made a phone call to the crematorium. It only took a moment to arrange for the disposition of her father’s remains.

Then, long before they were ready for it, it was their turn.

Inside the room Blundy sought out the cameras and found them, discreetly inconspicuous in corners of the room; the carrying out of sentences was a matter of public record. Few bothered to watch unless some relative was at risk, but Blundy squared his shoulders and assumed a properly grave expression.

The clerk looked directly at Petoyne and then looked down at his charge sheet. “Larasissa Petoyne Marcolli, first year, for willfully failing to destroy a surplus animal,” he read. “Sentence is one in a thousand. Come on, and hurry up,” he said, “because I want to get home sometime tonight.”

Blundy rose with the girl. He took her arm firmly, though she didn’t resist. They didn’t say anything to the newcomers they had left behind in the waiting room, though Blundy could almost feel the resentment the adults felt toward a mere one-in-a-thousand.

The execution room was the one for children, with pretty pictures on the walls. The room itself was not much bigger than a closet, no chairs, just a sort of metal bench along one side of it and a low table that contained the urn. “Up on the table, Petoyne,” the executioner ordered. “You’ve been here before.” Petoyne climbed up, looking woebegone at Blundy, uncomfortable on the cold metal. There were drains around the edge of it to carry off the involuntary excretions an executed criminal often could not help but release, and there was a faint shit smell in the room to show that some had. The executioner turned to take a jar off its shelf, saying chattily over his shoulder, “I was surprised to see you out there, Blundy, but of course I knew you were just being a witness. I would have been sorry if it had been the other way around, because I really like your work.”

“Thank you,” Blundy said automatically. He was mildly annoyed, though; Winter Wife-was only a minor work in his eyes. His social, political, and philosophi-cal contributions were what he really prided himself on, and yet it was the video plays that everyone praised him for. Then he biinked. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

“I said, do your job, Blundy,” the executioner repeated, and obediently Blundy bent to check the jar with its thousand little jellybean pills. The seals were intact. “When he said so, the execution clerk said fretfully, “Well, then, break it open, man!”

And he then took the lid off the jar, and offered it to Petoyne, who unhesitatingly thrust her little fist in, pulled out a pill, popped it in her mouth, swallowed, She looked suddenly lost and fearful for a moment.

Then she gave Blundy a broad, happy smile.

“Open your mouth,” the executioner commanded, and rummaged around inside it with his forefinger.

Then he nodded. “Sentence carried out,” he said. ‘Try not to come back here again, will you? Next time you’ll be grown up.” And opened the back door to let them out into the warm spring afternoon sun.

“You know, I’m getting to like the taste of those things,” bragged Petoyne, almost skipping along beside Blundy. “What do you want to do now? Have a drink somewhere? Go check on the slaughtering? Get something to eat? No,” she said, watching his face, “you’re off to see Murra, aren’t you? Why don’t you break it off with her, Blundy? She’s such a pain.”

He stopped and glowered down at her. “Leave Murra out of it,” he ordered. “And, listen, I’m not going to this place with you again, Petoyne. You’re going to be a one-year-old pretty soon, and then you won’t be getting any one in a thousand shots anymore. So straighten out if you want to live to see that ship come in.”