Stopping at Slowyear

Chapter Three

When Mercy MacDonald came looking for Betsy arap Dee, she found her friend in the Lesser Common Room of the starship, working with her fingers on a scrimshaw sampler but her eyes on the picture of their next planet that was displayed on the wall screen.

“We’re getting good pictures now,” MacDonald commented, looking for a good way to start a conversation. They were only a couple of light-days out now; four or five more weeks and they would be in orbit, and then the frenzy of transshipping and dealing would start.

MacDonald stretched to reach up and trace the outlines of Slowyear’s single great continent with a fingertip. It was more or less pear-shaped, with the widest part of the pear right around the planet’s equator. “Where do you suppose the landing parties will touch down?” she asked. Betsy didn’t answer, except possibly with the faintest of shrugs, so MacDonald answered herself: “Probably right near their city, here ” putting her finger on the place the radio signals came from. “It ought to be nice by the time we get there. They say it’s their springtime.”

Betsy finally found some words worth saying.

“That would have been nice for the baby,” she said, bending her head back over her sampler.

MacDonald bit her lip and tried another tack.

“How about giving me a hand.?” she suggested. “I need to check the special-interest programs in the store so we can see what we’ve got to sell.”

Betsy glanced up at her. “Why? We already did that, Mercy.”

“So I want to do it again. To make sure. It’s not good if we suddenly discover something we overlooked after we’ve left, is iff”

Betsy sighed and put her sampler down. She gave her friend a level gaze. “I know what you’re doing.

You’re just trying to keep me busy so I won’t be depressed, aren’t you? But you don’t have to bother.

I’m keeping myself busy, can’t you see?”

“But you’re still depressed,” Mercy said reasonably.

Betsy nodded. “Of course I am. I’m still on this damn ship. Once I get off I’ll perk right up, I promise.”

MacDonald lifted an eyebrow. “You really think a few weeks on a planet will straighten everything out?”

“Who said anything about a few weeks? I’m staying.”

MacDonald blinked at her in surprise. It wasn’t really astonishing that Betsy arap Dee was thinking of jumping ship at Slowyear almost everybody thought such thoughts, almost every time they made a planetfall. The unusual thing was that she was talking about it out loud. Even to her best friend. “Horeger wouldn’t like to hear you say that,” she offered.

Horeger had devoted no less than five of his all-hands broadcasts to the reasons why no one should leave the ship on Slowyear, along with threats of what would happen if anyone tried.

Betsy laughed. It was a curiously somber sound.

“Do you think I care what Hans likes anymore?” she asked. “Do you?”

When Mercy MacDonald had a problem that needed talking over, her confidant of first choice was of course Betsy arap Dee. But when Betsy herself was the problem, she had to turn to someone else. That somebody else had to be a friend. A real one.

The list of possible candidates was not long. The little universe of Nordvik was far too small to hold any strangers, but the bulk of them weren’t friends, either.

Not friends of Mercy MacDonald’s, anyway. Betsy was certainly a friend, moody as she was since the loss of her baby. Another definite friend was the captain of the Nordvik by which she certainly didn’t mean nasty, grabby Hans Horeger but the real captain, Arnold Hawkins. So were the three old navigator/astrographers, Moira Glorietti, Yahouda ben Aaron, and Dicke Dettweiler. They’d all come aboard early in the voyage, like the captain and Mercy MacDonald herself; like them they’d voted against Hans Horeger’s takeover. Also like the captain, they were getting a little elderly to be close friends anymore.

Then there was the larger number of those who used to be friends, of one degree or another, but had voted for Horeger and so weren’t friends anymore.

That included most of the engineers and the bio people, both the medics and the ones that cared for their biological stocks. And then there were the handful of those who had never been friends of Mercy MacDonald’s at all. That wasn’t a long list, though.

Most of the time there was only one person on it, that person of course being Deputy Captain Hans Horeger.

There had never been a time when MacDonald thought of Horeger as a friend (though, she was ashamed of herself to admit, for a time she had been feeling low enough to accept him as a lover). There were quite a few times when she wished him off the ship, if not actually dead because of his crude and meaningless sexual advances; because he had unseated old Captain Hawkins; and most of all because of what he had done to Betsy arap Dee.

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 wallscreen 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. Norctvik was still far away from Slowyear’s star, much farther than Pluto was from its primary. All the same, Slowyear’s star was by 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 about 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 iff” 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 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 bum, 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 kind of life did she have now?