Stopping at Slowyear

Chapter Four

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 thought 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 short, 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 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 percent 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-Mokoms 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 a 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 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 cross-legged 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 didn’t really listen. He was studying her. He observed, as though for the first time, that his wife had a widebrowed 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, Blundy, 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 P

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. She was thinking. Part of her thoughts were about the fact that he hadn’t really said anything specifically admiring about her poem, but what she was mostly thinking about was Petoyne.

Murra would not have described her feelings about Petoyne as jealousy. Murra never felt jealousy; she was far above that. She would have said that she was simply surprised. What surprised her was that Blundy hadn’t become tired of the girl by now. After all, he’d seen a lot of little Petoyne all through the filming of Winter Wife, twenty long months from Freeze to New Year’s, a show every week for two hundred weeks.

Petoyne hadn’t even reached puberty when they started taping; that had been the subject of one whole set of shows.

Of course, there hadn’t been anything sexual between Petoyne and Blundy then. That had happened later. Blundy had not confided a date to her, but, Murra conjectured, it had probably been about the time the month of New Year’s changed to Firstmelt, and with the first touch of coldspring the world began to look interesting again.

“Blundy?” she said softly, sweetly, inquiringly. He didn’t answer, but she knew he was awake. “Blundy, what I don’t understand is why she went out with you.

A young girl like that, she should be doing her taxtime in town. What does she do about her schooling?”

“She studies in the camp,” Blundy said, without turning over.

“Yes, but she can get in trouble there, can’t she? I mean, this thing with the dog. It wasn’t her dog. It was just a sheepdog, and it was too old to be any good anymore. Why didn’t she let them put the silly thing to sleep, the way they were supposed to?”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I guess when Petoyne loves something she hates to let go of it.”

“I see,” Murra said. “Yes, I see that.” And a moment later she heard Blundy’s regular breathing turn into a gentle snore as he really did go to sleep; but she lay awake for some time, thinking about that.

Although Murra was careful to preserve her public image of perfect, unstriving self-control, she was not at all an idle person. On the contrary. Murra acted with great and speedy force when force was needed. She simply used her force in the most economical fashion, by pushing where whatever force opposed her was weakest.

In the present case, she was quite confident that that weakest point was young Petoyne herself, and so Murra made it her business to be at the sheep pens the next day, knowing that Petoyne would be working off another stretch of her taxtime there.

The sheep pens were not the sort of place Murra generally cared to visit. The place sounded and smelled and looked like what it was, a killing field, and when Murra arrived the processing of the flock for shearing and slaughter was already well under way.

These particular herds were all meat animals, smaller and more active than the larger breeds kept for milk, and so their life expectancy was always short. They were milling restlessly in the pens as they waited their turns to be shorn before being slaughtered. Murra could hear the terrified bleating of the sheep as they filed into the shearing shed and, one by one, were each rudely caught and cropped by the shearers. Their wool flopped in great flat tangled mats to the floor, sometimes reddened with blood when the shearer’s giant scissors cut too close to the skin. Nude and yammering, the sheep then ran to the nearest exit, where they were sorted out young ewes herded away to be preserved for the next lambing, the old ones and the young males on to the slaughterhouse itself.

That was where the bleating stopped forever.

What remained of each animal was swiftly dealt with by men and women in bloody coveralls as the carcass was gutted, sectioned, cleaned, wrapped and sent on its way to the freezers against the next winter’s needs.

It was all very quick: forty-five minutes, tops, from the first touch of the shears to the ice. The speed made it merciful, Murra thought, but it did not make it any less ugly to watch.

She looked around for Petoyne, and found the girl in the wool sheds, with a dozen others lugging the mats of raw wool to a flatbed trailer.

Petoyne looked up, sweaty and disgruntled, when Murra called her name. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“You seem to be busy right now,” Murra smiled.

“Oh, is that the way it looks to you?” Petoyne nodded agreeably. “It looks that way to me, too. I’m supposed to be working now.”

Murra saw with satisfaction that the girl was trying to deal with her on her own terms. She had never doubted that her will would prevail over this presumptuous child, but now it was certain. “It’s really fine of you to be so sensible about it,” she said. “What I don’t see is why you can’t be so sensible about other things.”

“What particular things?” Petoyne challenged.

“Why, your recklessness, of course. You really should stop getting in trouble. You’re going to be one soon, aren’t you?”

“Next month. The eleventh of Green.”

“And then you won’t be taking from the baby jar anymore, will you?”

“Yes, everybody says that,” Petoyne agreed. “Is that what you came here to tell me?”

“Not exactly, no. I did want to talk about responsibility, though. Our responsibility to the world we live in. I’m sure you know how important Blundy’s plays are to the whole world Blundy’s and mine, really.

They aren’t just entertainments, you know. People rely on us. We help them keep their lives under control.”

She tried to decipher the girl’s bland expression, then nodded. “I know what you’re thinking, Petoyne.

You think I’m not really that important to the plays, don’t you? You’re thinking that Blundy’s the one who counts and, after all, I’ll be nearly four next winter, and maybe a little elderly to still be playing in Blundy’s stories?” She nodded again, a friendly, understanding nod. “Yes, that’s what you’re thinking, all right. But the important thing here is what Blundy thinks, don’t you agree?”

Petoyne shrugged. Murra allowed her one of those silvery laughs. “Oh, don’t mind what I say, child,” she said good-naturedly. “I have this terrible habit of reading other people’s thoughts. Confess, I knew just what was on your mind.”

Petoyne turned to face her squarely. ‘“What I was thinking was that I have to finish here, so I can go home and get cleaned up and hear Blundy in the stadium tonight. Aren’t you going?”

In surprise, “But, my dear, I can’t go to the stadium.

I have to work. But I’ll hear all about it from Blundy himself. When he comes home. Because he always comes home, you know.”

It was true that Murra had to work out her labor tax.

No one avoided that, because the community always had jobs that had to be done. What was also true was that being Murra being Blundy’s Murra she had almost the same privileges of picking and choosing as Blundy himself. She used her privileges a lot more freely than Blundy did, too. Of course, she wasn’t in politics, as he was, and so she could afford to be less concerned about seeming diligent.

These were the seasons of the long year when you needed privileges, too, if you wanted to avoid some such ghastly assignment as Petoyne’s, because there was a lot of hard and unpleasant work to be done after the winter. Construction, for instance. Everything that the kilometers-thick glaciers had planed into rubble had to be built over again; that was hard, physical work of the exact kind that Murra would never let herself be trapped into. The farms had to be plowed and seeded just as laboriously; the fishing fleets had to be repaired, or more often replaced with new construction even more laborious; the roads graded, the power lines restrung, even the sewers cleared and patched. In that sort of taxtime work people sweat a lot, and that did not suit Murra.

During the harshest, earliest month of Slowyear’s long vernal seasons she had made sure to get work in the hospital. At least you were always indoors there, besides which the work was not intellectually demanding and most of the time was even fairly easy. On the other hand, much of it was, by Murra’s standards, rather ignoble she loathed the bedpans, and had been repelled by her first few weeks, when she had found herself committed to the obstetrical wards.

Transfer to caring for the newboms was a slight improvement, though it involved crying babies and messy diapers. Then she had worked her way up to the large wards where the dying infants were kept. At least those brats were either comatose or heavily sedated, which came to the same thing, but overseeing a couple of hundred small kids in the process of dying was simply too depressing for Murra to put up with.

Then she got the job she wanted. A position came open in the utilities section. It was Murra’s kind of work checking employment records for the people who did the physical work of keeping the solar-power plants running at maximum efficiency. She stayed away from the actual physical labor, of course. That kind of work was at least dirty, since you couldn’t stay neat when you were digging down to a leaking pipe in the underground clay beds that stored the summer’s heat to feed back to the city all winter long. Some of it was actively dangerous maintaining the high-pressure storage tanks where the hydrogen fuel was kept after being electrolyzed out of glacier meltwater by the solar energy; there weren’t many accidents with the hydrogen, but when there was one people generally died. And all of it was hard or at least, all of it but Murra’s own part, which was spent in the air-conditioned accounting office, with a pot of tea always beside her, safely away from the nastiness of the actual digging and repairing.

She even had a little vid screen of her own on her desk, and when Blundy gave his speech she naturally stopped work to watch. No one objected. Everyone she worked with knew very well how important she was to Blundy. Now and then some of her colleagues would even take time from their own work to drift to her desk and look over her shoulder at the screen.

They were careful not to disturb her concentration, of course. If they spoke to her at all, it was only to say things like, “He’s in good form tonight,” or, “Blundy really ought to be on the council.” She didn’t even really hear such remarks. They were completely expected, and she acknowledged them only with an automatic nod or smile.

The burden of the speech, she heard, was a challenge to the council to make better plans for the future.

It was a pity that he hadn’t discussed it with her ahead of time, she thought regretfully; it wasn’t a very forceful issue. Still, he made it sound serious enough as he demanded that the pipes be laid farther underground, so that they might not freeze in the next cold, to find safer places for the fishing fleet “to think ahead, ” he cried, “so we don’t have to start from scratch every spring, so we can make things better each year instead of working as hard as we can just to stay even!”

Unfortunately, the audience seemed to share her opinions of themes. Oh, they cheered him, all right, and he’d been given a really satisfactory turnout the cameras showed that there had to be at least a couple of thousand people in the audience, with no doubt twenty or thirty times as many watching at home on their screens. But the same cameras showed that they weren’t all staying. All through his talk a few were getting up and leaving. Not many. Just a handful, now and then, and they were quite polite and quiet about it…but he was losing them.

And if the cameras saw that, Blundy would be seeing it too.

Murra sighed and resigned herself. He would not be in a good mood when he got home. So her primary job then would have to be reassurance. She would be supportive and complimentary rather than critical.

The little notes she had made to pass on to him his distracting little habit of scratching his nose every few minutes, her suggestion that he look directly into the camera more often, to allow for close-ups they would have to wait for another time.

All those burdens were easily borne. They were exactly the things that made her indispensable to Blundy. What was harder to bear was that, when the speech was over, not a single one of her office colleagues came over to congratulate her. It almost seemed as though they had been disappointed.

Blundy himself was, though. That was apparent from the fact that he wasn’t home when Murra got there. When he did show up, hours late, he shook his head at the dinner she had rushed to prepare for him.

She smiled to show she didn’t mind. “I suppose you’ve been ruining your digestion with hawkerfood,” she said, her tone gently humorous to show that it wasn’t meant as a reproach, although it was.

He shrugged. “I was discussing the meeting with some people, it got late, I was hungry. Murra? Do you think I ought to hold off on any more meetings for a while?”

“Oh, no, my dear! Look at the way they applauded you!”

“But there wasn’t a single question about anything I said!” he complained, flinging himself onto a chair.

“All they wanted to talk about was the ship how I thought we should receive the people, how much we should tell them, what I thought we’d gain from their visit.”

She knelt beside him and said apologetically, “I’m afraid I didn’t hear any of the discussion period. They cut away right after your speech.”

“I wish I had!” He was silent for a moment. Then his hand reached out absently to stroke her head.

“Well, what about it? Shouldn’t I give it up until this ship thing has come and gone? Some of my friends think so.”

Murra, who was quite sure which of his “friends” the advice was coming from, said only, “I think that must be your decision to make, my dear. Would you like to come to bed?”

He shook his head. She got up and kissed him good night, not failing to notice the faint echo of her own perfume on him.

That wasn’t unexpected. Murra didn’t comment. It was a fact, though, that although she had no intention of quarreling over Petoyne’s attempts to replace her in Blundy’s bed, she came very close to complaint when she discovered the girl had switched to wearing her own perfume.

This part of spring was a joyous time. Murra did her best to make it joyous for Blundy. As the days went on, though, it began to trouble her to observe how little time he chose to spend with her. He was always busy.

Yes, she understood, Blundy needed to get away by himself from time to time that was why she had not objected, or at least had not objected much, when he signed up to escort the flocks of pregnant ewes off to the grazing lands. (But how incongruous that Arakaho Blundy Spenotex should be a shepherd!) But that was then. This was now. She did her best to understand what it was that kept him away from her so much of the time (doing such strange and inferior things as helping inseminate the ewes and sod the bare lawns of the new houses anybody could do them!).

It was not, of course, simply that she longed for his company. She wasn’t sure she did long for it very much, really. The certainty that he would always return to her was almost as good as his physical presence, and a lot less trouble. No, what Murra jealously wanted was the privilege of making sure that Blundy’s needs were met.

When she realized that what he needed most was simple-minded recreation, nothing that made demands on him, nothing that required thought, her task became simple.

She would arrange a dinner party.

Yes, a dinner party would please him. Her dinner parties always had. As soon as she had thought of it she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before, and immediately began to plan.

The guest list was the most important part, of course. No more than six people: Blundy mustn’t be tired by the company. For the same reason, nobody serious. The party was to relax Blundy and give him pleasure, not to be work. The first couple she chose were Delyle and Kondi, a natural selection because they had appeared as young marrieds in Winter Wife.

Although they hadn’t actually been married then, they’d got along with each other so well that now they were. More important, they’d got along with Blundy, too. And he liked Vennit and Ginga, too, who had the additional advantage that Ginga Macklin Ginga Spenotex was some sort of distant relative of Blundy’s. Besides, they both were outspokenly loyal to Blundy’s political ideals, though Murra doubted either of them knew just what they were. Finally she decided on her sister and her husband, though only if they were willing to leave the kids at home; she didn’t want Blundy to have to share his guests’ attention with children.

When she had finished her list she regarded it with satisfaction. All the guests she chose were young, attractive, and as close as possible to brainless; and the list did not, of course, include Petoyne.

On the day of the party she sent Blundy about his business, without asking what that business was, and set off on an exhaustive study of the marketplace. The salad had to be the crispest, the yams the sweetest, the butter for her sauces the richest. She circled the stalls critically, looking for inspiration. She had already decided that the main dish would not be scoggers, because she had served them to Blundy too many times already in the recent past. Nor would it be anything that came from sheep, of which he had had plenty while out with the herd. She settled finally on a handsome, meter-long “fish” they called it a salmon, though it did not resemble anything on Earth which she steamed to a golden yellow, chilled and, that night, served with a rich sauce on a bed of greens, and was satisfied.

Almost satisfied. The food was first-rate, the guests were obligingly cheerful; and Blundy sat through it patiently. He praised the food, and carried on polite talk with the guests. But he was bored.

When Murra found out what Blundy was doing with his time she was mildly vexed.

He wasn’t secretly writing, as she had hoped. He wasn’t even meeting with his political allies, or even with Petoyne not often, anyway. What the man was doing was taking flying lessons. Every day he was climbing the hill to the plateau people called the “spaceport,” where the shabby old shuttles were being checked and demothballed, and spending hour after hour sitting at the simulator controls, with an instruction program running on his screen.

When she laughed at him he didn’t get angry, only patient. “But how can you learn to operate a spaceship out of a training program?”

“How else? There’s nobody alive to teach me.”

“But, my dear, why should it be you to take such a risk?”

He thought it over carefully before he found the right answer. “Because I want to,” he said.

As the month of Thunder warmed into the month of Green, Murra tried again and again to recapture his attention, or at least to entertain him. She didn’t nag her husband; that wasn’t her style. Murra’s style was to be forgiving, loving, and never irritating in fact, a perfect winter wife, even through coldspring and warmspring and right on through the years. She kept inventing pleasures for him unfortunately, pleasures that he didn’t seem to want.

That didn’t keep Murra from going on with her project of devising entertainments for him. Some represented real sacrifices on her own part, as when she persuaded Blundy to a weekend’s rafting on Sometimes River, slowly dwindling down from its coldspring flooded size. That wasn’t a success for either of them. Murra managed to contain, or at least disguise, her own distaste for anything out of doors, but Blundy was not entertained. He did some mood-disguising of his own. He dutifully paddled the raft with her, shouting as loud as she when they were drenched in the rapids, smiled a lot, exclaimed appropriately at the pretty warmspring flowers that were beginning to carpet the canyon sides and was bored again.

The sort of thing that would really give Blundy the pleasure and stimulation he needed had to be a mixture, she decided. Fun people to talk to (but not the sort of dolts she had invited to dinner), an interesting place to visit (but nothing that required too much exertion) of course! She had it: a picnic up on the glaciers, perhaps at a place near where the shuttles were just now emerging from their winter shroud of ice.

Again she chose her guest list with the greatest care. Her first pick was Vorian, who was old but still spry, and was always willing to play chess with Blundy; besides, Vorian wouldn’t be with them much longer, she was pretty sure. Then Momey, who was still pretty in spite of the fact that she was nearly three; Blundy liked being around pretty women. Importantly, she was also quite securely married to Megrith, the family doctor, who was an asset to the picnic in his own way: he loved to cook outdoors. Finally, there were Vincor and Veria, Vincor because Blundy liked him and Veria because she was Murra’s sister. And this time they would be invited to bring their children. You couldn’t have children at a dinner party, but how could you have a picnic without them? They were good enough children, as children went; they were winter-born kids, old enough to be reasonably civilized. (And sister Veria, though a cheerful soul and always good company, was conspicuously plain.) Of course, when Blundy was told about the picnic he got that cold and obstinate look of his. But then he always did. And he gave in in the end.

When Blundy found Petoyne to make his apologies she was working in the insemination pens. “I’m sorry, Petoyne,” Blundy told her, watching while she worked. “You know I wanted to spend your birthday with you, but I really can’t get out of this picnic. Maybe I can fix it so you could come along?”

She finished with the bieating ewe, spraddled on its back with all four of its legs tied in the air, and looked up at him. “Fat chance of that,” she said dispassionately. “Even if Murra would let me come I’d spoil the whole day for her. Not that I’d mind that so much. But she’d make it miserable for me, too. No,”

she said, “I’ll spend my first birthday by myself. It’s all right. I’ll have others.”

She filled the syringe again with the mixture of sheep semen and distilled water and moved to the next writhing ewe. Blundy knotted his brows. ‘“Why did you volunteer for insemination? You don’t have to do all this kind of scut work,” he protested.

“I have to pay my taxtime off, don’t I?”

“Well, sure.” They all had that problem Petoyne, Murra, Blundy, himself, everyone connected with Winter Wife; the show had been a great financial success, and their taxes were high. “But not this way, Petoyne. I’ll be going out with the herd again, after the ship lands. You could come with me again.”

“Oh,” she said, “I want to get it out of the way. I think I’m going to want to stay in town when the ship’s here. You know. Just to see what they have to sell; and mostly, I guess, just to see the strangers.”

“That’s not my idea of fun,” Blundy said.

“Well, it’ll be interesting, anyway. You don’t get the chance to see that every day.” She finished with that ewe and moved to the next; it was almost the last.

“Do you know what these people from the ship are like?” she asked.

“As much as you do, I guess. No more. They’re just traders, people in an old ship, trying to make a living going from planet to planet.” He thought for a moment, then added, “They’ll probably seem pretty strange. They’re old, you know. I don’t mean physically I mean the time dilation they travel pretty close to the speed of light between stars, so time slows down for them. I’d bet that some of them were already born when the first colonists landed here.”

She nodded. It wasn’t anything she didn’t know for herself, but it needed repetition to make her believe that any living person could have been alive that long, long time ago, more than twenty-five of Slowyear’s very slow years. She sighed. “Poor people,” she said, finishing the last of the ewes. She patted the creature’s head, then sealed the bottle of semen for return to the freezer and sat down to wait until it was time to release the dozen bleating animals. “You’d think it would be more fun for them to do it the other way,” she said absently, watching them struggle against their bonds.

“With a ram, I mean.”

“Then we couldn’t control the breeding. We get better lambs with artificial insemination,” he pointed out.

She nodded, then suddenly giggled. “You could do it this way with Murra,” she said, grinning up at him.

“Then you could get a baby, and you wouldn’t have to touch her.”

Blundy cleared his throat uncomfortably. He hated it when Petoyne talked that way about Murra, almost as much as he hated it when Murra talked about Petoyne. All he said was, “What makes you think I want a baby?”

“Well, everybody does, don’t they?” she said reasonably. “I do. I’ll take my chances, some day. Maybe pretty soon, too,” she added, “because that’s the best time to do it, when you’re one.”

It was another allusion to her birthday, Blundy thought, the birthday that he would not be spending with her. The trouble was, birthdays were important.

You didn’t have more than four or five of them in your life, and every one marked a real change. The first long year was for growing up. The second was when you finished your education and began to get your career and your family and your life together. In your third and fourth years you were as successful and able as you were ever going to be, because the fourth birthday was retirement time if you lived to see it and then you just went downhill until you died.

“I’ve got to get cleaned up and out of here,”

Petoyne said. “And I guess you’ve got to get back to Murra.”

“Well, I promised “

“Sure,” the girl said. “So long, Blundy. Have a nice picnic.”

And she put her face up to be kissed, just as though nothing had changed.

He gave it up. He -kissed her. “Happy birthday tomorrow,” he said, turning to leave. He was a dozen paces away when he heard her call his name.

He turned to look at her. “Blundy?” she said. “I wanted to tell you Well, if you did want to have a baby Well, I’d be willing to have it for you.”

Blundy resisted going on the picnic again at the last minute, suddenly determined to spend Petoyne’s coming-of-age birthday with her after all. But it didn’t take Murra long to reason him out of disappointing the others, and at last he let Murra drag him along to the hills.

And when they got out of the borrowed cat-car in a pleasant glade he seemed resigned to going along with the picnic spirit. More than that, Murra thought; he seemed quite relaxed. Even happy. He sat on a blanket under the biggest tree they could find no more that two meters tall, because of course it had only had coldspring to grow and gazed out over the scene before them. Far below the Sometimes River had at last returned to within its banks. The floodplain all around was already planted, and the first crops well along good crops they would be, too, because all that land was refreshed every year from the spring flooding, just as ancient Egypt had been before the building of the Aswan Dam. (Though neither Murra nor Blundy had any clear knowledge of the country of Egypt, much less of Aswan.)

The thing was that when at last he stirred himself he fled from the grownups Murra had selected with such care and romped up onto the glacier with the children. Murra gazed indulgently up at them, sliding around on the ice as they chased a little flock of pollies.

“He’s so good with children,” she told Veria proudly thoughtlessly, because then her sister had no more sense than to say:

“I’ve always thought Blundy would love having some of his own.”

“Oh, certainly he would,” Murra said, her lips smiling but her eyes suddenly cold. “But we can’t have everything we want, can we? You know how it is with Blundy and me. Can you imagine us with children?

We do love them so, naturally we do, but you see that for us it would be quite impossible.”

Veria nodded, seeing seeing mostly what Murra hadn’t said. She understood, out of her own experience, why any woman would hesitate to have a baby on Slowyear. They were unbearable in winter, when everyone was huddled together underground, and not much better in the hot summer, when most people were back in the buried city again. And even if you arranged to have the childbirth at the best possible time right after New Year’s, say, when people were getting ready to emerge into the sunlight again, as she had with her younger child there was the high risk of heartbreak, with infant mortality on Slowyear so frighteningly high. Veria had seen a dozen of her friends go through all the mess and misery of bearing a child, and watch it like a hawk for ten long months, knowing there were three chances in ten that it would sicken and die, swiftly and inevitably, before it could walk. She’d been lucky with her own…so far.

But others had not. Two of her own friends had lost babies just in the past five months since New Year’s, one of them twice.

Veria didn’t say any of that to her sister. She turned to peer down into the crevasse, where the pumps were sucking the meltwater from around the hydrogen fuel complex. That would serve the shuttles, all three of them gleaming like beached whales on the flat plateau off to the west. She said, to the group at large, “It looks like everything will be ready in time for the ship.”

“In time for the ship, in time for the ship,” Megrith said, looking up from the fire he was starting in the grill. “That’s all you hear these days, what’s going to happen when the ship comes.”

Old Vorian agreed. “But it’s exciting, Megrith,” he said. “You can’t blame people. It’s a good thing the ship’s coming in warmspring, too. There‘11 be plenty of time for the unloading before the worst of the summer.”

Megrith nodded. “The last one was bad, they say. You know, the one that came in, oh, eight years ago, was it? It came in winter and they had a terrible time getting the shuttles ready to fly.”

“Before my time,” Vorian cackled. At four and a bit, it pleased him to talk about things before his time. He craned his neck. “Isn’t Blundy ever coming down.?” he complained. “I brought the chessboard.”

“Oh, leave him alone, Vorian,” Veria said good-naturedly. “Can’t you see he’s having fun? let him wear himself out with the kids maybe he’ll wear them out, too, and then we can have a civilized lunch and talk.”

Her husband looked at her and cleared his throat.

“Actually,” he said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to Blundy about something and to you too, Murra.”

“Oh?” said Murra.

“I’ve just been wondering,” Vincor said apologetically. “I mean, Winter Wife was such a great success “

“They’re going to rerun it, aren’t they?” Veria asked.

“Yes, so they say,” Murra agreed, looking at her brother-in-law. She was well aware that Vincor had always been a little envious of Blundy’s success and hers, of course; the man wanted to be a director himself. Warily she asked, “What about it, Vincor?”

“Well, I had an idea. With a huge success like that, you might as well follow up on it. You know, in a few months it’ll be summer….”

“Personally,” his wife put in, “I think summer’s as hard to get through as winter, though it’s shorter, of course.”

“So what would you think of a new one for the summer? I thought of a natural title. It tells the whole story: You could call the new series Summer Wife. “

Murra pursed her lips. They had obviously been planning this for some time. She didn’t blame her sister for being ambitious didn’t blame anyone, as long as their ambitions didn’t conflict with her own, and there were advantages to working with your family. “Summer Wife, ” she said meditatively. “Now, that’s quite an idea, isn’t it?”

“Do you think Blundy would like to do it?” Vincor asked, the eagerness showing in his voice.

“Oh, heavens, Vincor,” Murra smiled, “you’d have to ask Blundy about that. I never interfere. When you’re married to a genius you have to learn to let the man do things his own way.” She spread her hands helplessly. Then she said, “Anyway, I think I’ll just go up and join them on the ice for a bit; it looks like so much fun.”

Before she reached the ice she had to dodge half a dozen screeching pollies, making their escape from Blundy and the little boys. Brightly colored emerald green, scarlet, one or two patterned with diamonds and polka dots the pollies weren’t dangerous, except to the bugs they fed on, but Murra disliked having them there: they were uncontrolled. Climbing up from the greensward onto the glacier itself was a very un-Murralike thing to do. It meant puffing and panting, and besides the grass turned into mud and the mud into slush before you were on solid ice. She was glad she’d worn old boots.

She was also glad she’d worn warm clothes, because it was cold up there. Not winter cold, of course; the sun was still hot. But the breeze was chilling.

Besides, she could hear sounds of running water from underneath the ice, and now and then a sharp cracking sound, like a large stick snapping. Was this place really safe?

She paused and looked at Blundy and the two little boys, Petternel the sturdy fourteen-month-old, Porly the toddler. They hadn’t seen her yet. They had found a smooth place for sliding, and they were running toward it, then planting their feet and gliding along it, arms windmilling to keep their balance, shouting with pleasure, laughing when little Porly fell down anyway.

It was very good, Murra thought with satisfaction, to see her husband laughing like that again. The picnic had been an excellent idea. She glanced around. The world was a pretty sight from the ice sheet. She could see clear down to Sometimes River and to the dozen streams that fed it with meltwater, some of them crystal clear as the ice itself, some milky white with the powdered rock they had ground away in their course.

It would have been even prettier if it were a photograph or a painting hanging in her drawing room, and a lot warmer, she thought, and for a moment wondered if she should try painting again. For a while in the early part of her second year Murra, before she turned to poetry, had thought she had a talent for art. But it had been a lot of hard work, with improvement coming very slowly; and anyway then she met Blundy and found a new career. As his leading lady, of course; there was always a part for her in everything Blundy wrote. More importantly, as his wife.

But a wife could also be a mother to children.

Veria had put that unwelcome idea in her mind, not for the first time. It wasn’t a prospect Murra could look forward to: four long months of pregnancy, with your belly swelling and your grace of movement stolen away. Then the pain of parturition. Then the other pain if the baby died

She shuddered. The trouble was that time was running fast on Murra’s biological clock. Your second year was when you had your children if you were intelligent about it, and it was an unfortunate fact that Murra’s second year was some time past.

But did she really want to have physical children?

Squalling, messy ones? Wasn’t it better to have mind-children? Her poems, for instance; weren’t those as valuable as babies?

But there too the clock was running for Murra. If anyone was ever going to be a poet a real poet, a poet whose work would be admired and cherished by many others than the poet’s own husband this was the time to do that, too, wasn’t it?

She turned around, startled. Blundy was approaching with the boys, one on either hand. Grinning, Blundy asked, “Time for lunch yet? I hope Veria brought along dry socks for the kids.”

“I’m sure she did,” Murra said, and waited for Blundy to drop the children’s hands so he could help her down the slippery ice, back to where Megrith had put the chops on the grill and old Vorian was gazing wistfully at the spring he would not likely see another. Concentrating on her footing, Murra had forgotten about the little boys behind them until she heard her sister scream the toddler’s name.

They turned. Little Porly was spread-eagled on the ice, with his brother fearfully tugging at him. “He just fell,” Pettemel moaned, “but he won’t get up.”

Then all the adults were racing up the slope, Veria in the lead, Megrith close behind her transformed instantly from cook to doctor. By the time Murra got to them they had all surrounded the child and Megrith had the boy’s head on his crouching knee, lifting an eyelid to peer at the eye. Veria was sobbing and Blundy was swearing to himself.

Then the little boy opened the other eye, and, struggling to get up, began to cry.

Megrith gave a little laugh. “He’s all right, Veria.

He just fell and it knocked the wind out of him. But now his clothes are all wet…and, oh, hell, can’t you smell the chops? They’ll be burned black if I don’t get back to them!”

The chops, really, were quite all right, and so was the salad, and old Vorian, sampling the bottle of wine he had opened, pronounced it first-rate. So the picnic was a success after all, though Veria was still shaken.

When they had settled down after the meal Murra sat next to her husband, watching the others clean up.

Lowering her voice, she said, “Oh, Blundy, Vincor had an idea he wanted to talk over with you. Summer Wife.

A new series for the hot time; what do you think?”

Blundy pursed his lips. Then he shrugged. But he hadn’t said no. “Of course,” she went on, “we wouldn’t have to have the same cast, exactly, I mean if you think it’s worth doing at all. For instance, maybe I’m getting a little too, well, mature for the wife’s part “

And waited for him to say, “That’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t do anything like that without you, you know that,” and found the day quite spoiled for her when he didn’t.