Stopping at Slowyear

Chapter Seven

When Mercy MacDonald pulled herself out of the shuttle into Nordvik’s hatch the first thing that struck her was how many people there were aboard the old ship, and how few of them she knew. The only one nearby was not one she really wanted to talk to, but she did her best to be amenable. “Hello, Maureen,” she said to Horeger’s wife, who was looking even sulkier than usual.

The woman grunted. “So how’s Slowyear?” she asked, managing to convey in three words her extreme irritation at not having already seen it for herself.

“It’s Fine. You’ll like it,” MacDonald said generously. “Do you know where Betsy arap Dee is?”

“Christ, no. I don’t know where anybody is,”

Maureen Horeger complained. “You could try the datastore room unless she’s shacked up with that damn Slowyear doctor again.”

“Thanks,” MacDonald said, quite pleased at the news. And when she found Betsy, in the datastore room after all, she was even more pleased to see the sparkle in her friend’s eyes. The health officer from Slowyear that, MacDonald supposed, had put it there wasn’t with her, but old Captain Hawkins was. So MacDonald didn’t think it the right time to ask the questions on her mind, although she was pretty sure she knew the answers anyway. “Horeger,” she said, “wants the complete manifest brought up to date, and I’m supposed to check it out. Can you help me?”

“No problem,” Betsy said cheerfully, but the old captain had ideas of his own for MacDonald’s time. He was, it turned out, looking for warm bodies to help prepare the drive unit for its remote-controlled sojourn near the star, soaking up solar energy to make antimatter fuel. “What do you mean, you can’t, Mercy?” he complained. “But most of the crew’s already down on Slowyear! I want to go there myself.”

“That’s fine,” she said, slightly surprised. “Come down with me; I’ll be going back as soon as I can.”

“I wish! But I’ve got to finish my work here.” He gave her an eager look. “I get the impression you’re enjoying Slowyear,” he said. “How are things going?”

“My God, wonderful. They’re buying everything, and they don’t care what it costs.”

He said wistfully, “You know, maybe we could buy what we need to fix the ship up after all. I’ve got to get down there and see only how am I supposed to get them started on the fuel production, so I can get away?”

“Draft some of these new people,” she suggested.

There were certainly plenty of them. Nordvik had more people aboard it than it had seen in years, and three-quarters of them were Slowyearians. They were all over the old ship, poking into crew quarters, looking into storage holds, grinning (or politely trying not to grin) at the sanitary facilities (of course microgravity made all that sort of thing much more complicated; the toilets worked better when the ship was underway), taking pictures of the bridge when Mercy MacDonald opened the door of her own room, there was even a Slowyearian in her bed, blinking up at her in surprise, the covers pulled around her head.

“Oh,” the woman in the bed said, “you must be the one your name is oh, hell,” she said finally, beginning to unbuckle the sleep straps, “this is your room, isn’t it? I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were coming back. Look, I’ll get right out of here; just give me a minute to get my clothes on.”

She was floating free in the room, scrabbling in total non-dignity for the handhold she had forgotten to grasp, before MacDonald could stop her. She was also quite naked. MacDonald found herself laughing. “But it’s really all right,” she said to the naked woman. “Stay where you are. Please. I’m just coming up to get a few more things and I’m going to catch the next shuttle back down.”

The woman looked at her, still half asleep. “You’re sure you don’t mind?” Then she realized she had nothing on and made a grab for a sheet. Fortunately she caught a flying corner and managed to tug herself back to the bed. Wrapped in the sheet, now firmly holding to the grip of the headboard, she joined MacDonald in laughing. “Sorry about all this,” she said again. “Look, I’m Ilson. Burganjee Ilson Threely.” She held out a hand and MacDonald drifted herself close enough to shake it.

“Mercy MacDonald,” Mercy MacDonald said, releasing the hand. “Why don’t you stay right where you are? It won’t take me more than ten minutes to get everything together there’s not that much here that I want to keep and then you can go back to sleep.”

“Fine,” Ilson said, and watched silently for a moment while MacDonald opened closets, pulled out drawers, searched through cabinets. She had pretty well cleaned her stuff out, but there were, she found, a few bits of clothes, plus a few keepsakes, she had overlooked. She threw everything into a cloth bag, closing the top every time to keep what she packed from drifting out again. “You look like you’re getting ready for a long stay,” Ilson offered.

“Um,” MacDonald said, bobbing her head but more interested in the cabinet she was ransacking.

“I guess it makes a nice change,” Ilson said sociably. “It does for me. Being here on this ship, I mean.

I’m an instrument and control device specialist; I never though I’d have the chance to actually study a spaceship’s systems.”

“Are you getting all the help you need?” MacDonald said, making the effort to be polite.

“Oh, sure, everybody’s been great. It’s not that hard, anyway. This ship’s a pretty standard design for the old days, I mean. I could probably fly it myself.”

That made MacDonald look at her more closely.

Why would this sensible-looking woman want to know how to fly an interstellar ship? Slowyear didn’t have any. Slowyear wasn’t going to be building any, either, certainly not in the lifetime of anyone alive there now. They couldn’t. They didn’t have any of the necessary resource base: they had no antimatter technology, no c-speed instruments, none of the complicated gadgetry you needed to get a ship from star to star.

So, MacDonald deduced, there could be only one reason for Ilson’s interest: the woman was intending to ship out on Nordvik when it left.

There was a lot that Mercy MacDonald could have said to this woman. She didn’t say any of it. The regrettably bad decisions of a Slowyearian woman she didn’t even know were none of MacDonald’s business, and she wanted to get everything done that she needed to do on Nordvik so she wouldn’t miss her shuttle. She threw the last decent blouse she owned into the bag, closed it, held herself steady with one hand to the doorknob, her brow wrinkled as she tried to remember if there was anything else worth taking. Then she shrugged and said, “I guess that’s it.” She was silent for a moment, looking around the room. “I wonder if I’ll miss this place,” she mused out loud.

Ilson looked surprised. “Then you are planning to stay on Slowyear for a while,” she said.

“You bet. For the rest of my life,” said Mercy MacDonald with satisfaction. “So I make you a present of this room. May it give you more pleasure than it ever gave me.”