Stopping at Slowyear

Chapter Eight

In a way, Blundy wasn’t sorry that Mercy MacDonald was back on the ship for a few days, or at least not entirely sorry. (He did feel strongly that there was unfinished business between them, and since she was just off a ship that business couldn’t be postponed too long.) He had work to do, though, by which he meant not the creation of silly entertainments that other people valued so but his real work. Politics.

He faced the fact that, at present, his most effective political work had to be non-political. That was because that was the non-political present mood of the people of Slowyear, who could never (Blundy believed) keep more than one thought in their minds at a time. Right now what obsessed all minds was the ship; so Blundy gave up the idea of proposing taxtime reforms and building programs and concentrated on making sure that whenever anyone thought of Nordvik and its crew they also had to think about Arakaho Blundy Spenotex as well.

Meanwhile there was a job to be done that was sort of political. The governor and the council had invited a few prominent persons, Blundy one of them, to help them deal with the trade problem.

That wasn’t too tough, except that they should have taken care of all that long since trade had already begun. There wasn’t any doubt of that, because from the window of the council room, where they had gathered, they could look right down on the marketplace and see the shopping going on.

So they disposed of it quickly. They already had Mercy MacDonald’s catalogue of the goods Nordvik wanted to sell them. All they had to do was make a generous estimate of their aggregate value, then double it, then issue enough supplementary scrip to divide among the people of Slowyear to pay for it all. The only hard part was allocating the proper amount of scrip to each citizen, because the governor thought the most important citizens should be awarded extra scrip, and some of the council put forth the idea that lawbreakers, for instance, should be given less. But Blundy argued for flat-equal distribution to every living human on Slowyear, babies and felons included.

He carried the day.

“After all,” the governor mused when the vote had been taken, consoling himself for the defeat, “what does it matter? The only thing that’s important is to make the ship people happy.”

And one of the council, shrewdly looking forward to future power changes, said, “Exactly. We’ll call it the Blundy plan, and we can start the distribution tomorrow.”

All that went just as Blundy wished it, but he was dissatisfied. He began to wish for Mercy MacDonald’s return. Not just for her physical company, although there was certainly a sexual interest, but for what she knew. In Blundy’s eyes, Mercy MacDonald was a resource. She had once lived on Earth. Earth was the breeding ground of all politics, and he yearned to ask her for everything she knew.

Where MacDonald was, however, was two hundred-odd kilometers overhead, circling Slowyear nineteen times a day. Twice, after dark, he looked up and was able to pick out the glimmer of Nordvik in its singled orbit. There were shuttles going back and forth, almost every day. There wasn’t any shortage of ship people.

More than thirty of them had already come down in one shuttle or another even in Nordvik’s own shuttle, time-scarred and reentry-heat stained from its long use in so many different parts of the galaxy.

(Slowyearians laughed at it among themselves; they would not be so rude to their guests.) Almost all of the thirty-odd always excepting Mercy MacDonald were still on the surface of Slowyear, being feted and entertained by (and entertaining) their hosts.

Blundy did not fail to note that in one particular place there especially was no shortage of ship people, or at least of one ship person. That place was in his own house. It seemed to Blundy that every time he came home Hans Horegerwas there before him, sitting under that dumb piece of scrimshaw on the wall, sipping wine with Murra and looking ill at ease when Murra’s husband turned up.

That wasn’t important, either. It certainly didn’t cause Blundy very much annoyance least of all, jealousy; if there was anything Blundy was sure of, it was that, whatever Horeger was hoping for in his persistent attentions to Murra, Murra was not supplying it.

But still.

Blundy found himself staying out of the house even more than usual. Fortunately he had a lot to keep him busy. He had nearly decided at least, he had come to the point of thinking seriously about whether he was going to decide that it would be worth his political while to write something, after all, about Nordvik and its crew, and so he spent a lot of time visiting (“interviewing” was too strong a word) the ship people on Slowyear. That was easy. They were all over, mingling with the natives, looking at everything, curious about everything. They seemed to be happy that the Slowyearians were spending their new scrip freely, snapping up almost everything they had to offer without much regard to price or quality, either, because a lot of the junk Nordvik had hauled from star to star really was junk: old machines that nobody would dream of using anymore, “art” that was almost as ugly as Mercy MacDonald’s guest gift, plants that wouldn’t grow on Slowyear and sperm and ova of animals that would certainly die there.

None of them were MacDonald, though. When Blundy, tiring of their company decided to go back home for lunch it wasn’t to see whether Horeger was there before him.

But of course Horeger was. The only surprising thing was that he wasn’t alone. Their doctor, Megrith, was there, and he looked solemn.

Horeger was looking solemn, too, and even Murra seemed sober. Blundy guessed the reason. “Porly?“he asked, and Megrith nodded.

“He’s dying, yes.”

“But let’s not talk about it,” Murra said as she naturally would, since such subjects as the death of a small child were not only depressing but quite a bore.

Horeger, however, wasn’t smart enough to let it go. He said, sounding sad and sincere, “I feel we’ve let you down, Blundy. I wish we’d had something that helped.”

Murra started to speak, then restrained herself. “I’ll see how lunch is getting on,” she said, getting up.

Megrith responded for all of them. “Well, you didn’t,” he said. “I checked everything in your file myself. Nothing that seems to help with our own situation. Of course, there are plenty of items from way back on Earth. We found entries about all kinds of human prion diseases - kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Gerstmann-Straussler syndrome - and the veterinary syndromes, scrapie and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, but it’s all old, old stuff. Our own particular variation of the prion syndrome evidently didn’t occur on Earth.”

“Maybe not on any other planet we visited, either,” Horeger said regretfully, “because we dumped most of their data in, too. Where is he?” When Blundy biinked at him, he added, “Porly, I mean. The baby that is, ah, passing away.”

“Oh. In the hospital, of course.”

“That’s in the winter city,” Megrith explained. “The hospital’s too much trouble to move with the seasons, with all the equipment and everything. We have aid stations out here, but the real hospital’s in the winter city, up under the hill.”

“I’d like to see that too,” Horeger said thoughtfully.

“The whole idea of everybody holing up for the cold weather that’s interesting. ” Then, looking at Blundy, he added, “Mercy would, too. She’s coming back down tomorrow, by the way.”

“How very nice,” Murra said, coming in to announce lunch and speaking for Blundy without looking at him. “Why don’t we all go up there and show you around?”

“I’d love it,” Horeger said, moving toward the table.

“I’m sure Mercy would, too. And oh,” he said, sniffing appreciatively, “that does smell good! What is it? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

Blundy didn’t have to invite Mercy MacDonald to tour the winter city. Murra did that for him. As soon as the ship woman had returned to the surface Muria was there at the landing strip, welcoming her back warmly, telling her how much pleasure it would give her and Blundy to show Murra and Hans Horeger around the underground dwellings. MacDonald looked at her strangely, but accepted at once; and the next morning they set out up the hill, all four of them in a tractor cab.

The winter city was set into the side of Winter Hill “Well, what else would we call it?” Murra said, amused. “Regard it well. It’s where we all live, squeezed in on top of each other, for ten long months every year.”

Horeger stared up at the thirty-meter metal tower on top of Winter Hill. “In that? That big metal thing?”

Murra smiled, and Blundy explained, “The tower is just the entrance. The city’s all underground, to conserve heat.”

Horeger frowned up at the tower. “But it’s got all those doors,” he said, as of course it had: six great doors, one at each level, of which only the lowest one was open.

“Because of the snow,” Blundy said. “It piles up all winter long, you see. It doesn’t start to melt until New Year’s, so sometimes it gets twenty meters deep here.

As it keeps building up we have to switch to a higher door every month or two so as to come out on top of it.”

He halted the tractor at the base of the tower and they got out to look around. Holding her floppy hat against the hilltop breeze, Murra pointed south. “Can you see the pastures over the rim hills there? That’s where we take the sheep to fatten; Blundy can tell you all about that.”

“Yes,” Blundy said, giving his wife a look, “I do go out with the sheep sometimes. It’s taxtime work for me. See, we have to pay part of our taxes in community labor, and “

But, smiling, Horeger was holding up a hand to stop him. “Yes, I know about taxtime. Murra has explained it all.”

“Well, anyway…. I pay the taxes that way because I like it. It gives me a chance to be off by myself “

“Or with a good friend,” Murra put in amiably.

“Or with a friend, maybe, but pretty much by myself. So I can think. As a matter of fact, “he added, “I’ve decided to go out again with the next flock, maybe in a couple of days.” He didn’t meet the gaze his wife turned on him, but waved to the planted lands down the hill. “That’s all farm. We’re lucky with our farmland here. We always get good crops; there aren’t any native pests, just a few stowaway bugs that sneaked in from Earth on the first landing, and not many of those.”

Horeger said, as a pleasantry, “I hope we haven’t brought any new ones.”

“There’s no chance of that,” Muna said reassuringly, “because of course we checked everything. Did you know that we have farms in the winter city, too?”

“Underground?” Horeger said in admiration.

“Well, hothouses, anyway,” Murra amended herself. “They aren’t very big. There’s plenty of power and water for them, of course, but we are a little cramped for space. Still, we get fresh vegetables from them all winter long.”

“Some,” Blundy said.

Murra gave him another look. “Well, we can’t grow enough to feed everybody all the time, of course, but there’s always plenty of summer-grown food in the freezers.”

“The power’s the big thing,” Blundy said. He took Mercy MacDonald’s arm and pointed. “Look over here. Do you see that field that looks like it’s just been plowed? It hasn’t been. They’re solar collectors.

They’re where we get most of our heat and power.

Murra can tell you all about that; she works there.”

“Just for taxtime,” Murra added quickly, to make sure the visitors understood her real career was as actress and poet and, mostly, as wife to Arakaho Blundy Spenotex.

Gallandy, Horeger said, “But that sounds fascinating, Murra. Solar power! That’s how we make antimatter for Nordvik, you know. I’d really love to see how you do it here.”

“Shall I show you around the power plant? I’d be happy to,” Murra said. “But let’s take a look at the winter city itself first.”

So they did. At Horeger’s request, for whatever sentimental reason Horeger thought he had, they visited the hospital first. Naturally enough, the hospital was on the highest level of the city. That was for the benefit of those who needed to get to it in a hurry, in the seventy-odd months of the year when the winter city itself was nearly abandoned…though it did nothing for the great bulk of the hospital’s occupants.

Showing visitors around the hospital was a brand new experience for Blundy. No Slowyear citizen had ever had to be given a tour of it, since no Slowyear citizen ever got through his first year without at least an occasional visit. He knew what the starship people wanted, though. He gave them a cursory look at the general medical section, the maternity wing, and the long wards, more than five hundred beds worth of wards, partly occupied with adults recovering from surgery or illness or not recovering, as the case might be. Then he led them to the saddest wards of all, the custodial facility for terminal cases, where nearly two hundred children, some looking like newborns, others toddlers and talkers, were lying stupefied, or gazing blankly, or giggling pointlessly.

Murra wrinkled her nose fastidiously; even the older children were too sick to be continent. Horeger scowled helplessly, and Mercy MacDonald shuddered.

“I don’t know why we wanted to come here,” she said, her voice shaking with sympathy. And Horeger said, as Blundy had known he would:

“Isn’t your nephew here, Murra?”

Murra gave the captain a sweet look of sorrowful resignation. “Dear little Porly,” she sighed. “Oh, he’s here, all right. We could ask one of the nurses to help us find which crib he’s in if you like, but, really, there’s no point.”

“He wouldn’t know we were here,” Blundy explained or apologized. “None of them do, you see, not after the first day or two. It’s the brain that’s attacked first. It just turns into a kind of sponge, and that’s it.”

“I’m so sorry, “MacDonald said.

“Yes, of course,” Murra said, nodding graciously.

“Well, what can one say? Except that this is a depressing place, isn’t it? Perhaps we should go on to look at the rest of the city. There are elevators just outside here; we can go down a few flights to the apartment quarters, and you can see how we lived.”

The elevator was big enough for forty people, or for any reasonably sized cargo; the four of them took only a corner of it. When it stopped they emerged into a long hall, metal walled and punctuated with metal doorways, dimly illuminated with sparse standby lights. “Just a minute,” Blundy said, and rummaged around a closet until he found the right switch.

Then the overhead lights sprang up. They were carefully covered with colored glass to make the light as pleasant, and as varied, as possible; and the walls, once the lights were on, turned out to be painted and decorated handsomely. But Blundy’s look was dour.

“It strikes me as a bit well sterile,” Horeger suggested, peering down the long hallway.

Murra gave him a kindly smile. “Oh, it is. We all feel that, don’t we, dear? Still, it’s better than being out in the cold,” she told him. “Although sometimes we don’t think so, along about Christmas or Mean.”

“And it really is a whole city, isn’t it?” Mercy MacDonald said, strolling a few meters down the hall and testing a door. It was unlocked. It opened to show stripped rooms, nothing in them but bare built-in desks and empty wall shelves.

“We take everything we own when we move out in the spring,” Blundy told her, and went on to give her the statistics: “Just about five hundred thousand people live here all winter long. That’s practically the world’s whole population, not counting the few people who stay on in the outposts. We have factories here in the city, as well as stores, and schools, and swim-ming pools they’re on the next level, along with the gyms and the sports facilities and theaters and everything else that makes up a city.”

“We’ll be expanding it come fall,” Murra added.

“There‘11 be fifteen hundred new rooms added, so some families can have private sitting rooms and so on.

That’s one of the things Blundy’s been so good at, making the council take action on things that everybody needs, but they just haven’t got around to.

They’ll be getting ready to debate the plans in a month or so, isn’t that right, dear?” Blundy nodded. “We do all our construction in the fall, you see, because that’s when everything’s dried out and it’s not too hot to work outside. So we do all our planning before the end of summer.”

“When a lot of us come right back into the city here,” Blundy said sourly. “The summer heat’s almost as bad as the winter cold.”

“So,” Murra finished, giving the guests an admiring look, “you see that you people came at the best time time of year. This is when everybody’s pretty happy “

“Or as happy as we ever get,” Blundy finished.

MacDonald found herself shivering. When she saw that Murra had noticed she said apologetically, “It’s a lot warmer in the hospital.”

Murra was immediately solicitous. “Oh, I’m sorry about that, but, you see, we don’t heat the whole city this time of year even the hospital won’t need it much longer; but the outside air’s still a little cool, up here on Winter Hill.” She smiled. “I don’t know if you’re interested in the details “

“I am,” Horeger said immediately.

“Well, we pump heat in you remember the photovoltaic farm you saw? Well, the PV cells turn the sunlight into electricity; that’s where we get our power, and we use the surplus to electrolyze icewater into hydrogen for fuel for tractors and aircraft, and now for the space shuttles, too, of course. But the photovoltaic cells can’t use much of the infrared radiation the heat from the sun; in fact, they work better when they’re cooler. So we run pipes under them to carry the heat away to a big clay bed in the mountain.

The clay stores heat all spring, summer, and most of the fall, then we pump the heat back into the city all winter long.”

“I’d really like to see that, if you’d be willing to show it to me,” Horeger said.

“Of course, Hans. You too, Mercy, if you’d like it?”

“I don’t care much about power plants. I’d rather poke around the city,” MacDonald said. “If Blundy doesn’t mind showing me, I mean.”

Blundy didn’t, at all. When the other two had gone, he said, “I could start by showing you where I lived ” And when she nodded, “But I’m hungry right now, aren’t you? Let’s get some sandwiches first. We can take them with us and eat them in one of the apartments, then you’ll get an idea of what it’s like to live in this place for ten dreary months on end.”

In the huge elevator going back to the hospital level, walking down the cafeteria lines to choose their food, Blundy held Mercy MacDonald’s arm not aggressively; just confidently, because things were working out as well as he could have hoped. They chatted on the way about non-essentials. He asked her how her shipmates were enjoying Slowyear, and she told him they all seemed to love it “All of them; even old Captain Hawkins came down with his wife and Sam Bagehot he’s one of our medics got someone to give him a ride to some fishing village on the coast. He said he’s always wanted to go fishing.”

He looked at her affectionately. “It’s interesting for you to be here?”

“You bet, Blundy. I’d almost forgotten what a planet was like. All this space - well, not here in this place, of course; but out in the open “

He nodded. “Then you’ll understand how much I hate being cooped up here all through the winter.

Here, let’s see if we can get into our old apartment.”

He selected a door, no different from any other door in the hall as far as MacDonald could see, then scowled apologetically. “I’m sorry; I forgot we locked it, and I don’t have the key. But all the apartments along here are pretty much the same.”

He tried three or four other doors before he found one that opened, shook his head, tried a dozen more until he found the one he was looking for. “This’ll do,”

he said, and held the door open for her.

She looked around the room, no bigger than her own cabin on Nordvik. It was almost as bare as the one they had seen on the other level, though it did contain a stripped-down bed.

“So we’ll have something to sit on,” he said.

“Of course,” she said, and he saw her nose wrinkling.

“Stinks, doesn’t it?” he said. “They turn off most of the ventilation when people are outside but it’s not much better in the winter.”

“I was just thinking that it looks pretty crowded,”

she said, half apologizing. “And well dreary?”

“It was dreary. Crowded, too,” he said sourly, gazing around. “Well, we might as well sit down.”

They sat on the edge of the bed, since there was no other place to sit, and opened their sandwiches.

There wasn’t much room. Their elbows touched from time to time, and Blundy could feel, or imagined he could feel, the warmth that came from her body.

He was surprised when she asked him, “Are you sure you want to be here?”

He blinked at her; that wasn’t the question on his mind at all.

“You seem well, I don’t know. Depressed, maybe. Is it seeing the hospital?”

He shook his head, then thought for a moment.

“Maybe a little,” he said, avoiding the truthful answer.

“Maybe it’s this whole place. I can’t tell you how much it begins to look like a prison after the first few weeks.

Of course, Murra and I were lucky because we had our work. We kept pretty busy all winter long with Winter Wife, and we got to spend a lot of time in the studios.

We even went outside on location, for a couple of episodes, though that wasn’t much fun, either; if you’re going to be out for more than a few minutes you have to dress really warmly, with electrically heated boots and gloves.”

She looked at Blundy quizzically. “And that was a big success? Winter Wife, I mean?” He shrugged. She studied him for a moment. “I don’t understand, Blundy. You’re a famous playwright “

“Video dramas,” he corrected her.

“Same thing; and yet you work as a shepherd.”

“But I enjoy that,” he said, surprised. “After you spend seven hundred winter days crowded together in this place a little solitude is a good thing. Besides, it’s beautiful out there. You see all the stars at night, and in daylight the mountains are always there on the horizon. They’re really spectacular to look at. And the air’s so pure, and it’s quiet, and by now the flowers are springing up all over and everything smells so sweet “

He stopped, surprised. She was almost laughing.

“That’s quite a sales talk,” she said.

“Sales talk?”

“It sounds like you’re saying I ought to go out with you,” she amplified.

“Well,” he said, touching her arm, “I suppose I am.

If you’d like to.”

“I accept,” she said gravely. “But in that case and because it’s still a little chilly in here if you and I are going off into the boondocks together, don’t you think that now it’s about time you put your arms around me?”

Blundy slept in his own bed that night, with Murra peacefully sleeping beside him. If she knew he had bedded Mercy MacDonald that afternoon, as he was convinced she always did, she had had the grace to keep silent about it. She had asked no questions when he came home, offered no criticism, invited no sexual advances. She was a model winter wife, Blundy thought glumly as he drifted off to sleep. Unfortunately it was now spring.

The next morning he rose early, wakened by the thunder of the departing shuttle, and headed for the marketplace.

As he had expected he would, he found Petoyne idly looking through the scanty remaining stocks of scrimshaw. When she saw Blundy, and put down the carved plastic statuette she’d been looking at to come over to him, there was something in her face that told Blundy she knew as well as Murra that he had found a new lover.

Unlike Murra, she didn’t pretend not to. She said, her tone hostile, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I do know. And, listen ” getting it over with “I’m going to take Mercy MacDonald out to the flocks with me.”

Petoyne nodded as though she had expected it.

“You won’t want me along, then.”

“Well, I think “

“I know what you think.” Then she gave him a look which he could not decipher. It was neither angry nor amused. It was, if anything sympathetic? Sad?

“What’s the matter?” he demanded.

“There’s something I think you should know. That old captain from the ship? I saw him taking his clothes off in the marketplace this morning.” He stared at her, and she nodded. “So if you’re going anywhere with Mercy MacDonald,” she said, “my advice is, do it pretty soon.”