Stopping at Slowyear

Chapter Nine

Up to the very last minute, Mercy MacDonald had not really decided whether to have an affair with this conspicuously married little man; in fact, she had decided quite a long time ago that going to bed with married men was the sort of mistake she had outgrown long since. But there were always extenuating circumstances, weren’t there? Obviously this particular man’s marriage to that slinky, pretentious woman had become a burden to him, while Blundy himself had seemed so down and also so very male…. No, there was something about this Blundy that was worth pursuing, she was sure of it.

All the same she was startled, when she thought about it, to find herself climbing into his stubby, high-roofed vehicle on the way to the (for God’s sake!) sheep pastures with him; and it occurred to her that she hadn’t really decided to do that, either.

But she was doing it.

Since she was actually doing it, there was no reason to worry about it. Maybe at some later time, MacDonald informed herself, she would have to think harder about what all this was getting her into. Not now. Now she was quite content to enjoy this interesting new experience with this interesting new man.

The word that was important here was “new.”

MacDonald had had quite a reasonable number of lovers before, at one time or another, but it had been most of her life since any one of them could have been called “new.” New to share her bed, maybe, but for decades now any new body that showed up in her bed had been simply an old, familiar body in a somewhat altered relationship.

But now there was this Blundy man squat, sometimes sulky, quite married but, oh, so very, so excitingly and completely new.

She laughed out loud, surprising herself. When Blundy turned to give her a puzzled look, she just shook her head. She was as silly as silly little Betsy arap Dee, she thought. Or as lucky. Or as yes as young. All of a sudden, without any physical change, she was seeing the world through the eyes of a teenager again.

It was all fascinating, even this silly, blocky car they were riding in. She had never been in a vehicle quite like it before; it was obviously designed for just two people, and her big traveling bag had barely squeezed into the space behind the seats wouldn’t have made it at all if Blundy’s own bag hadn’t been quite small. As she studied the way he drove the thing she concluded she could easily learn how to do it herself. There was a wheel that steered it, and on the wheel a selector lever that seemed to shift gears; and on the floor a pedal that controlled the speed and another that controlled a brake. All that was simple enough. Once you started it up and put your foot on the right pedal the high-pitched, sputtering hydrogen motor pushed the little car along at a satisfying rate of speed.

There were other vehicles on the road big tractor-trailers going empty out to the farms and coming back laden with crates of vegetables and fruits and bins of grain; flatbeds with farm workers who dangled their feet over the sides and waved to them as they passed; smaller trucks with machinery and beams and slabs of construction materials. The important part about driving, she decided, was knowing how to avoid hitting any of the other vehicles. Blundy seemed to manage it well enough, snaking around and past them.

If Blundy could do it so could Mercy MacDonald.

Then they were climbing up through a pass and the basin that held the summertown was behind them.

The number of vehicles dropped sharply. The character of the landscape changed. The farmland that had been all around them was now gone. The road they were on bugged a cliff, high above a gorge. Far below a good-sized river ran, sculptured by rapids and boulders.

“I thought we were taking the sheep out to pasture,” she offered.

“The flock had to leave at daybreak. By now they’re thirty or forty kilometers down the pike, almost to the graze. I got a friend of mine to start them off for us. We’ll take over when we catch them.”

She nodded, looking around. Once through the hills the landscape had flattened out again, but there were no farms here, nothing but meadow and scrub as far as she could see.

When she commented on that to Blundy he explained, “It’s the river, Mercy. The first thing that freezes in the winter is Sometimes River, and then the ice blocks its channel. So the whole basin behind the ice dam fills up, fifty or sixty meters deep, and then that freezes, too. So all the silt comes out and makes the soil better there. On this side of the hills, not as good.

Good enough for pasturing sheep, though see?”

And ahead of them she did see, a long, plodding line of stone-colored animals, with a dozen dogs loping back and forth along them to keep them in order. At the head of the line a tractor-trailer was leading the way, its pace creeping no faster than the sheep. Blundy pressed a button on the steering wheel and a horn blared; a moment later an arm stretched out from the cab of the tractor and waved. “She sees us,”

he said. “We’ll catch up in just a minute “

And in not more than a minute they had. The tractor had pulled a few dozen meters ahead of the flock; Blundy and Mercy MacDonald were out of their car and Blundy was heaving their bags into the tractor cab at once.

That part was all right. The part that wasn’t all right was that the driver of the cab turned out to be the skinny little teenaged girl who was named Petoyne.

“I thought we were going to be alone,” MacDonald couldn’t help saying, but Blundy didn’t hear; he was already climbing into the cab himself, sliding behind the wheel.

“Come on, Mercy,” he ordered. And then, leaning out of the cab, he waved to the girl, who was standing with one hand on the door of the little car they had chased her in, looking at the two of them with a hard stare. “Thanks, Petoyne,” he called. “See you in a month or so.” And, the leaders of the flock already beginning to catch up with them, he started the tractor crawling forward again as soon as Mercy MacDonald’s feet left the ground.

So it was just as well he hadn’t heard, MacDonald thought as she settled herself in, although what she also thought was that the way Petoyne looked at her suggested something Blundy hadn’t seen fit to mention. How many lovers could this man handle, she wondered.

It was not a serious question, though. For the next few weeks, anyway, the answer would surely be: one.

For there wasn’t going to be anyone else around.

Never once before in all of her life had Mercy MacDonald been so remote from the society of others.

In this place there was simply no one at all. Outside the shell of the tent they lived in (imagine living in a tent!) there was not a single living creature she could see for many miles in any direction, except for the herd of snuffling, grunting ewes and the dogs that watched over them….

And except, of course, for Arakaho Blundy Spenotex.

It was almost dark before she realized that she didn’t feel lonely at all, and that the reason was Blundy.

He seemed to take up a great deal of space in her life, enough for multitudes. He was inescapably, but not at all oppressively, there.

When they had reached the grazing grounds, bumping slowly over open ground for several hours till they reached the stream he had been looking for, Blundy turned off the radio beacon, hauled great bulky packages out of the back of the trailer and began setting up their quarters. He waved at the sun, still high in the sky but beginning to lower. “We want to get all set up before dark,” he said, “so let’s get on with it.”

Within the first hour he had made them a home no, they had made it; she did as much as Blundy did.

He showed her how to set the first tent peg in at the proper angle, then left her to drive the others in, in the pattern he marked out for her, while he unrolled the fabric itself. They put it up together, sweating and grunting. Blundy lugged in the stuff too heavy for her to carry, or too awkward, but her bag, his own, the cooking utensils, the one airbed, the folding furniture all that he left for her to sort out and shift into position. While he dug the sanitary pit and moved the trailer down to the stream she opened cartons and tried to figure out where everything went.

That wasn’t easy. Tents didn’t seem to have built-in lockers. MacDonald had never even seen a tent before, much less lived in one. The only time she’d come across the word was in books, where the things seemed mostly associated with armies. She spent a long time, that first long afternoon, wondering what she had got herself into.

But then things began to pick up. When she came out of the tent with sandwiches she saw that Blundy had single-handedly pitched a smaller tent over the sanitary hole (she had wondered about that). They ate companionably, if rapidly, while Blundy outlined to her the other things they had to do that day. “It’s clouding up over there,” he said, waving to the west, “so I think we’ll have rain tomorrow. And we want as much as possible done before that.”

She nodded. The sheep were scattered all around now, without the radio beacon to keep them in order, individual animals spotted across the landscape, munching away. “Don’t you have to worry about the herd.?” she asked.

“What for? All they have to do is roam around and eat. The dogs won’t let them stray too far, and the rest they can handle by themselves. Let’s get the pipes strung.” And so the two of them ran a flexible hose from the tractor at the banks of the stream; a pump in the tractor sucked water out of the stream, the idling engine warmed it and it came out of a nozzle at the top of a pole: a shower. “We’d better only use it in the daytime,” Blundy said. “because the nights are still a little chilly.” But it wasn’t quite dark yet when they had finished, and MacDonald insisted on trying it out, which is when she discovered the interesting possibilities when two people showered at once. When they came damply out of the shower, wrapped in towels, into the still warm evening, it was full dark. She looked up and caught her breath.

“I told you about the stars,” Blundy said, his arm around her.

But no one could have. Although the western edge of the sky was clouded black most of it was still clear; and stars seen through Nordvik’s vision plates were nothing like stars spread over your head on a warm spring night. There was nothing in the heavens to compete with them. Slowyear didn’t have a moon; Slowyear’s sun certainly had a family of planets, but the distances between them were great and none were very bright from the surface of Slowyear; the stars had Slowyear’s sky to themselves, and they filled it. Here, away from the lights of the summer city, the sky was black and pearl, sprinkled with diamonds. The Milky Way spread across one whole corner of the sky like a lunar mist.

Mercy MacDonald leaned against Blundy’s warm arm, her head back, eyes filled with the starry splendor. It was not only dark, apart from the faint glow that came through the fabric of their living tent, it was silent.

All she could hear was small snuffling noises from sleeping sheep. She could smell them not an offensive odor, just a natural one. One of the dogs woke up enough to amble over to investigate them, then lay with its head on its paws to watch them.

This was what solitude was like, MacDonald thought. A little scary. But fine.

Blundy stirred and pointed. “That’s where the Earth is,” he said. She tried to peer along his index finger. “You see those two lines of stars three in a row, and then four in a row just above them? Well, right between those two lines “

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

“No. You can’t. We’re too far, but that’s where it is.”

She didn’t answer that, and she didn’t go on looking at the stars, either. She was looking at Blundy’s face, very near her own but almost invisible with nothing but starlight to see by. She could not make out his expression.

“Would you like to go there?” she asked.

He lowered his gaze to look at her. “Go to the Earth? But I can’t,” he said reasonably.

“Ships do go there, Blundy. Not Nordvik, of course. I don’t know where Nordvik will go from here, but it isn’t likely to be the Earth, but “

“I’m never going to leave Slowyear,” he said, his tone flat. “So what’s the use of wishing? Come to bed.”

The next morning Mercy MacDonald woke with thunder crashing in her ears and a drumming of rain on the side of the tent. Blundy was nowhere in sight.

That was a new experience for her, too, and not one she really enjoyed peering out of the flap of the tent she saw eye-searing flashes of lightning all around, and the rain that was turning the ground into swamp was not just rain. Chunks of ice the size of her thumbnail were bouncing off the ground, astonishing her. She had heard the word “hail” before; she had never seen any.

But when Blundy came dripping into the tent a few minutes later he promised it would all be over soon; and it was; and by noontime the water had run off and the sky was blue and warm.

It was not a bad way to live, she decided.

Shepherding had a lot going for it. The food was good, the accommodations comfortable enough, once you got used to them, and the sex with Blundy was she hunted for the right word and grinned to herself when she found it: “ample.” It changed the way she felt about everything. Her whole metabolism seemed to have shifted gears.

It was just as well that making love never failed to give pleasure, because there wasn’t much else to do.

The sheep took care of themselves, pretty much, with a little help from the dogs but it didn’t matter if they wandered. When it came time for lambing, Blundy explained, he would turn on the radio beacon and that would bring all the ewes back close to the tent. Then things would get busy enough helping the ewes deliver when they needed help; fitting the newborn lambs with radio guides of their own, clipped into their noses.

“Can we do that by ourselves?” she asked, trying to imagine what it would be like to “help” a ewe bring forth its lamb and not liking what she imagined.

He hesitated for a moment, putting his arm around her. “We wouldn’t have to,” he said. “I’d get some help out here for that.” And she might have asked more, but his arm was tightening around her and his hands were on her as he spoke, and there was only one place for them to go then.

But even while they were making love she was thinking. And kept on thinking as they settled in. This existence was interesting as an experience, and re-warding in bed, but it did, she admitted, get a little well, not boring, exactly, but empty. Their “work” was certainly not demanding. Once a day she and Blundy went out for a walk he called it “inspection” and what they inspected was the landscape, dotted with sheep. “What are we looking for?” she asked, and he shrugged.

“Sick ones. Dead ones, maybe. If they’re dead we bury them, and if they’re sick we give them antibiotics but it’s pretty early for that. We don’t usually get any real problems until the lambing starts.” He took her hand and moved on, to the top of a hill; he took out his field glasses and swept the area, finding nothing that needed attention.

MacDonald was glad to sit down on the grass for a moment; it had been a long time since she had done this much walking. She gazed around at the pretty landscape, with its haze of bugs none of them more than mild annoyances, because Slowyear’s bugs did not care for the blood of mammals, never having had any mammals to co-evolve with. The only large creatures in sight were the idle dogs and the scattered sheep. “That’s all you have for livestock, sheep? No cattle, goats, pigs, horses ?”

He took the glasses away from his eyes and frowned down at her, trying to remember. “We did have, some of them. A long time ago twenty-five slowyears ago, when the colony first landed. But they died.”

“They’ve got frozen sperm and ova on the ship, you know.”

“Yes, you told us. I don’t think they’d work here.”

“You could try,” she said.

“Well, we probably will hey,” he said, scuffing at the base of a bush with the toe of his boot. “Look at that. There’s scoggers here.”

She looked, but could see nothing but a hole in the ground. But that was all you ever saw in the daytime, he explained. “They only come out at night, but fresh scogger’s the best eating there is. We’ll catch us a couple one of these nights.” He grinned down at her.

“Speaking of which,” he said, “I’m getting hungry, aren’t you?”

And that was a shock to her, too, because what they ate was lamb chops, but they didn’t get them out of a frozen food locker, they got them from that permanently available larder on the hoof that was all around them. She closed her eyes with a faint squawk when Blundy leisurely selected one of the smaller ewes, lifted its chin with one hand, slit its throat with the knife in the other.

That wasn’t the end of it, either. Then there was the skinning, and the disposal of the offal (buried deep so the dogs wouldn’t dig it up again), then the rough butchering, then, while their own chops were broiling over the little hydrogen-burning grill, Blundy whistled the dogs in and fed them the rest of the dismembered carcass. “They have to eat, too,” he reminded her, “so we’ll slaughter one sheep a day as long as we’re here.”

MacDonald wasn’t at all sure she could eat something that had been gazing at her with sad eyes no more than half an hour earlier. But she did. It tasted good, too. And when it was done, and they’d buried the bones she looked around expectandy. “Now what do we do?” she asked.

“Whatever we like,” he said. “We’re through for the day.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “What would you be doing if I weren’t here?”

He shrugged. “Write for a while, maybe.”

“Then do it,” she commanded, and tried to make herself inconspicuous while he obediently sat down at his little keyboard.

That wasn’t easy to do, she discovered. MacDonald was used to having a lot of free time between stars, time was what you had the most of on Nordvik. But on the ship at least she had her books, and her recorded music and films, and people to talk to even if they were always the same few dozen people you had got tired of talking to years before. Here there was nothing. They could have had television, but Blundy explained that he had vetoed that “There’s no point looking for solitude and bringing the whole world along, is there?” But then, almost as an apology, he added, “There’s a player in the cab of the tractor, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, it’s there. And I think there are disks. Mostly they’d be technical stuff on taking care of sheep, you know, but there might be some others. Anyway, you might want to learn more about sheep.”

She did learn more about sheep more than she had ever wanted to know about sheep but what saved MacDonald’s sanity was that there turned out to be quite a few disks on other subjects, too. Some had evidently been left behind by that gawky adolescent, Petoyne, Blundy’s former helper. Those were school work: math lessons, accountancy lessons, grammar lessons. They were not in any particular order, and some had been spilled out of their container and wedged their way under the seats or behind forgotten tools. None of the school lessons were really exciting for Mercy MacDonald, but in among the lesson disks were some recorded episodes from Blundy’s video drama, Winter Wife.

Those interested Mercy MacDonald quite a lot. Not just because Blundy was the guiding spirit behind them, but because those particular episodes had been selected for a purpose. She did not need to be told that they had been Petoyne’s. They mostly had Petoyne herself in a leading role, but a younger, skinnier Petoyne than the young woman MacDonald had met, and MacDonald studied them with a good deal of interest.

So she spent most of her afternoon hours watching vid disks there in the tractor cab, while Blundy did whatever he did with his writing machine; he did not want to show her any of it, and she stopped asking.

And they ate, and slept, and did their chores, and made love. And sometimes (but not often) swam in the very cold stream. And sometimes picked wildflowers. And sometimes, on clouded nights when there wasn’t even much starshine to guide them, went out scogger-hunting in the velvet dark (stumbling over bushes and hillocks, with ultraviolet lights that made the grubs’ epicuticles fluoresce so they looked like neon-lit cockroaches in the night) and broiled their catch for breakfast. And made love. And sometimes MacDonald sat by herself out of Blundy’s sight and stared thoughtfully into space, wondering just what she was doing there, on this planet, with this stranger.

That took a lot of thinking. There was no doubt in MacDonald’s mind that she was fond of Blundy she had not yet decided to entertain the word “love” or that Blundy was an attractive man, most so because he was a brand new one, but that didn’t answer her main question, which was: was there a future with him? She wondered what he would be like in the long term (assuming there was a long term, assuming his wife conveniently evaporated while they were gone). Of course that wouldn’t happen. Of course (there were so many “of course”s) she could change her mind and leave with the ship. Leave without him of course or, alternatively, she considered the possibility that he might want to come along in Nordink. The beauty part of that was that Murra certainly never would. So that part of the problem would solve itself But Blundy wouldn’t go either.

It wasn’t enough for her to be sure of that in her mind, she had to hear it from Blundy himself. When she broached the subject, joking seriously, he shook his head. “Nobody from Slowyear will ever leave,” he said positively.

“Why?”

He took her hand in his, kissing it while he thought for a moment. “We wouldn’t be welcome,” he said at last, and then his kisses moved up her arm, and naturally they made love again. To change the subject, she was pretty sure. And why were there so many subjects he kept on changing?

The last disks she found were the most disturbing.

They turned up when she had abandoned hope of discovering any more, forgotten under a seat cushion, and they were additional episodes from Winter Wife.

She played one of them over and over, until it made her weep. When she could watch no more the sun was almost setting, and she stumbled to the tent and Blundy.

He looked up in startlement from his machine.

“Mercy!” he cried, alarmed, jumping up to take her in his arms. “What’s the matter?”

“Winter Wife, ” she said, trying not to sob. “The part where the little girl dies like your little nephew, Porly.”

“Oh,” he said, beginning to understand. “Yes. That episode. You found a copy? That was one of the best ratings we got, when the baby died.”

“It was horrible, “she said. “They called it ‘Essie,’

or something like that.”

He held her silently for a moment before he answered. “It’s the letters, SE,” he said. “Stands for spongiform encephalopathy. Like we said. The brain turns all loose and fluffy, and they die.”

She let him stroke her hair while he told her again about spongiform encephalopathy. Known as a disease of animals on Earth it was called “scrapie”

when sheep got it, “Mad Cow Disease” when it infected cattle on Slowyear it was a kind of failure of the human body’s auto-immune systems. The brain dete-riorated fast and stopped being any kind of a useful brain. Adult Slowyearians were generally safe from it. Babies weren’t. Their immune systems were incompletely developed, so they were at severe risk…and four out of ten of them died of it. So were old people, as their immune systems began to break down, putting them at risk. “If you survive past the first twenty months,” he explained, “you’re almost always all right until you’re almost three “

“Three slowyears,” MacDonald said, doing the arithmetic in her head. “Almost fifty standard years?”

“I suppose so.”

“Oh, Blundy,” she said woefully. “I don’t think I could stand it.”

He said soberly, “A lot of people can’t.”

She didn’t answer that, because a thought had struck her. What she was thinking was that accounted for Murra’s childlessness. Then she made herself stop crying. She sat up straight, rubbing the last damp from her cheeks, and said the other thing that was on her mind: “That was really moving, ” she said. “The show, I mean. It made me cry.”

Blundy didn’t answer, unless looking modestly pleased was an answer, so MacDonald pressed on with her thought. “What I mean,” she said, “is that you could sell those disks. To the captain. I’m sure there’d be an audience for them on other planets.”

He didn’t answer that, either, but the way he didn’t answer surprised her. His face suddenly went still, no expression at all. She waited to see if he would speak.

When he didn’t, she ventured, “Is something wrong?

You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

He stirred and got up. “I do want to,” he said.

“Mercy, what do you think I am? I’m a writer part of the time, anyway and when I write I write for people. I’d love to have an audience a big audience, the biggest there is people I don’t even know, maybe even people who aren’t born yet “

“Well? So then will you give the captain the disks?”

“Sure,” he said, in a tone that was not intended to be believed, and turned away. She looked at him, puzzled. He seemed to have forgotten the matter. He was going about the simple household business of turning on the lights, and when that was done he went to the cooler and pulled out a bottle of wine.

It took the lighting of the lamps to make MacDonald realize that it had become dark outside. “Oh, my,” she said. “We’re forgetting about dinner.”

He nodded agreement, pouring wine for both of them. She accepted hers willingly enough they generally had some wine with their dinners, why not a glass before? But it wasn’t going to be just one glass, for as soon as the first glasses were down he was pouring more.

Well, MacDonald told herself, she wasn’t that hungry. If Blundy felt like having a few drinks, why should they not have them? She sat companionably next to him in silence, thinking about the things she hadn’t really wanted to think about before, until the wine emboldened her to speak. “It is pretty awful, isn’t iff I mean knowing what might happen to your babies, if you had them.””

“Awful enough,” he agreed.

“And knowing that it’s going to happen to you, too, I mean even as a grownup, if you live long enough,” she went on thoughtfully. “Is that why you ah?”

“Why we what”” he demanded, pouring again.

“Well, I mean the poison pills. I mean, sentencing people to take poison for doing things that really aren’t so bad, you know? I mean, on other planets they have laws, too, but mostly they just put people in jail if they break them.”

He thought it over. “Maybe so,” he said.

“Because dying of a poison pill is better than the, ah, the SE thing?”

He had to think about that, too. “Maybe,” he said.

“Well, I guess it is, but that’s not the only thing.

Everybody dies on all the other planets, too, don’t they?”

“You do seem to have a different attitude on Slowyear, though.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “I guess we do have a different attitude on Slowyear. On Slowyear I don’t think we’d ever put anybody in jail. Maybe we don’t have jails because we’re all in jail all winter long twenty months. Fourteen hundred days. And it doesn’t matter if you’re guilty of anything or not.”

“Poor Blundy,” she said, kissing his cheek, and Blundy said:

“Finish your wine, then let’s get to bed.”

When Mercy MacDonald woke up the next morning she knew she’d gone to bed pretty tipsy both times; because she had a memory of Blundy and herself stumbling out into the warm night, sometime or other, just to breathe a little fresh air before sleeping.

She even remembered that he had pointed out the glimmer of light on the western horizon that was Nordwk, high enough above the planet to be caught in the last of the sunlight before it entered Slowyear’s shadow, and that he had been crying. She remembered that, for some reason, that had seemed funny to her at the time.

What she hadn’t expected was that, although her head hurt with a serious hangover, it seemed funny now, too. She giggled at the thought that she was still a bit tipsy.

She got up, looking for Blundy to tell him that amusing fact. He wasn’t far. He was right outside the door, feeding a piece of the scogger they hadn’t remembered to eat for dinner to one of the dogs, and he looked up when he saw her. “Hi,” he said, smiling because he saw that she was smiling. She giggled at him.

“What are you doing that for?” she asked.

He looked surprised. “I’m giving him a taste for it,” he explained. “Come winter we use dogs to sniff out the larvae on the slopes, sometimes, where the wind scours the snow away. We have to wear the heated suits to dig them up, but the dogs have to tough it out ” He broke off, smiling no longer. “What is it?” he asked sharply.

“It’s just that that’s so funny, “she gasped, laughing. “Digging up bugs. With dogs. “

It was quite annoying, though, that this man was not laughing with her. His look was serious even frightened. “You don’t see the humor of it,” she said, pouting, “you you ” Then she reeled. It was almost as though she were back on the ship, suddenly weightless, and it was embarrassing, too.

She pulled herself together. “Do you know,” she said, “it’s a funny thing, but I don’t seem to remember your name.” And saw with astonishment that the man was crying.