Stopping at Slowyear

by Frederik Pohl

  He waved a hand, and under his chin the planet's stats appeared: An F8 star; a planetary surface gravity very close to Earth normal; an atmosphere a little denser, but with a slightly lower partial pressure of oxygen. "See what it says about the primary?" he invited. "It's bright. So those worrywarts among you can't rest easy-we won't have any trouble refueling there."

  "Meaning worrywarts like me," Mercy MacDonald told the screen, since she had been telling Horeger for months that if they didn't refuel pretty soon their next stop would be their last.

  She might have said more, because talking back to Horeger on the screen was one of the habits that had become standard for her-and a lot less maddening than talking to Horeger when he could hear-but it dawned on her that the faint tapping sound she heard was someone at her door.

  For a nasty moment she feared it might be Horeger back again.

  Impossible, of course; there he was blithely pontificating away in real time on the screen. When she opened the door she was pleased to see that it was little Betsy arap Dee, as close as she had to a "best friend" on Nordvik.

  "Hi," she said, welcoming-

  Then she got a better look at Betsy's face. "What's the matter?"

  MacDonald asked sharply, suddenly afraid.

  Betsy was holding her swollen belly. "The baby," she sobbed. "I'm spotting, and I hurt. Can you help me get to the sickbay, please?"

  * * *

  By the time Mercy MacDonald got her friend to the room they used for a sickbay Sam Bagehot, the closest thing they had to a nurse, had an obstetric bed ready and Danny de Bride, their approximation of a doctor, was fretfully studying the obstetric displays from their medical database.

  De Bride wasn't a real doctor, but he was the best Nordvik had left after the mass desertion on Hades, and he had at least long since read through all the gynecological section. "I hope I know what I'm doing," he gritted to MacDonald as the nurse guided Betsy's feet into the stirrups and he played with the fetoscope earphones in his hand.

  "I hope so, too," MacDonald said, but not out loud. Out loud she only whispered encouragingly in Betsy arap Dee's ear. Whether her friend heard her she could not say. Betsy's eyes were closed, her forehead was cold and clammy and she was moaning.

  De Bride was muttering something to his nurse, but MacDonald missed it.

  Over their heads Horeger was still prattling noisily away on the screen.

  "What?" she demanded.

  "I said she's hardly dilated at all," de Bride complained.

  "And I'm not getting any fetal heartbeat," said Sam, holding the metal disk on Betsy's belly and watching the readout.

  "Oh, shit," said de Bride. "What do you think, Sam? Do I have to do a C-section? I've never even seen one!"

  "You'll see one now," his nurse told him. "Mercy, give me a hand. You take care of the instruments while I handle the anesthesia, will you?"

  The "will you" was only politeness. There wasn't any real choice. If there had been, Mercy MacDonald would have been out of there long before the cutting started, but under the circumstances she was present for it all.

  She had never seen anyone deliberately slice into the flesh of another human being before. There was less blood than she had expected, but still a great deal of blood; it went faster than she had imagined, but still a long business of de Bride muttering angrily to himself as he inexpertly pushed muscle walls and tissues out of the way and fumbled for the little scarlet gnome curled up inside Betsy's abdomen. MacDonald was both horrified and fascinated-yes, and something else, too. Almost even envious. For here was silly little Betsy arap Dee bringing a whole new person into existence. Marvelously! Wonderfully. Enviably. . . .

  For a moment MacDonald almost forgot the gore, didn't hear de Bride's steady muttering to himself or Horeger's orating from the screen. She could do this, she told herself. She could have done it years earlier, when she still had Walter to be a father; could still do it, maybe, if she didn't take too long getting it started-

  "Here," said de Bride suddenly. "Hold it while I cut the cord."

  MacDonald found herself with that purple-red little creature in her unpracticed hands. She blinked down at it, wondering. It wasn't until de Bride said, shamefaced, "I couldn't save it, you saw that. Maybe it twisted in the womb, you know?, and the cord strangled it?" that she realized the baby she was holding was dead.

  She stood frozen, until the nurse told her that she might as well put the tiny thing down. Then she did as she was told, and began to clean the bloodstains off the arms of her blue coverall (now really ruined, she thought regretfully) with a dressing. She didn't look at Betsy arap Dee, now being sewn glumly back together. She was watching Hans Horeger's face on the screen, listening as intently as if she cared about anything he might say.

  "We're still about two light-weeks away," he was saying. "Call it three thousand a.u. We'll be there in eight months, just about. Friends, I feel in my bones that this is going to be the stop that pays off for all the others.

  They're going to be crazy about us!"

  From behind Mercy MacDonald, Sam Bagehot said, "They'd better be."

  Chapter 2

  Actually, the people on Slowyear pretty nearly were going crazy over the approaching ship, or at least some of them were, though it would be many weeks before Nordvik entered orbit. Mostly if was the young ones who were working up steam on the subject, though even among them there were quite a few who had too many other things on their minds to get excited over the prospect of a visiting interstellar ship.

  For instance, there was Blundy. Blundy had his mind full of other things, which not only weren't the approaching Nordvik, but weren't even the wife who was waiting for him in the summer city, much less the seventeen hundred things he was supposed to keep his mind on-namely the long ambling column of sheep he was herding into town for shearing and slaughter. Hans Horeger had been right about that. The people of Slowyear spent a lot of time farming their fields and tending their livestock, stocks, but where Horeger went wrong was that they didn't stop there. To the people aboard Nordvik a word like "shepherd" meant a beardless boy or a doddering old man with a stick, not someone riding in a computer-guided, hydrogen-fueled crawler who led his flock with a radio beacon keyed to the receivers implanted in each nose. The people of Slowyear had their high technology, all right; they just didn't show it off.

  In that Blundy was like his planet, because he didn't show off all his strengths, either. Blundy was short and broad, with a body that was all muscle and almost no fat. The muscle didn't show. If you ever picked him up you would be surprised to discover how much he massed-if he allowed you to take the liberty of trying to pick him up. There wasn't much chance of that. Trying it would most likely turn out to mean that you were stretched out on the ground in front of him, gazing stupidly up as you wondered if anyone else had felt the earthquake.

  What Blundy was thinking about on his homebound trip was politics. He had plenty of time to think, of course, because what he was doing took very little of his attention. There was hardly any local traffic on the road this far from the city-a few tractor-trailers on their way to and from the fishing villages on the coast and almost nothing else-and anyway the crawler's computer did most of the driving. Blundy could have been thinking about many things because he was many things-not least of them, a celebrated entertainer on the view screens. But what drew his imagination just then was his political planning.

  Because he had been off with the flock for the four seventy-day months that were his taxtime he was beginning to feel eager to get back into his political incarnation again. He was trying to find a theme for a campaign.

  If he could work out the right subjects to talk about he would then, he calculated, do well to take the town auditorium for a speech the next night-if the auditorium was finished, as his helper, Petoyne, had told him it would be when they talked on the radio; if Petoyne had been efficient enough to reserve it for him.

  There remained the difficult question, which was w
hat the speech should be about. It had to be important. His followers would expect no less.

  But what could he say that would sound important enough to shock them all into life?

  Because his mind was far from what he was doing, he almost missed the traffic warden standing in the road before him. The man's hand was held sternly up and he was scowling.

  Blundy slowed the crawler; he hadn't noticed that they had just passed the highest point in the pass. Other roads joined them there, and there was a tractor-trailer train of construction material waiting to cross before him.

  Blundy leaned out of the cab window to give the warden a quizzical look.

  Then the warden recognized him. He gave Blundy an embarrassed salute and waved him on.

  Blundy waved his thanks to the warden and his apology to the other driver, who would now have a good long wait for the flock to clear the crossing.

  He didn't refuse the courtesy, though. It was a real nuisance to try to halt a procession of seventeen hundred sheep.

  Then, as they began their descent into town, on impulse Blundy opened the cab door and jumped out to stretch his legs. The computer would be quite capable of following its programmed route without him, and he thought better on his feet.

  Blundy landed easily on the packed dirt beside the stock road. He stretched and took a deep breath, letting the tractor and its trailer crawl past him at their two-kilometer-an-hour trudge. The road itself had been repaved since the last time he had come by, four months earlier, with the much shorter line of sheep heading out to the eastern pastures. Now there were beginning to be an occasional high-speed vehicle passing by in both directions-not at high speed here, though, not as they squeezed past the shambling line of sheep, careful of the occasional wilful stray. There weren't many strays, Blundy saw with satisfaction. The flock was obediently following the bellwether radio in the trailer; and the dogs were properly patrolling between sheep and vehicles to keep them off the paved road and on the grassy verge.

  Then Blundy pressed two fingertips to his lips. It was what he did when he got an idea.

  "Like sheep," he said, half-voicing the words past his nearly closed lips.

  "Like sheep we stray in all directions, pointlessly and ignorantly, without a real goal, wandering until we die-"

  No. It was the right sort of note to strike, but certainly not "until we die".

  There was too much dying going on all the time as it was. He scowled at the flock and tried again. "-wandering without goal or direction. How can we find a goal worth attaining? What can lead us as surely as the radio call leads the flock to-"

  No again, positively no. Wrong image entirely. What the call led the sheep to was the shearers' sheds for all and the slaughterhouse for most.

  He was getting back to death again, and that was no good.

  Still, he had the feeling that there was something there that he could use.

  It was just the kind of quick, elucidating metaphor that his political audiences loved: the radio beacon that guided the sheep standing for the purpose that would carry the voters with him. And there was something more there waiting to be expressed. Something about sheep going astray was tickling his mind, some phrase he had heard once that had come out of some old book. . . .

  Murra would know. "The hell with it," he said, meaning for now; he would ask Murra, out of her vast reading in the books that no one else bothered with, and then maybe it would all come clear.

  He looked around, pleased at the sight, pleased to be going home again after taxtime. Looking down into the valley, he thought the broad Sometimes River had dropped a good deal since the last time he had passed this way. It was still well over its summertime banks, a hundred meters of flood rushing furiously downhill, but nothing like the raging torrents of first melt he had seen four months before. The glacier on the west wall was showing the signs of advancing warmth, too; it had retreated half a kilometer at least. He squinted at it until he thought he had found the spot under its lip where, at the end of the summer before, he had shared a cabin with the woman who had then been his new and brightest love.

  That had been a long time ago.

  Murra wasn't new and bright any more, and the intervening winter's ice had planed away all trace of the cabin.

  Then an eruption of yelping behind him made him turn. He took a good look at his flock and swore. The long line of sheep was breaking up into clots. Even though the dogs barked and nipped at their rumps the animals were tiring and so they were pausing to nibble at the fresh growth beneath their hooves. He touched the talk button on his lapel. "Give them a jolt to wake them up; they're clumping," he ordered Katiro, his replacement helper now drowsing in the trailer (and the boy was incompetent, too; why had Petoyne begged to go in early to take care of some undefined business and left him with this idiot?) A moment later Blundy heard a chorus of dismayed baaing from the flock as their radio collars gave them peremptory little electric shocks. Obediently they picked up their pace, but Blundy was annoyed. The radioman in the back of the tractor should have prevented that. If Petoyne had been in the trailer it wouldn't have happened. Petoyne would have kept an eye on the flock without without being reminded. But Petoyne had had that private business that Blundy had decided he didn't even want to know about-and out of fondness for his chief helper Blundy had agreed.

  It occurred to Blundy that his fondness for Petoyne was likely to become a liability.

  He turned and walked after the trailer, trying to remember that glimmering of an idea-about sheep, wasn't it? But just as it was coming back to him he heard his name called. "Hey, Blundy!" A tractor pulling a flatbed loaded with protein supplement for the nursing ewes in the field had slowed and the driver was waving to him. "You've got a welcoming committee!"

  the man shouted, jerking a thumb back down the hill toward the summer city. When Blundy craned his neck to see past his own tractor, already half a kilometer ahead, he saw that it was the truth. . . .

  And that useful half-formed idea was irretrievably gone.

  * * *

  There were fifty people waiting for Blundy as he stepped aside and let the tractor proceed toward the pens-people of all shapes and sizes, male and female, oldsters of four and even five years and children-well, semi-children, like his quite nearly adult assistant Petoyne, who was waving violently to catch his eye.

  Blundy gave them all a sober salute. He didn't smile at them. Blundy did not mind at all when his partisans made a fuss over him, but he didn't like to give the appearance of encouraging it. Petoyne was hurrying toward him, whispering urgently. "Blundy? I need a favor, and you're my best friend, so you're the only one I can ask. Remember my dog that was getting kind of old? Well, I didn't like the idea of killing him just because he wasn't a pup any more, so I did a kind of dumb thing-"

  Blundy shook his head. "Oh, hell, Petoyne. Another dumb thing? Talk to me later," he said, not wanting to hear. He turned to the waiting crowd, marshalling his thoughts. There was a rock at the side of the road, thrown there by Sometimes River when it had rampaged through at icebreak.

  Blundy climbed up it to get a better look at his welcomers. Were they political or theatrical? A little of each, he decided, and settled on political, not on the evidence, but because what he really wanted was to convert some of the people who admired him for his theatrical work into the ones who followed his political lead.

  So, "Citizens," he said, improvising as he went along, "you know where I've been. I've been paying off my taxtime, and I ask myself: Why so much taxtime? What do the governors do with the taxtime? Is the winter city any bigger or more comfortable with all the taxtime work we put in? Are we ever going to start that other city on Deep Bay they've been talking about for years? Do they have a plan?"

  He shook his head to indicate the answer, and there was a mutter of moderate agreement from the crowd-they didn't see quite where he was going, but they were willing to follow him far enough to find out. "Then why so much taxtime?" he demanded. "Why should an ordina
ry citizen have to spend a twentieth of his life working off his obligations to the state, when nothing ever changes for the better? I'm not talking about money taxes; we all pay income tax, and that's all right; no one complains about that. But to be required as well to put in long, weary hours at the state's business-and always in the best times of the year, when we could be enjoying ourselves-why, that is slavery." Louder grunts of approval.

  Blundy was beginning to catch the rhythm of his own oratory, so he gave them the smile he had withheld. "But we can't discuss that as fully as it deserves now," he said. "Tomorrow night-" he glanced at Petoyne, who nodded. "Tomorrow night I'll be speaking at the assembly, and I hope I'll see you all there. But now-well, I haven't been home for four months. So if you'll excuse me-?"

  And he jumped nimbly off the rock, moving through them, shaking hands, kissing some of the younger women, with Petoyne tagging grimly behind.

  It all took time. When he was well clear of the last of them Petoyne tugged imploringly at his blouse. "Please, Blundy. I need a favor."

  He didn't stop, because he didn't want any of the fans to catch up with him, but he looked down at her. She was a small woman-small girl, really; she hadn't yet finished her first full year. She was undersized for her age and that made her even shorter than Blundy, though he was no giant himself.

  "Well?" he asked.

  She hesitated. "Remember my dog?" she said, as though she hadn't said it before. "They were going to put him down because of his age, you know. But he was a good dog, Blundy. I grew up with him. I thought if I could switch him with one of the others-"

  "Oh, God," he said, knowing what would come next.

  It did. "They caught me," she said simply.

  "You keep doing really dumb things," he said, shaking his head.