Stopping at Slowyear

by Frederik Pohl

  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 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 any more. 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 preserved her public image of perfect, unstriving self-control, but 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 other 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 any more, 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 .7einstance. 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 newborns was a slight improvement, though it involved crying babies an
d 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 the 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 closeups-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 incongrous that Irakaho 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 de-mothballed, 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?" she asked.