Stopping at Slowyear

by Frederik Pohl

  Vorian gave him a sharp look. "What infant-mortality thing is that?" he demanded.

  Horeger looked surprised. "Oh, shouldn't I have said anything? I mean, I wondered why you were so hot for all our medical data and so on, so I assumed that was it. All the babies that die, I mean."

  "Who told you about babies dying?" Vorian asked, but Blundy answered instead.

  "What difference does it make who told him?" he asked reasonably.

  "That's right, Horeger. We have a very high infant-mortality rate; it's the worst thing about living here. And every time a ship comes by we hope they'll have something we can use-but they never have so far."

  "I thought so," Horeger said, sounding satisfied. "Believe me, Blundy, we want to help you any way we can-"

  "Oh, Christ," Mercy MacDonald interrupted him. "Why don't you just shut up?"

  Horeger turned a wrathful face on her. "Have you forgotten who you're talking to?" His voice was strangled, as though he was striving against insuperable odds for self-control. "I'm simply making a humanitarian offer of aid to people in need."

  "Yes? What kind of aid is that? We don't even have a real doctor on Nordvik." She looked at Blundy. "I think," she said, "the best thing we could do is mind our business."

  Vorian sighed. "We'd appreciate that," he said softly. "And now I think it's getting late for an old man to be out."

  * * *

  When Murra came back they were all at the door, and unwilling to be cajoled into staying. "No, really," Horeger said apologetically, pressing her hand. "We really must go. Especially you, Mercy."

  MacDonald gave him a surprised look. "Me?"

  Horeger nodded blandly. "To catch the shuttle back to Nordvik," he explained. "It'll be taking off early in the morning and you'll have to be on it."

  "I will?"

  "It's your job." He was grinning at her, but quite determined. "You have to check out the rest of the cargo. Oh, you can come back down when that's done, of course."

  MacDonald thought for a moment, then shrugged. "I'll do that," she said.

  "Good night, Murra."

  And then all the good nights were said. It was too bad in a way, Murra thought, that Verla's call about little Porly had spoiled the party. On the other, one major part of the party's purpose had been to allow Blundy the chance to compare his wife and the challenging new woman side by side.

  Murra was quite content with the results.

  Blundy offered to show Horeger and MacDonald back to the quarters they had been given, with the rest of Nordvik's landing party. Vorian went along. But when Petoyne started to leave with them, Murra touched her arm in a friendly way. "Stay a little, please?" she urged. "I sent the servers home, so could you help me straighten things up?"

  Petoyne couldn't refuse that, as Murra had intended she couldn't; and when, sulkily, the child began to pick up glasses to take them to the housework room Murra stopped her. "The cleaner will be back tomorrow to take care of that," she said sweetly. "Sit down, Petoyne. Help me finish that last bottle of wine-you're old enough now, surely. Just sit with me a minute, please."

  Petoyne was unwilling, but she was also very young. She did as she was told by the older woman whose husband she had borrowed. She watched without speaking while Murra fetched clean glasses from the sideboard and poured, chatting idly about the soup, that awful "scrimshaw" thing, the guests.

  "I'm sorry about your nephew," Petoyne offered.

  Murra looked surprised, then shrugged. "It's a pity, of course, but what can you do?" She sipped her wine, looking at Petoyne over the top of her glass. "You know, you've been very brave," she said.

  Petoyne stiffened. "Me? Brave?"

  "I don't know what else to call it. I know this is difficult for you, dear,"

  Murra said, her tone sympathetic. It's an unfortunate situation. Blundy is a wonderful man, but he simply can't help being drawn to attractive women."

  Petoyne, with her untouched wine glass before her, said stiffly, "If you're talking about Mercy MacDonald, I don't have anything to be brave about. I happen to know Blundy and that woman aren't lovers. Blundy would have told me."

  "No, I don't suppose they are, now," Murra agreed. "But they surely will be, dear, and you mustn't let yourself be hurt."

  Petoyne looked at her for a moment without speaking. Then she stood up, proud if young. "I'll be all right, Murra. I do want to go home now."

  "Of course," Murra smiled, and would have kissed her cheek at the door if the girl had given her the chance. She gazed after her, quite content.

  They all had to learn, after all. These little peccadillos of Blundy's were-well-sometimes hard to accept, as no one knew better than she. In the long run they didn't matter, for what was certain was that such silly affairs were all temporary and in any case definitely did not threaten Blundy's marriage to Murra. Sooner or later they always would end-this one with the woman from the interstellar ship sooner than most, of course.

  And, she thought, heading back into the house, it was an established fact that Blundy never went back to a previous mistress. Poor starship woman.

  Poor Petoyne.

  Chapter 7

  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 amiable.

  "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 under way), 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 cove
rs 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 my 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 at 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 intrument and control device specialist; I never thought 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 taken. 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 awhile," 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."

  Chapter 8

  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 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 script 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 rewarded with 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 angled 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 Horeger was 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 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 any more, "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 died an hour ago."

  "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.