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 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 anymore, 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 instance. 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 newboms was a slight improvement, though it involved crying babies and 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.