“Can’t I help?” the man from the ship asked politely.
“Of course not, Captain Horeger,” Murra said warmly, consciously flattering him by upgrading his title. “You’re a guest.”
“Oh, please, call me Hans,” he said, looking at her with admiration, and not bothering to mention the fact that Mercy MacDonald, who was also a guest, was already standing to help Blundy with the hanging.
“Hans, then,” she said, saying it in a way that conveyed appreciation of the name, and also of the man who owned it. “Please, just sit down and make yourself comfortable. Let me get you some wine? It’s summer wine from last year. That’s when the grapes are best, just when everything starts to get too hot to grow.” And smiled at him while she was pouring, but did not fail to see, out of the comer of her eye, Mercy MacDonald handing the sampler up to Blundy, and their hands touching.
Although there were only six at dinner it wasn’t quite as intimate as Murra had intended. Though only the six of them sat down to eat, Rosha, the cleaner, had stayed on to serve and Grannis, the cooker, insisted on carrying some of the dishes in himself, thrilled to be so close to the visitors; and both of them felt quite free to take part in the conversation.
Murra made sure there was plenty of conversation, careful to guide it to new areas whenever it showed signs of slowing (after all, Murra’s dinners were not about food, they were about talk.) But it didn’t need much guiding. There was plenty to talk about. The visitors had so much to learn about Slowyear, and the locals were delighted to tell them. About Slowyear’s seasons: “Well, yes, we have a very long year,” Blundy was telling Mercy MacDonald, “so we divide it into six principal seasons coldspring, warmspring, summer, hotfall, coldfall, and, of course, winter.”
Petoyne made a face. “Winter’s the worst,” she said, looking at Mercy MacDonald in a very wintery way.
“Not for me,” Rosha disagreed. He leaned past Murra to set down the soup tureen. “Wow, that was heavy,” he informed them all. “The way I look at it, when it’s winter at least you can dress warm and go out for a little while if you want to, but there’s nowhere to go in summer. Unless you’re rich. How’s the soup?”
“Fine,” Blundy said, just as though it were a reasonable question for a server to ask.
“Good, I’ll tell Grannis,” he said, and reluctantly left the room.
Mun-a smiled after him, just as though she meant it. “As a matter of fact,” she told her guests, “Blundy and I do go to one of the polar places sometimes in the summer.” Then she saw the look on Blundy’s face.
“But not this one, I think,” she said.
Blundy picked up the conversation where it had been interrupted. “So altogether we have a hundred months, each one about seventy days long there are holidays now and then to make it come out even with the year. Right now we’re in Green, coming up on Flower. The whole countryside gets really pretty in Flower; you’d like it.”
“I was born in Flower,” Vorian contributed. “That isn’t a good time, though. I was just beginning to get big enough to be really active when summer came along. My mother told me she had the devil of a time keeping me indoors from Fry to Sweat.”
“And I was born on the sixty-seventh of Shiver that’s the first month of winter,” Murra added, “and Blundy’s birthday is the forty-fifth of Christmas, while Petoyne here has just had her very first birthday. The 11th of Green, wasn’t it, dear?”
Petoyne looked down at her food without answering. Blundy took up the thread. “So I’m two and seventeen months,” he told the company. “That would be about thirty-five of your years, Mercy. And, let’s see, Murra’s now “
Murra was already overriding his voice. To the deputy captain: “Are you really enjoying your soup?”
“It’s delicious,” Horeger responded gallantly. “What is it?”
Petoyne giggled. “You don’t want to know. What do you eat on the ship?”
“Nothing as good as this,” Horeger said at once, and gave Murra a complimentary smile. She smiled back, comfortably aware that the main appreciation in his eyes was not for the food but for herself. That was a situation familiar to Murra, and always welcome.
There was no doubt in her mind that this Hans Horeger person would sooner or later do his best to get her alone, and from there to a bed. She didn’t mind that.
She looked forward to it, in fact. She also, however, knew that she definitely would not let it go that far, not ever. The self-indulgence of actually sleeping with any of the men who had made it clear she was invited would cost too much. At a minimum, it would mean the sacrificing of a grievance: she wouldn’t be un-selfishly tolerating Blundy’s adulteries anymore. Simply knowing that she could easily be bedded by Horeger was almost as good as doing it, and a lot less trouble in the long run.
When the scoggers were served, and each of the guests from the spaceship had sampled them with enjoyment, Petoyne spoke up. “They’re bugs, you know,” she said, avoiding Murra’s quick vexed look.
“The soup was made out of their shells, now this is the meat.”
Horeger stopped with a fork almost to his lips.
“Bugs?”
Blundy took over, explaining that Slowyear’s native fauna were seldom vertebrate, not counting the flying “pollies,” and never mammalian. The largest life forms the original settlers found were arthropods, vaguely like terrestrial insects, with an insectoid egg-pupa-winged life cycle. “You won’t see them now they’re only out at night but they’re around,” he told the visitors. “Then when the dry season starts they burrow into the ground and cocoon up. In hotfall they come out when the rains start. By then they’re big winged things the size of my fist; they fly, eat, mate, lay eggs, and die. Then the eggs hatch and over the winter the pupae grow underground. We use dogs to dig them up in the winter, before they hatch out by themselves; this time of year we can catch them on the surface, if we’re good at it.”
“These are fresh,” Murra said, proudly careful to refrain from displaying the pride she felt in the meal she had set before her guests after all, not every hostess could provide out-of-season delicacies on short notice. “Hunters brought them back this morning.”
“They do taste good,” Horeger said, doubtful but game.
Mercy MacDonald said, “Oh, God, Hans, why shouldn’t they? After all, back on Earth we used to eat lobsters. We’d eat them on the ship, too, if we had any.”
Which led to talk about shiplife. That was the part that really fascinated the servers, consequently slowing the meal down. Murra sighed and resigned herself: at least that meant more time for conversation. Mercy MacDonald described the universal shipboard practice of making scrimshaw “to sell, sure, but mostly to give us something to do. Otherwise we’d all go crazy.”
Hans Horeger modestly explained the difficulties involved in guiding a starship across the long light-years between worlds. MacDonald pointed out how boring it was for everyone and how, no matter how careful they were in dealing with each other, sometimes some members of the crew simply could not stand some other member of the crew one second longer she was, Murra thought with interest, talking more to her deputy captain than to her hosts. But Horeger didn’t appear to notice. He blithely began to explain that they would soon have to dislodge the ship’s fuel storage, converting it to a factory for more fuel and sending it close in to the star for solar energy to make the antimatter fuel. Murra said quickly, “Surely there’s no hurry. Aren’t we being good hosts for you here?”
“Well,” said Hans Horeger, turning toward her, “in some ways extremely good.”
“He means we don’t have any complaints at all,”
Mercy MacDonald put in. “You’ve been so good about commercial dealings you’ve just about put me out of a job. I don’t have to bargain! You pay us so well that we can afford just about everything we ask for machine parts, metal, supplies “