“Well, anyway…. I pay the taxes that way because I like it. It gives me a chance to be off by myself “
“Or with a good friend,” Murra put in amiably.
“Or with a friend, maybe, but pretty much by myself. So I can think. As a matter of fact, “he added, “I’ve decided to go out again with the next flock, maybe in a couple of days.” He didn’t meet the gaze his wife turned on him, but waved to the planted lands down the hill. “That’s all farm. We’re lucky with our farmland here. We always get good crops; there aren’t any native pests, just a few stowaway bugs that sneaked in from Earth on the first landing, and not many of those.”
Horeger said, as a pleasantry, “I hope we haven’t brought any new ones.”
“There’s no chance of that,” Muna said reassuringly, “because of course we checked everything. Did you know that we have farms in the winter city, too?”
“Underground?” Horeger said in admiration.
“Well, hothouses, anyway,” Murra amended herself. “They aren’t very big. There’s plenty of power and water for them, of course, but we are a little cramped for space. Still, we get fresh vegetables from them all winter long.”
“Some,” Blundy said.
Murra gave him another look. “Well, we can’t grow enough to feed everybody all the time, of course, but there’s always plenty of summer-grown food in the freezers.”
“The power’s the big thing,” Blundy said. He took Mercy MacDonald’s arm and pointed. “Look over here. Do you see that field that looks like it’s just been plowed? It hasn’t been. They’re solar collectors.
They’re where we get most of our heat and power.
Murra can tell you all about that; she works there.”
“Just for taxtime,” Murra added quickly, to make sure the visitors understood her real career was as actress and poet and, mostly, as wife to Arakaho Blundy Spenotex.
Gallandy, Horeger said, “But that sounds fascinating, Murra. Solar power! That’s how we make antimatter for Nordvik, you know. I’d really love to see how you do it here.”
“Shall I show you around the power plant? I’d be happy to,” Murra said. “But let’s take a look at the winter city itself first.”
So they did. At Horeger’s request, for whatever sentimental reason Horeger thought he had, they visited the hospital first. Naturally enough, the hospital was on the highest level of the city. That was for the benefit of those who needed to get to it in a hurry, in the seventy-odd months of the year when the winter city itself was nearly abandoned…though it did nothing for the great bulk of the hospital’s occupants.
Showing visitors around the hospital was a brand new experience for Blundy. No Slowyear citizen had ever had to be given a tour of it, since no Slowyear citizen ever got through his first year without at least an occasional visit. He knew what the starship people wanted, though. He gave them a cursory look at the general medical section, the maternity wing, and the long wards, more than five hundred beds worth of wards, partly occupied with adults recovering from surgery or illness or not recovering, as the case might be. Then he led them to the saddest wards of all, the custodial facility for terminal cases, where nearly two hundred children, some looking like newborns, others toddlers and talkers, were lying stupefied, or gazing blankly, or giggling pointlessly.
Murra wrinkled her nose fastidiously; even the older children were too sick to be continent. Horeger scowled helplessly, and Mercy MacDonald shuddered.
“I don’t know why we wanted to come here,” she said, her voice shaking with sympathy. And Horeger said, as Blundy had known he would:
“Isn’t your nephew here, Murra?”
Murra gave the captain a sweet look of sorrowful resignation. “Dear little Porly,” she sighed. “Oh, he’s here, all right. We could ask one of the nurses to help us find which crib he’s in if you like, but, really, there’s no point.”
“He wouldn’t know we were here,” Blundy explained or apologized. “None of them do, you see, not after the first day or two. It’s the brain that’s attacked first. It just turns into a kind of sponge, and that’s it.”
“I’m so sorry, “MacDonald said.
“Yes, of course,” Murra said, nodding graciously.
“Well, what can one say? Except that this is a depressing place, isn’t it? Perhaps we should go on to look at the rest of the city. There are elevators just outside here; we can go down a few flights to the apartment quarters, and you can see how we lived.”
The elevator was big enough for forty people, or for any reasonably sized cargo; the four of them took only a corner of it. When it stopped they emerged into a long hall, metal walled and punctuated with metal doorways, dimly illuminated with sparse standby lights. “Just a minute,” Blundy said, and rummaged around a closet until he found the right switch.
Then the overhead lights sprang up. They were carefully covered with colored glass to make the light as pleasant, and as varied, as possible; and the walls, once the lights were on, turned out to be painted and decorated handsomely. But Blundy’s look was dour.
“It strikes me as a bit well sterile,” Horeger suggested, peering down the long hallway.
Murra gave him a kindly smile. “Oh, it is. We all feel that, don’t we, dear? Still, it’s better than being out in the cold,” she told him. “Although sometimes we don’t think so, along about Christmas or Mean.”
“And it really is a whole city, isn’t it?” Mercy MacDonald said, strolling a few meters down the hall and testing a door. It was unlocked. It opened to show stripped rooms, nothing in them but bare built-in desks and empty wall shelves.
“We take everything we own when we move out in the spring,” Blundy told her, and went on to give her the statistics: “Just about five hundred thousand people live here all winter long. That’s practically the world’s whole population, not counting the few people who stay on in the outposts. We have factories here in the city, as well as stores, and schools, and swim-ming pools they’re on the next level, along with the gyms and the sports facilities and theaters and everything else that makes up a city.”
“We’ll be expanding it come fall,” Murra added.
“There‘11 be fifteen hundred new rooms added, so some families can have private sitting rooms and so on.
That’s one of the things Blundy’s been so good at, making the council take action on things that everybody needs, but they just haven’t got around to.
They’ll be getting ready to debate the plans in a month or so, isn’t that right, dear?” Blundy nodded. “We do all our construction in the fall, you see, because that’s when everything’s dried out and it’s not too hot to work outside. So we do all our planning before the end of summer.”
“When a lot of us come right back into the city here,” Blundy said sourly. “The summer heat’s almost as bad as the winter cold.”
“So,” Murra finished, giving the guests an admiring look, “you see that you people came at the best time time of year. This is when everybody’s pretty happy “
“Or as happy as we ever get,” Blundy finished.
MacDonald found herself shivering. When she saw that Murra had noticed she said apologetically, “It’s a lot warmer in the hospital.”
Murra was immediately solicitous. “Oh, I’m sorry about that, but, you see, we don’t heat the whole city this time of year even the hospital won’t need it much longer; but the outside air’s still a little cool, up here on Winter Hill.” She smiled. “I don’t know if you’re interested in the details “
“I am,” Horeger said immediately.
“Well, we pump heat in you remember the photovoltaic farm you saw? Well, the PV cells turn the sunlight into electricity; that’s where we get our power, and we use the surplus to electrolyze icewater into hydrogen for fuel for tractors and aircraft, and now for the space shuttles, too, of course. But the photovoltaic cells can’t use much of the infrared radiation the heat from the sun; in fact, they work better when they’re cooler. So we run pipes under them to carry the heat away to a big clay bed in the mountain.