But then things began to pick up. When she came out of the tent with sandwiches she saw that Blundy had single-handedly pitched a smaller tent over the sanitary hole (she had wondered about that). They ate companionably, if rapidly, while Blundy outlined to her the other things they had to do that day. “It’s clouding up over there,” he said, waving to the west, “so I think we’ll have rain tomorrow. And we want as much as possible done before that.”
She nodded. The sheep were scattered all around now, without the radio beacon to keep them in order, individual animals spotted across the landscape, munching away. “Don’t you have to worry about the herd.?” she asked.
“What for? All they have to do is roam around and eat. The dogs won’t let them stray too far, and the rest they can handle by themselves. Let’s get the pipes strung.” And so the two of them ran a flexible hose from the tractor at the banks of the stream; a pump in the tractor sucked water out of the stream, the idling engine warmed it and it came out of a nozzle at the top of a pole: a shower. “We’d better only use it in the daytime,” Blundy said. “because the nights are still a little chilly.” But it wasn’t quite dark yet when they had finished, and MacDonald insisted on trying it out, which is when she discovered the interesting possibilities when two people showered at once. When they came damply out of the shower, wrapped in towels, into the still warm evening, it was full dark. She looked up and caught her breath.
“I told you about the stars,” Blundy said, his arm around her.
But no one could have. Although the western edge of the sky was clouded black most of it was still clear; and stars seen through Nordvik’s vision plates were nothing like stars spread over your head on a warm spring night. There was nothing in the heavens to compete with them. Slowyear didn’t have a moon; Slowyear’s sun certainly had a family of planets, but the distances between them were great and none were very bright from the surface of Slowyear; the stars had Slowyear’s sky to themselves, and they filled it. Here, away from the lights of the summer city, the sky was black and pearl, sprinkled with diamonds. The Milky Way spread across one whole corner of the sky like a lunar mist.
Mercy MacDonald leaned against Blundy’s warm arm, her head back, eyes filled with the starry splendor. It was not only dark, apart from the faint glow that came through the fabric of their living tent, it was silent.
All she could hear was small snuffling noises from sleeping sheep. She could smell them not an offensive odor, just a natural one. One of the dogs woke up enough to amble over to investigate them, then lay with its head on its paws to watch them.
This was what solitude was like, MacDonald thought. A little scary. But fine.
Blundy stirred and pointed. “That’s where the Earth is,” he said. She tried to peer along his index finger. “You see those two lines of stars three in a row, and then four in a row just above them? Well, right between those two lines “
“I don’t see anything,” she said.
“No. You can’t. We’re too far, but that’s where it is.”
She didn’t answer that, and she didn’t go on looking at the stars, either. She was looking at Blundy’s face, very near her own but almost invisible with nothing but starlight to see by. She could not make out his expression.
“Would you like to go there?” she asked.
He lowered his gaze to look at her. “Go to the Earth? But I can’t,” he said reasonably.
“Ships do go there, Blundy. Not Nordvik, of course. I don’t know where Nordvik will go from here, but it isn’t likely to be the Earth, but “
“I’m never going to leave Slowyear,” he said, his tone flat. “So what’s the use of wishing? Come to bed.”
The next morning Mercy MacDonald woke with thunder crashing in her ears and a drumming of rain on the side of the tent. Blundy was nowhere in sight.
That was a new experience for her, too, and not one she really enjoyed peering out of the flap of the tent she saw eye-searing flashes of lightning all around, and the rain that was turning the ground into swamp was not just rain. Chunks of ice the size of her thumbnail were bouncing off the ground, astonishing her. She had heard the word “hail” before; she had never seen any.
But when Blundy came dripping into the tent a few minutes later he promised it would all be over soon; and it was; and by noontime the water had run off and the sky was blue and warm.
It was not a bad way to live, she decided.
Shepherding had a lot going for it. The food was good, the accommodations comfortable enough, once you got used to them, and the sex with Blundy was she hunted for the right word and grinned to herself when she found it: “ample.” It changed the way she felt about everything. Her whole metabolism seemed to have shifted gears.
It was just as well that making love never failed to give pleasure, because there wasn’t much else to do.
The sheep took care of themselves, pretty much, with a little help from the dogs but it didn’t matter if they wandered. When it came time for lambing, Blundy explained, he would turn on the radio beacon and that would bring all the ewes back close to the tent. Then things would get busy enough helping the ewes deliver when they needed help; fitting the newborn lambs with radio guides of their own, clipped into their noses.
“Can we do that by ourselves?” she asked, trying to imagine what it would be like to “help” a ewe bring forth its lamb and not liking what she imagined.
He hesitated for a moment, putting his arm around her. “We wouldn’t have to,” he said. “I’d get some help out here for that.” And she might have asked more, but his arm was tightening around her and his hands were on her as he spoke, and there was only one place for them to go then.
But even while they were making love she was thinking. And kept on thinking as they settled in. This existence was interesting as an experience, and re-warding in bed, but it did, she admitted, get a little well, not boring, exactly, but empty. Their “work” was certainly not demanding. Once a day she and Blundy went out for a walk he called it “inspection” and what they inspected was the landscape, dotted with sheep. “What are we looking for?” she asked, and he shrugged.
“Sick ones. Dead ones, maybe. If they’re dead we bury them, and if they’re sick we give them antibiotics but it’s pretty early for that. We don’t usually get any real problems until the lambing starts.” He took her hand and moved on, to the top of a hill; he took out his field glasses and swept the area, finding nothing that needed attention.
MacDonald was glad to sit down on the grass for a moment; it had been a long time since she had done this much walking. She gazed around at the pretty landscape, with its haze of bugs none of them more than mild annoyances, because Slowyear’s bugs did not care for the blood of mammals, never having had any mammals to co-evolve with. The only large creatures in sight were the idle dogs and the scattered sheep. “That’s all you have for livestock, sheep? No cattle, goats, pigs, horses ?”
He took the glasses away from his eyes and frowned down at her, trying to remember. “We did have, some of them. A long time ago twenty-five slowyears ago, when the colony first landed. But they died.”
“They’ve got frozen sperm and ova on the ship, you know.”
“Yes, you told us. I don’t think they’d work here.”
“You could try,” she said.
“Well, we probably will hey,” he said, scuffing at the base of a bush with the toe of his boot. “Look at that. There’s scoggers here.”