She looked, but could see nothing but a hole in the ground. But that was all you ever saw in the daytime, he explained. “They only come out at night, but fresh scogger’s the best eating there is. We’ll catch us a couple one of these nights.” He grinned down at her.
“Speaking of which,” he said, “I’m getting hungry, aren’t you?”
And that was a shock to her, too, because what they ate was lamb chops, but they didn’t get them out of a frozen food locker, they got them from that permanently available larder on the hoof that was all around them. She closed her eyes with a faint squawk when Blundy leisurely selected one of the smaller ewes, lifted its chin with one hand, slit its throat with the knife in the other.
That wasn’t the end of it, either. Then there was the skinning, and the disposal of the offal (buried deep so the dogs wouldn’t dig it up again), then the rough butchering, then, while their own chops were broiling over the little hydrogen-burning grill, Blundy whistled the dogs in and fed them the rest of the dismembered carcass. “They have to eat, too,” he reminded her, “so we’ll slaughter one sheep a day as long as we’re here.”
MacDonald wasn’t at all sure she could eat something that had been gazing at her with sad eyes no more than half an hour earlier. But she did. It tasted good, too. And when it was done, and they’d buried the bones she looked around expectandy. “Now what do we do?” she asked.
“Whatever we like,” he said. “We’re through for the day.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “What would you be doing if I weren’t here?”
He shrugged. “Write for a while, maybe.”
“Then do it,” she commanded, and tried to make herself inconspicuous while he obediently sat down at his little keyboard.
That wasn’t easy to do, she discovered. MacDonald was used to having a lot of free time between stars, time was what you had the most of on Nordvik. But on the ship at least she had her books, and her recorded music and films, and people to talk to even if they were always the same few dozen people you had got tired of talking to years before. Here there was nothing. They could have had television, but Blundy explained that he had vetoed that “There’s no point looking for solitude and bringing the whole world along, is there?” But then, almost as an apology, he added, “There’s a player in the cab of the tractor, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, it’s there. And I think there are disks. Mostly they’d be technical stuff on taking care of sheep, you know, but there might be some others. Anyway, you might want to learn more about sheep.”
She did learn more about sheep more than she had ever wanted to know about sheep but what saved MacDonald’s sanity was that there turned out to be quite a few disks on other subjects, too. Some had evidently been left behind by that gawky adolescent, Petoyne, Blundy’s former helper. Those were school work: math lessons, accountancy lessons, grammar lessons. They were not in any particular order, and some had been spilled out of their container and wedged their way under the seats or behind forgotten tools. None of the school lessons were really exciting for Mercy MacDonald, but in among the lesson disks were some recorded episodes from Blundy’s video drama, Winter Wife.
Those interested Mercy MacDonald quite a lot. Not just because Blundy was the guiding spirit behind them, but because those particular episodes had been selected for a purpose. She did not need to be told that they had been Petoyne’s. They mostly had Petoyne herself in a leading role, but a younger, skinnier Petoyne than the young woman MacDonald had met, and MacDonald studied them with a good deal of interest.
So she spent most of her afternoon hours watching vid disks there in the tractor cab, while Blundy did whatever he did with his writing machine; he did not want to show her any of it, and she stopped asking.
And they ate, and slept, and did their chores, and made love. And sometimes (but not often) swam in the very cold stream. And sometimes picked wildflowers. And sometimes, on clouded nights when there wasn’t even much starshine to guide them, went out scogger-hunting in the velvet dark (stumbling over bushes and hillocks, with ultraviolet lights that made the grubs’ epicuticles fluoresce so they looked like neon-lit cockroaches in the night) and broiled their catch for breakfast. And made love. And sometimes MacDonald sat by herself out of Blundy’s sight and stared thoughtfully into space, wondering just what she was doing there, on this planet, with this stranger.
That took a lot of thinking. There was no doubt in MacDonald’s mind that she was fond of Blundy she had not yet decided to entertain the word “love” or that Blundy was an attractive man, most so because he was a brand new one, but that didn’t answer her main question, which was: was there a future with him? She wondered what he would be like in the long term (assuming there was a long term, assuming his wife conveniently evaporated while they were gone). Of course that wouldn’t happen. Of course (there were so many “of course”s) she could change her mind and leave with the ship. Leave without him of course or, alternatively, she considered the possibility that he might want to come along in Nordink. The beauty part of that was that Murra certainly never would. So that part of the problem would solve itself But Blundy wouldn’t go either.
It wasn’t enough for her to be sure of that in her mind, she had to hear it from Blundy himself. When she broached the subject, joking seriously, he shook his head. “Nobody from Slowyear will ever leave,” he said positively.
“Why?”
He took her hand in his, kissing it while he thought for a moment. “We wouldn’t be welcome,” he said at last, and then his kisses moved up her arm, and naturally they made love again. To change the subject, she was pretty sure. And why were there so many subjects he kept on changing?
The last disks she found were the most disturbing.
They turned up when she had abandoned hope of discovering any more, forgotten under a seat cushion, and they were additional episodes from Winter Wife.
She played one of them over and over, until it made her weep. When she could watch no more the sun was almost setting, and she stumbled to the tent and Blundy.
He looked up in startlement from his machine.
“Mercy!” he cried, alarmed, jumping up to take her in his arms. “What’s the matter?”
“Winter Wife, ” she said, trying not to sob. “The part where the little girl dies like your little nephew, Porly.”
“Oh,” he said, beginning to understand. “Yes. That episode. You found a copy? That was one of the best ratings we got, when the baby died.”
“It was horrible, “she said. “They called it ‘Essie,’
or something like that.”
He held her silently for a moment before he answered. “It’s the letters, SE,” he said. “Stands for spongiform encephalopathy. Like we said. The brain turns all loose and fluffy, and they die.”
She let him stroke her hair while he told her again about spongiform encephalopathy. Known as a disease of animals on Earth it was called “scrapie”
when sheep got it, “Mad Cow Disease” when it infected cattle on Slowyear it was a kind of failure of the human body’s auto-immune systems. The brain dete-riorated fast and stopped being any kind of a useful brain. Adult Slowyearians were generally safe from it. Babies weren’t. Their immune systems were incompletely developed, so they were at severe risk…and four out of ten of them died of it. So were old people, as their immune systems began to break down, putting them at risk. “If you survive past the first twenty months,” he explained, “you’re almost always all right until you’re almost three “
“Three slowyears,” MacDonald said, doing the arithmetic in her head. “Almost fifty standard years?”
“I suppose so.”