“Oh, Blundy,” she said woefully. “I don’t think I could stand it.”
He said soberly, “A lot of people can’t.”
She didn’t answer that, because a thought had struck her. What she was thinking was that accounted for Murra’s childlessness. Then she made herself stop crying. She sat up straight, rubbing the last damp from her cheeks, and said the other thing that was on her mind: “That was really moving, ” she said. “The show, I mean. It made me cry.”
Blundy didn’t answer, unless looking modestly pleased was an answer, so MacDonald pressed on with her thought. “What I mean,” she said, “is that you could sell those disks. To the captain. I’m sure there’d be an audience for them on other planets.”
He didn’t answer that, either, but the way he didn’t answer surprised her. His face suddenly went still, no expression at all. She waited to see if he would speak.
When he didn’t, she ventured, “Is something wrong?
You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”
He stirred and got up. “I do want to,” he said.
“Mercy, what do you think I am? I’m a writer part of the time, anyway and when I write I write for people. I’d love to have an audience a big audience, the biggest there is people I don’t even know, maybe even people who aren’t born yet “
“Well? So then will you give the captain the disks?”
“Sure,” he said, in a tone that was not intended to be believed, and turned away. She looked at him, puzzled. He seemed to have forgotten the matter. He was going about the simple household business of turning on the lights, and when that was done he went to the cooler and pulled out a bottle of wine.
It took the lighting of the lamps to make MacDonald realize that it had become dark outside. “Oh, my,” she said. “We’re forgetting about dinner.”
He nodded agreement, pouring wine for both of them. She accepted hers willingly enough they generally had some wine with their dinners, why not a glass before? But it wasn’t going to be just one glass, for as soon as the first glasses were down he was pouring more.
Well, MacDonald told herself, she wasn’t that hungry. If Blundy felt like having a few drinks, why should they not have them? She sat companionably next to him in silence, thinking about the things she hadn’t really wanted to think about before, until the wine emboldened her to speak. “It is pretty awful, isn’t iff I mean knowing what might happen to your babies, if you had them.””
“Awful enough,” he agreed.
“And knowing that it’s going to happen to you, too, I mean even as a grownup, if you live long enough,” she went on thoughtfully. “Is that why you ah?”
“Why we what”” he demanded, pouring again.
“Well, I mean the poison pills. I mean, sentencing people to take poison for doing things that really aren’t so bad, you know? I mean, on other planets they have laws, too, but mostly they just put people in jail if they break them.”
He thought it over. “Maybe so,” he said.
“Because dying of a poison pill is better than the, ah, the SE thing?”
He had to think about that, too. “Maybe,” he said.
“Well, I guess it is, but that’s not the only thing.
Everybody dies on all the other planets, too, don’t they?”
“You do seem to have a different attitude on Slowyear, though.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “I guess we do have a different attitude on Slowyear. On Slowyear I don’t think we’d ever put anybody in jail. Maybe we don’t have jails because we’re all in jail all winter long twenty months. Fourteen hundred days. And it doesn’t matter if you’re guilty of anything or not.”
“Poor Blundy,” she said, kissing his cheek, and Blundy said:
“Finish your wine, then let’s get to bed.”
When Mercy MacDonald woke up the next morning she knew she’d gone to bed pretty tipsy both times; because she had a memory of Blundy and herself stumbling out into the warm night, sometime or other, just to breathe a little fresh air before sleeping.
She even remembered that he had pointed out the glimmer of light on the western horizon that was Nordwk, high enough above the planet to be caught in the last of the sunlight before it entered Slowyear’s shadow, and that he had been crying. She remembered that, for some reason, that had seemed funny to her at the time.
What she hadn’t expected was that, although her head hurt with a serious hangover, it seemed funny now, too. She giggled at the thought that she was still a bit tipsy.
She got up, looking for Blundy to tell him that amusing fact. He wasn’t far. He was right outside the door, feeding a piece of the scogger they hadn’t remembered to eat for dinner to one of the dogs, and he looked up when he saw her. “Hi,” he said, smiling because he saw that she was smiling. She giggled at him.
“What are you doing that for?” she asked.
He looked surprised. “I’m giving him a taste for it,” he explained. “Come winter we use dogs to sniff out the larvae on the slopes, sometimes, where the wind scours the snow away. We have to wear the heated suits to dig them up, but the dogs have to tough it out ” He broke off, smiling no longer. “What is it?” he asked sharply.
“It’s just that that’s so funny, “she gasped, laughing. “Digging up bugs. With dogs. “
It was quite annoying, though, that this man was not laughing with her. His look was serious even frightened. “You don’t see the humor of it,” she said, pouting, “you you ” Then she reeled. It was almost as though she were back on the ship, suddenly weightless, and it was embarrassing, too.
She pulled herself together. “Do you know,” she said, “it’s a funny thing, but I don’t seem to remember your name.” And saw with astonishment that the man was crying.
Chapter Ten
When they moved Deputy Captain Hans Horeger of the interstellar spaceship Nordvik to the adult terminal ward Murra went with him, though she could not have said why. By then there was no longer any chance that the man would regain consciousness again. He was in the deep sleep, or coma, or paralysis that marked the final stage of spongiform encephalopathy, and, though sometimes his eyes opened, she knew that there was nothing he saw. The eyes might work still, but that was the end of it. Horeger no longer had enough of a brain to know what die eyes were seeing.
Murra didn’t tarry in that depressing place. Twenty of its thirty-two beds were occupied now. Another twenty of Nordvik’s people had died already. By now they were smoke and ash in the crematorium, surviving only as some few harvested grams of cell cultures for the doctors to ponder over later. A handful were dead or dying on the spaceship itself, not worth the trouble of shipping down planetside; and so Nordvik’s long voyages were coming to an end.
Murra took the flowers she had brought and arranged them in a vase by Horeger’s bed. It was not a sensible thing to do, but, she was aware, it was a pretty one. Then she nodded to the attendant, drowsing in a chair by the door, and when she left the ward Deputy Captain Hans Horeger ceased to exist in her mind.
At the desk a friend hailed her to say that Blundy’s tractor had been sighted coming down the road from the pass. She accepted the news with thanks, and, of course, a certain amount of pleasure, and decided to wait to see him come in. So she went to the hospital cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a bit of pastry, chatting with the others sitting around there. It was a more cheerful crowd there this day; after all, the influx of terminal cases were almost all from Nordvik, and it was not as though they were relatives, or friends. Across the long table from Murra a doctor who had just come down from the ship was holding court. He was tired, everyone could see that, but willing to indulge everyone’s natural curiosity. Yes, every remaining Nordvik person in orbit was now terminal or gone; he’d given the last of them soporifics to ease their passing. No, he didn’t think it was just as well to feed them a poison pill, as they did with babies in the last stages of SE; they were not in pain, they were very little trouble and they would die on their own quickly enough. No, it didn’t look as though any of Nordvik’s people had been among the very lucky very few who were naturally immune; outsiders so rarely were. He held up one of the little dry-ice-cooled boxes he’d brought with him. “Still, I’ve brought down all the tissue samples. This one was a woman named Betsy arap Dee; she was one of the first to die, and I checked her out myself. She never did get down to Slowyear,” he added, sounding almost sentimental.