The “will you” part was only politeness. There wasn’t any real choice. If there had been, Mercy MacDonald would have been out of there long before the cutting started, but under the circumstances she was present for it all.
She had never seen anyone deliberately slice into the flesh of another human being before. There was less blood than she had expected, but still a great deal of blood; it went faster than she had imagined, but still a long business of de Bride muttering angrily to himself as he inexpertly pushed muscle walls and tissues out of the way and fumbled for the little scarlet gnome curled up inside Betsy’s abdomen. MacDonald was both horrified and fascinated yes, and something else, too. Almost even envious. For here was silly little Betsy arap Dee bringing a whole new person into existence. Marvelously! Wonderfully. Enviably….
For a moment MacDonald almost forgot the gore, didn’t hear de Bride’s steady muttering to himself or Horeger’s orating from the screen. She could do this, she told herself. She could have done it years earlier, when she still had Walter to be a father, could still do it, maybe, if she didn’t take too long getting it started
“Here,” said de Bride suddenly. “Hold it while I cut the cord.”
MacDonald found herself with that purple-red little creature in her unpracticed hands. She blinked down at it, wondering. It wasn’t until de Bride said, shamefaced, “I couldn’t save it, you saw that. Maybe it twisted in the womb, you know? And the cord strangled it” that she realized the baby she was holding was dead.
She stood frozen, until the nurse told her that she might as well put the tiny thing down. Then she did as she was told, and began to clean the bloodstains off the arms of her blue coverall (now really ruined, she thought regretfully) with a dressing. She didn’t look at Betsy arap Dee, now being sewn glumly back together. She was watching Hans Horeger’s face on the screen, listening as intently as if she cared about anything he might say.
“We’re still about two light-weeks away,” he was saying. “Call it three thousand a.u. We’ll be there in eight months, just about. Friends, I feel in my bones that this is going to be the stop that pays off for all the others. They’re going to be crazy about us!”
From behind Mercy MacDonald, Sam Bagehot said, “They’d better be.”
Chapter Two
Actually, the people on Slowyear pretty nearly were going crazy over the approaching ship, or at least some of them were, though it would be many weeks before Nordvik entered orbit. Mostly it was the young ones who were working up steam on the subject, though even among them there were quite a few who had too many other things on their minds to get excited over the prospect of a visiting interstellar ship.
For instance, there was Blundy. Blundy had his mind full of other things, which not only weren’t the approaching Nordvik, but weren’t even the wife who was waiting for him in the summer city, much less the seventeen hundred things he was supposed to keep his mind on namely the long ambling column of sheep he was herding into town for shearing and slaughter. Hans Horeger had been right about that.
The people of Slowyear spent a lot of time farming their fields and tending their livestock, stocks, but where Horeger went wrong was that they didn’t stop there. To the people aboard Nordvik a word like “shepherd” meant a beardless boy or a doddering old man with a stick, not someone riding in a computer-guided, hydrogen-fueled crawler who led his flock with a radio beacon keyed to the receivers implanted in each nose. The people of Slowyear had their high technology, all right; they just didn’t show it off.
In that Blundy was like his planet, because he didn’t show off all his strengths, either. Blundy was short and broad, with a body that was all muscle and almost no fat. The muscle didn’t show. If you ever picked him up you would be surprised to discover how much he massed if he allowed you to take the liberty of trying to pick him up. There wasn’t much chance of that. Trying it would most likely turn out to mean that you were stretched out on the ground in front of him, gazing stupidly up as you wondered if anyone else had felt the earthquake.
What Blundy was thinking about on his home-bound trip was politics. He had plenty of time to think, of course, because what he was doing took very little of his attention. There was hardly any local traffic on the road this far from the city a few tractor-trailers on their way to and from the fishing villages on the coast and almost nothing else and anyway the crawler’s computer did most of the driving. Blundy could have been thinking about many things because he was many things not the least of them, a celebrated entertainer on the view screens. But what drew his imagination just then was his political planning.
Because he had been off with the flock for the four seventy-day months that were his taxtime he was beginning to feel eager to get back into his political incarnation again. He was trying to find a theme for a campaign. If he could work out the right subjects to talk about he would then, he calculated, do well to take the town auditorium for a speech the next night if the auditorium was finished, as his helper, Petoyne, had told him it would be when they talked on the radio; if Petoyne had been efficient enough to reserve it for him.
There remained the difficult question, which was what the speech should be about. It had to be important. His followers would expect no less.
But what could he say that would sound important enough to shock them all into life?
Because his mind was far from what he was doing, he almost missed the traffic warden standing in the road before him. The man’s hand was held sternly up and he was scowling.
Blundy slowed the crawler; he hadn’t noticed that they had just passed the highest point in the pass.
Other roads joined them there, and there was a tractor-trailer train of construction material waiting to cross before him. Blundy leaned out of the cab window to give the warden a quizzical look. Then the warden recognized him. He gave Blundy an embarrassed salute and waved him on.
Blundy waved his thanks to the warden and his apology to the other driver, who would now have a good long wait for the flock to clear the crossing. He didn’t refuse the courtesy, though. It was a real nuisance to try to halt a procession of seventeen hundred sheep.
Then, as they began their descent into town, on impulse Blundy opened the cab door and jumped out to stretch his legs. The computer would be quite capable of following its programmed route without him, and he thought better on his feet.
Blundy landed easily on the packed dirt beside the stock road. He stretched and took a deep breath, letting the tractor and its trailer crawl past him at their two-kilometer-an-hour trudge. The road itself had been repaved since the last time he had come by, four months earlier, with the much shorter line of sheep heading out to the eastern pastures. Now there were beginning to be an occasional high-speed vehicle passing by in both directions not at high speed here, though, not as they squeezed past the shambling line of sheep, careful of the occasional willful stray. There weren’t many strays, Blundy saw with satisfaction. The flock was obediently following the bellwether radio in the trailer; and the dogs were properly patrolling between sheep and vehicles to keep them off the paved road and on the grassy verge.
Then Blundy pressed two fingertips to his lips. It was what he did when he got an idea.
“Like sheep,” he said, half-voicing the words past his nearly closed lips. “Like sheep we stray in all directions, pointlessly and ignorantly, without a real goal, wandering until we die “
No. It was the right sort of note to strike, but certainly not “until we die.” There was too much dying going on all the time as it was. He scowled at the flock and tried again ” wandering without goal or direction. How can we find a goal worth attaining?