What can lead us as surely as the radio call leads the flock to “
No again, positively no. Wrong image entirely.
What the call led the sheep to was the shearers’ sheds for all and the slaughterhouse for most. He was getting back to death again, and that was no good.
Still, he had the feeling that there was something there that he could use. It was just the kind of quick, elucidating metaphor that his political audiences loved: the radio beacon that guided the sheep standing for the purpose that would carry the voters with him. And there was something more there waiting to be expressed. Something about sheep going astray was tickling his mind, some phrase he had heard once that had come out of some old book…
Murra would know. “The hell with it,” he said, meaning for now; he would ask Murra, out of her vast reading in the books that no one else bothered with, and then maybe it would all come clear.
He looked around, pleased at the sight, pleased to be going home again after taxtime. Looking down into the valley, he thought the broad Sometimes River had dropped a good deal since the last time he had passed this way. It was still well over its summertime banks, a hundred meters of flood rushing furiously downhill, but nothing like the raging torrents of first melt he had seen four months before. The glacier on the west wall was showing the signs of advancing warmth, too; it had retreated half a kilometer at least. He squinted at it until he thought he had found the spot under its lip where, at the end of the summer before, he had shared a cabin with the woman who had then been his new and brightest love.
That had been a long time ago.
Murra wasn’t new and bright anymore, and the intervening winter’s ice had planed away all trace of the cabin.
Then an eruption of yelping behind him made him turn. He took a good look at his flock and swore. The long line of sheep was breaking up into clots. Even though the dogs barked and nipped at their rumps the animals were tiring and so they were pausing to nibble at the fresh growth beneath their hooves. He touched the talk button on his lapel. “Give them a jolt to wake them up; they’re clumping,” he ordered Katiro, his replacement helper now drowsing in the trailer (and the boy was incompetent, too; why had Petoyne begged to go in early to take care of some undefined business and left him with this idiot?) A moment later Blundy heard a chorus of dismayed baaing from the flock as their radio collars gave them peremptory little electric shocks. Obediently they picked up their pace, but Blundy was annoyed. The radioman in the back of the tractor should have prevented that. If Petoyne had been in the trailer it wouldn’t have happened.
Petoyne would have kept an eye on the flock without being reminded. But Petoyne had had that private business that Blundy had decided he didn’t even want to know about and out of fondness for his chief helper Blundy had agreed.
It occurred to Blundy that his fondness for Petoyne was likely to become a liability.
He turned and walked after the trailer, trying to remember that glimmering of an idea about sheep, wasn’t it” But just as it was coming back to him he heard his name called. “Hey, Blundy!” A tractor pulling a flatbed loaded with protein supplement for the nursing ewes in the field had slowed and the driver was waving to him. “You’ve got a welcoming commit-tee!” the man shouted, jerking a thumb back down the hill toward the summer city. When Blundy craned his neck to see past his own tractor, already half a kilometer ahead, he saw that it was truth….
And that useful half-formed idea was irretrievably gone.
There were fifty people waiting for Blundy as he stepped aside and let the tractor proceed toward the pens people of all shapes and sizes, male and female, oldsters of four and even five years and children well, semi-children, like his quite nearly adult assistant Petoyne, who was waving violently to catch his eye.
Blundy gave them all a sober salute. He didn’t smile at them. Blundy did not mind at all when his partisans made a fuss over him, but he didn’t like to give the appearance of encouraging it. Petoyne was hurrying toward him, whispering urgently. “Blundy?
I need a favor, and you’re my best friend, so you’re the only one I can ask. Remember my dog that was getting kind of old? Well, I didn’t like the idea of lolling him just because he wasn’t a pup anymore, so I did a kind of dumb thing “
Blundy shook his head. “Oh, hell, Petoyne.
Another dumb thing? Talk to me later,” he said, not wanting to hear. He turned to the waiting crowd, marshalling his thoughts. There was a rock at the side of the road, thrown there by Sometimes River when it had rampaged through at icebreak. Blundy climbed up it to get a better look at his welcomers. Were they political or theatrical? A little of each, he decided, and settled on political, not on the evidence, but because what he really wanted was to convert some of the people who admired him for his theatrical work into the ones who followed his political lead.
So, “Citizens,” he said, improvising as he went along, “you know where I’ve been. I’ve been paying off my taxtime, and I ask myself: Why so much taxtime? What do the governors do with the taxtime? Is the winter city any bigger or more comfortable with all the taxtime work we put in? Are we ever going to start that other city on Deep Bay they’ve been talking about for years? Do they have a plan?”
He shook his head to indicate the answer, and there was a mutter of moderate agreement from the crowd they didn’t see quite where he was going, but they were willing to follow him far enough to find out.
“Then why so much taxtime?” he demanded. “Why should an ordinary citizen have to spend a twentieth of his life working off his obligations to the state, when nothing ever changes for the better? I’m not talking about money taxes; we all pay income tax, and that’s all right; no one complains about that. But to be required as well to put in long, weary hours at the state’s business and always in the best times of the year, when we could be enjoying ourselves why, that is slavery. ” Louder grunts of approval. Blundy was beginning to catch the rhythm of his own oratory, so he gave them the smile he had withheld. “But we can’t discuss that as fully as it deserves now,” he said.
“Tomorrow night ” he glanced at Petoyne, who nodded. “Tomorrow night I’ll be speaking at the assembly, and I hope I’ll see you all there. But now well, I haven’t been home for four months. So if you’ll excuse me?”
And he jumped nimbly off the rock, moving through them, shaking hands, kissing some of the younger women, with Petoyne tagging grimly behind.
It all took time. When he was well clear of the last of them Petoyne tugged imploringly at his blouse. “Please, Blundy. I need a favor.”
He didn’t stop, because he didn’t want any of the fans to catch up with him, but he looked down at her.
She was a small woman small girl, really; she hadn’t yet finished her first full year. She was undersized for her age and that made her even shorter than Blundy, though he was no giant himself. “Well?” he asked.
She hesitated. “Remember my dog?” she said, as though she hadn’t said it before. “They were going to put him down because of his age, you know. But he was a good dog, Blundy. I grew up with him. I thought if I could just switch him with one of the others “
“Oh, God,” he said, knowing what would come next.
It did. “They caught me,” she said simply.
“You keep doing really dumb things,” he said, shaking his head.
“I know,” she admitted. “But I need a witness for my sentence. Now. I’m supposed to be in the execution hall in about half an hour. I’ve been waiting and waiting for you, Blundy “