I’m keeping myself busy, can’t you see?”
“But you’re still depressed,” Mercy said reasonably.
Betsy nodded. “Of course I am. I’m still on this damn ship. Once I get off I’ll perk right up, I promise.”
MacDonald lifted an eyebrow. “You really think a few weeks on a planet will straighten everything out?”
“Who said anything about a few weeks? I’m staying.”
MacDonald blinked at her in surprise. It wasn’t really astonishing that Betsy arap Dee was thinking of jumping ship at Slowyear almost everybody thought such thoughts, almost every time they made a planetfall. The unusual thing was that she was talking about it out loud. Even to her best friend. “Horeger wouldn’t like to hear you say that,” she offered.
Horeger had devoted no less than five of his all-hands broadcasts to the reasons why no one should leave the ship on Slowyear, along with threats of what would happen if anyone tried.
Betsy laughed. It was a curiously somber sound.
“Do you think I care what Hans likes anymore?” she asked. “Do you?”
When Mercy MacDonald had a problem that needed talking over, her confidant of first choice was of course Betsy arap Dee. But when Betsy herself was the problem, she had to turn to someone else. That somebody else had to be a friend. A real one.
The list of possible candidates was not long. The little universe of Nordvik was far too small to hold any strangers, but the bulk of them weren’t friends, either.
Not friends of Mercy MacDonald’s, anyway. Betsy was certainly a friend, moody as she was since the loss of her baby. Another definite friend was the captain of the Nordvik by which she certainly didn’t mean nasty, grabby Hans Horeger but the real captain, Arnold Hawkins. So were the three old navigator/astrographers, Moira Glorietti, Yahouda ben Aaron, and Dicke Dettweiler. They’d all come aboard early in the voyage, like the captain and Mercy MacDonald herself; like them they’d voted against Hans Horeger’s takeover. Also like the captain, they were getting a little elderly to be close friends anymore.
Then there was the larger number of those who used to be friends, of one degree or another, but had voted for Horeger and so weren’t friends anymore.
That included most of the engineers and the bio people, both the medics and the ones that cared for their biological stocks. And then there were the handful of those who had never been friends of Mercy MacDonald’s at all. That wasn’t a long list, though.
Most of the time there was only one person on it, that person of course being Deputy Captain Hans Horeger.
There had never been a time when MacDonald thought of Horeger as a friend (though, she was ashamed of herself to admit, for a time she had been feeling low enough to accept him as a lover). There were quite a few times when she wished him off the ship, if not actually dead because of his crude and meaningless sexual advances; because he had unseated old Captain Hawkins; and most of all because of what he had done to Betsy arap Dee.
Captain Hawkins….
Yes, MacDonald decided, he was the one she needed to talk to. The problem was to find him. He certainly wouldn’t be on the bridge; that was Horeger’s territory now. When she stopped by the little suite he shared with his elderly wife, she was there but the captain wasn’t. But Marjorie Hawkins, though not fond of Mercy MacDonald (or of any other single woman on the ship, her husband’s advanced age notwithstanding), somewhat reluctantly told her he could be found in his workshop.
He wasn’t there, either, when MacDonald pushed open the door after a couple of minutes of fruitless knocking. She could see, though, that he wasn’t far.
Captain Hawkins’s scrimshaw work was glass mosaics, assembled with painstaking care and a fair number of cut fingers. Pieces of the work were scattered all over the room, piles of glass chips of a hundred colors covering every flat surface in the room. For further indication that he was nearby, the wallscreen was on.
Confident that he was no farther than the nearest toilet, MacDonald sat down to wait for his return. She saw that the captain’s screen, like Betsy arap Dee’s, was displaying their next port of call. It was a different view, though; probably it was what was being seen, in real time, by Nordvik’s bow cameras. Thousands of stars were visible, but there was no doubt which star was Slowyear’s sun. Norctvik was still far away from Slowyear’s star, much farther than Pluto was from its primary. All the same, Slowyear’s star was by far the brightest thing in that part of the sky. She squinted to see if she could make out the planet of Slowyear itself, but didn’t expect success. It was still too faint, probably lost in its sun’s glare.
She knew well enough what Slowyear was going to be like. Like everybody else on Nordvik, she had pored over its statistics for hour after hour, partly out of generalized curiosity, partly looking for a reason to make it her home for the rest of her life or for not.
MacDonald knew that the bad thing about Slowyear was the very thing it was named after. Slowyear had a very slow year indeed. The planet was a good long way from its sun, and took a good long time to circle it nineteen standard years, just .about.
Fortunately for the hope of any life on Slowyear, its orbit was nearly circular. “Nearly” circular still wasn’t quite. The small difference between elliptical and round was critical. It meant that the planet had winters, and it had summers. And when you said “winter,” she thought, biting her lip, you weren’t talking about three or four chilly months. You were talking about nasty. At aphelion the planet was moving slowly, like a yo-yo at the top of its climb, and Slowyear stayed at that distant point for nearly five standard years. Five bitter-cold Earth-time years of hiding underground to stay away from the surface snow and cold and misery. Mercy MacDonald, who had not experienced any real winter since she was eighteen years old, remembered the data table that said a typical night-time winter low on Slowyear was minus 70 degrees Celsius and a typical daytime winter high was only about minus ten, and felt herself shivering in anticipation.
Of course, luck had been with the visitors on Nordvik. It wasn’t winter on Slowyear now. The good part was that they would be reaching the planet in its late spring. There would be plenty of time to decide whether to stay or not before things got frigid.
When Captain Hawkins found her waiting he gave her an apologetic grin. “It’s nice to see you, Mercy,”
he said, pleased. “Sorry I missed you, but that’s what comes with being an old man.” He made a face to express the annoying problems of being old and male, then changed the subject. “How do you like iff” he asked, gesturing at the nearly finished scrimshaw wall plaque on his easel. It was a mosaic picture of their starship, made of thousands of bits of glass, carefully cracked and mounted on a plastic board, and under it he had assembled bright red letters to spell out a motto: Ad astra per aspera.
“It’ll sell,” MacDonald said, giving her professional opinion. “What does it say?”
The captain dreamily traced the words with a fingertip. “It’s Latin,” he said with pride. “It means, To the stars through difficulties.” MacDonald snickered, and he looked up at her with shrewd humor, enjoying the patness of the motto with her. Then he sighed. “Of course, I don’t suppose they’ll remember Latin on Slowyear. We’ll have to translate for them but that just makes it more interesting, don’t you think.?”
“I’m sure of it,” she told him, glad to be able to say something kind to him that was also true. MacDonald liked the captain. He was old and feeble, sure, and she hadn’t forgiven him for letting the reins of the ship fall into Hans Horeger’s hands, but he was a nice man. If he had been just a little younger But he wasn’t younger. He’d been in his fifties when he took command of the ship, back in Earth orbit. Now that he was well past eighty his principal activities were scrimshaw and naps.