He was already sitting before his scrimshaw, sorting through the pile of violet glass for just the right piece to make a background star. She cleared her throat. “Captain?”
He looked up with a smile of reluctant resignation.
“You didn’t just come here for my company, did you?
I suppose something’s the matter.”
“With Betsy arap Dee,” she specified. “I don’t know if you know about her problems “
“Of course I do,” Captain Hawkins said, finding the right chip of purple and dabbing it with cement. “She’s miserable. She didn’t really want to have that baby, because Hans was the father and wanted to pretend he wasn’t, and then it died. Now she hates everybody.”
“She doesn’t hate me!” MacDonald protested, then amended herself. “Not really, anyway. She hates the whole ship, I guess. She’s talking about jumping on Slowyear.”
“Yes,” the captain nodded, carefully setting his new star in place.
“And so am I,” she finished.
He looked up at her kindly. “Of course you are, Mercy. Did you want to ask for my blessing? You’ve got it. Betsy, too. There’s no future for you here.” He reached out and covered her hand with his lean, age-spotted one. “I’d do it myself,” he said, “if I were a little younger. If Maureen would agree. As it is, I don’t know if I’ll even go down.”
That startled her. Never before had the captain failed to touch the soil of a new planet. “But you have to!”
“Nonsense, Mercy. You don’t need me. You can handle all the bargaining yourself, and anyway I’m going to have to stay aboard.”
“You mean for the refueling,” MacDonald said, trying to understand. “But Horeger can take care of that”
“Not just the refueling. Rebuilding.” He reached past her to the screen. “Look here, Mercy,” he ordered as the schematics of Nordvik appeared to replace the starfield. The whole ship was outlined skeletally there, mostly white lines but with some components in yellow and green and a few flashing red. “Look at the air system. It’s falling apart; we’re going to have to rebuild it if we can or buy one on Slowyear, if they have anything we can use. And water regeneration’s almost as bad, and well. Maureen tells me we’re almost out of fabrics for clothes and bedding; we’ll have to see what they can offer there, too. We need a lot of stuff. You’ll have to make some good deals for us, Mercy.”
“And if I can’t?”
He considered for a moment, studying the engineering reports. “You will,” he said. Then, wearily, he flicked the screen off. “You have to. Otherwise we don’t go anywhere from Slowyear.” He looked at her face and smiled comfortingly. “It won’t be so bad for you down there. They eat bugs on Slowyear, did you know that? Oh, they raise sheep and eat them, too, but the only native land life forms they can eat are arthropods. Although there’s a lot of native fish, or something like fish. They don’t seem to have any cows or pigs, by the way. Your frozen genetic materials ought to be worth something…. And the place has a lousy climate, and it’s a pretty backward world, I think, but you can make a life there, Mercy.”
She looked at him, suddenly apprehensive. True, she had been toying with the idea of jumping ship there in her own thoughts…. But that was when she had a choice. But if she didn’t? If Slowyear was going to be her last stop, ever? Make a life on a planet with a year nearly twenty years long? Bitter winters, burning summers, the only time the place would be bearable at all when freeze was melting toward bum, or sweat on its way down to chill. What kind of life would that be?
Or (the question came uninvited to her mind), for that matter, what kind of life did she have now?
Chapter Four
What Blundy knew for sure as he headed toward Murra’s house was that Murra would be there waiting for him. She always was.
He had to look around and finally ask directions, though, because he not only couldn’t find Murra, he couldn’t even find their house.
Naturally she wasn’t in the house they’d shared all the mean, long winter just past. That place hadn’t even been a house at all, actually; it was a nasty, cramped three-room flat, not much worse than any other winter flat, but not much better, either. It had been in the winter city, dug into the caverns under the hill. No one would want to go back and live there again for many months now. Certainly not until summer drove them to it, maybe not until the next desolate winter came, when the babies born now would be getting close to puberty and just beginning to understand what they were in for when the cold came.
As it turned out, Murra wasn’t even in the house he’d left her in (that one hardly more than a tent), because while Blundy was out with the flocks the building boom had reached its peak. Most of the constructions of the year before, that winter ice had crushed and spring floods had washed away entirely, had now been replaced. Now they had a real house, he discovered. Murra had moved their things into it while he was out with the sheep. It was smallish but spanking new, all their own; and of course Murra was waiting in it for him, because she always was.
What she was waiting for was to be kissed. He obliged her, wondering why a kiss seemed so much like a political statement, but she had no such reservations. She pressed herself against him as they kissed, confident she was welcomed.
In a certain sense she was; Blundy could feel his body confirming it. Whatever Blundy thought about his wife, his body found her powerfully attractive.
Murra was a handsome woman: tall, ten centimeters taller than Blundy himself. She was big-boned and not exactly pretty, but very close to beautiful. Murra had a kind of Oriental cast to her face, with short, black hair and blue eyes, and when she moved it was with studied grace.
More than any of that, she was Blundy’s. She proclaimed it in everything she did. She was totally supportive of him in everything he chose to do, and let that fact be known to everyone. She had a soft, cultivated, well-articulated voice; for Blundy it was her best feature, and the one that made her the exact right choice to appear in his vid productions.
All in all, she was ideal for him. He accepted that fact. It was an annoyance that he didn’t always enjoy it.
When they had finished their kiss she didn’t release him but comfortably whispered the latest bits of news against his lips to bring him up to date. “They’re starting up the shuttles,” she told him. “Ten-month infant mortality figures are up a little around eleven point three percent but that’s still in the normal range. I hope you like your new house; I only finished moving things in last week. And, oh, yes, the Fezguth-Mokoms have broken up, he’s taken up with some two-year-old and Miwa simply can’t stand it.”
She sounded proud. Blundy recognized the tone, because he knew what the pride came from. Both Kilowar Miwa Fezguth and Murra were among the few who could call themselves successful winter wives, the envied kind who had managed to keep their marriages going all through the cramped, everybody-in-everybody’s pocket months and months of the interminable winter. But Murra’s pride was double now, because, of the two of them, it now transpired that only Murra had managed to stay married through the spring. “I feel so sorry for her,” she added generously, smug in her own security. “They say if you can make it as a winter wife you can make it forever, but I guess they showed that isn’t true for everybody. Just the lucky ones like us,” she finished with pride.
“Yes,” he said, separating himself from her at last.
She gazed at him fondly. “And do you like what I’ve done with your new house?”
“Of course. Are they all in working condition?”