Blundy asked, and she looked puzzled until she realized he meant the shuttles.
“Oh, I think so. They’ve been kept in a good, sheltered valley ever since the last ship came. Of course, the ice covered them every year, but the roof held.” She smiled at him affectionately. “Don’t worry, they’ll be ready to go by the time the ship gets here.
And it’ll be warmspring by then a good time to come here, don’t you think? Are you going to write something about it”
Since Blundy was used to his wife’s uncanny ability to read his mind though he was certain he’d never said anything to her about his plans he didn’t blink at that. “I’ve been thinking about it, yes.”
“I thought you might. Of course, you know best, dear, but isn’t that sort of a depressing subject?”
“Tragic,” he corrected her. “That’s where real drama is, after all, and I’m tired of writing all this light stuff to keep people quiet during the winter.”
“I see. So you’ll want to go up to the ship right away, won’t you? Don’t deny it, dear; who knows you as well as I do? And of course you should.”
He didn’t deny it. He’d already decided to put his application in, and with his standing in the community there was every chance the governor’s council would approve it. He had even told Murra when he’d done it. What he hadn’t told her was who he proposed to take with him on that first mission to the starship, and so he was surprised when, without a break, she went on:
“And how was Petoyne?”
Blundy misunderstood her on purpose. “She’s fine. She got away with it again.”
“No, of course she got away with it,” Murra said, tolerant and sweet, and not in the least interested with the fact that once more Petoyne had escaped with her life, “or you would have said something right away.
That’s not what I mean. I mean how was she in bed.””
He glared at her. “For God’s sake, Murra, she isn’t even one yet!”
“I know,” Murra agreed, her tone interested and a little amused. “Isn’t it funny how men always like the very young ones? Is it because they’re so skinny? Or so ignorant and unexperienced? Please don’t be embarrassed to talk about it with me, Blundy. I’ve never been jealous, have I? And you know we always tell each other things like that.” She smiled. “In pillow talk,” she added, “because, do you realize, you haven’t even looked at your new house yet? Not even at the new bed I just put in.” And he knew what to do then, and wondered when it had begun to be a chore.
There were times while they were making love when Blundy’s body managed to make Blundy’s mind forget the fact that Murra was really a royal pain in the ass. At those times he pretty much forgot to think about anything at all, because Murra in bed was not at all like the Murra who let herself be viewed as she sat, perfumed, enrobed and regal, in her reception room.
In sexual intercourse she was wild. She screamed and scratched, and she writhed and squeezed; she was everything any man dreamed of in the arts of intercourse. None of it was inadvertent, either. That had been the most disillusioning of Blundy’s slow discoveries about the woman he had married. It was all rehearsed. Murra made love by script, her skills quickly and thoroughly learned. “A lady in the drawing room, a harlot in bed,” she said of herself, in that pillow talk that meant so much to her, and she had herself perfectly right.
But then, when they had sufficiently worn each other out, she naturally had to spoil it all by talking.
“I wrote you a poem, my love,” she told him, serene again if sweaty. “Would you like to hear it”
“Of course,” he of course said, but hardly listened as she pulled her notebook out of the nightstand and sat naked and cross-legged at the foot of the bed, reading. The poem was a typically long one. It had to do with ancient shepherds and the loving lasses they had left behind them, and it was full of graceful little turns of phrase and unexpected rhymes, but he didn’t really listen. He was studying her. He observed, as though for the first time, that his wife had a widebrowed face that tapered to the chin, with large, pale blue eyes and the kind of bobbed hair that is usually seen in pictures of medieval squires. She smiled a lot as she read faintly, enigmatically, frequently. It occurred to Blundy that Murra’s smiles didn’t seem to be related to anything she found humorous, only to an inner confidence that whatever happened next was bound to be nice.
She didn’t ask him if he liked the poem when she was done, she only sat there, regarding him with that smiling self-confidence. So naturally he said, “It’s a fine poem, Murra. Your poems are always fine.”
She nodded graciously. “Thank you, Blundy, but what about you? Did you write anything while you were away?” That was the naked question he had known she would ask, so much an offense to hear. He shook his head. “Not even a political manifesto?” He shook his head again, resentfully now. Murra didn’t let that put her off. She laughed, the silvery, loving, forgiving laugh that he had heard so often. “Oh, Blundy, what am I going to do with you? You don’t write anything but puppet shows all winter because you need to be alone in order to do anything serious.
Then you don’t write anything at all when you’re out in the boonies with all the room in the world because Well, I don’t know what the because is there, do P
Maybe then you’re not alone enough out there, are you, with that pretty little Petoyne there to distract you?”
“Good night,” he said, and rolled over, and pretended to be asleep.
Murra was not deceived. She snuggled down next to him, rubbing the small of his back in the way that he liked, or had once told her he liked. She was thinking. Part of her thoughts were about the fact that he hadn’t really said anything specifically admiring about her poem, but what she was mostly thinking about was Petoyne.
Murra would not have described her feelings about Petoyne as jealousy. Murra never felt jealousy; she was far above that. She would have said that she was simply surprised. What surprised her was that Blundy hadn’t become tired of the girl by now. After all, he’d seen a lot of little Petoyne all through the filming of Winter Wife, twenty long months from Freeze to New Year’s, a show every week for two hundred weeks.
Petoyne hadn’t even reached puberty when they started taping; that had been the subject of one whole set of shows.
Of course, there hadn’t been anything sexual between Petoyne and Blundy then. That had happened later. Blundy had not confided a date to her, but, Murra conjectured, it had probably been about the time the month of New Year’s changed to Firstmelt, and with the first touch of coldspring the world began to look interesting again.
“Blundy?” she said softly, sweetly, inquiringly. He didn’t answer, but she knew he was awake. “Blundy, what I don’t understand is why she went out with you.
A young girl like that, she should be doing her taxtime in town. What does she do about her schooling?”
“She studies in the camp,” Blundy said, without turning over.
“Yes, but she can get in trouble there, can’t she? I mean, this thing with the dog. It wasn’t her dog. It was just a sheepdog, and it was too old to be any good anymore. Why didn’t she let them put the silly thing to sleep, the way they were supposed to?”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I guess when Petoyne loves something she hates to let go of it.”
“I see,” Murra said. “Yes, I see that.” And a moment later she heard Blundy’s regular breathing turn into a gentle snore as he really did go to sleep; but she lay awake for some time, thinking about that.
Although Murra was careful to preserve her public image of perfect, unstriving self-control, she was not at all an idle person. On the contrary. Murra acted with great and speedy force when force was needed. She simply used her force in the most economical fashion, by pushing where whatever force opposed her was weakest.