Pohl, Frederik - Stopping at Slowyear
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Stopping at Slowyear
Frederik Pohl
Chapter 1
The ship was called the Nordvik (though no one aboard it remembered why), and it was a big one.
Even if you didn't count the thrusters on the outriggers astern, or the projectors for the Bussard
collection cone at the bow, it was more than a hundred meters long; if just the habitable part of
Nordvik had set down on any football field on Earth it would have lapped over at both ends. That
would never happen, though. It had been a good many centuries, Earth time, since Nordvik had been
anywhere near its home planet, and there was very little chance that it would ever return. It
also wouldn't happen because Nordvik, or any ship like it, could never set down on any planet
anyway. All those ancient starships were built in space and lived all their lives in space-mostly
interstellar space, at that-and sooner or later they all died in space.
More likely it would be sooner, thought Mercy MacDonald as she slammed her door in the face of
Deputy Captain Hans Horeger. What MacDonald didn't want to do was die when the ship did. She had
lived aboard Nordvik for twenty-seven years, ship's time-never mind the time the outside universe
went by; she didn't want to think about that-twenty-seven years and eight planetary systems, and
it was time to find some comfortable place and settle down. With some suitable man, she hoped.
But not just any man. Certainly not with the fat and lecherous-unselectively lecherous, which
made it worse-Deputy Captain Hans Horeger.
The first thing MacDonald did was make sure the door was well locked behind her, with Horeger on
the other side. The second thing was unwrap the towel she had clutched around her as she dashed
out of the shower stall and dab at her sticky body. The bastard hadn't even let her rinse before
he began grabbing. It wasn't much use. She moistened a cloth in her washstand, but you never
could get all the soap off with a cloth. She resigned herself to going around sticky until her
next turn at the showers.
It wasn't hard to do that. She'd had plenty of practice. The people who couldn't resign
themselves to aggravation didn't last long on a tramp starship; and there were always plenty of
tranks available in her medicine chest.
She swallowed one, sighed, and set to work. Naked, she sat down at her desk to begin keying up
the ship's trade-goods manifest for the next planetfall. Concentration came hard. Horeger had
not given up. She could hear him scratching at the door. She could even hear his voice; it was
too low-pitched to carry, but that didn't matter. She knew what he was saying, and the occasional
words that filtered through-"bitch" and "tease" and even that word he used as a final argument,
"love"-were all words she had heard from him before.
It made her laugh. She knew just what he was doing out there. She could picture him crouched at
her door, lips close to the crack, hands cupped around his mouth so that the rest of Nordvik's
people wouldn't hear. As though any of them had failed to observe his unrelenting pursuit.
Especially his wife, Maureen.
Mercy MacDonald stood up and dressed quickly in fresh clothes, not because there was anyone to see
but because she intended to speak to Horeger and obscurely did not want to do so naked. She
looked at herself in the mirror while she was pulling on the blue coverall. Figure still good,
chin clean, eyes clear-not bad for forty-five and a bit, she thought. The coverall, on the other
hand, need mending again at the shoulder seams; she would have to do a good deal of patching, she
thought, to get herself ready for a planetfall. She listened at the door for a moment, then
called, "Leave me alone, Hans. It's over. If you're that horny, go find Maureen."
But he didn't answer.
"Why, you bastard," MacDonald said to the door, suddenly angry when she realized he had given up.
She didn't have any legitimate reason for the anger. She had certainly made it clear to him that
furtive sex when his wife wasn't looking didn't satisfy her any more, especially when she
discovered she was sharing him also with her best friend . . . but why had he given up so easily?
#
One of the worst features of life aboard Nordvik was that among the fifty-six human beings who
lived on the starship, adult males were a distinct minority. There were only twenty-two of them,
against thirty-one adult women-adult enough, anyway. There were also three children (would be
four in a week or two, MacDonald reminded herself, as soon as Betsy arap Dee delivered herself),
but the ones already born were all girls, which would some day make the balance even worse.
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Would, that is, if no one else jumped ship, or if they didn't recruit any new people at their next
stop; but that was for the future. Meanwhile the oldest child, at eight, was still too unripe
even for Hans Horeger's attention.
Facing odds of that sort was a bad deal for the nine women without regular mates. Mercy MacDonald
didn't like being one of them.
She hadn't always been. She'd had a husband for a good many years; in fact, both she and Walter
were among the handful who were said to own a piece of Nordvik's keel. Apart from the doddering
old captain there was no one else left aboard who, like Mercy MacDonald, had signed on when the
ship first launched from Earth orbit. Counting the three children, eleven of the ship's
complement were ship-born; all the rest had been picked up at one planetfall or another along the
long, twisted way.
That was just one more injustice to swallow. Seniority should have counted for something. Even
not factoring in the datum that MacDonald was probably the smartest and most able person aboard;
even not adding on the intangible fact that she was also just about the most loyal person in the
ship's complement, which she had proved by not jumping ship, not even at Hades, their last port of
call, when twenty-three others were finally sufficiently fed up to pay off . . . including her own
husband.
Neither brains nor loyalty had paid off for her, though. MacDonald was still no more than eighth
or ninth down in the ship's heirarchy. As "purser," whatever that ancient title meant, she was
head of the trading section, to be sure, but that meant nothing when the ship was between planets.
She thought for a moment about Hades. She had been tempted to leave with the others there;
Nordvik was running poorer and less hopeful every year, and there was certainly no future aboard
for anyone.
But Hades had been the wrong place. Hades didn't have much good land. Most of the planet was
rocky hills and desert, and everything good had been nailed down by the first settlers. For whom
everybody else worked-at low pay, when they could get any pay at all. All the promising planets
were well in the past, MacDonald told herself. The longer Nordvik traveled, the worse the places
it visited seemed to get. It was even possible that this new one they were coming up on would be
even drearier than Hades.
It wasn't the first time that notion had occurred to her. She had even thought it during the
wretched weeks when they were orbiting Hades, with her husband and herself snapping at each other
whenever they were in earshot. She might well have paid off there herself . . . if Walter hadn't.
There had almost been a mutiny after Hades. A near half of the crew were urging tottering old
Captain Hawkins to give up the whole idea of trading with future planets. They wanted either to
settle down on one of the colonized worlds, or even to find some new one from the old robot-probe
reports and start a colony of their own. That was when Hans Horeger had become the actual
captain, in all but name. He was the one who stirred everyone up to go on.
Anyway, it wasn't a good idea. Nobody was settling new worlds right now. There were at least a
dozen that the robot probes had identified by now, and maybe more reports still coming in from
stars still farther away. But by now everybody knew how hard it was to start a colony in a world
where no human being, no creature from Earth at all, had ever lived before. The rage for
colonizing had worn itself out centuries (Earth-time centuries, at least) before.
Oh, no doubt, the pioneering spirit would blossom back to life again-some time-some later time,
maybe a few centuries down the pike, when all the new worlds were themselves beginning to bulge at
the seams and the adventurers and the malcontents would yearn to move on. But not just yet. And
definitely not with the discouraged, tired, aging crew of the starship Nordvik.
#
Mercy MacDonald shook herself and got back to work. Maybe Slowyear would be better.
Maybe it wouldn't, too, because tramp starships like Nordvik didn't get to the better worlds.
Ships like Nordvik didn't have any real reason for being any more. Ships like Nordvik were
fossils. The only reason their cooperative had been able to buy it in the first place was that
that whole class of starships had already been made obsolete by the new grid-function vessels that
could actually land on a planet's surface, at least when the planet was big enough and prosperous
enough to afford a landing system. Nordviks were a disappearing breed, good for nothing but
wandering around the poorest and least developed colony worlds, in the hope of transacting a
little business and replenishing their supplies so they could wander a little farther.
But as she patiently checked over the invoices, MacDonald wondered whether even a poor world would
be poor enough to want to buy any of the things they had to sell. Some of the appliances and
machines aboard Nordvik were ten or fifteen years old-ship's time-and technology had progressed
beyond them wherever they had gone. Their trade goods were almost as obsolete as the ship. There
were 2300 pieces of "scrimshaw"-the novelties the ship's crew made for themselves, to sell and to
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pass the time between stars-including poems, art objects and knitted goods. There were eleven
thousand, almost, varieties of flowers, fruits, ornamental trees, vegetables and grasses, the most
promising of them already setting new seeds in the refresher plots. There was a library of nearly
50,000 old Earth books in the datastore-assuming anybody on this new planet read books any more;
at Hades that part of the cargo had been a total loss, which was one of the reasons why MacDonald
thought the planet was so well named. (But they were good books! MacDonald had read six or seven
thousand of them herself, one time or another, and they'd made the long travel times endurable for
her. Almost.) There were machines to sell to be copied (if ancient Earth machines had any value
any more) and, most of all, the huge store of data that covered every branch of human knowledge,
from medicine to anthropology to combinatorial mathematics (also, sadly, subject to being
deflatingly out of date.)
If you put a cash value on all Nordvik's wares (as MacDonald had to do, to figure out what to
trade for what) that had to be easily thirty or forty million dollars' worth of goods, even after
you discounted the holds packed with stuff that probably wasn't ever going to sell to anyone,
anywhere.
But the value of a commodity was what it would fetch in the market, and who knew what these
Slowyear people would be willing to pay?
She was glad to be interrupted by the ship's bell, less glad when it was Hans Horeger's flabbily
hairy face that appeared in the corner of the screen. "Oh, shit," she said. At least it wasn't
a personal call; it was one of his incessant all-ship addresses.
That didn't make it much better. She resignedly saved her worksheet and let Horeger take over the
full screen. He had got dressed from their little interlude in the showers, anyway. Now he was
wearing his public face, calm, self-possessed and not at all like the frantic breast-grabber whose
sweaty hands had been all over her twenty minutes before.
"Shipmates," Horeger was saying, yellow teeth gleaming between mustache and beard, "I have just
received another communication from our next port of call at the planet of Slowyear. We're still
at long range, but reception is better now and the news from them is all good. They say they
haven't had a ship call in a long time. I don't know how long, exactly, because they use their
own calendar. But long. And they're thrilled we're coming. They're a good size for us, too.
They've got a world population of half a million or so. That's kind of funny," he said, in that
chatty, endearing style that endeared nobody, "because they've had twelve or fifteen generations
to build up their numbers, but it could have been a lot worse." Of course it could have,
MacDonald thought. It could have been zero. Slowyear wouldn't have been the first planet to die
out between visits, leaving the next wanderer to arrive that way high and dry. "Anyway that's
half a million customers. Good ones, friends! They're farmers. Farmers and stock raisers, and
that means they won't have a hell of a lot of industry so I'm counting on selling a lot of our
machine cargo there. Let's take a look at what Slowyear is like."
He waved a hand, and under his chin the planet's stats appeared: An F8 star; a planetary surface
gravity very close to Earth normal; an atmosphere a little denser, but with a slightly lower
partial pressure of oxygen. "See what it says about the primary?" he invited. "It's bright. So
those worrywarts among you can't rest easy-we won't have any trouble refueling there."
"Meaning worrywarts like me," Mercy MacDonald told the screen, since she had been telling Horeger
for months that if they didn't refuel pretty soon their next stop would be their last.
She might have said more, because talking back to Horeger on the screen was one of the habits that
had become standard for her-and a lot less maddening than talking to Horeger when he could hear-
but it dawned on her that the faint tapping sound she heard was someone at her door.
For a nasty moment she feared it might be Horeger back again. Impossible, of course; there he was
blithely pontificating away in real time on the screen. When she opened the door she was pleased
to see that it was little Betsy arap Dee, as close as she had to a "best friend" on Nordvik.
"Hi," she said, welcoming-
Then she got a better look at Betsy's face. "What's the matter?" MacDonald asked sharply,
suddenly afraid.
Betsy was holding her swollen belly. "The baby," she sobbed. "I'm spotting, and I hurt. Can
you help me get to the sickbay, please?"
#
By the time Mercy MacDonald got her friend to the room they used for a sickbay Sam Bagehot, the
closest thing they had to a nurse, had an obstetric bed ready and Danny de Bride, their
approximation of a doctor, was fretfully studying the obstetric displays from their medical
database.
De Bride wasn't a real doctor, but he was the best Nordvik had left after the mass desertion on
Hades, and he had at least long since read through all the gynecological section. "I hope I know
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what I'm doing," he gritted to MacDonald as the nurse guided Betsy's feet into the stirrups and
he played with the fetoscope earphones in his hand.
"I hope so, too," MacDonald said, but not out loud. Out loud she only whispered encouragingly in
Betsy arap Dee's ear. Whether her friend heard her she could not say. Betsy's eyes were closed,
her forehead was cold and clammy and she was moaning.
De Bride was muttering something to his nurse, but MacDonald missed it. Over their heads Horeger
was still prattling noisily away on the screen. "What?" she demanded.
"I said she's hardly dilated at all," de Bride complained.
"And I'm not getting any fetal heartbeat," said Sam, holding the metal disk on Betsy's belly and
watching the readout.
"Oh, shit," said de Bride. "What do you think, Sam? Do I have to do a C-section? I've never
even seen one!"
"You'll see one now," his nurse told him. "Mercy, give me a hand. You take care of the
instruments while I handle the anesthesia, will you?"
The "will you" 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 2
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 if
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.
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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 homebound 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 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 wilful 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? 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.
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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 any more, 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 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 committee!" 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 the 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 killing him just because he wasn't a pup any more, 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;
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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 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. Now. I'm supposed to be in the execution hall
in about half an hour. I've been waiting and waiting for you, Blundy--"
"They sentenced you already?" he asked, suddenly fearful for her.
She nodded. "They gave me another poison pill," she said. "I have to take it today."
#
It was, Blundy counted as he glumly accompanied his friend, the third time he had gone with
Petoyne to the execution chamber. He was getting really fed up. Not just with the nasty business
of poison pills itself, but with Petoyne for her dumbness, for the demands she made on him when he
had more important things to keep him busy. "But I just got back," he complained to her as they
walked, and, "I could be seeing Murra now instead of wasting my time on this crap," and,
"Can't you just stay out of trouble for a while?"
Petoyne didn't answer, not directly anyway. She just stretched to look up at him, shivering in
the wind that came down from the ice, her face woebegone, with sorrowful eyes and trembling chin.
She didn't say that the law required her to have a witness for her execution date, because
everybody knew that, or that they had long ago agreed that they were best friends, because she'd
said that already. Instead she mentioned a fact: "You know you're getting pretty tired of Murra
anyway." And she complained: "Who did it hurt if I just let Barney live a little longer?" And
she mourned, a couple of times, in different ways, "But, Blundy, don't you see what this means?
If I die of this business I could miss the ship. I've never seen a ship. By the time this one
lands I could be dead."
He didn't respond. They walked in silence, Blundy nodding to people who recognized him, while the
girl thought hard. Then an encouraging thought struck her. "One good thing," she said. "People
will see you on the TV."
He gave her a scowl, intending to show that that wasn't the kind of publicity he sought, and even
more to show that he didn't care what she said because he had one answer for all. "Quit
complaining. It's your own damn fault," he told her judgmatically. Petoyne had known what the
price was going to be, just as she had known all the other times she'd broken the laws-the two
times she'd been caught and the dozens of times she hadn't.
All the same, Blundy knew how the kid felt. Petoyne wasn't just afraid of dying-well, of course
she was afraid of that. Who wouldn't be? But worse than just the normal fear of dying was that
nobody, not anybody, least of all an almost-one-year-old like Petoyne, wanted to be left out of
that special once-in-a-lifetime excitement, both thrilling and bleak, that only happened when some
wandering spaceship came along. And even "once in a lifetime" was an exaggeration. It wasn't
that often; ships didn't usually happen along even once in a normal lifetime. There was hardly a
soul alive on Slowyear who remembered the last time a ship had called, apart from the tiny and
dwindling handful of five- and six-year-old dodderers.
You got to the summer execution chamber by a pebbled walk through a garden. Ribbonblossoms and
roses were in bloom, thousands of them, already halfway up their two-meter trellises though spring
was only five months old. The flowers didn't quite hide the chamber from people going by on the
summer town's streets, but they at least kept it decently remote. Most people didn't look, though
a child of thirty months or so stopped as they passed, leaning his bike against the gate to follow
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them with his fascinated eyes.
The marshal at the door nodded respectfully to Blundy as they entered the hall. Inside, generic
music was playing in the waiting room for the execution chamber, the kind of low-pitched whispery
strings Blundy associated with funerals and his almost-wife, Murra. (Funnily, at first he had
loved Murra's taste in music.) The waiting lounge smelled as flowery as the grounds outside.
There was a pot of babywillows in the center of the room, honey-sweet, and minty greenflowers hung
from ceiling baskets.
Blundy and Petoyne weren't the only ones waiting. There were four couples ahead of them, sitting
quietly on the comfortable benches or pretending to be conversing with each other. They would
have to wait, Blundy saw with resignation. The waiting was an extra burden, because Petoyne was
getting nervouser and nervouser as she came closer to the deed itself, gripping tight Blundy's
hand even though she was still technically short of her first birthday, and thus was only going to
take from the children's jar.
They sat down in the waiting room, nodding politely to the ones ahead of them. The execution
clerk wasn't at his desk, but almost as soon as they sat he came back in, looking around
impatiently. Petoyne clutched Blundy's arm and took a quick breath, trying to read the man's
face. There wasn't much on it to read, though, because the clerk was a hard-bitten old guy,
easily five, maybe more, had seen everything and was surprised at nothing.
He did blink in recognition as he saw Blundy there, and quickly glanced at the monitor on his
desk. Then he called a name and read a sentence: "Mossriker Woller Duplesset, for falsification
of taxtime records, one in fifty." A man not much older than Petoyne stood up, hanging his head.
The woman with him was nearly three-his mother, Blundy supposed-and she was the one who was
weeping as the executioner escorted them out to a chamber. He paused in the doorway to give
Blundy a friendly nod, then closed the door behind them.
There was a moment's silence, then the ones left began to talk. The old man got up from beside
the woman who seemed to be a daughter. Wandering around the room, he paused and absently stroked
the soft, downy pods of the babywillow. Then he looked more closely and frowned at what he saw.
He got a cup from the water cooler and carefully moistened the roots of the plant. "They should
take better care of their plants," he said severely, to no one in particular. Then his eyes
focused on Blundy.
"You were just coming in this morning, weren't you?" he asked politely, "I thought so. Those
were nice-looking herds you brought in." Blundy agreed that, for late spring herds, the sheep had
fattened up nicely. Another-a middle-aged woman, there with a younger woman who could have been
her daughter-what crime could she have committed to bring her here?-said, "They've started taking
the shuttles out of mothballs," and then a couple of them began talking about what their parents,
or their grandparents, had told them about the way it was the last time a ship came to call. What
they did not talk about was why they were here.
Petoyne didn't join in the conversation, but she was obviously beginning to get her nerve back.
"They're all adults," she told Blundy, looking around at the others in the room. "I guess
they've really got something to worry about."
"You'll be an adult pretty soon," Blundy reminded her.
"But I'm not now," Petoyne said, managing a smile for the first time. "What I am is hungry. Are
you?" And then, without waiting for an answer: "I bet you don't want any more lamb chops,
anyway. Listen, Blundy. Let me tell you what I had last night. I made myself a scogger-broiled;
a big one, with plenty of melted butter, the way you like it. And I've got a couple more in the
freezer, if you wanted to come over tonight-I mean," she added, glancing at the door, "if
everything, uh, if everything goes all right here." He shook his head. "Well, Murra's expecting
you, I guess." She might have said more but then, much sooner than any of them expected, the
clerk was back for another condemned and escort. The charge was assault this time, one in forty,
and, surprisingly, the convict was the middle-aged woman.
"Looks like there's life in the old girl yet," Petoyne whispered, almost giggling.
Two other couples were coming in, but Blundy didn't get a good look at them because the old man
was standing up and coming toward them. "I guess it's my turn next," he said apologetically. "I
didn't recognize you before, but-you are Irakaho Blundy Spenotex, aren't you? I thought so. I
just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your show last winter, and, well, I might not get the chance
to tell you later on."
"Of course," Blundy said, professionally warm. "Nice of you to say it."
The old man stood there, nodding like any fan who had made the approach and didn't really know
what to say. "My wife really loved it. It was about the only thing that kept us going, the last
couple of months," he said.
"Well, that's what it was supposed to do," Blundy said politely. "Do you recognize Petoyne here?
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She played Liv on Winter Wife. The younger daughter, remember?"
"Really?" The man seemed quite interested as he studied the girl up and down. "I wouldn't have
known her," he marveled, "but then, I guess everybody says that, don't they? The augmentation
and all. Well, I'm sorry to see you here, Petoyne, but you're still under age, aren't you? So it
won't be so-oh," he said in a different voice, as the door opened, "I guess it's my turn. I
hope I see you again."
And as the door closed behind him, the executioner and his witness, Petoyne said, "Hopes to see
you again! I bet he does! Did you hear that? He got a one in five! For murder. Do you know
what I think, Blundy? I think it probably was his wife he murdered, don't you think? Who else
would an old guy like that kill? So maybe the show didn't keep him going all that long, after
all."
#
Then there was another wait.
The wall screen was showing a musical group, which was getting on Blundy's nerves. He got up.
"Mind if I try to get some news?" he asked. No one seemed to care, though they all looked
docilely at the screen when it came on. The oilwells on Harbor Island had been successfully
uncapped, the pipelines to the refineries on the continent checked and reopened-but Blundy already
knew that, because he'd seen the smoke on the horizon. The warmspring census, taken after the
first crop ofpost-winter babies had had a chance to be born, showed a planetwide population of
534,907, the highest for that season in nine years. The water temperature in Sometime River was
up to 3.5 C, and there was an 80% chance of rain-
And then the woman came back in. She was alone.
She looked very sober as she made a phone call to the crematorium. It only took a moment to
arrange for the disposition of her father's remains.
Then, long before they were ready for it, it was their turn.
Inside the room Blundy sought out the cameras and found them, discreetly inconspicuous in corners
of the room; the carrying out of sentences was a matter of public record. Few bothered to watch
unless some relative was at risk, but Blundy squared his shoulders and assumed a properly grave
expression.
The clerk looked directly at Petoyne and then looked down at his charge sheet. "Larasissa Petoyne
Marcolli, first year, for wilfully failing to destroy a surplus animal," he read. "Sentence is
one in thousand. Come on, and hurry up," he said, "because I want to get home sometime
tonight."
Blundy rose with the girl. He took her arm firmly, though she didn't resist. They didn't say
anything to the newcomers they had left behind in the waiting room, though Blundy could almost
feel the resentment the adults felt toward a mere one-in-a-thousand.
The execution room was the one for children, with pretty pictures on the walls. The room itself
was not much bigger than a closet, no chairs, just a sort of metal bench along one side of it and
a low table that contained the urn. "Up on the table, Petoyne," the executioner ordered.
"You've been here before." Petoyne climbed up, looking woebegone at Blundy, uncomfortable on the
cold metal. There were drains around the edge of it to carry off the involuntary excretions an
executed criminal often could not help but release, and there was a faint shit smell in the room
to show that some had. The executioner turned to take a jar off its shelf, saying chattily over
his shoulder, "I was surprised to see you out there, Blundy, but of course I knew you were just
being a witness. I would have been sorry if it had been the other way around, because I really
like your work."
"Thank you," Blundy said automatically. He was mildly annoyed, though; Winter Wife was only a
minor work in his eyes. His social, political and philosophical contributions were what he really
prided himself on, and yet it was the video plays that everyone praised him for. Then he blinked.
"I beg your pardon?" he asked.
"I said, do your job, Blundy," the executioner repeated, and obediently Blundy bent to check the
jar with its thousand little jellybean pills. The seals were intact. When he said so, the
execution clerk said fretfully, "Well, then, break it open, man!"
And he then took the lid off the jar, and offered it to Petoyne, who unhesitatingly thrust her
little fist in, pulled out a pill, popped it in her mouth, swallowed.
She looked suddenly lost and fearful for a moment. Then she gave Blundy a broad, happy smile.
"Open your mouth," the executioner commanded, and rummaged around inside it with his forefinger.
Then he nodded. "Sentence carried out," he said. "Try not to come back here again, will you?
Next time you'll be grown up," And opened the back door to let them out into the warm spring
afternoon sun.
#
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Voltage-Controlled High-Bandwidth Terahertz Oscillators Based On Antiferromagnets Mike A. Lund1Davi R. Rodrigues2Karin Everschor-Sitte3and Kjetil M. D. Hals1 1Department of Engineering Sciences University of Agder 4879 Grimstad Norway5.9 玖币0人下载
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Voltage-controlled topological interface states for bending waves in soft dielectric phononic crystal plates5.9 玖币0人下载
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