“I don’t see anything,” she said.
“No. You can’t. We’re too far, but that’s where it is.”
She didn’t answer that, and she didn’t go on looking at the stars, either. She was looking at Blundy’s face, very near her own but almost invisible with nothing but starlight to see it by. She could not make out his expression.
“Would you like to go there?” she asked.
He lowered his gaze to look at her. “Go to the Earth? But I can’t,” he said reasonably.
“Ships do go there, Blundy. Not Nordvik, of course. I don’t know where Nordvik will go from here, but it isn’t likely to be the Earth, but-”
“I’m never going to leave Slowyear,” he said, his tone flat. “So what’s the use of wishing? Come to bed.”
The next morning Mercy MacDonald woke with thunder crashing in her ears and a drumming of rain on the side of the tent. Blundy was nowhere in sight. That was a new experience for her, too, and not one she really enjoyed-peering out of the flap of the tent she saw eye-searing flashes of lightning all around, and the rain that was turning the ground into swamp was not just rain. Chunks of ice the size of her thumbnail were bouncing off the ground, astonishing her. She had heard the word “hail” before; she had never seen any.
But when Blundy came dripping into the tent a few minutes later he promised it would all be over soon; and it was; and by noontime the water had run off and the sky was blue and warm.
It was not a bad way to live, she decided.
Sheepherding had a lot going for it. The food was good, the accommodations comfortable enough, once you got used to them, and the sex with Blundy was-she hunted for the right word and grinned to herself when she found it: “ample”. It changed the way she felt about everything. Her whole metabolism seemed to have shifted gears.
It was just as well that making love never failed to give pleasure, because there wasn’t much else to do. The sheep took care of themselves, pretty much, with a little help from the dogs-but it didn’t matter if they wandered. When it came time for lambing, Blundy explained, he would turn on the radio beacon and that would bring all the ewes back close to the tent. Then things would get busy enough-helping the ewes deliver when they needed help; fitting the newborn lambs with radio guides of their own, clipped into their noses.
“Can we do that by ourselves?” she asked, trying to imagine what it would be like to “help” a ewe bring forth its lamb and not liking what she imagined.
He hesitated for a moment, putting his arm around her. “We wouldn’t have to,” he said. “I’d get some help out here for that.” And she might have asked more, but his arm was tightening around her and his hands were on her as he spoke, and there was only one place for them to go then.
But even while they were making love she was thinking. And kept on thinking as they settled in. This existence was interesting as an experience, and rewarding in bed, but it did, she admitted, get a little-well, not boring, exactly, but empty. Their “work” was certainly not demanding. Once a day she and Blundy went out for a walk-he called it “inspection”-and what they inspected was the landscape, dotted with sheep. “What are we looking for?” she asked, and he shrugged.
“Sick ones. Dead ones, maybe. If they’re dead we bury them, and if they’re sick we give them antibiotics-but it’s pretty early for that. We don’t usually get any real problems until the lambing starts.” He took her hand and moved on, to the top of a hill; he took out his field glasses and swept the area, finding nothing that needed attention.
MacDonald was glad to sit down on the grass for a moment; it had been a long time since she had done this much walking. She gazed around at the pretty landscape, with its haze of bugs-none of them more than mild annoyances, because Slowyear’s bugs did not care for the blood of mammals, never having had any mammals to co-evolve with. The only large creatures in sight were the idle dogs and the scattered sheep. “That’s all you have for livestock, sheep? No cattle, goats, pigs, horses-?”
He took the glasses away from his eyes and frowned down at her, trying to remember. “We did have, some of them. A long time ago-twenty-five slowyears ago, when the colony first landed. But they died.”
“They’ve got frozen sperm and ova on the ship, you know.”
“Yes, you told us. I don’t think they’d work here.”
“You could try,” she said.
“Well, we probably will-hey,” he said, scuffing at the base of a bush with the toe of his boot. “Look at that. There’s scoggers here.”
She looked, but could see nothing but a hole in the ground. But that was all you ever saw in the daytime, he explained. “They only come out at night, but fresh scogger’s the best eating there is. We’ll catch us a couple one of these nights.” He grinned down at her. “Speaking of which,” he said, “I’m getting hungry, aren’t you?”
And that was a shock to her, too, because what they ate was lamb chops, but they didn’t get them out of a frozen food locker, they got them from that permanently available larder on the hoof that was all around them. She closed her eyes with a faint squawk when Blundy leisurely selected one of the smaller ewes, lifted its chin with one hand, slit its throat with the knife in the other.
That wasn’t the end of it, either. Then there was the skinning, and the disposal of the offal (buried deep so the dogs wouldn’t dig it up again), then the rough butchering, then, while their own chops were broiling over the little hydrogen-burning grill, Blundy whistled the dogs in and fed them the rest of the dismembered carcass. “They have to eat, too,” he reminded her, “so we’ll slaughter one sheep a day as long as we’re here.”
MacDonald wasn’t at all sure she could eat something that had been gazing at her with sad eyes no more than half an hour earlier. But she did. It tasted good, too. And when it was done, and they’d buried the bones she looked around expectantly. “Now what do we do?” she asked.
“Whatever we like,” he said. “We’re through for the day.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “What would you be doing if I weren’t here?”
He shrugged. “Write for a while, maybe.”
“Then do it,” she commanded, and tried to make herself inconspicuous while he obediently sat down at his little keyboard.
That wasn’t easy to do, she discovered. MacDonald was used to having a lot of free time-between stars, that was what you had the most of on Nordvik. But on the ship at least she had her books, amd her recorded music and films, and people to talk to-even if they were always the same few dozen people you had got tired of talking to years before. Here there was nothing. They could have had television, but Blundy explained that he had vetoed that-“There’s no point looking for solitude and bringing the whole world along, is there?” But then, almost as an apology, he added, “There’s a player in the cab of the tractor, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, it’s there. And I think there are disks. Mostly they’d be technical stuff on taking care of the sheep, you know, but there might be some others. Anyway, you might want to learn more about sheep.”
She did learn more about sheep-more than she had ever wanted to know about sheep-but what saved MacDonald’s sanity was that there turned out to be quite a few disks on other subjects, too. Some had evidently been left behind by that gawky adolescent, Petoyne, Blundy’s former helper. Those were school work: math lessons, accountancy lessons, grammar lessons. They were not in any particular order, and some had been spilled out of their container and wedged their way under the seats or behind forgotten tools. None of the school lessons were really exciting for Mercy MacDonald, but in among the lesson disks were some recorded episodes from Blundy’s video drama, Winter Wife.
Those interested Mercy MacDonald quite a lot. Not just because Blundy was the guiding spirit behind them, but because those particular episodes had been selected for a purpose. She did not need to be told that they had been Petoyne’s. They mostly had Petoyne herself in a leading role, but a younger, skinnier Petoyne than the young woman MacDonald had met, and MacDonald studied them with a good deal of interest.
So she spent most of her afternoon hours watching vid disks there in the tractor cab, while Blundy did whatever he did with his writing machine; he did not want to show her any of it, and she stopped asking. And they ate, and slept, and did their chores, and made love. And sometimes (but not often) swam in the very cold stream. And sometimes picked wildflowers. And sometimes, on clouded nights when there wasn’t even much starshine to guide them, went out scogger-hunting in the velvet dark (stumbling over bushes and hillocks, with ultraviolet lights that made the grubs’ epicuticles fluoresce so they looked like neon-lit cockroaches in the night) and broiled their catch for breakfast. And made love. And sometimes MacDonald sat by herself out of Blundy’s sight and stared thoughtfully into space, wondering just what she was doing there, on this planet, with this stranger.