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.
“You know, I’m getting to like the taste of those things,” bragged Petoyne, almost skipping along beside Blundy. “What do you want to do now? Have a drink somewhere? Go check on the slaughtering? Get something to eat? No,” she said, watching his face, “you’re off to see Murra, aren’t you? Why don’t you break it off with her, Blundy? She’s such a pain.”
He stopped and glowered down at her. “Leave Murra out of it,” he ordered. “And, listen, I’m not going to this place with you again, Petoyne. You’re going to be a one-year-old pretty soon, and then you won’t be getting any one in a thousand shots any more. So straighten out if you want to live to see that ship come in.”
Chapter 3
When Mercy MacDonald came looking for Betsy arap Dee, she found her friend in the Lesser Common Room of the starship, working with her fingers on a scrimshaw sampler but her eyes on the picture of their next planet that was displayed on the wall screen.
“We’re getting good pictures now,” MacDonald commented, looking for a good way to start a conversation. They were only a couple of light-days out now; four or five more weeks and they would be in orbit, and then the frenzy of transshipping and dealing would start.
MacDonald stretched to reach up and trace the outlines of Slowyear’s single great continent with a fingertip. It was more or less pear-shaped, with the widest part of the pear right around the planet’s equator. “Where do you suppose the landing parties will touch down?” she asked. Betsy didn’t answer, except possibly with the faintest of shrugs, so MacDonald answered herself: “Probably right near their city, here-” putting her finger on the place the radio signals came from. “It ought to be nice by the time we get there. They say it’s their springtime.”
Betsy finally found some words worth saying. “That would have been nice for the baby,” she said, bending her head back over her sampler.
MacDonald bit her lip and tried another tack. “How about giving me a hand?” she suggested. “I need to check the special-interest programs in the store so we can see what we’ve got to sell.”
Betsy glanced up at her. “Why? We already did that, Mercy.”
“So I want to do it again. To make sure. It’s no good if we suddenly discover something we overlooked after we’ve left, is it?”
Betsy sighed and put her sampler down. She gave her friend a level gaze. “I know what you’re doing. You’re just trying to keep me busy so I won’t be depressed, aren’t you? But you don’t have to bother. 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 any more?” 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 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 together on Earth, like the captain and Mercy MacDonald herself; like MacDonald and Captain Hawkins they’d voted against Hans Horeger’s takeover. Also like the captain, they were getting a little elderly to be close friends any more.
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 any more. 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 friend 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 advantages; 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 wall screen was on.