Confident that he was no farther than the nearest toilet, MacDonald sat down to wait for his return. She saw that the captain’s screen, like Betsy arap Dee’s, was displaying their next port of call. It was a different view, though; probably it was what was being seen, in real time, by Nordvik’s bow cameras. Thousands of stars were visible, but there was no doubt which star was Slowyear’s sun. Nordvik was still far away from Slowyear’s star, much farther than Pluto was from its primary. All the same, Slowyear’s star was far the brightest thing in that part of the sky. She squinted to see if she could make out the planet of Slowyear itself, but didn’t expect success. It was still too faint, probably lost in its sun’s glare.
She knew well enough what Slowyear was going to be like. Like everybody else on Nordvik, she had pored over its statistics for hour after hour, partly out of generalized curiosity, partly looking for a reason to make it her home for the rest of her life-or for not.
MacDonald knew that the bad thing about Slowyear was the very thing it was named after. Slowyear had a very slow year indeed. The planet was a good long way from its sun, and took a good long time to circle it-nineteen standard years, just about.
Fortunately for the hope of any life on Slowyear, its orbit was nearly circular. “Nearly” circular still wasn’t quite. The small difference between elliptical and round was critical. It meant that the planet had winters, and it had summers. And when you said “winter”, she thought, biting her lip, you weren’t talking about three or four chilly months. You were talking nasty. At aphelion the planet was moving slowly, like a yo-yo at the top of its climb, and Slowyear stayed at that distant point for nearly five standard years. Five bitter-cold Earth-time years of hiding underground to stay away from the surface snow and cold and misery. Mercy Macdonald, who had not experienced any real winter since she was eighteen years old, remembered the data table that said a typical night-time winter low on Slowyear was minus 70 degrees Celsius and a typical daytime winter high was only about minus ten, and felt herself shivering in anticipation.
Of course, luck had been with the visitors on Nordvik. It wasn’t winter on Slowyear now. The good part was that they would be reaching the planet in its late spring. There would be plenty of time to decide whether to stay or not before things got frigid.
When Captain Hawkins found her waiting he gave her an apologetic grin. “It’s nice to see you, Mercy,” he said, pleased. “Sorry I missed you, but that’s what comes with being an old man.” He made a face to express the annoying problems of being old and male, then changed the subject. “How do you like it?” he asked, gesturing at the nearly finished scrimshaw wall plaque on his easel. It was a mosaic picture of their starship, made of thousands of bits of glass, carefully cracked and mounted on a plastic board, and under it he had assembled bright red letters to spell out a motto: Ad astra per aspera.
“It’ll sell,” Macdonald said, giving her professional opinion. “What does it say?”
The captain dreamily traced the words with a fingertip. “It’s Latin,” he said with pride. “It means, To the stars through difficulties.” Macdonald snickered, and he looked up at her with shrewd humor, enjoying the patness of the motto with her. Then he sighed. “Of course, I don’t suppose they’ll remember Latin on Slowyear. We’ll have to translate for them-but that just makes it more interesting, don’t you think?”
“I’m sure of it,” she told him, glad to be able to say something kind to him that was also true. Macdonald liked the captain. He was old and feeble, sure, and she hadn’t forgiven him for letting the reins of the ship fall into Hans Horeger’s hands, but he was a nice man. If he had been just a little younger-
But he wasn’t younger. He’d been in his fifties when he took command of the ship, back in Earth orbit. Now that he was well past eighty his principal activities were scrimshaw and naps.
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 down 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 burn, 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 kinf of life did she have now?
Chapter 4
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.