Almost satisfied. The food was first-rate, the guests were obligingly cheerful; and Blundy sat through it patiently. He praised the food, and carried on polite talk with the guests. But he was bored.
When Murra found out what Blundy was doing with his time she was mildly vexed.
He wasn’t secretly writing, as she had hoped. He wasn’t even meeting with his political allies, or even with Petoyne-not often, anyway. What the man was doing was taking flying lessons. Every day he was climbing the hill to the plateau people called the “spaceport”, where the shabby old shuttles were being checked and de-mothballed, and spending hour after hour sitting at the simulator controls, with an instruction program running on his screen.
When she laughed at him he didn’t get angry, only patient. “But how can you learn to operate a spaceship out of a training program?” she asked.
“How else? There’s nobody alive to teach me.”
“But, my dear, why should it be you to take such a risk?”
He thought it over carefully before he found the right answer. “Because I want to,” he said.
As the month of Thunder warmed into the month of Green Murra tried again and again to recapture his attention, or at least to entertain him. She didn’t nag her husband; that wasn’t her style. Murra’s style was to be forgiving, loving and never irritating-in fact, a perfect winter wife, even through coldspring and warmspring and right on through the year. She kept inventing pleasures for him-unfortunately, pleasures that he didn’t seem to want.
That didn’t keep Murra from going on with her project of devising entertainments for him. Some represented real sacrifices on her own part, as when she persuaded Blundy to a weekend’s rafting on Sometimes River, slowly dwindling down from its coldspring flooded size. That wasn’t a success for either of them. Murra managed to contain, or at least disguise, her own distaste for anything out of doors, but Blundy was not entertained. He did some mood-disguising of his own. He dutifully paddled the raft with her, shouting as loud as she when they were drenched in the rapids, smiled a lot, exclaimed appropriately at the pretty warmspring flowers that were beginning to carpet the canyonsides-and was bored again.
The sort of thing that would really give Blundy the pleasure and stimulation he needed had to be a mixture, she decided. Fun people to talk to (but not the sort of dolts she had invited for dinner), an interesting place to visit (but nothing that required too much exertion)-of course! She had it: a picnic up on the glaciers, perhaps at a place near where the shuttles were just now emerging from their winter shroud of ice.
Again she chose her guest list with the greatest care. Her first pick was Vorian, who was old but still spry, and was always willing to play chess with Blundy; besides, Vorian wouldn’t be with them much longer, she was pretty sure. Then Morney, who was still pretty in spite of the fact that she was nearly three; Blundy liked being around pretty women. Importantly, she was also quite securely married to Megrith, the family doctor, who was an asset to the picnic in his own way: he loved to cook outdoors. Finally, there were Vincor and Verla, Vincor because Blundy liked him and Verla because she was Murra’s sister. And this time they would be invited to bring their children. You couldn’t have children at a dinner party, but how could you have a picnic without them? They were good enough children, as children went; they were winter-born kids, old enough to be reasonably civilized. (And sister Verla, though a cheerful soul and always good company, was conspicuously plain.)
Of course, when Blundy was told about the picnic he got that cold and obstinate look of his. But then he always did. And he gave in in the end.
When Blundy found Petoyne to make his apologies she was working in the insemination pens. “I’m sorry, Petoyne,” Blundy told her, watching while she worked. “You know I wanted to spend your birthday with you, but I really can’t get out of this picnic. Maybe I can fix it so you could come along?”
She finished with the bleating ewe, spraddled on its back with all four of its legs tied in the air, and looked up at him. “Fat chance of that,” she said dispassionately. “Even if Murra would let me come I’d spoil the whole day for her. Not that I’d mind that so much. But she’d make it miserable for me, too. No,” she said, “I’ll spend my first birthday by myself. It’s all right. I’ll have others.”
She filled the syringe again with the mixture of sheep semen and distilled water and moved to the next writhing ewe. Blundy knotted his brows. “Why did you volunteer for insemination? You don’t have to do all this kind of scut work,” he protested.
“I have to pay my taxtime off, don’t I?”
“Well, sure.” They all had that problem-Petoyne, Murra, Blundy himself, everyone connected with Winter Wife; the show had been a great financial success, and their taxes were high. “But not this way, Petoyne. I’ll be going out with the herd again, after the ship lands. You could come with me again.”
“Oh,” she said, “I want to get it out of the way. I think I’m going to be want to stay in town when the ship’s here. You know. Just to see what they have to sell; and mostly, I guess, just to see the strangers.”
“That’s not my idea of fun,” Blundy said.
“Well, it’ll be interesting, anyway. You don’t get the chance to see that every day.” She finished with that ewe and moved to the next; it was almost the last. “Do you know what these people from the ship are like?” she asked.
“As much as you do, I guess. No more. They’re just traders, people in an old ship, trying to make a living going from planet to planet.” He thought for a moment, then added, “They’ll probably seem pretty strange. They’re old, you know. I don’t mean physically-I mean the time dilation-they travel pretty close to the speed of light, between stars, so time slows down for them. I’d bet that some of them were already born when the first colonists landed here.”
She nodded. It wasn’t anything she didn’t know for herself, but it needed repetition to make her believe that any living person could have been alive that long, long time ago, more than twenty-five of Slowyear’s very slow years. She sighed. “Poor people,” she said, finishing the last of the ewes. She patted the creature’s head, then sealed the bottle of semen for return to the freezer and sat down to wait until it was time to release the dozen bleating animals. “You’d think it would be more fun for them to do it the other way,” she said absently, watching them struggle against their bonds. “With a ram, I mean.”
“Then we couldn’t control the breeding. We get better lambs with artificial insemination,” he pointed out.
She nodded, then suddenly giggled. “You could do it this way with Murra,” she said, grinning up at him. “Then you could get a baby, and you wouldn’t have to touch her.”
Blundy cleared his throat uncomfortably. He hated it when Petoyne talked that way about Murra, almost as much as he hated it when Murra talked about Petoyne. All he said was, “What makes you think I want a baby?”
“Well, everybody does, don’t they?” she said reasonably. “I do. I’ll take my chances, some day. Maybe pretty soon, too,” she added, “because that’s the best time to do it, when you’re one.”
It was another allusion to her birthday, Blundy thought, the birthday that he would not be spending with her. The trouble was, birthdays were important. You didn’t have more than four or five of them in your life, and every one marked a real change. The first long year was for growing up. The second was when you finished your education and began to get your career and your family and your life together. In your third and fourth years you were as successful and able as you were ever going to be, because the fourth birthday was retirement time-if you lived to see it-and then you just went downhill until you died.
“I’ve got to get cleaned up and out of here,” Petoyne said. “And I guess you’ve got to get back to Murra.”
“Well, I promised-”
“Sure,” the girl said. “So long, Blundy. Have a nice picnic.”
And she put her face up to be kissed, just as though nothing had changed.
He gave it up. He kissed her. “Happy birthday tomorrow,” he said, turning to leave. He was a dozen paces away when he heard her call his name.
He turned to look at her. “Blundy?” she said. “I wanted to tell you- Well, if you did want to have a baby- Well, I’d be willing to have it for you.”