Blundy resisted going on the picnic again at the last minute, suddenly determined to spend Petoyne’s coming-of-age birthday with her after all. But it didn’t take Murra long to reason him out of disappointing the others, and at last he let Murra drag him along to the hills.
And when they got out of the borrowed cat-car in a pleasant glade he seemed resigned to going along with the picnic spirit. More than that, Murra thought; he seemed quite relaxed. Even happy. He sat on a blanket under the biggest tree they could find—no more than two meters tall, because of course it had only had coldspring to grow-and gazed out over the scene before them. Far below the Sometimes River had at last returned to within its banks. The floodplain all around was already planted, and the first crops well along-good crops they would be, too, because all that land was refreshed every years from the spring flooding, just as ancient Egypt had been before the building of the Aswan Dam. (Though neither Murra nor Blundy had any clear knowledge of the country of Egypt, much less of Aswan.)
The thing was that when at last he stirred himself he fled from the grownups Murra had selected with such care and romped up onto the glacier with the children. Murra gazed indulgently up
at them, sliding around on the ice as they chased a little flock of pollies. “He’s so good with children,” she told Verla proudly-thoughtlessly, because then her sister had no more sense than to say:
“I’ve always thought Blundy would love having some of his own.”
“Oh, certainly he would,” Murra said, her lips smiling but her eyes suddenly cold. “But we can’t have everything we want, can we? You know how it is with Blundy and me. Can you imagine us with children? We do love them so, naturally we do, but you see that for us it would be quite impossible.”
Verla nodded, seeing-seeing mostly what Murra hadn’t said. She understood, out of her own experience, why any woman would hesitate to have a baby on Slowyear. They were unbearable in winter, when everyone was huddled together underground, and not much better in the hot summer, when most people were back in the buried city again. And even if you arranged to have the childbirth at the best possible time-right after New Year’s, say, when people were getting ready to emerge into the sunlight again, as she had with her younger child-there was the high risk of heartbreak, with infant mortality on Slowyear so frighteningly high. Verla had seen a dozen of her friends go through all the mess and misery of bearing a child, and watch it like a hawk for ten long months, knowing there were three chances in ten that it would sicken and die, swiftly and inevitably, before it could walk. She’d been lucky with her own . . . so far.
But others had not. Two of her own friends had lost babies just in the past five months since New Year’s, one of them twice. Verla didn’t say any of that to her sister. She turned to peer down into the crevasse, where the pumps were sucking the meltwater from around the hydrogen fuel complex. That would serve the shuttles, all three of them gleaming like beached whales on the flat plateau off to the west. She said, to the group at large, “It looks like everything will be ready in time for the ship.”
“In time for the ship, in time for the ship,” Megrith said, looking up from the fire he was starting in the grill. “That’s all you hear these days, what’s going to happen when the ship comes.”
Old Varion agreed. “But it’s exciting, Megrith,” he said. “You can’t blame people. It’s a good thing the ship’s coming in warmspring, too. There’ll plenty of time for the unloading before the worst of the summer.”
Megrith nodded. “The last one was bad, they say. You know, the one that came in, oh, eight years ago, was it? It came in winter, and they had a terrible time getting the shuttles ready to fly.”
“Before my time,” Varion cackled. At four and a bit, it pleased him to talk about things before his time. He craned his neck. “Isn’t Blundy ever coming down?” he complained. “I brought the chessboard.”
“Oh, leave him alone, Varion,” Verla said good-naturedly. “Can’t you see he’s having fun? Let him wear himself out with the kids-maybe he’ll wear them out, too, and then we can have a civilized lunch and talk.”
Her husband looked at her and cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to Blundy about something-and to you too, Murra.”
“Oh?” said Murra.
“I’ve just been wondering,” Vincor said apologetically. “I mean, Winter Wife was such a great success-”
“They’re going to rerun it, aren’t they?” Verla asked.
“Yes, so they say,” Murra agreed, looking at her brother-in-law. She was well aware that Vincor had always been a little envious of Blundy’s success-and hers, of course; the man wanted to be a director himself. Warily she asked, “What about it, Vincor?”
“Well, I had an idea. With a huge success like that, you might as well follow up on it. You know, in a few months it’ll be summer. . . .”
“Personally,” his wife put in, “I think summer’s as hard to get through as winter, though it’s shorter, of course.”
“So what would you think of a new one for the summer? I thought of a natural title. It tells the whole story: You could call the new series Summer Wife.”
Murra pursed her lips. They had obviously been planning this for some time. She didn’t blame her sister for being ambitious-didn’t blame anyone, as long as their ambitions didn’t conflict with her own, and there were advantages to working with your own family. “Summer Wife,” she said meditatively. “Now, that’s quite an idea, isn’t it?”
“Do you think Blundy would like to do it?” Vincor asked, the eagerness showing in his voice.
“Oh, heavens, Vincor,” Murra smiled, “you’d have to ask Blundy about that. I never interfere. When you’re married to a genius you have to learn to let the man do things his own way.” She spread her hands helplessly. Then she said, “Anyway, I think I’ll just go up and join them on the ice for a bit; it looks like so much fun.”
Before she reached the ice she had to dodge half a dozen screeching pollies, making their escape from Blundy and the little boys. Brightly colored-emerald green, scarlet, one or two patterned with diamonds and polkadots-the pollies weren’t dangerous, except to the bugs they fed on, but Murra disliked having them there: they were uncontrolled. Climbing up from the greensward onto the glacier itself was a very un-Murralike thing to do. It meant puffing and panting, and besides the grass turned into mud and the mud into slush before you were on solid ice. She was glad she’d worn old boots.
She was also glad she’d worn warm clothes, because it was cold up there. Not winter cold, of course; the sun was still hot. But the breeze was chilling. Besides, she could hear sounds of running water from underneath the ice, and now and then a sharp cracking sound, like a large stick snapping. Was this place really safe?
She paused and looked at Blundy and the two little boys, Petternel the sturdy fourteen-month-old, Porly the toddler. They hadn’t seen her yet. They had found a smooth place for sliding, and they were running toward it, then planting their feet and gliding along it, arms windwilling to keep their balance, shouting with pleasure, laughing when little Porly fell down anyway.
It was very good, Murra thought with satisfaction, to see her husband laughing like that again. The picnic had been an excellent idea. She glanced around. The world was a pretty sight from the ice sheet. She could see clear down to Sometimes River and to the dozen streams that fed it with meltwater, some of them crystal clear as the ice itself, some milky white with the powdered rock they had ground away in their course. It would have been even prettier if it were a photograph or a painting hanging in her drawing room, and a lot warmer, she thought, and for a moment wondered if she should try painting again. For a while in the early part of her second year Murra, before she turned to poetry, had thought she had a talent for art. But it had been a lot of hard work, with improvement coming very slowly; and anyway then she met Blundy and found a new career. As his leading lady, of course; there was always a part for her in everything Blundy wrote. More importantly, as his wife.
But a wife could also be a mother to children.
Verla had put that unwelcome idea in her mind, not for the first time. It wasn’t a prospect Murra could look forward to: four long months of pregnancy, with your belly swelling and your grace of movement stolen away. Then the pain of parturition. Then the other pain if the baby died-