Mercy MacDonald shook herself and got back to work. Maybe Slowyear would be better.
Maybe it wouldn’t, too, because tramp starships like Nordvik didn’t get to the better worlds. Ships like Nordvik didn’t have any real reason for being any more. Ships like Nordvik were fossils. The only reason their cooperative had been able to buy it in the first place was that that whole class of starships had already been made obsolete by the new grid-function vessels that could actually land on a planet’s surface, at least when the planet was big enough and prosperous enough to afford a landing system. Nordviks were a disappearing breed, good for nothing but wandering around the poorest and least developed colony worlds, in the hope of transacting a little business and replenishing their supplies so they could wander a little farther.
But as she patiently checked over the invoices, MacDonald wondered whether even a poor world would be poor enough to want to buy any of the things they had to sell. Some of the appliances and machines aboard Nordvik were ten or fifteen years old-ship’s time-and technology had progressed beyond them wherever they had gone. Their trade goods were almost as obsolete as the ship. There were 2300 pieces of “scrimshaw”-the novelties the ship’s crew made for themselves, to sell and to pass the time between stars-including poems, art objects and knitted goods. There were eleven thousand, almost, varieties of flowers, fruits, ornamental trees, vegetables and grasses, the most promising of them already setting new seeds in the refresher plots. There was a library of nearly 50,000 old Earth books in the datastore-assuming anybody on this new planet read books any more; at Hades that part of the cargo had been a total loss, which was one of the reasons why MacDonald thought the planet was so well named. (But they were good books! MacDonald had read six or seven thousand of them herself, one time or another, and they’d made the long travel times endurable for her. Almost.) There were machines to sell to be copied (if ancient Earth machines had any value any more) and, most of all, the huge store of data that covered every branch of human knowledge, from medicine to anthropology to combinatorial mathematics (also, sadly, subject to being deflatingly out of date.)
If you put a cash value on all Nordvik’s wares (as MacDonald had to do, to figure out what to trade for what) that had to be easily thirty or forty million dollars’ worth of goods, even after you discounted the holds packed with stuff that probably wasn’t ever going to sell to anyone, anywhere.
But the value of a commodity was what it would fetch in the market, and who knew what these Slowyear people would be willing to pay?
She was glad to be interrupted by the ship’s bell, less glad when it was Hans Horeger’s flabbily hairy face that appeared in the corner of the screen. “Oh, shit,” she said. At least it wasn’t a personal call; it was one of his incessant all-ship addresses.
That didn’t make it much better. She resignedly saved her worksheet and let Horeger take over the full screen. He had got dressed from their little interlude in the showers, anyway. Now he was wearing his public face, calm, self-possessed and not at all like the frantic breast-grabber whose sweaty hands had been all over her twenty minutes before.
“Shipmates,” Horeger was saying, yellow teeth gleaming between mustache and beard, “I have just received another communication from our next port of call at the planet of Slowyear. We’re still at long range, but reception is better now and the news from them is all good. They say they haven’t had a ship call in a long time. I don’t know how long, exactly, because they use their own calendar. But long. And they’re thrilled we’re coming. They’re a good size for us, too. They’ve got a world population of half a million or so. That’s kind of funny,” he said, in that chatty, endearing style that endeared nobody, “because they’ve had twelve or fifteen generations to build up their numbers, but it could have been a lot worse.” Of course it could have, MacDonald thought. It could have been zero. Slowyear wouldn’t have been the first planet to die out between visits, leaving the next wanderer to arrive that way high and dry. “Anyway that’s half a million customers. Good ones, friends! They’re farmers. Farmers and stock raisers, and that means they won’t have a hell of a lot of industry so I’m counting on selling a lot of our machine cargo there. Let’s take a look at what Slowyear is like.”
He waved a hand, and under his chin the planet’s stats appeared: An F8 star; a planetary surface gravity very close to Earth normal; an atmosphere a little denser, but with a slightly lower partial pressure of oxygen. “See what it says about the primary?” he invited. “It’s bright. So those worrywarts among you can’t rest easy-we won’t have any trouble refueling there.”
“Meaning worrywarts like me,” Mercy MacDonald told the screen, since she had been telling Horeger for months that if they didn’t refuel pretty soon their next stop would be their last.
She might have said more, because talking back to Horeger on the screen was one of the habits that had become standard for her-and a lot less maddening than talking to Horeger when he could hear-but it dawned on her that the faint tapping sound she heard was someone at her door.
For a nasty moment she feared it might be Horeger back again. Impossible, of course; there he was blithely pontificating away in real time on the screen. When she opened the door she was pleased to see that it was little Betsy arap Dee, as close as she had to a “best friend” on Nordvik. “Hi,” she said, welcoming-
Then she got a better look at Betsy’s face. “What’s the matter?” MacDonald asked sharply, suddenly afraid.
Betsy was holding her swollen belly. “The baby,” she sobbed. “I’m spotting, and I hurt. Can you help me get to the sickbay, please?”
By the time Mercy MacDonald got her friend to the room they used for a sickbay Sam Bagehot, the closest thing they had to a nurse, had an obstetric bed ready and Danny de Bride, their approximation of a doctor, was fretfully studying the obstetric displays from their medical database.
De Bride wasn’t a real doctor, but he was the best Nordvik had left after the mass desertion on Hades, and he had at least long since read through all the gynecological section. “I hope I know what I’m doing,” he gritted to MacDonald as the nurse guided Betsy’s feet into the stirrups and he played with the fetoscope earphones in his hand.
“I hope so, too,” MacDonald said, but not out loud. Out loud she only whispered encouragingly in Betsy arap Dee’s ear. Whether her friend heard her she could not say. Betsy’s eyes were closed, her forehead was cold and clammy and she was moaning.
De Bride was muttering something to his nurse, but MacDonald missed it. Over their heads Horeger was still prattling noisily away on the screen. “What?” she demanded.
“I said she’s hardly dilated at all,” de Bride complained.
“And I’m not getting any fetal heartbeat,” said Sam, holding the metal disk on Betsy’s belly and watching the readout.
“Oh, shit,” said de Bride. “What do you think, Sam? Do I have to do a C-section? I’ve never even seen one!”
“You’ll see one now,” his nurse told him. “Mercy, give me a hand. You take care of the instruments while I handle the anesthesia, will you?”
The “will you” was only politeness. There wasn’t any real choice. If there had been, Mercy MacDonald would have been out of there long before the cutting started, but under the circumstances she was present for it all.
She had never seen anyone deliberately slice into the flesh of another human being before. There was less blood than she had expected, but still a great deal of blood; it went faster than she had imagined, but still a long business of de Bride muttering angrily to himself as he inexpertly pushed muscle walls and tissues out of the way and fumbled for the little scarlet gnome curled up inside Betsy’s abdomen. MacDonald was both horrified and fascinated-yes, and something else, too. Almost even envious. For here was silly little Betsy arap Dee bringing a whole new person into existence. Marvelously! Wonderfully. Enviably. . . .
For a moment MacDonald almost forgot the gore, didn’t hear de Bride’s steady muttering to himself or Horeger’s orating from the screen. She could do this, she told herself. She could have done it years earlier, when she still had Walter to be a father; could still do it, maybe, if she didn’t take too long getting it started-
“Here,” said de Bride suddenly. “Hold it while I cut the cord.”