He looked at her affectionately. “It’s interesting for you to be here?”
“You bet, Blundy. I’d almost forgotten what a planet was like. All this space-well, not here in this place, of course; but out in the open-”
He nodded. “Then you’ll understand how much I hate being cooped up here all through the winter. Here, let’s see if we can get into our old apartment.”
He selected a door, no different from any other door in the hall as far as MacDonald could see, then scowled apologetically. “I’m sorry; I forgot we locked it, and I don’t have the key. But all the apartments along here are pretty much the same.”
He tried three or four other doors before he found one that opened, shook his head, tried a dozen more until he found the one he was looking for. “This’ll do,” he said, and held the door open for her.
She looked around the room, no bigger than her own cabin on Nordvik. It was almost as bare the one they had seen on the other level, though it did contain a stripped-down bed.
“So we’ll have something to sit on,” he said.
“Of course,” she said, and he saw her nose wrinkling.
“Stinks, doesn’t it?” he said. “They turn off most of the ventilation when people are outside-but it’s not much better in the winter.”
“I was just thinking that it looks pretty crowded,” she said, half apologizing. “And-well-dreary?”
“It was dreary. Crowded, too,” he said sourly, gazing around. “Well, we might as well sit down.”
They sat on the edge of the bed, since there was no other place to sit, and opened their sandwiches. There wasn’t much room. Their elbows touched from time to time, and Blundy could feel, or imagined he could feel, the warmth that came from her body.
He was surprised when she asked him, “Are you sure you want to be here?”
He blinked at her; that wasn’t the question on his mind at all.
“You seem-well, I don’t know. Depressed, maybe. Is it seeing the hospital?”
He shook his head, then thought for a moment. “Maybe a little,” he said, avoiding the truthful answer. “Maybe it’s this whole place. I can’t tell you how much it begins to look like a prison after the first few weeks. Of course, Murra and I were lucky because we had our work. We kept pretty busy all winter long with Winter Wife, and we got to spend a lot of time in the studios. We even went outside on location, for a couple of episodes, though that wasn’t much fun, either; if you’re going to be out for more than a few minutes you have to dress really warmly, with electrically heated boots and gloves.”
She looked at Blundy quizzically. “And that was a big success? Winter Wife, I mean?” He shrugged. She studied him for a moment. “I don’t understand, Blundy. You’re a famous playwright-”
“Video dramas,” he corrected her.
“Same thing; and yet you work as a shepherd.”
“But I enjoy that,” he said, surprised. “After you spend seven hundred winter days crowded together in this place a little solitude is a good thing. Besides, it’s beautiful out there. You see all the stars at night, and in daylight the mountains are always there on the horizon. They’re really spectacular to look at. And the air’s so pure, and it’s quiet, and by now the flowers are springing up all over and everything smells so sweet-”
He stopped, surprised. She was almost laughing. “That’s quite a sales talk,” she said.
“Sales talk?”
“It sounds like you’re saying I ought to go out with you,” she amplified.
“Well,” he said, touching her arm, “I suppose I am. If you’d like to.”
“I accept,” she said gravely. “But in that case-and because it’s still a little chilly in here-if you and I are going off into the boondocks together, don’t you think that now it’s about time you put your arms around me?”
Blundy slept in his own bed that night, with Murra peacefully sleeping beside him. If she knew he had bedded Mercy MacDonald that afternoon, as he was convinced she always did, she had had the grace to keep silent about it. She had asked no questions when he came home, offered no criticism, invited no sexual advances. She was a model winter wife, Blundy thought glumly as he drifted off to sleep. Unfortunately it was now spring.
The next morning he rose early, wakened by the thunder of the departing shuttle, and headed for the marketplace.
As he had expected he would, he found Petoyne idly looking through the scanty remaining stocks of scrimshaw. When she saw Blundy, and put down the carved plastic statuette she’d been looking at to come over to him, there was something in her face that told Blundy she knew as well as Murra that he had found a new lover.
Unlike Murra, she didn’t pretend not to. She said, her tone hostile, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I do know. And, listen-” getting it over with-“I’m going to take Mercy MacDonald out to the flocks with me.”
Petoyne nodded as though she had expected it. “You won’t want me along, then.”
“Well, I think-”
“I know what you think.” Then she gave him a look which he could not decipher. It was neither angry nor amused. It was, if anything-sympathetic? Sad?
“What’s the matter?” he demanded.
“There’s something I think you should know. That old captain from the ship? I saw him taking his clothes off in the marketplace this morning.” He stared at her, and she nodded. “So if you’re going anywhere with Mercy MacDonald,” she said, “my advice is, do it pretty soon.”
Chapter 8
Up to the very last minute, Mercy Macdonald had not really decided whether to have an affair with this conspicuously married little man; in fact, she had decided quite a long time ago that going to bed with married men was the sort of mistake she had outgrown long since. But there were always extenuating circumstances, weren’t there? Obviously this particular man’s marriage to that slinky, pretentious woman had become a burden to him, while Blundy himself had seemed so down-and also so very male. . . . No, there was something about this Blundy that was worth pursuing, she was sure of it.
All the same she was startled, when she thought about it, to find herself climbing into his stubby, high-roofed vehicle on the way to the (for God’s sake!) sheep pastures with him; and it occurred to her that she hadn’t really decided to do that, either.
But she was doing it.
Since she was actually doing it, there was no reason to worry about it. Maybe at some later time, Macdonald informed herself, she would have to think harder about what all this was getting her into. Not now. Now she was quite content to enjoy this interesting new experience with this interesting new man.
The word that was important here was “new.” MacDonald had had quite a reasonable number of lovers before, at one time or another, but it had been most of her life since any one of them could have been called “new.” New to share her bed, maybe, but for decades now any new body that showed up in her bed had been simply an old, familiar body in a somewhat altered relationship.
But now there was this Blundy man-squat, sometimes sulky, quite married-but, oh, so very, so excitingly and completely new.
She laughed out loud, surprising herself. When Blundy turned to give her a puzzled look, she just shook her head. She was as silly as silly little Betsy arap Dee, she thought. Or as lucky. Or as-yes-as young. All of a sudden, without any physical change, she was seeing the world through the eyes of a teen-ager again.
It was all fascinating, even this silly, blocky car they were riding in. She had never been in a vehicle quite like it before; it was obviously designed for just two people, and her big traveling bag had barely squeezed into the space behind the seats-wouldn’t have made it at all if Blundy’s own bag hadn’t been quite small. As she studied the way he drove the thing she concluded she could easily learn how to do it herself. There was a wheel that steered it, and on the wheel a selector lever that seemed to shift gears; and on the floor a pedal that controlled the speed and another that controlled a brake. All that was simple enough. Once you started it up and put your foot on the right pedal the high-pitched, sputtering hydrogen motor pushed the little car along at a satisfying rate of speed.
There were other vehicles on the road-big tractor-trailers going empty out to the farms and coming back laden with crates of vegetables and fruits and bins of grain; flatbeds with farm workers who dangled their feet over the sides and waved to them as they passed; smaller trucks with machinery and beams and slabs of construction materials. The important part about driving, she decided, was knowing how to avoid hitting any of the other vehicles. Blundy seemed to manage it well enough, snaking around and past them. If Blundy could do it so could Mercy Macdonald.