That took a lot of thinking. There was no doubt in MacDonald’s mind that she was fond of Blundy-she had not yet decided to entertain the word “love”-or that Blundy was an attractive man, most so because he was a brand-new one, but that didn’t answer her main question, which was: was there a future with him? She wondered what he would be like in the long term (assuming there was a long term, assuming his wife conveniently evaporated while they were gone.) Of course that wouldn’t happen. Of course (there were so many “of course”s) she could change her mind and leave with the ship. Leave without him-of course-or, alternatively, she considered the possibility that he might want to come along in Nordvik. The beauty part of that was that Murra certainly never would. So that part of the problem would solve itself-
But Blundy wouldn’t go either.
It wasn’t enough for her to be sure of that in her mind, she had to hear it from Blundy himself. When she broached the subject, joking seriously, he shook his head. “Nobody from Slowyear will ever leave,” he said positively.
“Why?”
He took her hand in his, kissing it while he thought for a moment. “We wouldn’t be welcome,” he said at last, and then his kisses moved up her arm, and naturally they made love again. To change the subject, she was pretty sure. And why were there so many subjects he kept on changing?
The last disks she found were the most disturbing.
They turned up when she had abandoned hope of discovering any more, forgotten under a seat cushion, and they were additional episodes from Winter Wife. She played one of them over and over, until it made her weep. When she could watch no more the sun was almost setting, and she stumbled to the tent and Blundy.
He looked up in startlement from his machine. “Mercy!” he cried, alarmed, jumping up to take her in his arms. “What’s the matter?”
“Winter Wife,” she said, trying not to sob. “The part where the little girl dies-like your little nephew, Porly.”
“Oh,” he said, beginning to understand. “yes. That episode. You found a copy? That was one of the best ratings we got, when the baby died.”
“It was horrible,” she said. “They called it ‘Essie,’ or something like that.”
He held her silently for a moment before he answered. “It’s the letters, SE,” he said. “Stands for spongiform encephalopathy. Like we said. The brain turns all loose and fluffy, and they die.”
She let him stroke her hair while he told her again about spongiform encephalopathy. Known as a disease of animals on Earth-it was called “scrapie” when sheep got it, “Mad Cow Disease” when it infected cattle-on Slowyear it was a kind of failure of the human body’s auto-immune systems. The brain deteriorated-fast-and stopped being any kind of a useful brain. Adult Slowyearians were generally safe from it. Babies weren’t. Their immune systems were incompletely developed, so they were at severe risk . . . and four out of ten of them died of it. So were old people, as their immune systems begin to break down, putting them at risk. “If you survive past the first twenty months,” he explained, “you’re almost always all right until you’re almost three-”
“Three Slowyears,” MacDonald said, doing the arithmetic in her head. “Almost fifty standard years?”
“I suppose so.”
“Oh, Blundy,” she said woefully. “I don’t think I could stand it.”
He said soberly, “A lot of people can’t.”
She didn’t answer that, because a thought had struck her. What she was thinking was that accounted for Murra’s childlessness. Then she made herself stop crying. She sat up straight, rubbing the last damp from her cheeks, and said the other thing that was on her mind: “That was really moving,” she said. “The show, I mean. It made me cry.”
Blundy didn’t answer, unless looking modestly pleased was an answer, so MacDonald pressed on with her thought. “What I mean,” she said, “is that you could sell those disks. To the captain. I’m sure there’d be an audience for them on other planets.”
He didn’t answer that, either, but the way he didn’t answer surprised her. His face suddenly went still, no expression at all. She waited to see if he would speak. When he didn’t, she ventured, “Is something wrong? You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”
He stirred and got up. “I do want to,” he said. “Mercy, what do you think I am? I’m a writer-part of the time, anyway-and when I write I write for people. I’d love to have an audience-a big audience, the biggest there is-people I don’t even know, maybe even people who aren’t born yet-”
“Well? So then will you give the captain the disks?”
“Sure,” he said, in a tone that was not intended to be believed, and turned away. She looked at him, puzzled. He seened to have forgotten the matter. He was going about the simple household business of turning on the lights, and when that was done he went to the cooler and pulled out a bottle of wine.
It took the lighting of the lamps to make MacDonald realize that it had become dark outside. “Oh, my,” she said. “We’re forgetting about dinner.”
He nodded agreement, pouring wine for both of them. She accepted hers willingly enough-they generally had some wine with their dinners, why not a glass before? But it wasn’t going to be just one glass, for as soon as the first glasses were down he was pouring more.
Well, MacDonald told herself, she wasn’t that hungry. If Blundy felt like having a few drinks, why should they not have them? She sat companionably next to him in silence, thinking about the things she hadn’t really wanted to think about before, until the wine emboldened her to speak. “It is pretty awful, isn’t it? I mean knowing what might happen to your babies, if you had them?”
“Awful enough,” he agreed.
“And knowing that it’s going to happen to you, too, I mean even as a grownup, if you live long enough,” she went on thoughtfully. “Is that why you-ah-”
“Why we what?” he demanded, pouring again.
“Well, I mean the poison pills. I mean, sentencing people to take poison for doing things that really aren’t so bad, you know? I mean, on other planets they have laws, too, but mostly they just put people in jail if they break them.”
He thought it over. “Maybe so,” he said.
“Because dying of a poison pill is better than the, ah, the SE thing?”
He had to think about that, too. “Maybe,” he said. “Well, I guess it is, but that’s not the only thing. Everybody dies on all the other planets, too, don’t they?”
“You do seem to have a different attitude on Slowyear, though.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “I guess we do have a different attitude on Slowyear. On Slowyear I don’t think we’d ever put anybody in jail. Maybe we don’t have jails because we’re all in jail all winter long-twenty months. Fourteen hundred days. And it doesn’t matter if you’re guilty of anything or not.”
“Poor Blundy,” she said, kissing his cheek, and Blundy said:
“Finish your wine, then let’s go to bed.”
When Mercy MacDonald woke up the next morning she knew she’d gone to bed pretty tipsy-both times; because she had a memory of Blundy and herself stumbling out into the warm night, sometime or other, just to breathe a little fresh air before sleeping. She even remembered that he had pointed out the glimmer of light on the western horizon that was Nordvik, high enough above the planet to be caught in the last of the sunlight before it entered Slowyear’s shadow, and that he had been crying. She remembered that, for some reason, that had seemed funny to her at the time.
What she hadn’t expected was that, although her head hurt with a serious hangover, it seemed funny now, too. She giggled at the thought that she was still a bit tipsy.
She got up, looking for Blundy to tell him that amusing fact. He wasn’t far. He was right outside the door, feeding a piece of the scogger they hadn’t remembered to eat for dinner to one of the dogs, and he looked up when he saw her. “Hi,” he said, smiling because he saw that she was smiling. She giggled at him.
“What are you doing that for?” she asked.
He looked surprised. “I’m giving him a taste for it,” she explained. “Come winter we use dogs to sniff out the larvae-on the slopes, sometimes, where the wind scours the snow away. We have to wear the heated suits to dig them up, but the dogs have to tough it out-” He broke off, smiling no longer. “What is it?” he asked sharply.
“It’s just that that’s so funny,” she gasped, laughing. “Digging up bugs. With dogs.”