Stopping at Slowyear

by Frederik Pohl

  STOPPING AT

  SLOWYEAR

  Frederik Pohl

  BANTAM BOOKS

  NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND

  Mercy MacDonald sat down to wait for Hawkin’s return. She saw that the captain’s screen, like Betsy arap Dee’s, was displaying their next port of call. It was a different view, though; probably it was what was being seen, in real time, by Nordvik’s bow cameras.

  She knew well enough what Slowyear was going to be like. Like everybody else on Nordvik, she had pored over its statistics for hour after hour, partly out of generalized curiosity, partly looking for a reason to make it her home for the rest of her life — or for not.

  MacDonald knew that the bad thing about Slowyear was the very thing it was named after. Slowyear had a very slow year indeed. The planet was a good long way from its sun, and took a good long time to circle it — nineteen standard years, just about.

  Fortunately for the hope of any life on Slowyear, its orbit was nearly circular. “Nearly” circular still wasn’t quite. The small difference between elliptical and round was critical. It meant that the planet had winters, and it had summers. And when you said “winter”, she thought, biting her lip, you weren’t talking about three or four chilly months. You were talking nasty At aphelion the planet was moving slowly, like a yo-yo at the top of its climb, and Slowyear stayed at that distant point for nearly five standard years. Five bitter-cold Earth-time years of hiding underground.

  STOPPING AT SLOWYEAR

  A Bantam Spectra Book / Published by arrangement with Pulpbouse Publishing, Inc.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY Pulpbouse Edition /1991 Bantam Edition/June 1992

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s" are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved Copyright © 1991 by Frederik Pobl.

  Cover art copyright © 1992 by Don Dixon.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Pulpbouse Publishing, Inc., Box 1227, Eugene, OR 97440.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed* to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  ISBN 0-555-29487-3

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books* and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 666Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103•

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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  Chapter 1

  The ship was called the Nordvik (though no one aboard it remembered why), and it was a big one. Even if you didn't count the thrusters on the outriggers astern, or the projectors for the Bussard collection cone at the bow, it was more than a hundred meters long; if just the habitable part of Nordvik had set down on any football field on Earth it would have lapped over at both ends. That would never happen, though. It had been a good many centuries, Earth time, since Nordvik had been anywhere near its home planet, and there was very little chance that it would ever return.

  It also wouldn't happen because Nordvik, or any ship like it, could never set down on any planet anyway. All those ancient starships were built in space and lived all their lives in space-mostly interstellar space, at that-and sooner or later they all died in space.

  More likely it would be sooner, thought Mercy MacDonald as she slammed her door in the face of Deputy Captain Hans Horeger. What MacDonald didn't want to do was die when the ship did. She had lived aboard Nordvik for twenty-seven years, ship's time-never mind the time the outside universe went by; she didn't want to think about that-twenty-seven years and eight planetary systems, and it was time to find some comfortable place and settle down. With some suitable man, she hoped. But not just any man. Certainly not with the fat and lecherous-unselectively lecherous, which made it worse-Deputy Captain Hans Horeger.

  The first thing MacDonald did was make sure the door was well locked behind her, with Horeger on the other side. The second thing was unwrap the towel she had clutched around her as she dashed out of the shower stall and dab at her sticky body. The bastard hadn't even let her rinse before he began grabbing. It wasn't much use. She moistened a cloth in her washstand, but you never could get all the soap off with a cloth. She resigned herself to going around sticky until her next turn at the showers.

  It wasn't hard to do that. She'd had plenty of practice. The people who couldn't resign themselves to aggravation didn't last long on a tramp starship; and there were always plenty of tranks available in her medicine chest.

  She swallowed one, sighed, and set to work. Naked, she sat down at her desk to begin keying up the ship's trade-goods manifest for the next planetfall. Concentration came hard. Horeger had not given up. She could hear him scratching at the door. She could even hear his voice; it was too low-pitched to carry, but that didn't matter. She knew what he was saying, and the occasional words that filtered through-"bitch" and "tease" and even that word he used as a final argument, "love"-were all words she had heard from him before.

  It made her laugh. She knew just what he was doing out there. She could picture him crouched at her door, lips close to the crack, hands cupped around his mouth so that the rest of Nordvik's people wouldn't hear.

  As though any of them had failed to observe his unrelenting pu
rsuit.

  Especially his wife, Maureen.

  Mercy MacDonald stood up and dressed quickly in fresh clothes, not because there was anyone to see but because she intended to speak to Horeger and obscurely did not want to do so naked. She looked at herself in the mirror while she was pulling on the blue coverall. Figure still good, chin clean, eyes clear-not bad for forty-five and a bit, she thought. The coverall, on the other hand, need mending again at the shoulder seams; she would have to do a good deal of patching, she thought, to get herself ready for a planetfall. She listened at the door for a moment, then called,

  "Leave me alone, Hans. It's over. If you're that horny, go find Maureen."

  But he didn't answer.

  "Why, you bastard," MacDonald said to the door, suddenly angry when she realized he had given up. She didn't have any legitimate reason for the anger. She had certainly made it clear to him that furtive sex when his wife wasn't looking didn't satisfy her any more, especially when she discovered she was sharing him also with her best friend . . . but why had he given up so easily?

  * * *

  One of the worst features of life aboard Nordvik was that among the fifty-six human beings who lived on the starship, adult males were a distinct minority. There were only twenty-two of them, against thirty-one adult women-adult enough, anyway. There were also three children (would be four in a week or two, MacDonald reminded herself, as soon as Betsy arap Dee delivered herself), but the ones already born were all girls, which would some day make the balance even worse. Would, that is, if no one else jumped ship, or if they didn't recruit any new people at their next stop; but that was for the future. Meanwhile the oldest child, at eight, was still too unripe even for Hans Horeger's attention.

  Facing odds of that sort was a bad deal for the nine women without regular mates. Mercy MacDonald didn't like being one of them.

  She hadn't always been. She'd had a husband for a good many years; in fact, both she and Walter were among the handful who were said to own a piece of Nordvik's keel. Apart from the doddering old captain there was no one else left aboard who, like Mercy MacDonald, had signed on when the ship first launched from Earth orbit. Counting the three children, eleven of the ship's complement were ship-born; all the rest had been picked up at one planetfall or another along the long, twisted way.

  That was just one more injustice to swallow. Seniority should have counted for something. Even not factoring in the datum that MacDonald was probably the smartest and most able person aboard; even not adding on the intangible fact that she was also just about the most loyal person in the ship's complement, which she had proved by not jumping ship, not even at Hades, their last port of call, when twenty-three others were finally sufficiently fed up to pay off . . . including her own husband.

  Neither brains nor loyalty had paid off for her, though. MacDonald was still no more than eighth or ninth down in the ship's heirarchy. As "purser,"

  whatever that ancient title meant, she was head of the trading section, to be sure, but that meant nothing when the ship was between planets.

  She thought for a moment about Hades. She had been tempted to leave with the others there; Nordvik was running poorer and less hopeful every year, and there was certainly no future aboard for anyone.

  But Hades had been the wrong place. Hades didn't have much good land.

  Most of the planet was rocky hills and desert, and everything good had been nailed down by the first settlers. For whom everybody else worked-at low pay, when they could get any pay at all. All the promising planets were well in the past, MacDonald told herself. The longer Nordvik traveled, the worse the places it visited seemed to get. It was even possible that this new one they were coming up on would be even drearier than Hades.

  It wasn't the first time that notion had occurred to her. She had even thought it during the wretched weeks when they were orbiting Hades, with her husband and herself snapping at each other whenever they were in earshot. She might well have paid off there herself . . . if Walter hadn't.

  There had almost been a mutiny after Hades. A near half of the crew were urging tottering old Captain Hawkins to give up the whole idea of trading with future planets. They wanted either to settle down on one of the colonized worlds, or even to find some new one from the old robot-probe reports and start a colony of their own. That was when Hans Horeger had become the actual captain, in all but name. He was the one who stirred everyone up to go on.

  Anyway, it wasn't a good idea. Nobody was settling new worlds right now.

  There were at least a dozen that the robot probes had identified by now, and maybe more reports still coming in from stars still farther away. But by now everybody knew how hard it was to start a colony in a world where no human being, no creature from Earth at all, had ever lived before. The rage for colonizing had worn itself out centuries (Earth-time centuries, at least) before.

  Oh, no doubt, the pioneering spirit would blossom back to life again-some time-some later time, maybe a few centuries down the pike, when all the new worlds were themselves beginning to bulge at the seams and the adventurers and the malcontents would yearn to move on. But not just yet.

  And definitely not with the discouraged, tired, aging crew of the starship Nordvik.

  * * *

  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."