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dispassionately. "Even if Murra would let me come I'd spoil the whole day for
her. Not that I'd mind that so much. But she'd make it miserable for me,
too. No," she said, "I'll spend my first birthday by myself. It's all
right.
I'll have others."
She filled the syringe again with the mixture of sheep semen and distilled
water and moved to the next writhing ewe. Blundy knotted his brows. "Why did
you volunteer for insemination? You don't have to do all this kind of scut
work," he protested.
"I have to pay my taxtime off, don't I?"
"Well, sure." They all had that problem-Petoyne, Murra, Blundy himself,
everyone connected with
Winter Wife; the show had been a great financial success, and their taxes were
high. "But not this way, Petoyne. I'll be going out with the herd again,
after the ship lands. You could come with me again."
"Oh," she said, "I want to get it out of the way. I think I'm going to be
want to stay in town when the ship's here. You know. Just to see what they
have to sell; and mostly, I guess, just to see the strangers."
"That's not my idea of fun," Blundy said.
"Well, it'll be interesting, anyway. You don't get the chance to see that
every day." She finished with that ewe and moved to the next; it was almost
the last. "Do you know what these people from the ship are like?" she asked.
"As much as you do, I guess. No more. They're just traders, people in an old
ship, trying to make a living going from planet to planet." He thought for a
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moment, then added, "They'll probably seem pretty strange. They're old, you
know. I don't mean physically-I mean the time dilation-they travel pretty
close to the speed of light, between stars, so time slows down for them. I'd
bet that some of them were already born when the first colonists landed here."
She nodded. It wasn't anything she didn't know for herself, but it needed
repetition to make her believe that any living person could have been alive
that long, long time ago, more than twenty-
five of Slowyear's very slow years. She sighed. "Poor people," she said,
finishing the last of the ewes. She patted the creature's head, then sealed
the bottle of semen for return to the freezer and sat down to wait until it
was time to release the dozen bleating animals. "You'd think it would be more
fun for them to do it the other way," she said absently, watching them
struggle against their bonds. "With a ram, I mean."
"Then we couldn't control the breeding. We get better lambs with artificial
insemination," he pointed out.
She nodded, then suddenly giggled. "You could do it this way with Murra,"
she said, grinning up at him. "Then you could get a baby, and you wouldn't
have to touch her."
Blundy cleared his throat uncomfortably. He hated it when Petoyne talked that
way about Murra, almost as much as he hated it when Murra talked about
Petoyne. All he said was, "What makes you think I want a baby?"
"Well, everybody does, don't they?" she said reasonably. "I do. I'll take
my chances, some day.
Maybe pretty soon, too," she added, "because that's the best time to do it,
when you're one."
It was another allusion to her birthday, Blundy thought, the birthday that he
would not be spending with her. The trouble was, birthdays were important.
You didn't have more than four or
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.txt five of them in your life, and every one marked a real change. The first
long year was for growing up. The second was when you finished your education
and began to get your career and your family and your life together. In your
third and fourth years you were as successful and able as you were ever going
to be, because the fourth birthday was retirement time-if you lived to see it-
and then you just went downhill until you died.
"I've got to get cleaned up and out of here," Petoyne said. "And I guess
you've got to get back to Murra."
"Well, I promised-"
"Sure," the girl said. "So long, Blundy. Have a nice picnic."
And she put her face up to be kissed, just as though nothing had changed.
He gave it up. He kissed her. "Happy birthday tomorrow," he said, turning
to leave. He was a dozen paces away when he heard her call his name.
He turned to look at her. "Blundy?" she said. "I wanted to tell you- Well,
if you did want to have a baby- Well, I'd be willing to have it for you."
#
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
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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,
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