Chapter Six
Wife-ie
“Dying well often goes unnoticed.”—Scribbled in the john of a spaceship
Earth time: 1870’s
When Wife-ie died, Arthur of the North was sixty and inconsolable. His mother, painful as she was, always had the best ideas, the best solutions, and it was she who kept his son, James the Strong, in toe.
James the Strong—aptly named, as he was the only man on Planet Hy Man to finish the yearly challenge of pulling a spaceship down the main street on Arrival Day—was a hard son to manage.
Very little went on in his brain apart from shagging and spaceship-pulling, which was his idea in the first place.
“What’s the point of a spaceship you can’t pull?” he said, and after watching him pull robustly, no one argued.
Arrival Day started a year after the Settlers arrived, causing
