O Pioneer! (21 page)

Well, Giyt thought, he hadn't really expected any more. Meanwhile, what about this other matter? He started over to ask Mrs. Brownbenttalon what had gone wrong with her arrangements with the Kalkaboos.

That was when he found out that nothing had gone wrong at all.

He had incautiously turned his back on the High Champion. Before Giyt knew what was happening, the Kalkaboo leaped off his platform and bore him to the ground. "Die in wretched agony, vicious murdering person!" he shrieked, pounding Giyt's head against the floor. But not really very hard, and not for more than a moment. Then the Kalkaboo rose and said politely, "Thank you. Vengeance is now complete. Expect you recover from this beating soon."

When vengeance was complete, it seemed, it was complete, and it produced some unexpected dividends. The High Champion of the Kalkaboos did not become friendly, exactly—friendliness did not seem to be among the behaviors in the Kalkaboo repertory—but he did something better than that. He beckoned to the female Kalkaboo from the Slug office and whispered into her great ear. She in turn spoke to the Principal Slug, who listened for a moment, then called to Giyt. "Am informed repair requisition of you on file, so work will be done. Is quite irregular. Slugs, however, always cooperate reliably, this our nature."

And then the next morning, as he was breakfasting with Rina at daybreak, they heard the pop of an explosion outside their own door. When they peered out they found it was pouring, but they caught a glimpse of a Kalkaboo running away in the rain. "I guess they didn't trust you to set off your own firecracker, Shammy," Rina said. "Anyway, it's all straightened out now, right?"

"Looks that way," he said, and returned to his pancakes, more cheerful than he had been in days. At least the problems with the extraterrestrials on Tupelo seemed to be healing themselves.

The humans, however, were a different matter. The stresses there were not healing themselves. They were getting worse.

XX

The last species to reach Tupelo before the arrival of the Huntsville probe were the Petty-Primates. Once again, the identity of the solar system they come from has never been established, although it seems clear that, in regard to the conditions that affect life, their planet was quite like Tupelo, and thus no doubt a good deal like Earth itself.

Physically, the Petty-Primes are tiny. More than any other terrestrial creature they resemble tailless, hairless monkeys. Yet with a brain less than a tenth the size of a human's, they have demonstrated enough intelligence to develop a highly sophisticated technological culture. That is surprising in itself, but the Petty-Primes have another quality that is still more unlikely.

That is their life span. Earthly ethologists have drawn a sort of curve, plotting mass against longevity for mammalian species, and it demonstrates that the smaller the creature, in general, the shorter its life expectancy. Not the Petty-Primes. They are completely off the curve. Their childhood extends for nearly thirty years, so that by the time a Petty-Prime is sexually mature it has gone through decades of learning and experience. The length of their lives as adults is equally astonishing. When the first humans reached Tupelo some of the original Petty-Prime colonists were still alive and well, though, since then most have either died or returned to their home planet.

—
BRITANNICA ONLINE
, "
TUPELO
."/p>

The more Evesham Giyt thought about it,
_;
the more he was convinced that this world would be a better place if Hoak Hagbarth weren't in it, either back on Earth or, preferably, dead.

That was a conclusion that startled him. Giyt had never before in his life wished for any other person's death. It wasn't that he planned to do anything about it. He had no intention of getting into a shoot-out with Hagbarth, even if either of them had had weapons to shoot each other out with. But to punch the man stupid, yes, that was a tempting possibility. Bash him bloody and then kick his ugly face in—yes, definitely that scenario had real attractions for Giyt . . . Or would have had, if Rina hadn't begged him to let the matter pass; "All he did was tell the truth, Shammy," she said, dry-eyed and somber. "The whole thing is my fault."

"
Nothing
about this is your fault!"

She gave him the pursed-lips look that meant, You 're entirely wrong and I'm certainly right, but I don't choose to debate it any further. All she said was, "Please, Shammy. I'm asking you to let it go. For me."

Well, he couldn't let it go. But he couldn't go against the wishes of the mother of his unborn child, either. And while he was considering just what he could do, Rina cleared her throat. "You know. Shammy," she said, "if we had to go back—well, what I mean is, if we wanted to go back—it wouldn't be all that bad, would it?"

It took a moment for Giyt to understand what she was saying. Then he was firm. "Not a chance. We're not going to bring up our son in—"

"Or daughter," she said. "I haven't checked."

"Whichever. Anyway, we're not going to raise our family in some damn slide-room in Bal Harbor."

She looked at him, considering. "It wouldn't have to be in Bal Harbor, Shammy. I've been thinking. My sister and her husband have a three-roomer. I'm sure they'd be glad to have us, just till we got settled."

"No!" he said. "No way!" He looked at her accusingly. "I thought you liked living here in this house!"

"Actually, I love living here, Shammy, and I love our house. I never had a home of my own before, just places where I worked. I slept there after my clients had gone away, but they weren't homes. All the same, we have to face the simple facts."

Giyt put his arm around her, touched. The simplest fact of all, of course, was that back on Earth there were his stashes of mad money, plenty to buy any kind of house Rina wished, and if there wasn't enough there it would be easy enough to make more in the same way. . . assuming he was willing to go back to stealing for a living. And assuming he was prepared to do it on grimy, worn-out Earth.

He shook his head. "We're not leaving," he said. "I give you my word, Rina. We're going to bring up our kid right here on Tupelo."

So Giyt had made his wife a promise.

Evesham Giyt didn't have a lot of experience in keeping promises. He hadn't had to. He hadn't been in the habit of making promises to anyone. But this promise he was determined to keep. He was not going to allow Hoak Hagbarth to kick them off the planet of Tupelo for any reason at all.

But then, when Giyt had begun to search the files for those regulations that Hagbarth could invoke when he chose, it began to look as though there was a real problem there. There was in fact an Ex-Earth statute that said any colonist could be deported for what was called "aggravated antisocial behavior." The language was opaquely legal, but when Giyt read it over, he saw that it could have been that sort of charge that had terminated Shura Kenk's residence. Could have, at least, if she was actually guilty, whatever the de Mirs chose to believe. What was less clear was whether the regulation could be used against Rina. Could it, for instance, be made retroactive to cover acts committed light-years away and long in the past?

After the third or fourth re-reading Giyt still couldn't tell, and when he showed it to Rina, neither could she. "See, hon," she said, "you're really smart about some things, and I'm not so dumb, either, but that's lawyer talk. People like us aren't supposed to understand it. You need somebody to tell you what it means. You need a lawyer."

"I don't know if there are any lawyers here on Tupelo," he said, studying her. Rina seemed subdued, naturally enough, but as far as Giyt could tell she hadn't been crying. But then Rina wasn't ever a crier.

"Neither do I, but the way to look for one . . ." she began, and then stopped as a message override flashed on his screen. They both looked at it. It was for Giyt, and what it said was that the first official party of delegates for the six-planet conference was about to arrive, and his presence was required to greet them.

Giyt groaned. Rina shook her head. "You'd better go," she said, "What I was about to say was that the way to find out if anybody here is a lawyer is to check the personnel files. You go change your clothes. I'll do it for you."

"But they're all classified," he protested. "You'd have to bypass the blocks, dig into the protected files—"

"Sure," she said cheerfully. "I can handle that, remember? The trouble with you, hon, is you think you have to do everything yourself. You have to leave some things to your partner."

Pulling on his clean pants, Giyt pondered that thought. He had never had a partner before. And, as a matter of fact, it didn't take Rina long to get through Hagbarth's pretty primitive security blocks. While he was brushing his hair she came in and leaned on the doorway, watching him. "There isn't anybody who calls himself a lawyer," she reported, "but I did a deeper search and I found two people who had a little legal experience, anyway. One worked as a paralegal, and the other dropped out of law school in her first year."

"Good work," he said, to cheer her up.

"Well, maybe so," she conceded, "but I don't think it helps us much. The paralegal's Olse Hagbarth. And the other one is Silva Cristl."

When Giyt arrived at the square in front of the portal the rain had nearly stopped, which was a good thing, but there was something less good going on. He had expected to find at least a couple of dozen people mere, waiting to greet the incoming VIPs. He didn't. There was no one there at all except for a pair of Delt workmen, tinkering with a cart at the edge of the square in spite of the continuing drizzle. When he asked them what was going on, one of the Delts turned a single eye on him, the other still gazing at the exposed mechanisms of the cart. "You don't hear?" the Delt said. "New word recently coming. Slug bosses being delayed, don't say how long. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe who knows?"

"Never say how long," the other one put in. "Slugs, you know? But maybe give us time to get this busted old junk pile juicy enough for delicate Slug persons before getting here, that assuming you let us go on with repairing task."

The delay was news to Giyt. He wondered whether the fact that he hadn't received the amended message was more of Hagbarth's petty harassment or just simple inefficiency. It didn't matter; either way he had time to kill.

He considered going back home to wait. It didn't seem like a good idea. He might not be there long enough for any real purpose. He also might not get the word again in time to get back for the actual arrival and why give Silva Cristl something new to gossip about on her broadcasts?

He moved away restlessly. He had a lot on his mind, but it didn't seem to want to concentrate on any one subject. As he wandered, he was thinking about the turgid wording of the Ex-Earth regulations and wondering whether the Slug workers had started to fix his drains yet and noticing the fact that he was getting wet. Was the rain going to get harder again? Giyt had had little experience of hurricanes. He had checked out the weather reports and understood that the hurricane itself had missed their islands by a couple hundred kilometers; all they were getting was the arc of storms that spiraled around its trailing edge. He saw a few people moving around in the street, mostly eeties; they seemed to assume the worst of the rain was over, at least. . . .

Then he saw a pair of humans, and one of them was Hoak Hagbarth.

They seemed to be discussing something Hagbarth was displaying to the other man on his portable. When they looked up, Giyt looked away; he didn't want to talk to Hagbarth. Evidently the feeling was mutual. Hagbarth gave him only a glance, then turned to the other man with a hand on his shoulder and led him toward the portal. Giyt stared after them, trying to identify the other man. Was it one of the people from the hypermarket? He wasn't sure, and probably, he told himself, that was one more sign of his failings as mayor of the Earth community. A good politician would know all his constituents by now. Giyt admitted to himself that, whatever his other virtues, he wasn't a very good politician.

A whirring behind him made him turn to see a doll-sized Petty-Prime cart drawing up. The Responsible One leaned out. "Apologies for not offering ride to portal," he squeaked, "but you observe inadequate space in passenger side this my vehicle." He seemed to be making a pleasantry, so Giyt tried one in response.

"It's my fault for having too much growth hormone in my system," he said.

The Petty-Prime gazed at him blankly for a moment, then exhaled in a soft, uncomprehending sigh. "Anyway," he said, "express regret for potential for no longer sharing Joint Governance Commission duties, perhaps." He waved a small paw and accelerated his cart away.

Whatever he meant by that. Giyt really had to get at those translation programs one day soon, he told himself, and then remembered that maybe he wouldn't be present to have to worry about such things very much longer. Meanwhile, he had VIPs to greet.

When he got back to the square the keepers of the security switches were lounging by their posts, Hagbarth included, and a large group of Slugs were hooting one of their mournful hymns nearby. Other mayors were arriving, too. Mrs. Brownbenttalon poked her snout out of her can and beckoned to him. "My husband here say to tell you congratulations on excellent fall you took for new Kalkaboo stinky High Champion," she said. "I share sentiment. Extremely well done, I say!"

"Thanks," he said, nodding at the tiny male in his wife's neck fur. "I hope I'm not late."

"Be commoded, Large Male Giyt. Is last-minute decision of Slugs to arrive early, laster-minute to be somewhat later, typical Slug thing." She paused to listen as her husband chittered in her ear. "Oh, yes," she said. "Have sorrow about unfortunate forthcoming event—no, waiting a bit now, no time for discussing bad news. Hear warning dingle."

The chime had sounded to announce the imminent arrival of the leaders. As Mrs. Brownbenttalon flopped out of her cart the waiting Slug delegation redoubled their hooting, the people at the security switches came to attention, and the golden glow began to surround the portal as the field built up.