O Pioneer! Page 10

  Then the tankers detached to refill at the lakeshore and the pumpers rolled back to their own firehouse; the chief reminded everybody that they would soon be receiving assignments for their duties at the upcoming fair, and it was over.

  In the cart they shared to take them home, Lupe was all smiles. "So how did you like the wetdown, Evesham?" she asked, confident of the answer.

  "Actually," he admitted, "I did. One thing, though. I noticed we seemed to have a lot more equipment than the other guys. Do we really need all that firepower?"

  "Oh, hell, Evesham, you just wait and see. When we start getting brush fires in the dry season we'll be pumping the tankers dry every time we go out."

  "Oh," he said, thinking. Dry season. He would have to do a little digging about Tupelo's seasons, too. He turned and peered up at the mountain, where a large cloud was hanging over the peak. He commented, "Looks like we're going to get rain today, though."

  Lupe looked at him peculiarly. "Not from that, Evesham," she said. "That cloud's just orographic uplift. I guess the trade winds are starting early this time."

  So there was another key term for Giyt to try to learn something about. But every time he thought he'd have a few moments to put in on a literature search, something stopped him. He had another report to read. Or he had to show up at the gateway to welcome the next arriving batch of colonists. Or Rina disappeared into the sanitary room for longer than usual, and he couldn't think of anything but the chance of miscarriage, hemorrhage, some damn pregnancy-related thing . . . until she at last came tranquilly out, smiling fondly at her husband's unnecessary concern.

  After dinner that night Rina said, "Hon, let's let the dishes wait. I've got a better idea."

  It was a clear invitation; but when they had finished doing what the invitation had intended, Rina propped herself up on one elbow to look at him quizzically. "Is something wrong?" he asked.

  "That's what I was going to ask you. Shammy dear."

  ''Didn't you—"

  "Sure I did, hon, but, I don't know, you seemed a little—well, I guess the word is restrained."

  He made a joke of it. "Maybe it's time to get the whips and chains out."

  "I could if you wanted me to," she said, startling him, but smiling to show she didn't mean it. "But I don't think that's the problem here, sport. I think you've got the baby on your mind."

  "Well—"

  "Sure you do, Shammy. Listen. You really don't have to treat me as though I were made out of spun glass. It'll be six or seven months, anyway, before we have to start being careful."

  "I was just thinking," he began apologetically.

  "I know what you were thinking, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to get rid of a baby." She gave him a considering look, then added, "I don't know if I ever told you, but I was pregnant once before."

  "You had a baby?" He was suddenly wondering if there was some part of Rina left behind on Earth.

  "Not quite. What I had was an abortion. I was fourteen. And my father found out about it." She was silent for a moment, then said, "I did kind of like the idea of having a baby of my own, but I didn't see how I could manage it. Dad sure wasn't going to raise a bastard for me in his house, and what else could I do? I didn't like the idea of being a welfare mother, didn't have any skills to earn a living. So I stuck it out for a while after the abortion, and then I ran away."

  It seemed to Giyt that his wife was telling him this story for a reason. The way she was looking at him she seemed to want some reaction from him, but what that reaction should be, he could not guess. Awkwardly he took her free hand and placed it against his cheek.

  Apparently it was the right response. She gave him a sudden grin. "You always thought I was pretty dim to give money to every panhandler who came by, didn't you, Shammy?"

  "Dim? No, nothing like that!" he protested. "You're just a generous person."

  "Not just generous. I owe the street people. They took me in, fed me, showed me places where I could sleep, away from the cops and the weather. If they had anything to eat, so did I. They didn't expect anything back, either. They even put up with the way I was, and I was a lot to put up with—a dumb, weepy teenager. I was a mess, Shammy, and they treated me as though I were a human being. But I didn't want to go on sponging off them."

  She leaned over and kissed him. "You know something I've always appreciated about you, Shammy? You never once asked me why I became a whore."

  "None of my business," he said gruffly, surprised to find himself touched.

  "No," she agreed, "it wasn't, but I guess maybe it is now . . . Daddy. Anyway, that's how. Fifteen years old, how else could I make a living? And here I am." She hesitated, "But, Shammy, there's one thing I would like you to know. I screwed a lot of guys at one time or another. Mostly it was business, but sometimes not. But I never loved anyone else before you."

  XII

  The Centaurian colony had settled itself on Tupelo for only a few years when they had an unpleasant surprise. An exploring party of another species arrived. They were not welcome. In fact, they were the very people the Centaurians had been fighting their interminable war with, the sluglike inhabitants of Alpha Centauri's fourth planet.

  Although the fighting in their home system had temporarily subsided, it very nearly began again on Tupelo. It was touch-and-go for a while, but the sides paused long enough to talk a bit before opening hostilities. They discovered they had much in common. The Slugs in the exploration party were as tired of war as the Centaurians. Cautiously, both sides agreed to try the experiment of peaceful coexistence. They even agreed to share the same island, though at some remove from each other, a decision made easier by the fact that the Slugs preferred the damper, danker climate of the jungle to the plains that had attracted the Centaurians. The two sides signed a solemn compact, undertaking to together occupy what they called the Planet of Peace without fighting, and they created a Joint Governance Commission to mediate any conflicts that might arise.

  —BRITANNICA ONLINE, "TUPELO."

  The Taste of Tupelo started a couple of days early for Giyt, when the hypermarket called to say his dress uniform for the fire company had arrived, "Fine," said Giyt, who had pretty much forgotten he'd ever ordered the thing. I'll come right over to pick it up."

  "We'll both come, Shammy," Rina told him when he'd hung up, "because I surely want to see what you're going to look like."

  At the store Rina sat, peaceably chatting with another shopper, as Giyt pulled the drapes of the store's changing room behind him. It didn't take him long to get into the fire company's dress whites, with their silver buttons and silver-trimmed dress cap. He had never had any kind of uniform on before. And was startled to see how—appropriate?—it looked on him in the changing room's mirror.

  Rina thought so, too. "Ah, Shammy," she whispered, tugging his collar straight when he came out, "you do clean up nice, you know?" But standing unexpectedly behind her was Chief Wili Tschopp.

  "Very nice," he said. "Keep it on, Giyt. Listen, I heard you were here, so I came over. We need you to make a commercial for the fair. Why you? What do you mean, why you? Because you're the mayor, of course. Don't worry, it won't take long. The cameras are all set up right outside, and I've got your script right here."

  So Evesham Giyt had another first for that day, because he'd never recorded a commercial before, either. It wasn't much trouble. All he had to do was read the script, which promised great food, wonderful rides, and such splendid entertainment as Olse Hagbarth playing authentic American jazz on her own piano and the six-year-olds from Ms. Hilda's dance class doing authentic American line dancing. It took three tries before Wili Tschopp was satisfied, but the real drain on Giyt's time didn't come until Rina discovered the commercial was going to be broadcast on the systems of all six of Tupelo's races, with the appropriate language dubbed in. Then Rina was so tickled by the idea of hearing her husband talk Delt or Slug that Giyt decided to give her a treat. Trying to convert alien TV protocols to anything he h
ad ever seen before took more time than Giyt had expected. But he had his own original recording to match against the ones the others used, and it was, after all, the kind of thing Evesham Giyt was inordinately good at. He took it for granted that the other races would have been eavesdropping on each other's newscasts all along. His guess was right, and after some hard digging he succeeded in unearthing their conversion programs.

  The rest was easy. All he had to do was adapt their procedures to the Earth protocols. It was tedious work, but nothing he couldn't handle.

  Pleased with himself, he displayed for Rina his own image barking, squealing, moaning in all five of the .other languages. She was pleased, too. "Save them, hon," she instructed. When he asked what for she said, "Don't you think our child will want to see them someday?" And then Giyt had something else to ponder over.

  The actual day of the Taste of Tupelo dawned to the usual artillery barrage from the expiation of Kalkaboo sins. The day was hot, dry, and, as it turned out, extremely long. Right after first light Giyt reported for duty. He got lucky. To reinforce the recorded messages that invited all the eeties to the fair Chief Tschopp ordered him onto a sound truck. So in the early morning Giyt bumped downhill over that horrible forest road to cruise the Slug settlement under the dam, wheeping the siren and reminding the Slugs over the translator loudspeakers that they, like everybody else on Tupelo, were really welcome to come to the Earther fair.

  Apart from moments of terror that the fire engine would turn over as it pitched and jerked down the trail, the job could have been worse. Giyt could have been put to setting up the fair's booths and rides. Besides, it was a chance to take a good look at Slugtown. He would have been more comfortable if he hadn't been sweating in his full dress uniform. But it was bearable, and at least he wasn't the one who was faced with trying to drive the damn thing through the least watery sections of mud between the Slug huts.

  By the time he was back at the fairground (which was the broad space of Sommermen Square before the portal, which Tschopp had commandeered for the occasion) he was convinced that every possible Slug had been well and truly told about the fair.

  Giyt had seen fund-raising fairs before—barely. Sometimes he had caught a glimpse of them on TV, for that fraction of a second that it took him to realize that this was not a subject that interested him and to move on, sometimes from the window of an autocab that was passing one by and certainly didn't stop. That was as far as it went. At least since childhood he had never been disposed to attend one. Definitely he had never, ever, been one of the sweating crew that worked behind the game counters and in the refreshment stands and operated the children's rides.

  In spite of all their efforts at drawing in the eetie colonists, most of the crowd was human. (If crowd wasn't too strong a term for the fifteen or twenty people wandering among the two dozen booths; but, as Matya de Mir pointed out when she relieved him for a ten-minute pee break, it was early yet and a lot of people were still at work.) Just after the opening there had been a considerable but brief invasion of Petty-Primes, four or five of their Designated Mothers shepherding what Giyt supposed to be every young one in the Petty-Prime colony. (Which was a lot. Petty-Primes had a very long childhood, which meant that by the time they reached sexual maturity they were fully educated and ready to be adult citizens.) But the Petty-Prime kits hadn't stayed long. They weren't allowed to eat anything the Taste of Tupelo offered. Worse, all the rides were too big, and all the games of chance too hard, for Petty-Prime children. The other eetie communities were represented mostly by two or three pairs of Slugs that were cruising silently around in their damp-conditioned carts, never stopping at any of the booths, but not leaving, either.

  Giyt's own job was running what they called the coconut shy. It had hard rubber balls instead of coconuts, with an inviting pyramid of dolls and gadgets at the back of the booth for anyone who could knock one down. That did not often happen. The game was fixed. Each ball had a tiny cupro-nickel core, and Chief Tschopp had privately showed Giyt the button under the counter that would activate a continuously varying magnetic field between the contestant and the prizes. Not even the inhumanly skilled Delts could win unless Giyt let them. He didn't. As a result he had few customers at his booth; next to the wheel of fortune, across the way from the kitchen where Lupe and Rina, among others, were frying potatoes and chicken parts in a huge caldron of fat. Giyt kept looking across at them with concern. It was hot enough where he was; it had to be a lot worse next to the fryer, especially for two pregnant women.

  A female voice interrupted his dark thoughts. It turned out to belong to Mariam Vardersehn, his predecessor as mayor of the human colony. "Morning, Giyt," she said, not sounding particularly friendly. "You want to turn off the magnet so I can try to get that Kewpie doll?"

  He looked cautiously around, then did as she asked. All the same, she missed with the first three balls, fared even worse with the next three. That was enough. "The twins aren't big enough for dolls yet anyway," she said. "How are you liking being mayor?"

  "So far, so good. I guess you don't miss it, though."

  She gave him a look, then sighed. "Actually," she said, "it was better than changing diapers in this heat."

  Her tone made Giyt give her a closer look. "You almost sound as though you'd like to have the job back."

  "What does it matter what I'd like?" she asked moodily. "Only, if you ever make up your mind to quit, be sure to let me know."

  So Giyt had something else to think about. As far as he could see, there was no way for Mariam Vardersehn to undo the election that had given him the mayoralty. Unless, of course, he were to resign, but he had no intention of that, if only because he didn't particularly like the woman. For that matter, in some moods he didn't even particularly like the job. But the fact that she seemed to want it back made it just that little bit more attractive to him.

  Which; Giyt told himself with amusement, was pretty stupid, and when Hoak Hagbarth came by he was smiling at himself.

  Hagbarth winked at Giyt, paid for three balls, missed with each of them, and grinned back at him. "You look happy. Business that good?" he asked.

  Giyt, who had no way of knowing how business was supposed to be, shrugged. "I thought there'd be more people, after all the publicity we did. Did you see me on the other-race news broadcasts?"

  Hagbarth looked startled. "How can you see the other-race broadcasts? They use their own systems." Then Giyt had to explain that, out of curiosity—he didn't say for the sake of giving his wife pleasure—he had spent some hard hours figuring out how to convert their standards to the ones the human colonists used. "Hey," Hagbarth said admiringly, "that's great. Show me how you did it sometime, will you?"

  "Sure."

  "I mean really," Hagbarth persisted. "You know you've got a lot of tricks up your sleeve that you say you're going to show me, but I'm still waiting."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Sorry don't cut it, Evesham. You know what we've got here, don't you? Just a handful of human beings among"—he looked around and lowered his voice—"all these freaks. We have to stick together. So any way we can help each other out, we have to do it, right? Or the freaks will win. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  Giyt nodded.

  "I knew I could count on you," Hagbarth said, reaching across the counter to pat Giyt's arm. "We're all patriots here, aren't we? We just have to work at it a little harder than we would back home, that's all."

  XIII

  The provenance of the extraterrestrial race called "Kalkaboos" is unknown. From other evidence certain facts about it can be deduced. Their native planet's atmosphere appears to have been richer in oxygen than either Earth's or Tupelo's, though the difference is not normally enough to handicap the Kalkaboos in their life on Tupelo, Their planet's sun is almost certainly brighter than Earth's, particularly in the extreme ultraviolet frequencies, but it has never been identified.

  The Kalkaboos were the third sentient race to arrive on Tupelo, considerabl
y later than the Centaurians and the Slugs. When the Kalkaboos appeared, they presented a problem for the prior colonists. They had only two options: to resist the new arrivals or to permit them to join. Since resistance would almost certainly involve combat—and since both the Centaurians and the Slugs feared that such a conflict might easily escalate to involve themselves—they decided the lesser evil was to let the Kalkaboos remain, subject to their adhering to the terms of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace. After a short transition period the Kalkaboos, too, were granted a seat on the planet's Joint Governance Commission.

  —BRITANNICA ONLINE, "TUPELO."

  When Tupelo's long, long evening began, the crowds at the fair picked up. Most of the human population put in an appearance for at least a half an hour or so—had little enough choice about it, really, because nearly all of them were relatives or neighbors of a fireman. A scattering of the other races appeared too. Giyt kept feeding balls to a whole Delt family—Papa, Mama, four half-grown young—as they doggedly did their best to knock off a cuckoo clock or a stuffed panda. Even with the magnets working against them they came close—came closer still when Giyt belatedly realized who the male was. "You haven't recognize?" the Delt asked aggrievedly. "I am he who have been you pilot voyaging to Energy Island, God's sake; we have good talk about you famous Earth-human liar Kepigay. How can you have forget?"

  "Sorry," Giyt said. He started to reach out to shake hands with the Delt, then thought better of it; he didn't want any of that fetid Delt aroma coming off on him. Instead he surreptitiously switched off the magnetic field. After that it required only four shots from the female to collect three prizes.