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  Of course, Giyt didn't pay much attention to commercials, either. When his blab-off cancellation programs slipped up and let one get through, he generally just ignored it. This one, though, caught his eye—nice graphics, good background music, probably Hoist's The Planets, but jazzed up with a tricky rhythm. He actually listened to what the executive-looking man in the briefs and sunscreen was saying. "Tupelo," the man declaimed, holding up a string of thirty-centimeter trout. "An unspoiled world! Begging for people to come and enjoy its magnificent climate, its sports opportunities, its endless beaches, its balmy breezes! And Ex-Earth can take you there now. Absolutely without cost! All moving expenses met by the society! And you can begin the most wonderful vacation you can ever have, for the rest of your life!"

  On impulse, Giyt pressed the key for the stats. The more he examined them, the better Tupelo began to sound. It was undoubtedly the very best of the extra-solar planets anyone had yet detected even telescopically, much less actually visited: very Earthlike gravity, air, and temperatures. It didn't have much land, of course. Only one piece you could call a continent in that immense, planet-wide ocean, and that one way up around the North Pole. But it had plenty of good-sized and comfortable-seeming islands.

  And it was very nearly empty.

  That was the part that intrigued Giyt the most. Tupelo was just about a perfect model of a world to conquer. Oh, not really conquer. Certainly not with guns and swords and armies. But still—

  So before he could change his mind he set up an appointment and an hour later he was in a suite in one of Wichita's best hotels, having coffee with a very affable man who was very impressed with Giyt's credentials. "You, Mr. Giyt," he declared, "are exactly the sort of person we want to send to Tupelo. Good health, no genetic negatives. And your socialization scores are, well, just admirable."

  Giyt nodded modestly. He had been quite creative with his personal stats. The man was going on: "We seldom get an application for somebody with degrees in both agronomy and business management, not to mention your building skills."

  "That was a long time ago," Giyt protested. "Just summer jobs on construction projects while I was at school, but I did seem to have a knack for it."

  "I'm sure you did. About the only other thing I could wish for is a medical background—"

  Hell, Giyt thought to himself. He could have set that up too while he was inventing the other credentials, if only he'd thought of it.

  "—but, good lord, what can we expect from a single colonist? No, Mr. Giyt, you're perfect. I can inform you now: you're definitely accepted for the program. More coffee?" Then, almost as an afterthought, "Of course, we'll have to know something about your wife, too."

  "Wife?" Giyt repeated cautiously.

  "You do have one, don't you? You see, Ex-Earth doesn't just want tourists to come to Tupelo. What we want is families. I don't mean you can't come right back to Earth if you decide you don't want to stay on Tupelo," he added hastily, "but we don't think you will. We think you'll want to live your whole life on Tupelo, and your children and your children's children after you. Now, when can you bring her in?"

  So when Giyt left the hotel he didn't go back to Bal Harbor.

  He walked around Wichita's decaying business district, thinking. Street people thrust scanners at him for a handout, dope dealers whispered in his ear. He didn't hear.

  Then he made up his mind. He crossed the street to a Kinko-WalGreenMart superstore and rented a terminal. He had an hour before Rina got out of her class, and that was plenty of time to do what he had to do. When he was finished the clerk goggled at Giyt as he pushed the ID-sniffer away and offered actual money in payment. But Giyt had a stock explanation ready for using cash: "Don't want my wife to see the bill," he said, smiling.

  When Rina emerged from the school building, loaded down with palmtop and disks, looking like a very pretty schoolgirl, she was astonished to find Evesham Giyt waiting there for her. "Hey, Shammy," she said good-naturedly, "this is an unexpected pleasure. What's the occasion?"

  "There's something I want to talk to you about."

  "Really? What?" Then her expression changed. "Oh, Shammy," she said unhappily, "you're not suddenly jealous, are you? Sure, I have lunch with one of the guys now and then, but that's as far as it goes, and that's no reason for you to come down here to spy on me."

  "No, no, it isn't anything like that. I just wanted to ask you something. How would you like to get married?"

  She almost dropped the palmtop. "Married?"

  "That's right. Married. You and me." To prove the point he displayed the printout of the backdated license he'd got from the county clerk's program, absolutely indistinguishable from the real thing, even in the unlikely event that anybody would ever take the trouble to check back into the database.

  She studied it for a long minute, standing on the street corner with the breeze whipping her hair. Then she looked up at him. "My God, Shammy, I never thought—I don't know if we're really ready for . . . It's a big . . . Tell me the truth. Shammy, no shit, do you really mean it?"

  "You bet I mean it. And listen, I have a really great idea for the honeymoon."

  Rina said she wouldn't be nervous about being shot from one star to another in this newfangled Sommermen transportation thing, but Giyt thought she really was. He was. He got in and closed his eyes—and then, wonderfully, it was over as soon as it had begun. You stepped in the chamber on one world and stepped out of it on another, and that was all there was to it.

  And Tupelo was just as promised. It was an Earth-sized planet, with perfectly breathable Earth-style air—which was what it more or less had to have, because none of the ET-DIXIE probes had ever found a life-bearing planet that didn't. And it had a lot of water. Just as described, it was mostly ocean, with the colony on a Sri Lanka-sized island that was part of an archipelago in its temperate zone.

  Giyt wondered about living on an island. He'd never done that, and it sounded—well, sort of confined. He had to admit that it was a nice island, though. It had everything the recruiter had promised. The island was built like a sombrero, with huge central peaks, the remnants of ancient volcanoes (but now, they swore, thoroughly dead), and the town they were to live in was on one of the series of broad plateaus that descended to the sea. Streams with pretty waterfalls raced down the mountainside to make Crystal Lake. The climate was ideal, sort of like a coastal Oregon spring. Their new home was within easy walking distance of the pretty freshwater lake that had, as promised, already been stocked with Earthly game fish. There was a fully functioning net, with a prime database that had been copied from the North American nexus itself; one subset was the complete Library of Congress base, so Giyt would not have to be without his favorite entertainment. There was a hypermarket, well stocked and promising to special-order from Earth anything they wanted that wasn't already on the shelves; there were beauty shops and an office depot with everything the Earth superstores had and five or six small but nice-looking restaurants and bars . . . and all those things just in the services Ex-Earth had provided, with all the wonders of an alien planet to explore as well.

  And then there was their home itself.

  It had been a long time since Evesham Giyt had lived in anything that didn't pull out of the wall, like a file drawer. He was a little uneasy as they prowled their six rooms with one of the Ex-Earth resident agents. She was a woman named Olse Hagbarth, and it was her job (and, she said, her pleasure—and that of her husband-slash-colleague, too) to make all the new colonists welcome. "Of course," she said, looking around at the furniture with some disdain, "this stuff belonged to the previous occupant. Pity about her. She went back to Earth—homesick, I guess. You don't have to keep her furniture. If you want to replace it we can get you just about anything you want from Earth. And listen, don't worry about spending your resettlement grant. There's more where that came from; Ex-Earth is loaded."

  But Rina was happy with the furniture supplied, was happier than Giyt would have believed with the
house itself, and with the queer, un-Earthly plants that grew in its modest garden, and with the kitchen and the bathroom that was all their own, and she couldn't wait until the agent left and they could try out their huge and comfortable new bed. "Shammy, Shammy," she murmured into his ear, "don't you think this is wonderful?"

  It probably was, he agreed. Tupelo was everything they'd been promised.

  The only thing was, in one or two unexpected ways it was somewhat more than they'd been promised, because the recruiter in Wichita hadn't said anything about the fact that five rather odd-looking races from other star systems were also doing their best to colonize it.

  III

  Come on, guys! Let's all give a big Tupelo welcome to Ms. and Mr. Evesham Giyt, just joining us in our little heaven in the heavens. Ms. Giyt was a college student back in Wichita, while Mr. Giyt was a network systems analyst and consulting agronomist. We're glad to have you here, Evesham and Rina! And listen, folks, don't forget that Mam Bretweller's square-dance treat is on this afternoon in Sommermen Square.

  —SILVA CRIST'S SIESTA-TIME BROADCAST

  The funniest thing that happened to Evesham Giyt on Tupelo was when he got elected mayor of the human portion of the community.

  It was, Rina told him fondly, quite an honor for somebody who'd been on the planet for only five weeks. Giyt didn't think it was actually a great honor. There were only about eighteen hundred Earth humans there to be mayor of. Nobody else seemed to want the job, and the previous mayor, Mariam Vardersehn, flatly refused to run again, because she wanted to stay home and take care of her newborn twins.

  Still, it was an odd turn of events for the man who for all of his thirty-four years had resolutely paid very little attention to the problems of anyone but himself.

  Getting elected mayor was pretty much Giyt's own fault. When Hoak Hagbarth, the male half of Ex-Earth's team of on-site facilitators, happened to complain that the tax, license, and record-keeping functions of the government were in a terrible mess, Giyt incautiously volunteered to fix the programs. After that Hagbarth pointed out that it only made sense for the man who understood the system to be in charge of running it. "But I don't know anything about politics," Giyt protested. "Back in Wichita I didn't even vote."

  "Well, who did? Who could vote for those snot-nosed, bleeding-heart politicians—'cept the president, of course," Hagbarth added loyally. "I'm not talking about him. Walter P. Garsh is a real kick-ass go-getter that wants to make America strong again."

  "I guess so,' Giyt said, not mentioning certain reservations. President Garsh was the one who had called the prime minister of Canada a pitiful pip-squeak and threatened to punch the Chinese party secretary in the nose if he didn't repeal the import tax on American rice. Garsh's status as a kick-ass-America-the-Greater was, in fact, the principal reason Giyt would have voted for almost anybody else, if he had ever voted at all. But Hagbarth was punching his shoulder in a friendly way.

  "When Mariam got elected she didn't know anything about politics either," he said soothingly, "and she did all right. You'll be fine. Anyway, you look like a candidate. Got that friendly dumb face—not too handsome, not really ugly, either. You look—I don't know, I guess I'd have to say you look honest."

  "Yeah, thanks," Giyt said, rubbing his shoulder. Hoak Hagbarth was a big man, even by Giyt's own standards, and he was as strong as he looked. Giyt knew that he looked honest; it had been one of his most useful traits in the pursuit of his career as a crook, but Hagbarth didn't sound as though he meant it as a compliment.

  "Tell you what," Hagbarth said, winding up the conversation, "why don't we just let the voters decide? Now I've got work to do."

  As it turned out, the voters loved the idea. There was one vote for Albert Einstein, one for George Washington, and five for, succinctly, "Me." All the remaining nine hundred and seventy-six adult members of the Earth-human electorate cast their ballots for Evesham Giyt. It was a wonderful display of democratic consensus at work.

  Mayoring didn't seem to be a very difficult job at first. Since Giyt had straightened out the fiscal programs, they pretty much ran themselves. For the first bit of time his only real duties were more or less honorary. He was expected to speak to the graduating class at the human school; that worried him a little, as he had had no previous experience in public speaking. However, there were only eleven students graduating, so Giyt's public-speaking debut wasn't really all that public. Then, come Christmas, Giyt was the one who put on the Santa Claus suit and descended from a gyro-copter onto the soccer field, where the giant community tree was winking its eighteen hundred (by then eighteen hundred and eighty-five) instrument lights, one for every human being on Tupelo. It happened to be a very sultry and rainy day, not Christmasy at all, but the human part of the colony was still resolutely sticking to the Earthside calendar, Giyt kept his ho-ho-hos short and got a big hand when he was finished, since everyone was grateful to be allowed to get out of the rain.

  It wasn't bad. As a matter of fact, Giyt surprised himself by actually enjoying that sort of thing, once he got used to the idea of being known by everybody around. He liked the fact that all the humans greeted him as they passed in the streets—yes, and a good many of the eeties, too. At least Giyt thought the extraterrestrials were giving him friendly greetings, though unless he remembered to wear the earpiece translation phone, their various slurps, squawks, chirps, and gargles could have been anything.

  Getting used to a new neighborhood—actually to a whole new planet—was pretty much an unprecedented experience for Evesham Giyt. He had never paid much attention to his physical surroundings. His real environment had always been electronic and global, and didn't change simply because the location of his body had. But here he felt a real need to explore. Giyt had never spent so much time out-of-doors since the long-ago college days when his girl of the moment persuaded him to try jogging. He found he liked it. Liked to wander the streets of the town, enjoying the sight and scent of a human bakery next to a Kalkaboo soup brewery—two very different smells—and watching work crews digging new sewers and putting up new houses. It didn't disturb him that so many of the workmen—well, the work things—weren't at all human. He even enjoyed going to the hypermarket with Rina to pick out towels and bed linen and kitchen appliances—Giyt hadn't even known that his bride knew how to cook—and that really surprised him about himself.

  The other big advantage of being mayor was that it solved the problem of stalling Hoak Hagbarth, who had been getting increasingly insistent that a man with Giyt's impressive (if fictitious) background in agronomy would be a treasure on the community farms. Not that farming required any very demanding physical work, because Ex-Earth was very good about providing automatic machines for all the colony's really hard labor. Nevertheless Giyt, who had never once in his life had the experience of working with his hands, was just as well pleased to be spared the prospect of beginning it now.

  There was one part of his job, though, that he hadn't been prepared for. That was the weekly meeting with the heads of the five other Tupelo communities in the Planetary Joint Governance Commission.

  The evening before his first meeting Giyt was sitting on his tiny front porch, overlooking the "decorative" clumps of spiky flowering plants, with a drink in his hand. From next door were the distant sounds of Lupe and Matya de Mir trying to get their brood ready for dinner. Apart from that, it was more quiet than Giyt had ever known.

  That was one thing you had to say about Tupelo. Other than the occasional whir of one of the electric carts going past, bumblebee drone for the ones he and most of the races used, mosquito whine for the roller-skate-sized ones used by the little Petty-Primes—well, and also the New Day firecracker ceremony from the Kalkaboos every morning, and of course the once-or-twice-a-week thunder of the suborbital rocket taking off for the polar continent—well, at least generally, it was fair to say, Tupelo was wonderfully noise-free. Certainly it was not at all like Wichita. Once you got used to its awkward thirty-four-hour day a
nd the occasional drenching rain (and Giyt was pretty sure he would get used to them, sooner or later) it was actually not bad. Giyt wasn't prepared to go much farther than that. Rina evidently was, though; from inside the house he could hear her singing to herself as she made dinner.

  The singing got closer and stopped as Rina came out, wiping her hands on her apron. "The pot roast'll be ready in about an hour," she announced. "Who's that coming?"

  One of the electric carts had rounded the corner and was drawing up in front of their house. A man emerged from it, consulting his memo screen. Giyt had seen him before when they arrived: as big as Hagbarth, with a spade beard, named—Tschopp? Wili Tschopp? Something like that. "Got your order from the hypermarket, missus," the man said, looking Rina over in a way that Giyt was surprised to find he didn't like. And then he turned to Giyt. "You weren't at the terminal today when the new people came in," he accused.

  "Was I supposed to be?"

  "Of course you're supposed to be. You're the mayor, aren't you? So who's going to welcome them and all if you're not there?" He shook his head reprovingly, then returned his attention to Rina. "Where do you want me to put your towels and stuff, honey?"

  Giyt answered for her. "Just leave them. We'll put them away ourselves." He hadn't meant for his tone to be quite so sharp. After the man got back in his cart and drove away, Rina looked at him curiously. "Are you feeling nervous or something, Shammy?"

  "About what?"

  "About this Joint Governance Commission thing, maybe."

  "Of course not. What is there to be nervous about?"

  She nodded, then said, "Listen, maybe we should stretch our legs before dinner's ready. I'd kind of like to watch the sun set over Crystal Lake," and he couldn't come up with a reason why not.