O Pioneer! Page 9

  "Oh?"

  "We can have them if you want them, but—well, I've known guys like Hoak Hagbarth. When I was hooking, you know? There was this one guy, good-looking, nice body, good manners; it made you wonder why he wanted to pay for it. We didn't just jump in the sack. He made it like a date, brought a bottle of wine and everything, and when we got to bed he was sweet and so, well, loverly that I almost didn't want to charge him. And then before he left he beat the shit out of me."

  "Oh," he said again, though this time his tone was quite different—having nothing more useful to say. He got up and walked aimlessly to the door, pausing to kiss the top of Rina's head on the way. Among the other things he didn't know, he reflected, was much about Rina's life before she turned up in Bal Harbor. She certainly had concealed little from him, but he had not encouraged her to talk about it beyond the simple synopsis: poor family, no future, prostitution the easiest way to make a living.

  He stood on his little porch, gazing unseeingly out at the street. Down the road a pair of Slugs were running a digging machine, checking some problem with the drains. One of them turned an eyestalk on Giyt, who waved a greeting, admiring their dexterity with the tiny limbs usually concealed inside their slimy integument. He wasn't really paying attention. Something had changed about his relationship with Rina. Was it just the fact that now they were "married"? He hadn't thought very much about that before he popped the question, and maybe—

  He turned, startled. From the kitchen Rina was screaming his name. "It's the baby, Shammy! He's choking! Come help me, please!"

  It wasn't really a big problem. From high school days Giyt remembered the old Heimlich maneuver, remembered to be gentle with the baby's tiny body, on the first try got the child to cough a plug of something wet and nasty halfway across the room, and then he was fine. But Rina wasn't satisfied. Was overcome with guilt, in fact; begged Giyt to help her rush the baby to the hospital for a checkup. Then she got on the communicator and told Lupe what had happened, wringing her hands until Lupe arrived and the doctor had reassured them both. "Ah, no, Rina," Lupe said consolingly, "it's not your fault. I made the damn goo; I must've left some lumps in it. But you did just the right thing, Evesham, and Matya and I owe you."

  And on the way out of the hospital Rina paused in front of the nursery—two tiny infants in the twenty beds for newborns—deep in thought.

  "The baby's fine," Giyt informed her, holding her hand.

  "Yes, I know," she said, and then looked up at him. "Shammy? I might as well tell you now. I hope you won't get sore. I'm pregnant."

  That stopped him in his tracks. "You're pregnant?"

  She looked embarrassed. "What can I tell you? I guess I forgot to renew the patch." Then she corrected herself bravely. "No, Shammy, that's a lie. I didn't forget. I threw the damn things away a month ago."

  XI

  The first sentients to visit the planet which Earth humans call Tupelo came from a moon of the sixth planet of the star Alpha Centauri. It appears to he inevitable in the development of any technological civilization that sooner or later it will explore space for other habitable worlds. The Centaurians, however, had a stronger motive for such projects than most. For more than five centuries they had been intermittently at war with the inhabitants of their sun's fourth planet. The casualties had been great, the costs enormous. In desperation the Centaurians sent probes out to every nearby star in search of a habitable world that they could make their new home. Most stars had no suitable planet. The first four planets that might have been livable were ruled out because races of sentient beings already lived there; the Centaurians did not want to flee one war to risk fighting another. When they discovered Tupelo it was everything they had dreamed of: thoroughly habitable, totally uninhabited. But their colony had just begun to feel at home when another race appeared, with the same designs.

  —BRITANNICA ONLINE, "TUPELO."

  For Evesham Giyt the news of Rina's pregnancy took considerable thinking over. He had dreamed many dreams in his life, but not one of those dreams, ever, had been about fatherhood.

  Giyt didn't find the prospect overwhelming, quite, but it was certainly well and truly whelming. It contained so many consequences and ramifications: The raising of a kid. The changing of its diapers. Teaching it the facts of life. Teaching it how to throw a ball. Carving the bird at the head of the table at Sunday dinners, with the wife at the other end and the kid in between (or might it not be the kids, plural? because once you started on that track, didn't it get harder and harder to stop?). Babysitters; school; helping with homework; nursing through usual childhood diseases. The list was endless, because this baby business wasn't one of those things you could just grit your teeth and get through. It entailed a total reconsideration of your whole life, and it was permanent—or at least it was likely to last as long as Giyt himself did. What it came to was a whole and totally demanding new career, and Giyt was a long way from sure how he felt about it. Sometimes he glowered dismally at the wall as he thought of all that time taken up. Sometimes he felt a curious and wholly unexpected thrill of excitement.

  He wasn't even really sure how Rina felt about it. Oh, she was conspicuously happy about being pregnant, sure. She smiled a lot, kissed him a lot, went out of her way to find excuses to mind the neighbor kids for Matya and Lupe a lot. But how did pregnancy feel? He kept stealing glances at Rina when she was looking the other way to see if she showed any signs of—of what? Of morning sickness? Of strange food cravings? Actually, of being different in any detectable way at all. He couldn't find any such signs. Except for this boundless affectionate cheer—not all that different from her usual state—she was just the same as ever. She kept right on with her studies and her volunteer work at the human hospital and her attempts to coax the bizarre plants in their front yard to produce flowers. She hadn't changed a thing.

  That fact puzzled Giyt quite a lot. He was sure that if he had some organism growing inside of him he would spend a lot of time staring into space and trying to feel the damn thing grow.

  But Rina didn't seem to be doing that. As far as he could tell she simply went on with her life just as before, as though this business of pregnancy were something, well, normal.

  When it came time for the next Joint Governance Commission meeting, Giyt greeted it with pleasure. It was tangible work to do, and thus a relaxing change from worrying over the perils of approaching parenthood. Besides, he had some actual business to propose.

  As he took his seat, the Petty-Prime Responsible One was already in the chair—well, in his tree—and fussily chirping for order. The Responsible One ran a tight meeting. All in favor of the municipal reports accepted as read, yes; all old business continued for next meeting, yes; then, if there is no new business—

  That was when Giyt hastily put his hand up. "I have some new business, honored chairperson," he said, and launched into his sales talk.

  It didn't go well. The other mayors listened tepidly, or more likely hardly listened at all, to his graphic description of the predators of Ocean. But when he reached the point of formally requesting permission to import a few weapons for the protection of downed chopper crews he had the commission's instant attention. There was a mumbling from all five of the other seats, too low-pitched for the translator to make sense of, but the Slug had two limbs in the air before he finished speaking. "Is against all rules!" the Slug declared, slobbering at maximum volume. "No one imports weaponry to Peace Planet ever anyhow, for sure!"

  Hagbarth's briefing had prepared Giyt for that. "It is not a case of weapons, Principal Slug. It is merely for protection in case of accident. It is precisely analogous to the harpoons the Delts carry."

  And of course that got the Delt into it. "Not to be compared! Harpoons vital accessory for skimmers, for purpose providing protein to feed hungry persons."

  Giyt had an answer ready for that, too; surprisingly, someone else made it for him. It was the Petty-Prime chairperson who spoke up: "You have of skimmers, General Manager,
only three in total. You have of self-launching harpoons more than one hundred eighty."

  "Needed! For spares in case of losses or damages, which are frequent! And, repeating remark already spoken here, are also used for fishing purposes, not merely protection, same as Kalkaboos."

  The Kalkaboo High Champion jumped in: "Kalkaboo practice is primarily using of nets for fishing purposes."

  "Oh, yes," the Delt sneered. "Poison nets! Also harpoons as well."

  "Very small harpoons, very few in number," the Kalkaboo protested; and then it got worse. Several of them were talking at once, the translation phone in Giyt's ear totally unable to cope. Not only Giyt's phone, either. Nobody's translator was making any sense of the chorus of gurgling, baying, moaning, chirping, and screeching until the Petty-Prime rattled his doll-sized drumstick on his doll-sized drum. And kept it up until all the others had quieted down and the Petty-Prime declared the subject deferred for future study and the meeting adjourned.

  The funny thing was that, through it all, Mrs. Brownbenttalon hadn't said a word. She simply crouched there, eyes half closed, looking almost as though she were asleep; but from his position on her shoulder her tiny husband was raised up and staring. He never took his eyes off Giyt. And when Giyt said good-bye to them as everyone was leaving, neither he nor his giant wife replied.

  When Giyt got home a message from Hoak Hagbarth was waiting for him on the net. "You made a start, at least," Hagbarth told him consolingly. "Who thought they'd go along right away? It's a big decision for them. They need time to get over their outmoded prejudices and face up to the real needs of the present day. So we'll bring it up again next time. Then we'll just keep on bringing it up until they say yes. And listen, Giyt, you haven't forgotten about the safety codes for the portal, have you?"

  When Giyt hung up he stared glumly at his screen for a moment, considering what use to make of the rest of his day. What he needed to do was to try to catch up on his homework. He had a lot on his plate, and figuring out how Hoak Hagbarth could circumvent the portal's safety circuits was low on the stack. He had to read all the reports nobody had read at the joint governance meeting. Or he could tackle some of the accumulated petitions that kept silting up in his file. That particular part of the job was even tougher than it looked, because a lot of those requests dealt with questions Giyt still didn't really know much about, and so he had to educate himself first. For instance, the guy who had been turned down on moving to the polar mines was now demanding to know why at least the mines couldn't be located just as well on one of the neighbor islands so he wouldn't have to travel so far. Was that a sensible idea? Giyt had no way of telling. Probably he should begin to look it up . . . and at the same time repair the other gaps in his education, too. The history of Tupelo. The reason it had so many islands and so few continents. Et one damn cetera after another.

  But first, and most of all, there was one special subject he could not put off learning more about. So what he began accessing on his screen wasn't any of the problems of Tupelo and its people. It was medical files, the ones that dealt with the dangers and problems associated with pregnancy. Of which, it turned out, there were a lot more than he was really prepared to face. When he got to the part about teratogenesis and how every once in a while a seemingly normal fetus would fail to develop a head, or turn out to have a partly developed Siamese twin, he shuddered, closed the file, and went looking for Rina to reassure himself.

  She was cooking him lunch, and Lupe was in the kitchen with her. When Giyt came in Lupe beamed up at him. "Congratulations, Evesham," she said as she got up to kiss him chastely on the cheek. "The little monsters're a hell of a lot of bother, but, you'll see, they're worth it."

  "Thanks," he said, giving Rina an accusing look. It hadn't occurred to him that she would tell some outsider about their new problem—their situation, he corrected himself.

  But neither Lupe nor Rina seemed to think there was anything odd about it, and Lupe had something on her mind. "Listen," she said, "the reason I came over was to tell you what's going to be happening at the firehouse. You know when there's a fire you'll get a call on your carry-phone; then you drop everything and go."

  "Go to do what? Wasn't I supposed to be having some training first?"

  "Well, that's the thing I wanted to tell you. The chief just decided we're going to have a wetdown today. It's like a practice run, you know? So you'll just get your first lessons on the job. So when we get the signal don't get too shaken up. It won't be a real fire, this time, but we have to show up anyway."

  "I thought Matya didn't want you doing that."

  "I got an extension, just until the Taste of Tupelo's over; they'll need everybody for that . . . Ah, there's the call now. Let's go."

  And Rina, composedly ladling something into a container, said: "Stew's ready, so take some with you. You can eat it on the way."

  When Lupe and Giyt got to the firehouse all five of the gleaming fire trucks were pulled out onto the apron of the garage, motors going, tiremen and women from all over the town clambering aboard. "Here," said one of them, handing something to Giyt. "Put this on."

  It was a genuine fireman's hat, like the one he'd owned when he was five years old. Although the shape was the same, this one was bigger and heavier. Also there was an inset square of fabric on the front for Giyt to pin his chrome badge, as soon as they finished making him one. As he clung to the outside of Pumper 3, careening through the streets of the town, the driver—it was that Colly Detslider man from the Energy Island—stole a look over his shoulder and frowned at Giyt. He shouted something Giyt couldn't make out, but Lupe, clinging to the other side of the truck, apparently did. She pulled a slicker from a locker in the side of the truck and passed it to Giyt. "Don't try to put it on now," she bawled, "but you'll need it later—why do you think it's called a wetdown?"

  Giyt found himself grinning. This was something like! For the first time, he understood why people volunteered for the fire company. Pedestrians were waving to them as they passed, sirens wheeping, all the other traffic scattering out of their way. It wasn't just humans doing the waving. A flock of Petty-Prime young ones, kits no bigger than mice, chased after the procession on their little roller-skate-sized carts, cheeping and cavorting in excitement, until they reached the electronic limits of their freedom and had to turn back. Even a Slug raised itself out of its moist can to wave a pseudopod. Then they were out of the town, climbing a trail between a human cornfield and rows of Delt fruit-bearing shrubs. They were heading up the flank of the central mountains, where Giyt had never been before. Off to one side of the road was a pretty little waterfall, to the other a deep gorge. And then the trucks crossed an irrigation ditch, pulled up in a semicircle, and stopped.

  They were at the edge of a small coffee finca, with nothing but uncleared native vegetation beyond. These weren't the big trees Giyt had seen below the Slug dam; they were a mass of tangled shrubs, few of them more than waist high, a dozen different species. "Go!" Chief Tschopp shouted. Everyone piled out, uncoiling hoses, hooking pumpers to the giant tanker trucks, revving up the engines. A minute later Giyt found himself part of a three-man team holding the bucking nozzle of a hose that was tearing holes through the patch of native Tupelo crabbushes uphill. He was getting drenched because he'd left the slicker on the truck, but he was impressed with the force of the stream; the sturdy bushes were simply smashed out of the way. Then, a moment later, the fixed water cannon on each truck began to fire, throwing high-velocity streams to the far edge of the patch, and even the few trees on the site were simply exploding as the water struck.

  It took the fire company hardly a minute to get fully deployed, and then it was over. Chief Tschopp bawled, "That's it! Everybody secure!"

  But it wasn't really the end of the exercise, because then everybody began laying out hoses to drain, winding them back onto their reels at one end as the trapped water flowed out of the other, and they were moving faster than ever. It was only when everything was back in i
ts place that the chief, standing precariously atop one of the tankers, announced: "Fair. Fourteen minutes twenty-two seconds to arrival on scene, fifty-eight seconds to deployment, eight minutes eleven seconds to retrieval. We've done better. Officers? Any comments?"

  Lieutenant Silva Cristl raised her hand. "I have one. Giyt, you have to control your hose better. You got me pretty damn wet."

  She was, at that. As a lieutenant of fire police Cristl was exempt from the more physical work of a wetdown, but she was soaked anyway. "Sorry," Giyt offered, resolutely not grinning at her.

  The chief gave him a suspicious look. "So watch it next time," he ordered. "And get your damn slicker on. Now let's parade."

  So Giyt, soaked and uncomfortable under the hastily donned slicker, learned that they weren't quite through for the day, after all. He clung to the pumper's rail as they retraced their path toward the town, now more sedately.

  Back in the town they didn't head for the firehouse; they made a ceremonial tour, stopping to wheep their sirens in brief greeting before the firehouses of each of the other species. Giyt was interested to see that each of the other races evidently expected them. All the doors were open. All the fire-fighting equipment of the other companies was on display—green metal tractors for the Kalkaboos, a fleet of smaller, faster trucks for the Delts, an extension ladder for the Centaurians. From his position high on the truck he could see nothing of the equipment of the Petty-Primes, though the doors of their dollhouse-sized firehouse were open. Only the Slugs were missing. Their own firehouse, if they needed one at all in their dank surroundings, was no doubt down in their community. But in each of the others at least three or four members of their own fire companies were standing by, listening to the few words—squeals, gargles, grunts—that came out of the PA system as Chief Tschopp spoke to them through the translator microphone, inviting them all to the upcoming fair.