O Pioneer! (11 page)

The person to ask, of course, was Hoak Hagbarth. The Ex-Earth man shrugged it off. "America's where our funding comes from, right? So I guess that's where they do the recruiting, too. Probably they'll get around to the rest of the world sooner or later. Make sense?" And when Giyt nodded, Hagbarth pressed on. "Listen, Giyt, I need to talk to you about something else. I wanted you to take that trip to the island for a reason. You saw those monsters in Ocean, right?"

"Yes?"

Hagbarth gave a rueful sigh. "Mean-looking bastards, weren't they? I have to admit, every time I take the chopper over there they scare the crap out of me. Can you imagine what would happen if the chopper broke down over Ocean and had to come down in the water?"

"I think it has flotation devices," Giyt said.

"Sure it has, if they work. But can you imagine what it would be like to be waiting for rescue out there? With the damn shark things doing their best to climb aboard for dinner? They're
big,
Giyt, They'd probably swamp the thing, trying to get at the passengers—and lots of women and children take that flight, Giyt. And there'd be the damn monsters, tipping the chopper over and everybody screaming and—"

"Yes, yes. I get the picture."

"So What we need," Hagbarth said, getting to the point, "is some kind of protection. A couple of guns for the pilot to carry. To shoot the animals so they can stay alive out there waiting for help."

He paused, inviting a response from Giyt. "I guess that makes sense," Giyt said cautiously.

"Only the trouble is, the eeties have this damn rule against importing weapons. So what I think you should do, at the next meeting of Joint Governance, you could make a motion to let us import one or two guns for the pilots to carry. For defense against the sharks. Do you think you could do that?"

Giyt considered the question for a moment. It didn't sound entirely unreasonable. It didn't sound entirely kosher, either. He said cautiously, "I guess I could try."

"Good, Evesham! I knew we could count on you. And listen, try not to be too specific about the number of weapons, all right?"

If there was one thing Evesham Giyt had learned in his time on Tupelo, it was that he had a lot to learn. So whenever he found a moment—which is to say when he wasn't asleep or doing his household chores or fending off the demands of his constituents—whenever there was a crumb of unbudgeted time at Giyt's disposal he used it to work on Tupelo's immense database.

His best time for that sort of homework was first thing in the morning, when an Earth-conditioned human being would have slept his full eight hours and still had the remainder of the long Tupelo dark before the sun rose and the workday began. Those were the hours Giyt spent filling the voids in his knowledge—some of the voids, anyway. Prohibition against importing weapons? Oh, yes, there was one. As far as Giyt could tell there had never been any exceptions allowed, though he supposed it could do no harm to ask. Electric power? Yes, the Delt pilot had spoken truth: When the Delts discovered the planet they earned their way into the communality by building the fusion plant. Utilities in general? There were surprises there for Giyt, who had not given much thought to how the various races divided up the chores of building and maintaining the community's infrastructure. It turned out that Petty-Primes handled waste disposal, at least until everything solid had been mulched and diluted and the resulting sludge poured into the sewage lines, which were Slug. Power was Delt, of course. Building and maintaining the little carts everyone used to get around was a Centaurian task. Kalkaboos controlled the weather satellites and the polar rocket.

And the Earth humans?

Giyt was somewhat taken aback to discover that the only communal task reserved for Earth humans was clearing land and preparing it for agriculture. Every species had its own farm plots, of course. Humans had cattle and goats, some of the other races maintained fish farms, while the Delts and the Kalkaboos alone occasionally fished in Ocean. The Kalkaboos also practiced a sort of vermiculture, maintaining flocks of wormlike creatures that lived and grew underground and returned to the surface only to spawn—and to be captured for food. But the drudgery of digging out places for the fish farms or chopping down the trees to make new farmland—that was for human beings. Dr. Patroosh hadn't been out of line when she complained. It was true. The other races treated Earth as a kind of Third World planet.

The whole question of infrastructure was unfamiliar to Giyt. Just as you got electricity by turning on the switch, the way you got food, for example, was to take an autocab to the nearest restaurant. It didn't matter whether the food originated in a garden plot next door or on some agrotech industrial farm ten thousand kilometers away. All you needed to get the food was money, and the way you got money was by holding a job. Or by living on the government grants, like most of the people in Bal Harbor. Or, in Giyt's own case, by milking it out of some corporation's files.

Thinking of money made him think of the spendthrift way the Delts treated gold. That, the datafiles informed him, was a consequence of their home planet's geology. The Delta Pavonis planet was unusually well endowed with heavy metals in general. There was plenty of uranium, for instance, rich in its fissile isotopes—so no wonder they were good at nuclear power—and an inordinate amount of precious metals, including gold. The Delts didn't prize the gold for its beauty, it seemed, but because it was so easily worked and so unlikely to corrode. And, of course, so plentiful.

Giyt grinned to himself. Cortes, he thought, would have had a hell of a fine time on the Delt planet. He probably wouldn't even have had to hold the Delt General Manager in a cell, as Cortes had Montezuma, to force him to cough up his treasures. He probably just could have picked up all the precious metal he could carry as chunks of street litter.

Which led Giyt to wonder what the Delt planet was like, exactly, and that was when he got the greatest surprise of all.

No human being had ever been allowed to visit the Delt planet.

Nor had any human ever set foot on the home planet of any of the other races on Tupelo; and none of those other races had ever visited Earth, either. The races never had any face-to-face contact at all except what occurred right here on Tupelo when, every one hundred and thirteen Tupelo days, representatives of each of the six planets came together here to talk.

And the next scheduled meeting of that sort was only a few weeks ahead.

The Kalkaboo dawn racket made him realize that it was getting light outside. He winced as a particularly loud firecracker went off somewhere nearby—some Kalkaboo was expiating some particularly nasty sin by blowing it to bits—and went looking for Rina to tell her his discovery.

He found her in the kitchen, carefully feeding some sort of mashed vegetable to the baby from next door. Matya was at work, she explained, and Lupe had taken the older ones to the lake for an early-morning swim. The conference of the six races? Oh, sure, she told him, that was what Matya was doing this morning, overseeing construction of new and better quarters for the dignitaries from Earth. She thought Giyt must have known about that. Everybody did. And listen, as long as he was here, what would he think if they invited Lupe and Matya over for dinner some evening soon?

He paused in the middle of lifting the lid of something that was simmering on the stove. Here was another surprise; they had never had dinner guests before. "With the five kids?"

"Maybe after the kids are asleep; they get one of the Donar girls to babysit for them sometimes. Or we could bed the kids down here, for that matter." She picked up the baby and held it to her shoulder, gently massaging its back as she-studied Giyt's face. "I'm just thinking we ought to get to know more people socially. Of course, if you don't want to—"

"No, that would be fine," he said hastily. "Maybe we should invite the Hagbarths, too."

The baby emitted a moist burp; satisfied, Rina replaced it in its chair and resumed the feeding. After a moment she said, "Maybe . . . Well, to tell you the truth, I'm not that crazy about the Hagbarths."

"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.