O Pioneer! (5 page)

Well, all right, that was somewhat charming, Giyt admitted to himself. But he had never been alone with either of the de Mirs before, and by the time Rina came back with the tea tray he had run out of subjects that did not touch on sexual orientation.

Lupe, too, seemed oddly embarrassed. She greeted Rina with relief. "And your stove's all right now? Shura used to have a lot of trouble with it, among other things, and Hoak Hagbarth just wouldn't get it fixed for her."

"It's fine. I think they put in a new one after your friend moved out."

But Giyt was not interested in a friend who had moved away; he wanted to know what it was that was hanging over his head. "There was something you wanted to tell me?" he prompted his wife.

Rina looked at her guest for an answer. "Well, it's just that I'm pregnant again," Lupe announced, flushed becomingly rosy. "We always wanted six, so we're almost there."

"Congratulations," Giyt said, since that was what she seemed to be expecting; thinking that for a pair of same-sex females they were certainly remarkably fecund, courtesy of Ex-Earth's sperm bank.

"Thanks, but what I wanted to say is that all of a sudden Matya is after me to quit being a volunteer fireman. Too much physical activity for a pregnant woman, she says. Which is nonsense. We don't have that many real fires, and even if we did . . . Well, that's between Matya and me, isn't it? Anyway, I'm going to quit, just to please her, and what I was thinking is that that means there'll be a vacancy in the fire company. So what I was wondering was whether you wanted to join."

He blinked at her. "Be a fireman?"

"Only if you want to," Lupe said quickly. "It doesn't take much time—hell, how often does anything burn around here? Not counting brush fires, I mean, and you only get those in the dry. In a couple of weeks we're having our annual firemen's fair. We're calling it 'The Taste of Tupelo' this year, and that'll take everybody in the company to man all the booths. But—"

"But you really ought to, Shammy," Rina coaxed. "As mayor. Set a good example. What do you say?"

Well what could he say? He said yes. And on their evening walk that night, did little talking, because he was wondering how it had happened that, without warning, the lifelong career computer thief and con man, Evesham Giyt, was suddenly turning into a model citizen.

V

One thing about Tupelo that took some getting used to was its inordinately prolonged day. It wasn't quite 34 hours long, but the Earth-human clocks said it was
—it
was easier to deal with an "hour" that was only 59 and a bit minutes long than to try to handle an odd fraction of an hour every day.

Sunrise was at 10 hours. That's when Earth humans usually had a breakfast (actually, their second of the day) and started their day's work. At 16 hours was lunch, then siesta until 19 hours. Then the afternoon's work went until 22 hours, when it was customary to have a break for afternoon tea. Evening work was from 23 to 27 hours, which was sunset. Dinner at 28 hours; nighttimes free for whatever the persons wanted to do until 32 hours; then sleep. Since Earth humans could hardly ever sleep for more than 8 hours at a
,
stretch, they generally rose at 6, had their first breakfast while it was still dark, and then were on their own until sunrise at 10. It made for a long day, to be sure. But because of the midday siesta, it wasn't an exhausting one.

—
GETTING ALONG ON TUPELO
,
EX
-
EARTH GUIDE FOR NEWCOMERS

Time was, back on Earth, when Giyt might hear someone refer to an elected official as a "servant of the people" and take it as a joke. It wasn't a joke here, though. Here his constituents took it seriously. They called him on the net. They showed up on his doorstep. They buttonholed him in the street; and they all wanted something—sometimes a transfer to a different job, perhaps an increased line of credit at the hypermarket even some private tutoring for the child that wasn't doing well in school. At first most of the requests struck Giyt as easy enough to handle—"Actually," he would say, "that's not my department; you'd better talk to Hoak Hagbarth"—but then it turned out that a lot of the petitioners had already talked to Hagbarth, and Hagbarth had said no.

Hagbarth even said no to Mayor Giyt when Mayor Giyt asked him about some of the petitions. "Take Kettner off the farm and transfer him to the Pole? Hell, no! Listen, don't pay any attention to that bad back he keeps talking about; he just wants to sleep away his shift in a factory instead of running a cultivator. And how can we raise Gottman's credit limit past what the computer says he can pay? We plug in his income; we plug in his present debt balance; we plug in his past payment record. The rest is just arithmetic. Gripes, Evesham, you ought to know that for yourself; you're the guy who rewrote the programs."

It all made sense once Hagbarth explained it. It was just a little surprising to Giyt to have Hagbarth say no to him, since he'd never said no before.

On the other hand, Giyt realized, he had never asked Hagbarth for anything before.

It wasn't just the endless demands for favors he didn't know how to give, either. The real time destroyers were the endless extracurricular duties of a model citizen mayor. For instance, he was expected to show the flag when the Slugs had their annual eisteddfodd. That meant two hours of squirming in damp, uncomfortable seats in Slugtown, pretending to enjoy the sounds of the Slug choir baying and moaning at the bright Tupelovian stars. Well, it was interesting to see how the Slugs lived, in their mud huts just below the old dam on the far side of the lake. It made him wonder why they chose to live by themselves instead of bunking in higgledy-piggledy with all the other races, the way everybody else did. (But then the Slugs liked the climate moister than anybody else.) Rina sat loyally beside him at the sing, showing no signs of concern that her brand-new boots were getting all muddied up. But she did mention to Giyt her interesting observation that, although half a dozen other Earth humans had gamely showed up for the event, neither of the Hagbarths were among them.

Then there was the business of the volunteer fire company. Lupe insisted on taking him to the station herself so he could meet the others. Unpleasingly, the fire chief turned out to be that general handyman and admirer of Rina Giyt, Wili Tschopp, Giyt knew that it was unreasonable to take offense at the way the man looked at Rina. Lots of men had looked at her that way back in Wichita, and it had never bothered him. Still, it made him uncomfortable in Tschopp's presence. Then, as soon as he entered the firehouse, one of the other men buttonholed him to ask why he and his family couldn't be transferred to the north polar mines on a permanent basis; it was cooler there, the man explained, and his wife really hated hot weather, and what was the use of having a damn mayor, and one, he pointed out, that he personally had voted for, if he couldn't get a little help from the man now and then?

Giyt promised to think about it. He knew he would, too, because he was already thinking, a lot, about these endless requests.

The firehouse was interesting, though. Giyt was impressed, not to say amazed, by the mass of heavy-duty fire-fighting equipment the company possessed: three great tankers, four pumpers, and a chief's car. "But what burns here?" he asked the chief. "I mean, everything I see is fireproof, isn't it?"

"Brush," Chief Tschopp said succinctly, opening a beer. "Want one?"

Giyt didn't want any beer, exactly—he would have preferred a decent white wine—but he took the beer and listened to the chief's stories about how when the droughts came, they turned the chaparral and the stubble in the farmlands on this side of the mountain into tinder. That made sense, though it had never occurred to Giyt that the island could ever suffer droughts. But the important thing was that Tschopp seemed to be doing his best to be friendly; and when the company voted Giyt in that night (Lupe told him later), it was Chief Tschopp himself who made the nominating speech. All the same . . .

All the same, although each of the little new drags on his time was reasonable enough, and maybe even kind of fun—Giyt was actually looking forward to the time when he himself might be driving one of those huge pumpers to a fire—there were a
lot
of drags on his time.

Giyt wasn't used to that. He'd devoted his life to making sure nobody would ever be in a position to tell him that he had to do this or that at such and such a time. He'd made it happen that way, too, if you didn't count the times when he rented himself out for a few weeks as a master debugger. Even then those times were short and he could quit when he liked.

Here it was different. Here there was always some duty he was supposed to perform, and some of those duties took actual
work.

The fact that it all took time meant there wasn't much time left over for his former hobbies. Rina noticed that was true when, digging through the datastores for her schoolwork, she stumbled on an old TV series that she knew he would like. It was so old that it was just flat pictures, and black-and-white at that, but it was a documentary of Oliver Cromwell subduing the rebels in Ireland. But then, a day or two after she'd given him the locator data, she asked him how he'd liked it. "Haven't had a chance to look at it," he confessed.

"But I thought I saw you . . . Never mind," she said sunnily. "What would you like for dinner?"

She really had seen him sitting before the screen, watching something or other; but it wasn't his usual fare. For the first time in his life Evesham Giyt had become a news addict; it was the only way he could hope to understand what his constituents were going to ask of him. Tupelo news came over the net and it was delivered by a sharp-faced, homely-featured woman Giyt recognized; her name was Silva Cristl, and she was a lieutenant in the volunteer fire company. Tupelo news wasn't much like the stuff he'd avoided in Wichita. There were weather reports, introductions of new arrivals, personal messages (the Dunbay teenagers offering babysitting services, the Carlyles wanting to know if anyone else was interested in Zen chanting), once in a great while an obituary, details of who was in the hospital, new births, standings in the bowling league—well, there was all sorts of stuff there, delivered in Silva Cristl's hokey jes'-folks dialect It didn't matter if you 'got interrupted in the middle of it. Giyt hated having someone bother him when he was in the middle of a good story of some exciting conquest but with this stuff there was no problem.

When he found out all five of the other races had their own equivalent news programs he tried to access them as well. It didn't work. He got only garbage. Each eetie race had its own transmission codes, and none of them were in the least like Earth's.

That was a tough technical problem to solve, or would have been for anyone else. For Evesham Giyt, however, it was just a matter of decryption, and that was the thing he was really good at. It took him a while to solve the basic protocols that went into Petty-Prime electronic communication, but he did it . .
.
and was rewarded with what appeared to be an installment of an interminable Petty-Prime soap opera. And then, while he was trying to puzzle out just why the two young males were refusing to mate with the older female—who already seemed to have several husbands, all of whom were urging the males to take her on—he heard Rina call his name. "Shammy? Aren't you supposed to chair the commission meeting today? You don't want to be late for it, do you?"

He wasn't late in arriving at the Hexagon, But he wasn't really ready for it, either. As he called the meeting to order he realized he hadn't read over all the department reports so he could summarize them for the other commissioners. Besides, he was still a little worried about the Delts' copepod problem.

But the Delt General Manager accepted without demur Giyt's promise that the matter was being looked into, and actually, it was the Kalkaboo High Champion who made the only fuss of the day.

Even in this whole zoo of weirdly designed extraterrestrial beings, the Kalkaboos struck Giyt as being pretty much excessively weird. They were vaguely primate in shape. That is, they had two arms, two legs, and a head, though the head looked truly bizarre with those enormous ears napping around it. But they looked more like skeletons than people. They seemed to have no body fat at all; and their skin glittered with metallic scales.

Which, Giyt learned, were actually some sort of photovoltaic cells, and what the Kalkaboo High Champion was pissed off about was that their perfectly reasonable requirement for a new and larger radiation house to soak up ultraviolet in was being deferred because of the need to conserve power. It wasn't anyone's fault that Tupelo's sun was deficient in the intense far-UV radiation they liked, the High Champion admitted. On the other hand, it was definitely everyone's fault that they were wastefully burning up so much electrical power for their own frivolous purposes that none could be spared for this urgent requirement of the Kalkaboo horde. The most wasteful people of all, he pointed out, were the new immigrants, of whom so
many
continued to flock in.

As one of the new immigrants, Giyt knew who the creature was talking about. What he didn't know was what to do about it. It was the Principal Slug who came to his rescue with a proposal. Each race, he suggested slobberingly, should make a survey of its power consumption and at the next meeting come in with plans for reducing their demand. On a strictly temporary basis, of course. Until the added generating capacity was on line. He expressed confidence that there were plenty of reductions that could be made without seriously discommoding anybody, and then perhaps the Kalkaboos could have their new radiation chamber right away.

Moved, seconded, and passed; and then, surprisingly, the meeting was over.

Giyt hurried out of the Hexagon before anybody could raise any more problems, feeling he had dodged a bullet. He didn't like the feeling. He needed to get ahead of these problems, and the way to do that was to have a talk with Hoak Hagbarth.