O Pioneer! (20 page)

If Giyt were still back on Earth himself he could certainly handle that problem. He had included plenty of fire alarms and snooper-detection systems, so that he would be warned of what was happening in plenty of time to derail any imaginable inquiry. But he wasn't on Earth.

The best he could do here on Tupelo was to create a scout of his own and task it with roaming through the files back on Earth and reporting back to him. Creating it was no particular problem, either, but the scout couldn't be transmitted until the next time the portal was open. Then Giyt couldn't hope for a response until the time after that.

He did it anyway. When he had finished he noticed an unusual food aroma, and when he went into the kitchen he found Rina cooking up a huge batch of french fries. "Oh, they aren't for us, Shammy," she said, decanting them onto paper to drain. "Remember, we got that nice present from Mrs. Brownbenttalon? Well, we never gave her anything in return—like, you know, a thank-you present for having us over? And I remember her whole family was crazy about french fries at the fair. Do you think she'd like that?"

"I guess so. Well, sure she would," he said, less interested in the gift than in the fact that Rina seemed to have put Hagbarth and his gossip about her out of her mind.

"So when they're ready, would you like to take them over to her place for me? I'd do it myself, but I promised Lupe I'd help her take the little ones to the clinic for their checkups."

He would. He did; and so an hour later he got out of the cart at the gate of the Brownbenttalon residence with a thermally wrapped kilo of french-fried potatoes in his hand.

The whole Centaurian compound was fenced in, and the entrance gate was not exactly a gate; it was more like a cattle-crossing guard for some ranch on Earth, metal plates carrying a small electrical charge to discourage the smaller children from wandering away. They were no barrier to Evesham Giyt, but he waited politely until an immature female bustled up. "Oh, it is Large Male Giyt," she said, clearly surprised, apparently pleased. "Wait kindly." And a moment later Mrs. Brownbenttalon herself appeared, followed by a gaggle of subadults and children.

She raised her foreparts to give her little paws room to work, looking like a thoroughly bowed frankfurter as she rested her weight on her belly to rip the package open. "Ah, tubers in fat!" she exclaimed, giving every appearance of delight. She sampled a couple for herself, then indulgently handed the rest out, one fry apiece, to the children. "Is notably kind of you and same-size wife, yes. Look how they gobble! Now you come in, have small beverage, okay?" And then, when they were settled in the little garden with two males hastening to bring them the beery drinks, she inquired sociably, "You tell how are things progress with you? Is all completely well?"

"Just fine," he said automatically, but the question hadn't been entirely sociable. Mr. Brownbenttalon raised his nose out of his wife's back fur and clucked reproachfully at him, while his wife simply gazed in silence at Giyt.

"Well," Giyt confessed, "maybe not absolutely fine." He hesitated. She didn't seem to know about the rumors floating around the Earth community, and he didn't want to discuss the troubles among Earth humans with a Centaurian, anyway. But Hagbarth wasn't his only problem. "It's the Kalkaboos. I don't know what to do about them."

"I conjectured this." She sighed. "You don't know what to do, no one else do either. Stinky, noisy people, Kalkaboos, always getting feelings damaged. You want me helping for this situation?"

"Helping?"

"Can do so," she said modestly. "I have personally among them some certain less unreasonable acquaintances. Could negotiate on behalf of you if you wish, perhaps arrange some arrangement to reduce tensions maybe, what do you say?"

"Well . . ." he began, but she raised one paw to stop him, its single twisted talon gleaming.

"It is not necessary to express copious thank-yous," she said benevolently. "You know next commission meeting? You don't go there by yourself. You wait. At proper time I come by your dwelling, pick you up, take you to meeting so you can expiate offense given to new noisy Kalkaboo High Champion. Have no further fears, Large Male Giyt. It is all to be okay."

When he got home Rina was just taking her leave of Lupe and the children. She hurried to join him, putting up her face to be kissed. "So did Mrs. Brownbenttalon like the fries?"

"Oh, sure," Giyt said absently, sniffing. "She said to thank you very much. What's that smell?"

"We've been wondering about that. Lupe said she thought maybe some Delts had been around, but it doesn't smell Delt to me. Anyway, would you like a cup of coffee?"

She started the coffeemaker, but left to take a message on her screen. She was gone long enough for the coffee to be ready, and Giyt was just pouring out two cups when she came back, broadly grinning. "Guess what, hon? I heard from my sister again. They loved the clock, Shammy! They say all the neighbors are green with envy because—Shammy? Is something the matter?"

He hadn't been able to keep from changing expression. "Nothing," he said. "I just remembered . . . No, nothing."

"You sure? Well, anyway," she said doubtfully, but picking up speed, "they're really impressed by what I told them about life here on Tupelo. Salen says she'd cut out of Des Moines and emigrate in a hot minute, it sounds so good, but her husband's a real stick-in-the-mud—"

By then Giyt had his expression under control. He nodded and smiled while he considered the sudden enlightenment that had just come to him.

Rina's call to her sister! That had to be how Hagbarth had tracked her record down. Once somebody who was looking for dirt on the Giyts knew that the sister existed it wouldn't take a major expert to find out everything there was to find out about Rina.

When Rina set down her coffee cup and excused herself for a moment Giyt pondered the consequences. That answered a question for him, but like many answers, it was of no practical help. There was nothing for him to do about it, least of all reproach Rina for giving Hagbarth's gang the chance to dig up old dirt. The damage was done.

"Hon?" Rina said, frowning as she came back. "I'm afraid the toilet won't flush. What do you suppose is wrong?"

Giyt was no plumber, but it didn't take long to find out the answer. When inspection of the bathroom showed nothing obvious, he looked out at the back of the house.

There was an excavation that hadn't been there before, and a rank smell of sewage. While they were out of the house somebody had dug up their drains. And it seemed that Hagbarth's harassment was not going to stop with gossip.

XIX

Good morning, guys and guyinas, it's me again, your Voice of Tupelo, Silva Cristl, with a weather report that'll cheer you up. The bad news is that Hurricane Sam has intensified overnight; now it's Class Five, with winds over three hundred kilometers an hour. The good news is that it's going to miss us. We'll get some rain out of it, sure, but we'll miss the big winds. Speaking of big winds, did you hear there's a movement to rename the hurricane? People don't want to call it Hurricane Sam anymore. They want to call it Hurricane Evesham, because it's a lot of hot air that misses the mark.

—
SILVA CRISTL
'
S MORNING BROADCAST

Giyt didn't want to talk to Hoak Hagbarth. Given a choice, he would have cut the man out of his life entirely, but the mess in his backyard left him little choice. Something had to be done.

When he tried to call Hagbarth about getting it fixed, the man didn't answer his personal communicator; when he called the Hagbarth house, only Olse Hagbarth was there. "You say they dug up your backyard? Really? Well, I did hear something or other about a complaint of stopped-up drains a while back, but I'm afraid I wasn't paying much attention."

When Giyt asked who had made the complaint she only shrugged. "I guess you'd have to ask Hoak about that. Well, no, he isn't here right now. He's in a major meeting—you know, getting ready for the six-planet congress—and I can't interrupt him. Anyway, the sewers are Slug business, you know. Why don't you file a requisition? Although they're so backed up with the congress coming heaven knows when they'd be able to get around to it."

She was right about that. The Slugs were so busy getting ready for their VIPs to visit that there wasn't a single Slug in the waterworks office. In fact, there was only one person there, and that person—oh, when your luck was bad, it was bad all the way—was a female Kalkaboo.

When she saw Giyt coming, she raced him to the door, but he got inside the office before she could lock him out. Sulkily she retired to her desk.

At first Giyt thought she wasn't going to talk to him at all, but evidently her sense of duty overcame her revulsion. "Have no authority accept requisition," she told the air, unwilling to look Giyt in the face. "Slugs all in Slugtown, performing extremely great group sing for safety of soon-arriving leaders. Go away."

"But it's an emergency," Giyt protested.

"Yes, of course emergency, what difference? This work you are complaining not done by Slugs anyway. No work order in file. No progress report. So not Slug, so Slugs probably not going fix anyway. You don't like? You ask head Slug about same at commission meeting of joint governance, see how much good that do you. Go away."

The visit to the waterworks office wasn't quite a total loss. At least he had found out that the ruin in his backyard wasn't part of some official maintenance program. Which left only one possibility: it was more of Hoak Hagbarth's teaching Giyt a lesson.

The ameliorating fact was that the lack of waste-water disposal wasn't a desperate emergency. The de Mirs had offered them the use of their own facilities at any hour of the day or night. Then when Giyt got back from the waterworks office, he inexpertly managed to hook up a hose drain to the kitchen sink. It took an hour of swearing and getting wet, but when he was finished, Rina could at least cook, the waste spilling out onto what passed for their lawn.

None of that helped to alleviate the smell from the backyard.

Smoldering, Giyt snapped on the human-language broadcast to take his mind off Hagbarth's malice. What was on was a delayed broadcast of an Earthly hockey game. He watched it unseeingly until Rina called to him. "Hon? You haven't forgotten you've got a commission meeting coming up?"

He had. What's more, he had also completely forgotten about Mrs. Brownbenttalon's promise to mend matters with the Kalkaboos.

Mrs. Brownbenttalon hadn't, though. By the time Giyt got more or less cleaned up from his exploits with the kitchen drain, there the Centaurian was, leaning out of a cart before his door and calling to him. "What you do," she instructed as soon as he was inside, "is totally prepared by me. You perform return bout with new High Champion, okay? Nothing serious, you understand. No maiming. But element of paramount importance you must remember is you positively must not this time win." She bobbed her long nose at him for emphasis. "No more discuss this, please. What is terrible smell?"

And when Giyt told her about his troubles with the Slug repair crews she sighed. "Slugs," she said mournfully. "Who can do anything with Slugs? Perhaps you do like Kalkaboo lady say and ask head Slug at commission meeting, maybe he in good mood. Usually not. Now we have conversation of trivial matters so you compose yourself. You like this fine weather we having now, temporarily?"

There were a dozen or more persons milling around outside the door of the Hexagon, humans and eeties mixed. Giyt eyed them warily, but there did not seem to be any Kalkaboos among them. As Giyt entered, one of the men caught his arm. "Where the hell are we supposed to sit, Giyt?" he demanded.

Actually it was a fair question. Inside the building Delt and human crews were ripping out most of the seats usually supplied for the audience. New and obviously a good deal more comfortable chair equivalents were stacked along the wall, ready to be installed for the comfort of the delegations. Giyt gave the man a helpless shrug and entered cautiously.

All the other members were already in their places, even the Kalkaboo High Champion, who did not even look at Giyt. Mrs. Brownbenttalon piped to the room in general, "Sorrow for lateness. I and Earth human had business of nonpublic nature. Please begin."

And the Principal Slug, acting as chair for the day, slapped the desktop with one extruded member for order, commanded the work crews to stop their noisy activities, and began the meeting.

It was not a peaceful one. It seemed that every member of the commission had a complaint to make or a demand to register. The Principal Slug was first, usurping the privilege of the chair to point out that there were not enough damp-conditioned carts available in working order for the use of their delegation from the Slug home planet. Then the Petty-Primes' Responsible One protested that the traffic involved in preparing for the meeting was so heavy that their small carts were at risk of being run over in the streets, and then the Delts weighed in by announcing that the other members of the commission were taking up time on frivolous matters when they should have ratified the seat assignments on the suborbital polar rocket and, really, they should move along so the work crews could finish preparing the hall for the six-planet meeting. Even Mrs. Brownbenttalon indignantly proclaimed that all that work should have been completed long ago, because more staff members for the six-planet meeting would be arriving very soon, and the accommodations for the Centaurians were not ready.

It did not take Giyt long to figure out what was motivating them all. The audience was much larger than usual, uncomfortably perched on whatever surfaces were left for them. Most of them were eeties—Giyt even saw the female Kalkaboo from the waterworks office—and among them were a number he had never seen before.

Those newcomers, he realized, had to be advance staff members for the delegations from the home planets. What the mayors were doing was showing off for the high brass. Only the new Kalkaboo High Champion was silent. He did not speak, did not look at Giyt, hardly moved at all except for the flapping of his huge ears. The only time he paid any attention at all was when Giyt found an opening to bring up his own business with the Principal Slug. Then the Kalkaboo conspicuously turned his back, while the Slug in the chair slobbered reprovingly, "These smelly drains leak purely unofficial personal matter, Mayor Giyt. Not to come before this body never. No other proper business? Good. Meeting I now adjourn."