Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

“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.