Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

Hagbarth pursed his lips. “You’ve never been to the polar mines yet, have you? Sure, they’ve got processing stuff up there, but most of it isn’t ours. We just have a little corner of the works. What you call boutique factories, you know? Anything big, they don’t do much more than forty or fifty copies in a run.”

“So we can build some new factories, can’t we? So there will be something the Tupelo humans can do to earn money instead of living on handouts?”

Hagbarth looked as though he was tiring of the subject. “Well,” he said, “maybe you’ve got something there and maybe you don’t, but I guess it could be looked into. Tell you what: When the Earth commissioners come for the six-race meeting I’ll see if I can get them to send some specialists along, check over what the possibilities are here. How would that be?”

“Fine,” said Giyt, making a mental note to remind Hagbarth of his promise.

“Then that’s settled. I’d better be getting along—and listen, you won’t forget about those programs for me, will you? Because—oh, wait a minute.”

He paused, listening to a message from his carryphone. Then he looked angrily at Hagbarth. “Shit,” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s the goddamn Kalkaboo High Champion. He just died.”

“Died? But I thought . . . Oh, hell, that’s too bad.”

“Yeah, well, they’ll be boiling him all night—’’

“Boiling?”

“It’s what they do, Giyt. So the funeral will be at dawn tomorrow, and you’d better be there. See, basically they figure you killed him.”

The funeral of the High Champion, like all major Kalkaboo events, took place at dawn. So an hour before daybreak Giyt had to visit the Kalkaboo general store in order to buy a firecracker for the ceremonies.

Giyt had never been in the Kalkaboo store before. It was crowded. Nearly everyone else present, naturally enough, was a Kalkaboo. None of them spoke to him, and they looked at him, if at all, only out of the corners of their eyes, but he recognized that they were all on the same errand as himself.

What puzzled him was what size firecracker to buy. The Kalkaboos themselves were buying all sizes, from tiny beads to things the size of a baseball. He looked around for a friendly face but found none. He did, however, see the Petty-Prime Responsible One picking up something about as big as a thumbnail, which emboldened him to reach for another of the same size from the bin.

It was the wrong choice. A feathery hand snaked past him to clasp his own, and the voice of the translator in his ear snapped, “No. Not adequate. Come with.” And a Kalkaboo Giyt did not recognize led him to the back of the store. There was a muttered exchange with a clerk, who retired to the storeroom for a moment and emerged with what looked like a bright blue grapefruit. “Pay now,” Giyt was ordered. “This little other thing is detonator for making bomb bang. Don’t push till it’s time. Now go.”

The object weighed twenty kilograms at least. By the time he got it to the cart, where Rina was waiting, he was panting.

For the ceremonial the Kalkaboos had preempted the square in front of the transporter, the same space that had held the Taste of Tupelo just a day earlier. As Giyt and Rina got out of their cart they found they could smell the late High Champion even before they saw the pot he had cooked in. Actually he smelled rather appetizing, a bit like a lamb stew. Rina had hurried next door for advice and so had been able to explain to her husband that, yes, Hagbarth hadn’t lied. Kalkaboos simmered their dead overnight. Lupe didn’t think you could call it a religious thing, exactly, but it was certainly a pretty much inviolable custom, like the human habit of embalming. What they did with the corpse afterward was unclear, because Rina hadn’t had time to get more details from the de Mirs. As they sniffed the odor of cooking High Champion Giyt and Rina stared at each other with a wild surmise. “You don’t suppose—” Rina began.

“Jesus, I hope not,” said Giyt. But as they got out of their cart, Giyt gingerly holding his penance under one arm and the detonator in the other hand, they saw that there was food, all right, but of a more conventional sort. Most of the crowd was milling around a dozen huge and fully laden banquet tables.

“What do we do, Shammy?” Rina whispered. “We can’t eat Kalkaboo food.”

Giyt shrugged, grateful that at least they were apparently not expected to eat Kalkaboos. Where the crowd of mourners was thickest, Giyt could see the intact body of the late High Champion, removed from its cooking pot and slowly cooling inside a glass-sided sort of coffin. Or fish tank, because it seemed to be filled with water. The High Champion floated submerged inside, eyes closed, arms folded over his chest, the great floppy ears stirring slowly in the water. He was nude. Apart from that, simmering in a stewpot all through the long Tupelovian night didn’t seem to have changed his looks much. Next to the High Champion’s tank were three large covered pots, each with a Kalkaboo standing beside it as though guarding its contents.

The big question on Giyt’s mind was what to do with his huge firework. Nearly every person present, at least a thousand Kalkaboos and a representative or two of each of the other races, had a firecracker of his or her own, though he didn’t see any that approached the mass of his own monster.

He wondered what they were planning to do with the things. It didn’t seem sensible to set them off at random in this crowd, especially his own mammoth one. And the question was becoming urgent, because he could see the sky already graying around the island’s central mountain.

An elderly female Kalkaboo solved the problem for him. She came hurrying through the mob, made an expression of astonishment when she saw the size of what he carried, then beckoned him to follow her to a roped-off enclosure strewn with what looked like egg cups, in varying sizes, made of solid metal. Mourners were putting the larger firecrackers into the cups, and the largest cup of all, a hundred-kilo giant of fire-stained steel, appeared to be reserved for Giyt. When his burden was emplaced, the female hurried him out of the enclosure and bade him stand just outside the rope. He looked around for Rina, but she was lost in the crowd.

Then a drumbeat sounded. The crowd became silent, all turned toward the east, and just as the first edge of the sun popped over the mountaintop, the salvos began. Each Kalkaboo with a small firecracker tossed it into the enclosure. They exploded on impact. At first it was only sharp rifle cracks as the smaller ones went off; then one of the Kalkaboos holding a detonator like Giyt’s own pressed it. Then there was a larger blast, then a series of them, and then Giyt sighed and pushed the button for his own giant charge. Orange flame leaped up toward the sky. The concussion almost knocked him over, and the immense explosion nearly deafened him; and then it was over.