Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

It wasn’t later. In fact it was a good deal sooner than Giyt had expected. Rina had hardly returned next door to practice parenting on the de Mir kids when she came flying back. Both Matya and Lupe were with her, carrying the smaller children; Matya looked indignant, Rina wore anger and unhappiness, and Lupe seemed to have been crying. “Shammy,” Rina said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but somebody’s been telling around that I used to be a whore.”

Giyt froze. He hardly heard Lupe sobbing, “I told you, Matya! You shouldn’t have said anything!”

Arid Matya, half defensive, half repentant: “I thought she ought to know what those bastards at the firehouse were saying about her. They’re all Hagbarth’s buddies, I hated Lupe going there.”

“They’re not all like that,” Lupe protested.

“No, but the ones in charge are. Evesham? I’m sorry as hell about this, but really you did have to know. Hagbarth’s got all these regulations that he pulls out when he wants to. He might even be able to get you kicked off Tupelo, like Shura Kenk.”

“She’s the one who used to live here in your house,” Lupe supplied.

“I remember,” Giyt said. “But I thought she just got tired of living on Tupelo and went home.”

“Went home! Hagbarth had her thrown out. They said she’d molested one of the Grayhorn kids—the twelve-year-old, a born liar if I ever saw one. But they believed what he said. So they sent a special rocket up to the pole and flew her back in the middle of her shift to face the charges.”

“She didn’t do it, of course,” Lupe put in. “She said so, and we believed her. She said Hagbarth was just ticked off at her for something that happened at the factory.”

“But the mayor deported her. Well, it wasn’t just the mayor. It was Hagbarth, of course. And he could do that to you, too.”

Rina looked questioningly at Giyt. “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, Shammy? Maybe we ought to go back home anyway.”

“Oh, please no, Rina!” Lupe begged. “Everybody knows what a turd Hagbarth is. It’ll all blow over. We don’t want you to leave!”

“Do you really want a whore living next door to your children?”

“We want you , Rina!”

And Matya chimed in: “What does it matter what you did a long time ago? I mean, do I care? Back home, I used to work for the IRS.”

The good thing about being on Hoak Hagbarth’s enemies list was that it sure did cut down on the number of people who came to ask Giyt for favors. The bad part—

Well, there were more bad parts than Giyt could count, Never mind the crazy, silly problem with the Kalkaboos; never mind the possibility that Hagbarth might kick them right back to Earth. What troubled him most was what all this was doing to Rina. She had just barely got used to her status as the pregnant wife of a well-respected man when she had to shift gears and get used to his new status as a semi-pariah and, worst of all, to her own. It wasn’t just the embarrassment. It was a situation that Giyt was certain couldn’t be good for the baby. For that he intended never, ever to forgive Hoak Hagbarth.

Then there were the second-order derivatives of that bit of nastiness. One big question, for instance: How had Hagbarth found out about Rina’s past? There was nothing about that in the open records even back on Earth. Giyt had made sure that was so long ago, as a minor and unmentioned courtesy to a friend. Had someone back home done some serious digging? And if so, were they likely to do the same sort of digging in Giyt’s own records? They would certainly have a tough time, because he had erected some pretty solid blocks over everything that related to his own history. But would the blocks withstand a really serious attack by a really high-powered investigation?

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.