O Pioneer!

XVII

The morning after the Centaurian party Giyt took Mrs. Brownbenttalon’s advice. As the translated text of the treaty scrolled through his screen he whistled to himself. “No weapons of any kind” obviously meant no weapons at all. What had Hagbarth been thinking of with his nonsensical application to bring in guns? And for that matter, why hadn’t Hagbarth warned him about Kalkaboo customs? Or that his proposal for jointly exploiting Tupelo’s resources with the eeties would be laughed down?

Obviously Hagbarth was deliberately withholding information that Giyt needed to do his job properly. Why? Was he just intent on making Giyt look bad? And if so, what was the reason for that?

And, thinking of information withheld, what about Mrs. Brownbenttalon’s little bombshell concerning Professor Sommermen and the portal?

He attacked the system again, but there was nothing new about the portal to be found on a quick search. He sighed and prepared to dig deeper. He created a scout program to dig through the whole huge database for conjunction of key terms, wherever they might be found. But by the time the Kalkaboo morning barrage told him it was sunrise, nothing useful had turned up.

He showered and dressed abstractedly, sat abstractedly down to the breakfast Rina had made for him. She looked at him quizzically. “Are you all right. Shammy? Not hung over from last night?”

He blinked at her, mildly indignant. “I didn’t have that much to drink, did I?”

“Of course not, hon. You just seem a little down. It isn’t still that business with the Kalkaboos?” When he shook his head she changed the subject. “Shammy? Do you mind if I leave you alone for a while today? It’s Lupe and Matya. Today’s their anniversary, and they’ve got this kind of romantic idea, they want to go off for a picnic in the woods without all the kids around. So I promised I’d babysit.”

“Sure. I’ll be fine.”

“You’re positive? Because I could bring the little kids over here after I get the others off to school—”

That got his full attention. “No, no, that’s all right. Should you be doing all that in your condition, though?”

She beamed fondly at him. “You’re sweet, Shammy, but I’ll be fine. I love my condition, and you know what? I love you, too.”

Giyt was just sitting down to his terminal again when he heard someone at. the door. It turned out to be one of Mrs. Brownbenttalon’s lesser husbands. He was carrying a package as big as himself, that was wrapped in a shimmering silk-like fabric, decorated with flowers. Giyt scrambled to find his translator button and put it in his ear, just in time to hear the little creature say, “Object is freely given gift for enjoyment of you from honored wife and also from highly esteemed principal daughter. You observe have cart vehicle waiting? Reason for waiting of cart vehicle is must return quickly to home for urgent household duties.” He expertly detached a tiny record plate from the package and held it out for Giyt. “Sign signature for gift, please?”

Giyt pressed his thumb on the glassy section of the plate and scrawled his name over it, surprised and pleased. But as the Centaurian was getting into his cart another cart was pulling up behind it, and the good feelings evaporated as Hoak Hagbarth got out.

Hagbarth scowled curiously after the departing cart, but, if he had something to say about it, Giyt didn’t give him the chance to get it out. “Hagbarth, why is everybody lying about the portal?” he demanded without preface.

The expression on Hagbarth’s face changed in a way Giyt had never seen before. The scowl didn’t go away. If anything, it deepened, but at the same time Hagbarth’s pale eyebrows went up in incredulous shock. “Oh, God,” he moaned, “what is it with you now, Giyt?”

“You know what I’m talking about. The portal. Sommermen didn’t invent it. It was given to us by the eeties. I want to know why that’s been lied about.”

The frown and shock melted away from Hagbarth’s face, leaving only polite incredulity. “It was?”

“Of course it was. Mrs. Brownbenttalon told me about it herself.”

“Oh, right. You were at her place last night, weren’t you? How’d you like it?”

“Look,” Giyt said. “We’re not talking about the party. We’re talking about why Ex-Earth tells everybody the portal was Dr. Sommermen’s invention when it wasn’t.”

“Well now, how would I know that? Be reasonable, Giyt. I just work for Ex-Earth, they don’t tell me any secrets.”

“But you must know something.”

“No I mustn’t. I don’t, and that’s all there is to it. Aren’t you going to open your present?”

It was a standoff. Clearly if Hagbarth did have any information he wasn’t going to share it with Giyt, who surrendered and began to unwrap the package. It turned out to be half a dozen of the bamboo segments Mrs. Brownbenttalon had served, and Hagbarth’s scowl was replaced with a look of revulsion. “Oh, Christ, look what they’re giving you! It’s some of that damn lizard shit.”

Whether Giyt agreed with the sentiment or not, he felt obliged to defend his hostess. “It’s not so bad. We had some last night.”

“Oh, yeah. You were going to tell me what went on there.”

Actually, Giyt hadn’t intended to tell the man anything at all, but there was always the chance that if he kept on listening to Hagbarth the man might involuntarily tell him something useful. He said, “I guess you’d call it-a kind of coming-out party for her daughter.”

Hagbarth nodded wisely. “Yeah, I know those Centaurian parties. Pretty damn boring and lousy food, right? Mrs. B, used to invite me and Olse now and then, but, you know, they’re eeties, aren’t they? They have their ways, we have our ways. I’m not saying our ways are better necessarily, but still. Anyway, we really couldn’t stand being around that kind of company. Did anything interesting happen while you were there?”

“Well, the Kalkaboos didn’t show up—because I was there, I think.” He waited to see if Hagbarth would take the opportunity to remind him what an idiot he was for injuring the new High Champion, but all the man said impatiently was, “Sure, sure, but what did you talk about?”

The trouble with asking questions of Hoak Hagbarth was that it always wound up with Hagbarth asking all the questions. Giyt was getting tired of the one-way conversation. He said vaguely, “Oh, different things. Look, I think I ought to put this stuff in the fridge.”

What he was hoping was that Hagbarth would take the hint and leave, but the man only followed him into the kitchen, laughing. “Why bother? What could happen to it to make it any worse? Anyway, you were telling me about what you talked about at the party.”

Giyt cast about for subjects he might want to let Hagbarth know about. The way the other races had seemed to despise the Kalkaboos? But he didn’t really want to mention Kalkaboos to Hagbarth. What Mrs. Whitenose had said about Hagbarth himself? That was almost tempting, but Giyt decided on a neutral subject. “They were telling me about the war they had with the Slugs, long ago. Did you know about it?”

“Well, sure. Must’ve been a real donnybrook—nuked each other’s planets, killed off millions of people on both sides. Did they say anything about the kinds of weapons they used?”

Giyt searched his memory. “Nothing specific, no.”

“Well, they started out with old-fashioned rocket ships—the Slugs and the Centaurians are in the same solar system, you know. Then they got high-tech, but they don’t talk much about that. You know,” Hagbarth said, sounding indignant, “it wouldn’t hurt them to be a little more open with us. We haven’t hidden anything. Anything they want to know about Earth, we tell them—well, mostly we do, anyway. And there are a lot of people back on Earth who think we haven’t been getting a fair shake from them, that way.”

Giyt nodded and shrugged at the same time—the nod to indicate comprehension; the shrug for well, what can you do about it? Hagbarth was silent for a moment. Then he said abruptly, “Oh, listen, I almost forgot. I came here to talk to you about something.”

Giyt gave him a suspicious look. “The portal codes?”

“Well, that, too, but I guess you would’ve told me if you had them for me? Yes, that’s what I thought. No, what I wanted to tell you was Lieutenant Dern wants you at the firehouse today after siesta.”

Lieutenant Dern was the operations officer for the fire company, so Giyt was pretty sure he knew why. He asked the question anyway. “What for?”

“Training, and I think she’s going to pull a quiz on you, too. Have you been studying?”

“Well, not really.”

Hagbarth grinned at him. “So then it’s a good thing you’ve got a couple of hours, right? And listen, if I was you I’d just pitch that bamboo crap in the garbage. Mrs. B. will never find out.”

So that meant one more burden on Giyt’s suddenly insufficient time. There wasn’t any help for it. Resigned, he gave up the notion of doing a little more digging into some of the things he really wanted to know and got down to the business of studying.

The list of things a fireman was supposed to know was formidable. There were the schematics of the pumpers and the water cannon to learn, the theory of putting fires out to study (cool them with water, smother them with foam), the proper names of every air pack and peavey hook in the company’s arsenal to memorize. It wasn’t any more difficult than any of the college assignments Giyt had easily aced long ago. He had educated himself in far more complex subjects many times, for school or just for the pure pleasure of learning. This stuff was child’s play compared to, say, identifying Napoleon’s order of battle as he marched on Moscow, not to mention some of the more abstruse areas of network theory. If this one was a burden it was primarily because it was compulsory, had been most unjustly dumped on him without warning. And what did it matter whether he passed Lieutenant Dern’s quiz or not? What could they do to him?

So, having established that there was no good reason for him to cram for the test, Giyt did what he always did. He began to study, and he made good progress by the time he had to leave the house.

On the way to the firehouse Giyt stopped in at the house next door to tell Rina about Mrs. Brownbenttalon’s gift. He had to whisper, because one of the littlest kids was asleep in a bassinet by her feet, while Rina was trying to feed another in a high chair. Out in the yard, where Rina could keep a watchful eye on them through the open door, the rest of the de Mir get was playing raucously with a bunch of little pink Petty-Prime kits. “That was nice of the Brownbenttalons,” she said absently, aiming a spoonful of mush at the momentarily open mouth and expertly connecting. As he left she added, “Shammy? I’m glad to see you making some friends.”

On the way to the firehouse Giyt wondered if that was what he was doing. He hadn’t had much practice at making friends. For that matter, he hadn’t even had very many acquaintances back in Wichita, because every person who knew who Evesham Giyt was automatically became a potential threat to his carefully secured lifestyle. Well, and because he hadn’t much wanted any friends, either, he admitted to himself. The company he liked best was his own.

And of course Rina’s.

As he entered the firehouse, the first person he saw was Lieutenant Grazia Dern. She was definitely not a friend. She had already let Giyt know, pointedly, that she was very dose with the former mayor, Mariam Vardersehn, and thus not too friendly to her replacement. The only other fireman present at that moment wasn’t a good candidate for friendship, either, since he was the man who had been turned down for permanent family relocation to the polar factories, Maury Kettner.

Giyt’s training for the day turned out to involve a lot of hands-on practice, some enjoyable, some not much fun at all. After half an hour in the station Giyt thought he would never want to reel up a hose single-handedly again, but then Kettner took him out into the field. It got better then. Kettner let him drive the truck around the fringes of the lake to the foliage on the far side. That was interesting in itself, and then Kettner let him fire the water cannon at the brush along the roadway. That was pretty much pure pleasure: all that power under his hand! They had gone all the way down to the riverside below Slugtown before Giyt realized his “training” had served another purpose: under Kettner’s guidance his driving had widened a stretch of that horrible downhill road by a couple of meters on either side.

He didn’t mind. He didn’t even mind the stowing and draining after twenty minutes of blasting holes in the foliage along the banks of the foul-smelling stream, where one of the great cargo submarines from the Pole floated half submerged, waiting to be unloaded. But then, when they got back to the firehouse, the lieutenant was gone and Chief Tschopp was waiting to give him spot oral quizzes on what he had learned in his screen session.

That wasn’t what Giyt wanted at that moment. He was wet and sweaty and his arms were tired from holding back the kick of the water cannon. What he wanted most of all was to go home and take a shower. He didn’t do well on the quiz, and when Hoak Hagbarth strolled in in the middle of it, Giyt looked to him for a diversion.

It didn’t work that way. “For Christ’s sake, Giyt,” Tschopp exploded. “Pay attention!”

“He don’t catch on real fast, does he?” offered Maury Kettner, watching.

“He does not,” Tschopp agreed in disgust. “What’s the matter, Giyt? You too busy playing those little bedtime games with your lady to study?”

That was going farther than Giyt was prepared to accept, but as he was tensing to reply Hagbarth cut in. “Now, now,” he said mildly, “watch how you talk about somebody that’s about to become a mother, Wili. Come on. Tell Evesham here you’re sorry.” Tschopp looked rebellious, but muttered something that might have been an apology. “Now, that’s better. Are you through with the mayor? Because I need to talk to him about something.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, just jerked his head toward the chief’s office. As the two of them entered, Giyt asked, “How did you know Rina was pregnant?”

“Oh, hell, Evesham.” Hagbarth smiled. “Everybody knows everything around here, didn’t you know that? Except about the freaks. They keep a lot of secrets from us.” He closed the door on the man who was the office’s rightful occupant. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring, set with a topaz—obviously fake—the size of a pigeon’s egg. “There’s a recorder in the stone, Evesham. What I’d like you to do, I’d like you to just wear it next time you see Mrs. B., and maybe get her to talk a little more about what armaments they’ve got—”

Giyt stared at him. “You want me to spy on her?”

“I wouldn’t call it spying, exactly,” Hagbarth protested. “Just for archival purposes, you know? And it’s not that we want to know anything they shouldn’t be willing to tell us anyway—”

“No.”

Hagbarth looked at him incredulously. “You don’t mean that,” he said.

“Actually I do. No. I won’t do it.”

“Christ, Giyt, where’s your patriotism? You could be doing yourself some good, too. You can bet the eeties know everything there is to know about Earth—who knows what kind of spy stuff they had in the drone they sent the portal in? I mean,” he added hastily, “if they did do that, like they say. And we’ve never gotten a ship near any of their planets. Hell, we don’t even know where the Kalks and the Petty-Primes come from! And the scout ships the Huntsville people sent to Alpha Centauri and Delta Pavonis never even reported back—I give you one guess why.”

Giyt frowned. Put like that, it sounded damning. But he. said firmly, “Mrs. Brownbenttalon’s a friend, and I don’t do that to my friends. I’m not going to rat her out for you.”

Hagbarth looked him over in silence for a moment. Then he sighed. “So we might as well pack it in,” he said. “I guess your principles do you credit.”

But Giyt was quite sure he didn’t mean it. What Hagbarth meant, what the tone of his voice said for him, was I’m going to remember this.