“You had a baby?” He was suddenly wondering if there was some part of Rina left behind on Earth.
“Not quite. What I had was an abortion. I was fourteen. And my father found out about it.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “I did kind of like the idea of having a baby of my own, but I didn’t see how I could manage it. Dad sure wasn’t going to raise a bastard for me in his house, and what else could I do? I didn’t like the idea of being a welfare mother, didn’t have any skills to earn a living. So I stuck it out for a while after the abortion, and then I ran away.”
It seemed to Giyt that his wife was telling him this story for a reason. The way she was looking at him she seemed to want some reaction from him, but what that reaction should be, he could not guess. Awkwardly he took her free hand and placed it against his cheek.
Apparently it was the right response. She gave him a sudden grin. “You always thought I was pretty dim to give money to every panhandler who came by, didn’t you, Shammy?”
“Dim? No, nothing like that!” he protested. “You’re just a generous person.”
“Not just generous. I owe the street people. They took me in, fed me, showed me places where I could sleep, away from the cops and the weather. If they had anything to eat, so did I. They didn’t expect anything back, either. They even put up with the way I was, and I was a lot to put up with—a dumb, weepy teenager. I was a mess, Shammy, and they treated me as though I were a human being. But I didn’t want to go on sponging off them.”
She leaned over and kissed him. “You know something I’ve always appreciated about you, Shammy? You never once asked me why I became a whore.”
“None of my business,” he said gruffly, surprised to find himself touched.
“No,” she agreed, “it wasn’t, but I guess maybe it is now . . . Daddy. Anyway, that’s how. Fifteen years old, how else could I make a living? And here I am.” She hesitated, “But, Shammy, there’s one thing I would like you to know. I screwed a lot of guys at one time or another. Mostly it was business, but sometimes not. But I never loved anyone else before you.”
XII
The Centaurian colony had settled itself on Tupelo for only a few years when they had an unpleasant surprise. An exploring party of another species arrived. They were not welcome. In fact, they were the very people the Centaurians had been fighting their interminable war with, the sluglike inhabitants of Alpha Centauri’s fourth planet.
Although the fighting in their home system had temporarily subsided, it very nearly began again on Tupelo. It was touch-and-go for a while, but the sides paused long enough to talk a bit before opening hostilities. They discovered they had much in common. The Slugs in the exploration party were as tired of war as the Centaurians. Cautiously, both sides agreed to try the experiment of peaceful coexistence. They even agreed to share the same island, though at some remove from each other, a decision made easier by the fact that the Slugs preferred the damper, danker climate of the jungle to the plains that had attracted the Centaurians. The two sides signed a solemn compact, undertaking to together occupy what they called the Planet of Peace without fighting, and they created a Joint Governance Commission to mediate any conflicts that might arise.
The Taste of Tupelo started a couple of days early for Giyt, when the hypermarket called to say his dress uniform for the fire company had arrived, “Fine,” said Giyt, who had pretty much forgotten he’d ever ordered the thing. I’ll come right over to pick it up.”
“We’ll both come, Shammy,” Rina told him when he’d hung up, “because I surely want to see what you’re going to look like.”
At the store Rina sat, peaceably chatting with another shopper, as Giyt pulled the drapes of the store’s changing room behind him. It didn’t take him long to get into the fire company’s dress whites, with their silver buttons and silver-trimmed dress cap. He had never had any kind of uniform on before. And was startled to see how—appropriate?—it looked on him in the changing room’s mirror.
Rina thought so, too. “Ah, Shammy,” she whispered, tugging his collar straight when he came out, “you do clean up nice, you know?” But standing unexpectedly behind her was Chief Wili Tschopp.
“Very nice,” he said. “Keep it on, Giyt. Listen, I heard you were here, so I came over. We need you to make a commercial for the fair. Why you? What do you mean, why you? Because you’re the mayor, of course. Don’t worry, it won’t take long. The cameras are all set up right outside, and I’ve got your script right here.”
So Evesham Giyt had another first for that day, because he’d never recorded a commercial before, either. It wasn’t much trouble. All he had to do was read the script, which promised great food, wonderful rides, and such splendid entertainment as Olse Hagbarth playing authentic American jazz on her own piano and the six-year-olds from Ms. Hilda’s dance class doing authentic American line dancing. It took three tries before Wili Tschopp was satisfied, but the real drain on Giyt’s time didn’t come until Rina discovered the commercial was going to be broadcast on the systems of all six of Tupelo’s races, with the appropriate language dubbed in. Then Rina was so tickled by the idea of hearing her husband talk Delt or Slug that Giyt decided to give her a treat. Trying to convert alien TV protocols to anything he had ever seen before took more time than Giyt had expected. But he had his own original recording to match against the ones the others used, and it was, after all, the kind of thing Evesham Giyt was inordinately good at. He took it for granted that the other races would have been eavesdropping on each other’s newscasts all along. His guess was right, and after some hard digging he succeeded in unearthing their conversion programs.
The rest was easy. All he had to do was adapt their procedures to the Earth protocols. It was tedious work, but nothing he couldn’t handle.
Pleased with himself, he displayed for Rina his own image barking, squealing, moaning in all five of the .other languages. She was pleased, too. “Save them, hon,” she instructed. When he asked what for she said, “Don’t you think our child will want to see them someday?” And then Giyt had something else to ponder over.
The actual day of the Taste of Tupelo dawned to the usual artillery barrage from the expiation of Kalkaboo sins. The day was hot, dry, and, as it turned out, extremely long. Right after first light Giyt reported for duty. He got lucky. To reinforce the recorded messages that invited all the eeties to the fair Chief Tschopp ordered him onto a sound truck. So in the early morning Giyt bumped downhill over that horrible forest road to cruise the Slug settlement under the dam, wheeping the siren and reminding the Slugs over the translator loudspeakers that they, like everybody else on Tupelo, were really welcome to come to the Earther fair.
Apart from moments of terror that the fire engine would turn over as it pitched and jerked down the trail, the job could have been worse. Giyt could have been put to setting up the fair’s booths and rides. Besides, it was a chance to take a good look at Slugtown. He would have been more comfortable if he hadn’t been sweating in his full dress uniform. But it was bearable, and at least he wasn’t the one who was faced with trying to drive the damn thing through the least watery sections of mud between the Slug huts.
By the time he was back at the fairground (which was the broad space of Sommermen Square before the portal, which Tschopp had commandeered for the occasion) he was convinced that every possible Slug had been well and truly told about the fair.
Giyt had seen fund-raising fairs before—barely. Sometimes he had caught a glimpse of them on TV, for that fraction of a second that it took him to realize that this was not a subject that interested him and to move on, sometimes from the window of an autocab that was passing one by and certainly didn’t stop. That was as far as it went. At least since childhood he had never been disposed to attend one. Definitely he had never, ever, been one of the sweating crew that worked behind the game counters and in the refreshment stands and operated the children’s rides.