Giyt got confirmation of that when Rina came storming back from the neighbors’, her face dark with unexpected anger. “Have you been watching that bitch Cristl’s show on the net? Well, you better take a look. Go back to about twenty minutes ago.” And when he had backtracked to the beginning of the woman’s call-in show there she was, Silva Cristl, wearing her fire lieutenant’s uniform with the jacket unbuttoned enough to show her cleavage, smiling into the camera. Her caller’s face was pic-in-pic below her, and Giyt recognized him at once: Maury Kettner, the man who had wanted to move his family to the Pole and had been turned down.
Only, according to what the two of them were saying on the screen, he hadn’t been: “We’ll certainly miss you around the firehouse, Maury.”
“I’ll miss you guys, too,” Kettner said, flushed with the importance of being on the net, “so I just wanted to say good-bye for a while to all my friends. And to say thanks to Mr. Hagbarth, while I’m at it. He really came through for me, so I and the family are on our way to the Pole. No thanks to the mayor, you know. I must’ve asked him a dozen times, and he just wouldn’t do a thing.”
“I know what you mean.” Cristl was grinning, too. “I hope he’s a better fireman than he is a mayor.”
“Well, you’d lose that one,” said Kettner, chuckling as he was replaced by the next caller. The little picture showed a middle-aged woman, faintly familiar; Giyt thought maybe she was one of the ones he’d seen on Energy Island. She had criticisms of her own:
“Listen, I heard what Maury was saying about the mayor, and he’s damn right. You know what this Giyt did to the boss Kalkaboo, don’t you? How’s that going to look when all the big shots come here for their meeting? I have to say, I really miss Mariam Vardersehn.”
“There’ll be another election one of these days,” Cristl said consolingly.
“Yeah, and the dumb voters just might put Giyt right back in.”
“Well,” said Lieutenant Cristl, pursing her lips in a knowledgeable expression, “I don’t know if you have to worry much about that, sweetie. There’s a lot that hasn’t come out yet, take my word for it, and not just about Giyt himself, either. Now let’s go to the next caller.”
That was enough for Giyt. He clicked it off while Rina protested, “They’re being so unfair!”
“It’s not a fair world,” Giyt said absently, thinking about something he didn’t want to say out loud in Rina’s presence. And of course, Rina’s next remark was right on that subject. “What do you suppose Cristl was talking about—stuff that hasn’t come out yet?”
Giyt didn’t answer her for a moment. He was wondering just what Hagbarth might have found out—and even more, how Hagbarth had known where to look. He said, “I suppose we’ll find out sooner or later.”
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?”