“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.
“It is not necessary to express copious thank-yous,” she said benevolently. “You know next commission meeting? You don’t go there by yourself. You wait. At proper time I come by your dwelling, pick you up, take you to meeting so you can expiate offense given to new noisy Kalkaboo High Champion. Have no further fears, Large Male Giyt. It is all to be okay.”
When he got home Rina was just taking her leave of Lupe and the children. She hurried to join him, putting up her face to be kissed. “So did Mrs. Brownbenttalon like the fries?”
“Oh, sure,” Giyt said absently, sniffing. “She said to thank you very much. What’s that smell?”
“We’ve been wondering about that. Lupe said she thought maybe some Delts had been around, but it doesn’t smell Delt to me. Anyway, would you like a cup of coffee?”
She started the coffeemaker, but left to take a message on her screen. She was gone long enough for the coffee to be ready, and Giyt was just pouring out two cups when she came back, broadly grinning. “Guess what, hon? I heard from my sister again. They loved the clock, Shammy! They say all the neighbors are green with envy because—Shammy? Is something the matter?”
He hadn’t been able to keep from changing expression. “Nothing,” he said. “I just remembered . . . No, nothing.”
“You sure? Well, anyway,” she said doubtfully, but picking up speed, “they’re really impressed by what I told them about life here on Tupelo. Salen says she’d cut out of Des Moines and emigrate in a hot minute, it sounds so good, but her husband’s a real stick-in-the-mud—”
By then Giyt had his expression under control. He nodded and smiled while he considered the sudden enlightenment that had just come to him.
Rina’s call to her sister! That had to be how Hagbarth had tracked her record down. Once somebody who was looking for dirt on the Giyts knew that the sister existed it wouldn’t take a major expert to find out everything there was to find out about Rina.
When Rina set down her coffee cup and excused herself for a moment Giyt pondered the consequences. That answered a question for him, but like many answers, it was of no practical help. There was nothing for him to do about it, least of all reproach Rina for giving Hagbarth’s gang the chance to dig up old dirt. The damage was done.
“Hon?” Rina said, frowning as she came back. “I’m afraid the toilet won’t flush. What do you suppose is wrong?”
Giyt was no plumber, but it didn’t take long to find out the answer. When inspection of the bathroom showed nothing obvious, he looked out at the back of the house.
There was an excavation that hadn’t been there before, and a rank smell of sewage. While they were out of the house somebody had dug up their drains. And it seemed that Hagbarth’s harassment was not going to stop with gossip.
XIX
Good morning, guys and guyinas, it’s me again, your Voice of Tupelo, Silva Cristl, with a weather report that’ll cheer you up. The bad news is that Hurricane Sam has intensified overnight; now it’s Class Five, with winds over three hundred kilometers an hour. The good news is that it’s going to miss us. We’ll get some rain out of it, sure, but we’ll miss the big winds. Speaking of big winds, did you hear there’s a movement to rename the hurricane? People don’t want to call it Hurricane Sam anymore. They want to call it Hurricane Evesham, because it’s a lot of hot air that misses the mark.
Giyt didn’t want to talk to Hoak Hagbarth. Given a choice, he would have cut the man out of his life entirely, but the mess in his backyard left him little choice. Something had to be done.
When he tried to call Hagbarth about getting it fixed, the man didn’t answer his personal communicator; when he called the Hagbarth house, only Olse Hagbarth was there. “You say they dug up your backyard? Really? Well, I did hear something or other about a complaint of stopped-up drains a while back, but I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention.”
When Giyt asked who had made the complaint she only shrugged. “I guess you’d have to ask Hoak about that. Well, no, he isn’t here right now. He’s in a major meeting—you know, getting ready for the six-planet congress—and I can’t interrupt him. Anyway, the sewers are Slug business, you know. Why don’t you file a requisition? Although they’re so backed up with the congress coming heaven knows when they’d be able to get around to it.”
She was right about that. The Slugs were so busy getting ready for their VIPs to visit that there wasn’t a single Slug in the waterworks office. In fact, there was only one person there, and that person—oh, when your luck was bad, it was bad all the way—was a female Kalkaboo.