It wasn’t bad. As a matter of fact, Giyt surprised himself by actually enjoying that sort of thing, once he got used to the idea of being known by everybody around. He liked the fact that all the humans greeted him as they passed in the streets—yes, and a good many of the eeties, too. At least Giyt thought the extraterrestrials were giving him friendly greetings, though unless he remembered to wear the earpiece translation phone, their various slurps, squawks, chirps, and gargles could have been anything.
Getting used to a new neighborhood—actually to a whole new planet—was pretty much an unprecedented experience for Evesham Giyt. He had never paid much attention to his physical surroundings. His real environment had always been electronic and global, and didn’t change simply because the location of his body had. But here he felt a real need to explore. Giyt had never spent so much time out-of-doors since the long-ago college days when his girl of the moment persuaded him to try jogging. He found he liked it. Liked to wander the streets of the town, enjoying the sight and scent of a human bakery next to a Kalkaboo soup brewery—two very different smells—and watching work crews digging new sewers and putting up new houses. It didn’t disturb him that so many of the workmen—well, the work things—weren’t at all human. He even enjoyed going to the hypermarket with Rina to pick out towels and bed linen and kitchen appliances—Giyt hadn’t even known that his bride knew how to cook—and that really surprised him about himself.
The other big advantage of being mayor was that it solved the problem of stalling Hoak Hagbarth, who had been getting increasingly insistent that a man with Giyt’s impressive (if fictitious) background in agronomy would be a treasure on the community farms. Not that farming required any very demanding physical work, because Ex-Earth was very good about providing automatic machines for all the colony’s really hard labor. Nevertheless Giyt, who had never once in his life had the experience of working with his hands, was just as well pleased to be spared the prospect of beginning it now.
There was one part of his job, though, that he hadn’t been prepared for. That was the weekly meeting with the heads of the five other Tupelo communities in the Planetary Joint Governance Commission.
The evening before his first meeting Giyt was sitting on his tiny front porch, overlooking the “decorative” clumps of spiky flowering plants, with a drink in his hand. From next door were the distant sounds of Lupe and Matya de Mir trying to get their brood ready for dinner. Apart from that, it was more quiet than Giyt had ever known.
That was one thing you had to say about Tupelo. Other than the occasional whir of one of the electric carts going past, bumblebee drone for the ones he and most of the races used, mosquito whine for the roller-skate-sized ones used by the little Petty-Primes—well, and also the New Day firecracker ceremony from the Kalkaboos every morning, and of course the once-or-twice-a-week thunder of the suborbital rocket taking off for the polar continent—well, at least generally, it was fair to say, Tupelo was wonderfully noise-free. Certainly it was not at all like Wichita. Once you got used to its awkward thirty-four-hour day and the occasional drenching rain (and Giyt was pretty sure he would get used to them, sooner or later) it was actually not bad. Giyt wasn’t prepared to go much farther than that. Rina evidently was, though; from inside the house he could hear her singing to herself as she made dinner.
The singing got closer and stopped as Rina came out, wiping her hands on her apron. “The pot roast’ll be ready in about an hour,” she announced. “Who’s that coming?”
One of the electric carts had rounded the corner and was drawing up in front of their house. A man emerged from it, consulting his memo screen. Giyt had seen him before when they arrived: as big as Hagbarth, with a spade beard, named—Tschopp? Wili Tschopp? Something like that. “Got your order from the hypermarket, missus,” the man said, looking Rina over in a way that Giyt was surprised to find he didn’t like. And then he turned to Giyt. “You weren’t at the terminal today when the new people came in,” he accused.
“Was I supposed to be?”
“Of course you’re supposed to be. You’re the mayor, aren’t you? So who’s going to welcome them and all if you’re not there?” He shook his head reprovingly, then returned his attention to Rina. “Where do you want me to put your towels and stuff, honey?”
Giyt answered for her. “Just leave them. We’ll put them away ourselves.” He hadn’t meant for his tone to be quite so sharp. After the man got back in his cart and drove away, Rina looked at him curiously. “Are you feeling nervous or something, Shammy?”
“About what?”
“About this Joint Governance Commission thing, maybe.”
“Of course not. What is there to be nervous about?”
She nodded, then said, “Listen, maybe we should stretch our legs before dinner’s ready. I’d kind of like to watch the sun set over Crystal Lake,” and he couldn’t come up with a reason why not.
As they strolled, Rina looked up at him. “You don’t really have anything to be nervous about, Shammy dear,” she told him.
“That’s good, because I’m not nervous,” he said.
“Of course not, hon,” she agreed, and began telling him the funny thing the eldest neighbor boy, eight-year-old Juan, had said about his mothers. At the shore of the lake they hesitated, then turned right, away from the town, heading toward the farm plots. Rina did all the talking. She had plenty to tell him, because Rina was blossoming in their new home; she had made several dozen instant friends, not only human but all over the community; had been offered a job she liked as receptionist in the beauty shop; was a volunteer Gray Lady at the human hospital when she was needed (which wasn’t often, because the human community was a healthy lot and most of the hospital’s beds stayed empty); was glad to take the neighbor kids to the beach when their mothers were busy. There was a time when Giyt would have found her steady stream of gossip irritating, because, really, what did he care if the General Manager of the Delt colony had made a fool of himself by getting excessively high on hallucinogens at the Delt High Mass? Or that Lupe and Matya had weathered a serious strain in their marriage just a year ago, when Lupe thought for a time that Matya was getting a bit too involved with one of her co-workers at the Public Works office, who not only was clearly sexually attracted to Matya but was unforgivably a man? Now, though, he didn’t mind Rina’s chatter at all. He didn’t really listen to it all, either, but he went so far as to pretend he did, for no other reason than that these things gave her pleasure.
It occurred to Giyt, as they strolled past one of the human farm plots (harvester machines neatly slicing ripe tomatoes and yellow peppers off their vines and trundling them to the storage building in town), that their relationship had changed since they arrived on Tupelo. He caught another glimpse of what that change had been when they reached the Petty-Prime allotment next along the shore. (Properly those particular eeties were called Petty-Primates by the human colonists—never mind what they called themselves—because they were little and they were definitely primates, more or less, but Giyt had already learned to drop the extra syllable.) One of the little pink-skinned, monkey-like creatures stopped his work of grafting a new branch on a juice tree and chattered a greeting to them. They had no translator with them so Giyt had no idea what the thing was saying, but he automatically bowed to the creature in response . . . until Rina, by his side, chattered a few syllables back and he realized the greeting hadn’t been meant for him but for her. “Hell,” he said, wondering, “when did you learn to speak their language?”