But no one said anything, and then Mrs. Brownbenttalon got down to business. She reported to the commission that the power plant on Energy Island, six kilometers across the strait, was going to need expansion, and each home planet would be required to supply funds and materials for the job. Additional farmland had been cleared on the far side of their own island, and each race was entitled to 3.962 hectares for its own purposes, the particular allotment for each to be determined by a random drawing—after which, of course, they could swap back and forth as much as they liked. The weather satellites had detected no approaching storms large enough to require special precautions for at least the next few weeks. All this information, she pointed out, was in their datastores already, so if they would simply move to accept the reports as rendered? They did. Then she paused, while Mr. Brownbenttalon whispered urgently in her ear, and twisted around to look at Giyt. “Great misery I have,” she declared, “for necessity disimproving your nuptial night participation here with irritating complaints, but Delta Pavonis guys raise problem of conflicting interests. You speak now, Delta Pavonis guy.” The Delt took his fingers out of his mouth again and began to bark at Giyt. Giyt was willing to do his best to get along with these alien freaks, even the Slugs. But he couldn’t honestly say that he cared much for the Delts. For one thing, he thought they were unnecessarily ugly, with pop eyes that stared out in all directions from the top corners of their inverted-triangle heads. (Did the first humans call them Delts because of the name of their star, or for the Greek-letter shape of their faces? Giyt didn’t know.) The Delts also smelled, well, distinctly rancid, even in the thoroughly air-conditioned confines of the Hexagon. And they had the reputation of being a nuisance.
Which last trait the General Manager demonstrated for him now. The Delt translation program was little better than the Centaurian, but Giyt was able to figure out what the Delt was complaining about. It seemed that those steelhead trout Ex-Earth had stocked into Crystal Lake were eating the copepods the Delts had planted there, and no proper Delt could enjoy his dinner without a copepod garnish to give it taste. Something had to be done, the General Manager declared. Instantly. If not absolutely at that very instant, then certainly pretty damn soon, because all the Delts were suffering greatly from their deprivation.
The Delt was doing his best to make Giyt suffer, too, because he went on and on about it. Giyt took some comfort in the fact that the other commissioners were paying very little attention to the Delt’s complaints. Mrs. Brownbenttalon was whispering cozily to her principal husband as he perched just above her nose, the Kalkaboo was scratching its shiny pelt absorbedly, the Petty-Prime was studying its readout of reports, and the Slug was simply being a slug. And then, when at last the Delt was finished—or came to a breathing space in his oration—Giyt quickly promised to look into the matter, Mrs. Brownbenttalon immediately declared the session adjourned, and the audience applauded again as they all got up to go.
“You were wonderful,” Rina told him at the door. “See? I told you it would be a breeze.”
“Yes, sure,” he said, abstracted, “but you go on home and I’ll get there when I can. Right now I need to talk to the Hagbarths about this copepod business.”
Hoak Hagbarth wasn’t in his office, which was also the Hagbarth home, but Olse was there. “You did fine,” she told him at once. “Want some lemonade? I make it myself, bring in real lemons from Earth, Oh, the meeting? Sure, we both watched you on the screen, but Hoak’s gone fishing. The copepods? My advice is, forget it. The damn Delts try that on every time there’s a new mayor, but really, it’s all Delt crap. There’s no problem. We’ve got sonic barriers to keep the trout out of the copepod breeding places—you know, the wetland shallows in the lake’s bays—and if they do eat a few of the cruddy little things every now and then, who cares? There’s always plenty left over for the Delts. You sure you won’t have some lemonade?”
But that last question came from the kitchen, where Olse Hagbarth was already pouring him some. “Yes, thank you,” Giyt called to her, accepting fate as he looked around their place. It wasn’t any fancier than his own house. They did have a grand piano in the living room, but the rest of their furniture was, if anything, cheaper and less attractive than the stuff they’d furnished the Giyts. Nor did the Hagbarths have nearly as nice a location, half a kilometer away from the lakeshore, with no real view out their windows—unless you counted the rather hideous shape of a towering Petty-Prime barracks next door. So whatever else the Hagbarths might do, no one could say they were pampering themselves at the expense of their charges.
When she came back with the lemonade Olse settled herself on the couch to face him, looking motherly and hospitable. “There’s one thing,” she said. “You called the planet Tupelo, but the eeties don’t call it that. They call it the Peace Planet. They get bent if we don’t.”
“Oh, right,” Giyt said, remembering. “I thought at the time I might’ve said something wrong—”
“Not wrong, for heaven’s sake. That’s what the ET-Huntsville people named it when they discovered it, and we can call it what we like, can’t we? But the eeties get antsy if you don’t go along with their name. As I guess you noticed. How’s the lemonade?” When he had reassured her that it was fine, she added, “Listen, Hoak was thinking about something, if you’re interested. Hoak thought you might want to take a look at some of the off-island facilities. You know, the power plant on Energy Island, that sort of thing? Or even the mines and things on the polar continent. He said he’d order you a chopper any time you want to go to the island. You’ll have to take the suborbital to visit the mines, but you could go along when the next shift goes there. Or we could order a flight up there for you. Take Rina if she’d like to go; probably you’d both enjoy seeing more of Tupelo than this one island.”
“Maybe so,” he said, dazzled at the thought of having a high-speed suborbital transport ordered up for him any time he wanted to fly a few thousand kilometers away. “I’ll talk to Rina.”
“You do that, hon. And listen, Hoak and I just want to say that you’re doing a wonderful job, fitting right in the way you’re doing. But that’s our way, isn’t it? I mean the Earth humans here. We pitch right in, don’t make waves, don’t start trouble for anyone—”
“Like that Delt, you mean?”
“Including the Delts,” she said, nodding vigorously as she stood up. “They’re all eeties, so what do you expect? Anyway, come see us again, won’t you? Maybe we’ll have a little dinner party. Now I’d better get busy and try to catch up on our reports back to the home office.”
On the way back home, Giyt thought about the trip to the polar continent. He had no idea what it would be like. Cold, yes. According to the pictures he’d seen it was almost as ice-covered as Earth’s Antarctica, and just as bleak. When he told Rina about the invitation, sure enough, she was thrilled. She was standing in their front yard, talking over the fence to Lupe from next door, with a couple of Lupe’s kids splashing in their wading pool. “I’d love it, Shammy!” Rina cried, and Lupe confirmed:
“You will. Matya worked up at the Pole a couple of seasons, before the kids began to come, and I went up sometimes for weekends. It’s nice. Great accommodations, and they have a really good health club—in the Earth-human part, I mean. I guess the other people have all that stuff, too, but I never got around to seeing it. And speaking of the kids coming . . .”