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Rina told him fondly, quite an honor for somebody who'd been on the planet for only five weeks. Giyt didn't think it was actually a great honor. There were only about eighteen hundred Earth humans there to be mayor of. Nobody else seemed to want the job, and the previous mayor, Mariam Vardersehn, flatly refused to run again, because she wanted to stay home and take care of her newborn twins.
    Still, it was an odd turn of events for the man who for all of his thirty-four years had resolutely paid very little attention to the problems of anyone but himself.
    Getting elected mayor was pretty much Giyt's own fault. When Hoak Hagbarth, the male half of Ex-Earth's team of on-site facilitators, happened to complain that the tax, license, and record-keeping functions of the government were in a terrible mess, Giyt incautiously volunteered to fix the programs. After that Hagbarth pointed out that it only made sense for the man who understood the system to be in charge of running it. "But I don't know anything about politics," Giyt protested. "Back in Wichita I didn't even vote."
    "Well, who did? Who could vote for those snot-nosed, bleeding-heart politicians—'cept the president, of course," Hagbarth added loyally. "I'm not talking about him. Walter P. Garsh is a real kick-ass go-getter that wants to make America strong again."
    "I guess so,' Giyt said, not mentioning certain reservations. President Garsh was the one who had called the prime minister of Canada a pitiful pip-squeak and threatened to punch the Chinese party secretary in the nose if he didn't repeal the import tax on American rice. Garsh's status as a kick-ass-America-the-Greater was, in fact, the principal reason Giyt would have voted for almost anybody else, if he had ever voted at all. But Hagbarth was punching his shoulder in a friendly way.
    "When Mariam got elected she didn't know anything about politics either," he said soothingly, "and she did all right. You'll be fine. Anyway, you look like a candidate. Got that friendly dumb face—not too handsome, not really ugly, either. You look—I don't know, I guess I'd have to say you look honest ."
    "Yeah, thanks," Giyt said, rubbing his shoulder. Hoak Hagbarth was a big man, even by Giyt's own standards, and he was as strong as he looked. Giyt knew that he looked honest; it had been one of his most useful traits in the pursuit of his career as a crook, but Hagbarth didn't sound as though he meant it as a compliment.
    "Tell you what," Hagbarth said, winding up the conversation, "why don't we just let the voters decide? Now I've got work to do."
    As it turned out, the voters loved the idea. There was one vote for Albert Einstein, one for George Washington, and five for, succinctly, "Me." All the remaining nine hundred and seventy-six adult members of the Earth-human electorate cast their ballots for Evesham Giyt. It was a wonderful display of democratic consensus at work.
    Mayoring didn't seem to be a very difficult job at first. Since Giyt had straightened out the fiscal programs, they pretty much ran themselves. For the first bit of time his only real duties were more or less honorary. He was expected to speak to the graduating class at the human school; that worried him a little, as he had had no previous experience in public speaking. However, there were only eleven students graduating, so Giyt's public-speaking debut wasn't really all that public. Then, come Christmas, Giyt was the one who put on the Santa Claus suit and descended from a gyro-copter onto the soccer field, where the giant community tree was winking its eighteen hundred (by then eighteen hundred and eighty-five) instrument lights, one for every human being on Tupelo. It happened to be a very sultry and rainy day, not Christmasy at all, but the human part of the colony was still resolutely sticking to the Earthside calendar, Giyt kept his ho-ho-hos short and got a big hand when he was finished, since everyone was grateful to be allowed to get out of