His great head wobbled and shook on his scrawny neck, as though it might topple onto his desk at any moment. Behind him stood two stone-faced sec men, arms folded across their chests, carbines slung over their shoulders. Ryan stood with Doc, J.B. and Finn, facing him, trying to look calm and under control, knowing that a wrong word here could result in a collective icing.
“Nobody speaks to me? I think that this must be because of guilt.”
Ryan shook his head. “Not so, Mayor Sissy. The boy joined us only hours before we met your sec patrol. We thought he might be a mutie, but we let him travel with us until we could be sure.”
“If you’d been sure?”
“If we’d been sure the boy was a mutie, then I’d have chilled him myself.”
“Or brought him here for trial and then execution.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Now we must decide what to do with you. Your home-keeps are waiting for me to see them and decide if they are truly whores. What is your opinion, Outworlder Cawdor? Whores?”
Ryan shrugged, as though the question wasn’t of the least concern to him. “What you decide will be right, Mayor Sissy.”
He clapped his chubby little hands softly. “Well spoken, for an outworlder. You will all do well in our militia. But not the dotard,” he said, pointing at Doc Tanner.,”He can go to the Antigone Sissy Home for the Congenitally Senile and then be tested for removal to the Ronald W. Sissy Euthanasia Center.”
“Senile! Euthanasia!” Doc roared, stamping the end of his sword stick hard on the floor and making both sec men reach for their blasters. “You posturing little urrgh.”
Ryan shut him up the only way he knew how, elbowing him so hard in the guts that Doc folded over like an eager courtier, dropping to his knees with a cracking of joints. His face turned the color of curdled milk, and he gasped for breath.
“See how he behaves,” Mayor Sissy said. “So undignified for one so old.”
“Old, maybe,” Doc said quietly. “Not surfeit-swelled or profane.”
“What are you babbling about, old man?”
“Just a thought came from nowheres, Mayor Sissy. Be glad to go and see this Home you talked about.”
“Good, that’s better. If you live in Ginnsburg Falls and you walk the line what then?”
“You’ll be fine,” they said in chorus, receiving a beam of delight in reward.
“Excellent, outworlders.” Sissy leaned back, ticking points off on his fingers. “The white-headed mutie will be hunted and destroyed. The old man to the home. That can wait until the morrow. The home-keeps for me to see I shall leave that for tomorrow. I have to oversee an exposing.”
“A what?” Ryan asked.
“An exposing, outworlder. All the nonperson babies born in the past three months will all be taken by the elders of the council and exposed on the slopes about the ville. It is one of the most important of all our rites to maintain the proper balance as our founders decided.”
Ryan took a deep breath, trying to school his face to blankness. “I see, Mayor. Where is this done?”
“To the west, at the exposing place. The creatures of the wild gather for the ceremony.”
At the back of Ryan’s mind was still that peculiar radio message they’d received, promising help for anyone who went north.
“Not to the north?”
Sissy shook his head so violently that his tiny blue eyes rolled like marbles in lard. “Never north, you cretin! Even a stupe outworlder should know that. North is trouble and darkness and death. Any citizen of my ville that goes north is a dead man!”
“Should we go for the induction?” Ryan asked after the tiny mannikin had sat slumped in his wheelchair for several moments, seemingly exhausted by his vituperative outburst.
“Yes, go. No, wait. Wait. If there is to be the exposing today, many sec men will be busy. Let it wait. Go back to your dorms, or walk about the ville. Enjoy it. See what a pleasant life we lead here. Creds and passes will be issued. Don’t ask what Ginnsburg Falls can do for you, ask what you can do for Ginnsburg Falls.”