Georgia on My Mind and Other Places by Charles Sheffield Page A

to blame Waldo for being fat, but after I saw his aunts I vowed never to accuse him again. With such genes, he didn’t stand a chance. In fact, it was a tribute to the size of Ruby and Ruth that Pharaoh Potter was not himself a noticeable landmark. He was a big-framed man, well run to seed now but still possessing plenty of muscle on arms like a gorilla. He shook my hand, in a grip that mashed my bones together.
    “Play any tennis?” he said.
    “Haven’t for a while. I used to.” It seemed the safest answer: express interest, but don’t let yourself get dragged into any possibility of playing. I did not know it at the time, but my reply exhibited an uncanny prescience. “I never was much good,” I added.
    “Because you’re little and weedy,” Pharaoh replied. “A person needs some weight to make decent tennis shots.” He went off to sit in the corner with his head bowed. He was a man apparently in the grip of some great sorrow.
    I turned to Mortimer C. Wilberforce, just as Waldo called us through for dinner. Mort was the odd man out in the group, a function I suppose of his job. It’s probably a sort of professional requirement among morticians, that if you can’t actually be a corpse, you ought to look as much like one as you can. Mortimer did his best. If he had been the right height for his weight, he would have been about four-foot-two. As it was he was six-five, and pale as a well-blanched stalk of celery.
    I suppose he ate, but in this he was rather like a government official working. No matter how long and hard you looked, you would never see it happen.
    From my point of view, his behavior at the dinner table had one great disadvantage. I wanted to talk to him, but like a mute at a funeral he had no conversation and no apparent interest in anything. He seemed half-asleep. It was left to the others, and Pharaoh in particular, to make the running in the talk department.
    Which he certainly did. According to Waldo the dinner table conversation usually consisted of a catalog of deficiencies, Waldo’s personal ones and that of the free food that he was providing. Tonight, however, another concern predominated.
    Pharaoh Potter’s tennis partner had become disabled, and would be unable to play the next day. Pharaoh seemed to regard this as an Act of God, although he admitted that the other’s injury had occurred when Pharaoh knocked him flat and ran right over him.
    “It was actually his own fault,” Pharaoh explained. “He was poaching. The ball was clearly in my territory on the court. He should never have been there at all.”
    “But now, my love,” said Aunt Ruth, “you have a problem. You need a partner.”
    “Yeah. I know.” Pharaoh glanced along the table. I could see him dismissing me.
    ‘Little and weedy.’ Well, better that than a great fat lout.
    Mortimer, as the closest living relative of the stick insect, received an even lower approval rating. Ruth and Ruby were clearly A-l in the weight department, but they had the great disadvantage, for a men’s doubles, of being females.
    That left . . .
    I saw Pharaoh’s eye rest on Waldo, who was fighting the good fight for his share of the victuals.
    I watched the wheels turn. Adequate weight, certainly. Apparently in good health, as anyone must be who could hold his own with Ruth and Ruby in the struggle to be at the top of the food chain. Available tomorrow, since lawyers never did any useful work.
    “Waldo!”
    My business partner, distracted in his tug-of-war with Aunt Ruth over a dish of sliced green beans, turned to face Pharaoh.
    “What?”
    “You. You can be my tennis partner tomorrow.”
    “I cannot!” Waldo, in an excess of emotion, lost his grip on the plate of food.
    “Of course you can, Waldo,” Aunt Ruby said firmly. “You know how to play. I’ve seen you.”
    “When I was a child!”
    “It’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget.”
    “I have to work tomorrow.”
    “Nonsense. You can take a day off.” Aunt