A Planet for Rent

by Yoss

  Though neither of them complained to the other, Ettubrute was as alone as he was. Or more so.

  In Ningando, the Cetian capital, there weren’t even five humans apart from Moy. Meanwhile, pairs of Colossaur police patrolled everywhere. But those perfect specimens of their race despised Ettubrute for his “weakness” and his “dishonorable” line of work. They even ignored him when their paths crossed, as if he didn’t exist. To them, he was a virtual leper. Though Ettubrute pretended not to notice, he obviously found it much more painful when his fellows ostracized him than it would have been if they simply hadn’t been there.

  That’s probably why the two of them had ended up becoming so close.

  “The solidarity of pariahs,” Moy thought ironically, checking the explosive charges one by one and finding no mistakes.

  He’d never found out whether Ettubrute was male or female. He’d always called him “he”... He unconsciously identified his strength and brusque manners with maleness.

  Not that it made much difference. From the little he knew, Colossaurs came in something like seven sexes... In any case, they kept their genitals hidden under the plates of their armored carapaces 99.99 percent of the time. In the rare moments of sexual intimacy they had shared, pretty much compelled by their mutual loneliness, the human had always found it safer and more soothing to let himself be caressed by those big tridactyl hands and that sensitive forked tongue than to pay much attention to the flaps of skin, tinged violet like faded flowers, that he guessed were his agent’s genitals. He’d never found out whether Ettubrute expected him to penetrate them or to let himself be penetrated by them... Nor did he have any intention of finding out.

  Caressing Ettubrute’s armor-plated bulk was a strange sensation. Like feeling a machine, or a stone statue. Moy had always heard that Colossaurs had almost no sense of touch in their carapaces. But Ettubrute seemed to like that most of all. It didn’t cost Moy much trouble to satisfy him. It was like petting a dog. Just slightly bigger...

  From his earliest years, Moy, like all terrestrials, had discovered that sex was the common coin humans used to repay their obligations to the xenoids. Though it had never even crossed his mind to take up freelance social work, he figured the time he had spent satisfying the Colossaur’s strange appetites was a valuable investment... emotionally. It probably had made the difference in Ettubrute’s decision to give him a second chance with his debts.

  In this life, everything has its price.

  Everything was okay. Whistling, Moy left the tent and stepped out into the teeming plaza. The bustle, the noise, the smells, the colors hit his senses like a whack across the face. He took a deep breath and kept walking.

  A short walk before each performance had become a habit for him. The lovely spectacle of the Cetian capital and its people calmed him, and motivated him, too. It functioned more or less like: “Look at all the stuff you can have, if you work hard and don’t spend too much.”

  Normally there weren’t many pedestrians on the wide esplanade, but today was special. With the outrageous sense of aesthetics that only the Cetians could pull off (when they felt like it), a planetary-scale carnival was ringing in Union Day. The most important anniversary for every race. Commemorating the day they joined the community of the minds of the galaxy. Something like a coming of age.

  Cutting through or circling around groups of Cetians and other xenoids decked out in exotic polychrome costumes, Moy wondered whether someday humans would be able to celebrate something like this, instead of Contact Day. Or would it be better to say, Conquest Day?

  “Karhuz friz!” He was so lost in thought, it took him nearly a second to become aware of the words a Cetian had enthusiastically directed point-blank at him.

  He stared at him. The xenoid had used an ingenious system of holoprojections to make the right half of his body look completely transparent. The half-person had apparently mistaken Moy’s human physique for a particularly hilarious costume and had made some witty comment on it. Or maybe he had only asked where he’d gotten it because he wanted one, too.

  Moy only knew a few words in Cetian, and he didn’t have a translator on him. Like the Colossaur, he wasn’t crazy about them.

  He hugged the Cetian warmly, almost yelling into his ear.

  “Your half-mother sells herself to polyps!” And he laughed.

  The humanoid looked at him for an instant. Then he shook his head sideways, the Cetian gesture for nodding in agreement. He let out a crystal-clear laugh and gamboled off, happy.

  Seemed male. Pity.

  Though ninety-nine percent of the time they were refined aesthetes who treated all beings other than their own race with distant, solemn, and courteously disdainful manners, on Union Day they let their hair down completely. For these twenty-six hours, every sort of joke was allowed, and the Cetians turned to amusements they would consider obscene to even think about the rest of the year.

  The patchouli-scented aphrodisiac that he’d picked up by hugging the Cetian stimulated Moy’s pituitary and nearly gave him an erection.

  He stared after the Cetian, with half a mind to follow him.

  He must be a male (and Cetians hated and punished homosexuality), and he had never much liked his own sex. But if everything was permitted today... why not?

  The half-person had already disappeared among the crowd.

  Moy sighed. Maybe after the performance he’d find a female who was more... communicative. And who wouldn’t charge. Because Cetian hetaerae were magnificent but ridiculously expensive.

  Cetian humanoids had a rare beauty that hinted at their feline ancestry. Terrestrials were especially drawn to them. When the first males of their species visited Earth they provoked true waves of enthusiasm and passion, next to which the cults of any of the music or film stars of the past paled in comparison.

  And the females... Moy would never forget the tug on the groin he felt at the age of fourteen when he first set eyes on one of them, a female Cetian who had, probably by accident, attended an exhibition of his drawing teacher’s works. Her tall, gracefully proportioned figure, the slash of the vertical pupils in her eyes, her lithe and nimble gestures, the caressing tone of her voice. That air of exotic sensuality, which seemed to emanate from her body... And her scent.

  It wasn’t much consolation to know that there were pheromones any Cetian male or female could produce at will. The effect was the same: a burning desire to rub against their skin, to pet them, to dominate them and be dominated by them... and at the same time, an almost divine respect for them, which kept anyone who wasn’t a total idiot, or a sex maniac, or lobotomized, from ever attempting to have sex with a being born under the rays of Tau Ceti—unless you had a clear invitation from them first.

  The most interesting thing was that this effect of respectful fascination wasn’t exclusive to humans. Centaurians, Colossaurs... even the hermaphroditic, telepathic grodos seemed to lose some of their commercial aplomb in the presence of the exquisitely beautiful Cetians. One of the many riddles of the cosmos.

  After living among them for several months, Moy had reached his own conclusion: the refined Cetians, those avid supporters of the arts, had perfected what they considered the highest art of all: the art of sexual attraction. Beauty-crazed, they had turned themselves into beauty itself. It was their weapon, their secret trump card in the great poker game of power being played out among all the races in the galaxy. Just as telepathy was for the grodos, total secrecy for the Auyars, and massive bodies for the Colossaurs.

  But don’t let their looks fool you. They were angels from hell. Underneath their distant, serene charm you would almost always find cruel, calculating minds that yearned to win it all, that shrewdly cashed in on the slightest advantage. Behind the mantle of beauty they were implacable beings, capable of seducing humans just to get them to work as slaves in their brothels or sell their organs for transplants. Or worse. />
  So, they might be the Judases of the galaxy... but nobody beat them in artistic sensibility.

  It had been very clever of Ettubrute to pick Ningando as the grand finale of his tour. The capital of Tau Ceti was like the New York of Earth’s golden age, the art mecca of the galaxy. If you made it among the Cetians, you had made it among all the xenoids (save, perhaps, for the enigmatic Auyars). And the reports he had seen seemed to speak very highly of his performances. Maybe his Colossaur agent didn’t know much about art, but at least he knew where to find the people who did understand it... and who, moreover, paid well for it.

  Paying for art. Money. Credits. Everything boiled down to that.

  Moy strolled lost in thought, wandering down one of the streets that spun out like curving spokes from the wheel’s central hub: the plaza. The shadows of the tall buildings lining the pedestrian avenue fell across him.

  They were irregular structures, seemingly built in a thousand different styles, each one distinct. Yet the general effect was strangely harmonious. The Cetians had realized the impossible dream of Michelangelo, Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, and other great human city planners: the city as sculpture. The city conceived as a single whole, as a living organism that grows while maintaining a perceptible, natural order. After Ningando and the other Cetian cities, the cities of other xenoid races, no matter how magnificent, seemed identical to those of the humans: giant cancers, chaotic, sickly, putrid growths. Merely failed attempts at urban design.

  Moy recalled Colossa, Ettubrute’s home world, the first he had visited after leaving Earth. Massive city walls. Stout towers. Buttresses and bastions. Fortress-cities, conceived and built as temples to force and solidity by a powerful warrior race. Cities of excess, powerful but lacking any beauty, any grace, any rhythm. Any life.

  Here, curved or straight, volumes and surfaces combined harmoniously yet dizzyingly.

  Ningando. What wouldn’t human artists and architects give to see its structures! How avidly all his friends would have drunk in all its glorious forms. How much Jowe, for example, would have enjoyed every inch of those buildings...

  Moy stopped and looked back. Jowe...

  Brilliant, delicate, sincere, pure, uncompromising... moron, misfit, destined for failure: Jowe.

  The one with the greatest talent. The one with the most original ideas. The one who hewed most loyally to his theories of art. The one who cared the least about the market. The one who had the greatest disdain for agents and dealers.

  The one who sold the fewest works, because he never lowered himself to flattering the tastes of the xenoid tourists who came in search of exoticism and local color among human artists, and who kept his distance from testing or experimenting with form. The one who never wasted his talents on painting voluptuous social workers in provocative microdresses, or landscapes brimming with fake touristic radiance. The one who most hated the accommodating choirs of mediocre critics. Because his works delved deeper than empty provocations or the sterile masturbation of theory and countertheory. Because he made art.

  Jowe was a born loser. One who had never come to terms with selling his work for a ticket from Earth to success. A failure proud of his losses. And happy.

  Happy... The last Moy had heard of him, he was still creating, as tireless and unappreciated as ever. And to keep from prostituting his art, he had gotten into the semilegal protection racket. So he wouldn’t die of hunger.

  Hope it went well for him. Few deserved success more than Jowe.

  But life had taught Moy that success never goes to those who deserve it, but to those who seduce and cheat and fight for it, whatever it takes. For those who wink at Mammon with one eye and at the Muses with the other.

  Idealists like Jowe always fall by the wayside. The protection racket is tough. He probably owed megacredits to the Yakuza or the Mafia because his heart had gone out to some freelance social worker and her teary eyes. Or, much more likely, he was stuck in Body Spares for a few years, paying for his stupid collaboration with the dreamers in the Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation... a bunch of fanatics that Planetary Security only allowed to keep going because they’d have to give up most of their inflated antiterrorism budget if they broke up the gang once and for all.

  Jowe. What a pity that at the crossroads of life he’d picked the wrong path, the one of defeated martyrs, not the one of triumphant heroes. Moy, himself, on the other hand, had only had a little talent and a certain business savvy. But together, the two of them could really have gone far...

  And he would have loved just to be able to share Jowe’s astonishment at the exquisite architecture of Ningando, at the delicate embroidery of the clothes its people wore, at the throbbing pulse of its cosmopolitan heart...

  Absorbed in his memories, Moy nearly bumped into a group of Cetians whose somber gray clothing contrasted sharply with the explosion of forms and colors in the clothes of all their fellows.

  Body Spares.

  Earth wasn’t the only place where races with physiologies incompatible with local biosphere turned to using native bodies to be able to walk around without cumbersome life support systems. But among Cetians and other cultures, candidates for Body Spares were well-paid volunteers who considered it an honor to serve as “horses” for representatives of other races. Not criminals atoning for their crimes, as on Earth.

  And in Ningando, like almost anywhere else in the galaxy, the procedure was prohibitively expensive. It included incredibly stiff insurance fees, given the possibility of damaging the host bodies. The pittance that the Planetary Tourism Agency charged on Earth was irresistible bait for any tourist eager to mix it up with the local population without being discriminated against.

  Moy muttered a clumsy excuse in his rudimentary Cetian, stepped out of the way of the gray-garbed Cetians, and watched them. One of his favorite pastimes now was guessing the original race of the Body Spares customers by looking at how their “horses” moved. This was a group of seven, and they all walked holding hands. Though the way they walked would have been the envy of the most graceful human ballet dancer, they were clumsy compared to regular Cetians. And they gestured a lot. A lot. They were talking almost more in gestures than by vocalizing.

  Aldebaran polyps, most likely. Their sign language gave them away. Moy watched them hopefully. Unfortunately, they were headed away from the plaza and from his performance. They were probably very rich. Their super-resistant anatomies adapted perfectly well to any biosphere, so taking Cetian bodies was just an expensive whim.

  Someday he’d visit Aldebaran, too, he promised himself. Of course, it would have to be when he was very rich. Nobody but a polyp, or someone occupying the body of a polyp, could survive the tremendous pressures under the oceans of that world.

  What would it be like to weigh nearly a ton, have hundreds of tentacles and one giant muscular foot, and move slowly across the bottom of the ocean? If nothing else, a very interesting experience...

  Sigh. He’d probably never find out. More than likely there was some regulation or other stipulating that members of “inferior” races, as humans were considered, could not occupy the bodies of beings from species with full galactic rights.

  No matter how much money he managed to amass, there’d be something he could never shake. His original sin: being human... And most of the universe would be out of bounds for him forever.

  The idea was so depressing that for a second he seriously considered skipping his own act. Leaving it all and returning to Earth. He’d be poor forever, but at least he’d be among his equals.

  Probably during the Union Day carnival they’d hardly even notice he was gone, and there wouldn’t be many consequences...

  But at almost the same moment he remembered how he had gotten monumentally drunk barely a month before on a distillation of native algae that seemed acceptably similar to white wine from Earth. And how, thinking that being drunk was a perfe
ctly acceptable excuse for skipping out on one of his two weekly performances, he had remained nonchalantly asleep in his tiny accommodations.

  Three hours after his act was supposed to begin, two Colossaurs, next to whom Ettubrute had looked like a cream puff, woke him by bashing down the partition wall enclosing his room. He didn’t dare put up more than verbal resistance (they obviously did not understand Planetary, and they weren’t carrying translators) while they dragged him someplace that looked too much like a jail not to be one. There they literally threw him in head-first. It was all but a miracle he didn’t break his neck when he hit the floor.

  A mere thirty hours later his agent deigned to show up, and Moy kept his mouth closed and hung his head while he got one of the harshest reprimands of his life before being set free. Along the way, he found out that Cetians considered breaking a promise an extremely serious offense. Whether you had an excuse or not. And that’s how they’d seen it when he skipped out on a show he had previously agreed upon. He was stunned when Ettubrute revealed the size of the fine he’d had to pay (which, of course, would come out of his honoraria) to free him... And even more so when he learned that if he did it again, the punishment might even include being expelled from Tau Ceti as an undesirable alien—and having everything he’d earned on the planet confiscated.

  Obviously, being an alien was an enviable position only on Earth. Everywhere else in the galaxy it was as good as being garbage. Especially if you were an alien who didn’t belong to one of the powerful races like the grodos or the Auyars. Not even ignorance of the local law absolved you from obeying it.

  “Dura lex, sed lex,” Moy uttered solemnly as he returned resolutely to his tent. The law is harsh, but it’s the law. He couldn’t let himself suffer artist’s block, the way things were. He’d act. “The show must go on,” he whispered. Though what he really felt like doing was shouting “Shit!” at the top of his voice.