A Planet for Rent

by Yoss

  It seemed logical to me. After the dead art of past eras, the living creators.

  Logical. I couldn’t imagine how terribly logical it was.

  We started frequenting exhibits and performances by the most famous artists of the moment. Well, not exactly the most famous. The most famous ones who still lived on Earth.

  I learned the meaning of the word “patron” when I saw him in action. Though he was a very odd patron.

  He gave his credits away lavishly, without drawing up contracts, without committing himself to support anyone’s career. But they were just small contributions—“to relieve the artist’s situation,” as he put it himself while smiling his toothy grin.

  I couldn’t see the sense in what he was doing. Was he planning to devote himself seriously to the art business? The big xenoid dealers had cornered the market on exports from Earth, as everyone knew. Ettu could buy all the art produced on the planet; if he didn’t get the okay from the galactic sharks in the field, no collector would buy any of it from him.

  And if he was really aiming to help human artists, why toss around these relatively insignificant amounts, which might relieve their lives for a month or two but not longer? Why not pick three or four truly talented artists and give them some real support?

  Not long ago I saw the fishers in the Bay of Fundy. Before spreading their nets, they dumped the guts and scraps from their previous catch into the water. This clever operation, which attracted all the fish eager to devour the blood and entrails of their unfortunate peers, is called “baiting.”

  Ettu did know exactly what he wanted. And how to get it. But I did not understand what that was until later. Much less why he wanted it. Though in practice, those amounted to the same thing.

  During the time when the Colossaur was playing patron, our trust blossomed again. As if trying to make up for lost time, we became closer than ever.

  After pretending to be distant and pretentious at every art show, Ettu would let off steam with me. He enjoyed being just as childish as me, dropping the serious talk and the businessman mask. We played a lot. I soon realized that under that armored carapace of his, he was more of a playful puppy than a terrible machine of destruction like the one I’d seen when he saved my life from the attack by my former gang.

  He loved to carry me on his back, playing horsey with me. Day by day, I found it easier to see him not as a dangerous, almighty xenoid but as my ideal accomplice in all sorts of games and pranks. Slowly, without imposing himself, he pulled off the miracle of getting me to stop missing the companionship of Dingo and the others, which I could never get back now.

  When we went to art shows and the high-society afterparties, he dressed me like a miniature woman, like a living doll, and I went along with the masquerade, feigning a grownup’s serious and affected dignity and taking great care of my clothes. When I got bored of all the chatter about abstruse theories like transmodernism and holofigurative representation, all it took was a glance at Ettu’s tiny eyes for me to understand that it was all a kind of secret grand masquerade, in which only we were real and only we knew there was nothing behind the others’ masks. A brief annoyance we had to put up with before going on with genuine life. The life of games and jokes in the Castle.

  When I turned ten, he threw a surprise party for me that caused a commotion all over New York. All the artists and their minions came. Many of them gave me works of theirs as presents... I still have some: today they’re worth hundreds of thousands of credits, given that the artists who made them won’t produce any more...

  Only one thing was missing: children. It wouldn’t have cost Ettu anything to invite three or four dozen kids from any gang in Queens or Harlem, but he didn’t want to. In any case, I had already learned my lesson. Childhood is too precious to share with someone just because you both share the same age.

  All my apprehensions about his intentions died once and for all that day. The following week, as a magnificent post-birthday celebration, he skipped exhibits and inaugurations and devoted all his time to me. We went to a thousand amusement parks around the city, bought or rented all sorts of pets and riding animals, which wandered grunting and stamping around the enormous lawns of the Castle, practically driving to distraction the efficient and expensive huborg servants that Ettu had gotten from the Auyars, paying six month’s rent in advance.

  Because it soon became obvious that things might go on much longer than the “couple of months” he had mentioned to me at first. Ettu seemed to be in no hurry.

  On the contrary, he grew more interested each day in my desires and plans for the future, as if he were expecting us to spend several years together.

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be. Ballerina, painter, shuttle flight attendant, executive? Professions that were only a dream for a girl from Barrio 13 now seemed within my reach. And boringly real.

  “Liya, one way or another, you have your whole life ahead of you,” he always told me, stroking my head and cutting short my indecisive ruminations. “For now, enjoy life, find out about things, learn. You’ll have to choose later, when you’re grown.”

  And did I ever find out and learn! Ettu found the best alternative education programs for me. Education through play, which only the children of the big shareholders in the Planetary Tourism Agency had access to, the sort of education I’d never even dreamed of in Barrio 13.

  He even arranged to have some facts about the history of Earth translated for me from the educational materials of other races. That could have cost him some stiff fines, maybe even a memory erasure, if he’d been caught. The facts about how xenoids viewed my race were stark and cruel in their schematic coldness. But they only confirmed what Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation leaflets constantly repeat, what every human learns almost subconsciously from childhood: they weren’t our friends, they were our masters.

  But to see it written by the xenoids themselves, without all their altruistic rhetoric, was very hard. You always dreamed that it was all just slander, mistakes in Earth’s administration, problems with the transfer of power...

  At first I didn’t understand why Ettu revealed it all to me. Revealed the truth, no less terrible for always having been intuitively known.

  “Do you feel guilty for me?” I asked him in a fury after stomping on one of the more explicit and difficult holovideos about the political economy of the galactic races toward Earth. “Because just being born on Colossa gave you all the privileges I’ll never aspire to as a human?”

  And he smiled.

  But I wanted to wound him, and I kept at it. “Do you think adopting me as your daughter will make me forgive the whole galaxy in your name? Do you think I’ll ever love you?”

  Then he got serious and told me in a carefully neutral tone of voice, “Liya, I don’t like talking about this. There’s something I’ve never told you: I can’t have children. I’m not... fit. On Colossa, only the biggest and strongest have the right to leave descendants. They let me live—but they sterilized me.”

  Of course, I already knew in practical terms what “sterilized” meant: what the Planetary Security guys did when they flew over my barrio with their radiation transmitters “so the shit won’t overflow,” as they put it. Lots of adults protested, yelled, got angry. But the social workers and most of the young people just shrugged and laughed, joking that at least they wouldn’t have to worry about the venereal disease that lasts nine months, followed by a lifelong convalescence.

  After my tantrums and my hatefulness, I always went back to him. He was the only one I had... And in a way, I felt... pity? affection?... for him. Those aren’t as different as you might think.

  I knew he was alone, much more alone than me. I was on my own planet at least, where I wasn’t anybody, but I was one of many nobodies. He was a stranger, and always would be. A stranger on his own world, where they didn’t consider him Colossaur enough to let him reproduce, a
stranger here on Earth, where he was too Colossaur to be anything else.

  We didn’t talk much about it. In the middle of our talks about games, about the human history that I was starting to find more fascinating than the best stories, because on top of everything else it was real, sometimes a word about it slipped in. It always sounded strangely alien, and it would practically paralyze us to hear it. Like we were trying to understand the odd word, wondering where it had come from and what it meant, as if we didn’t both know perfectly well.

  Children... Friends... Race... Belonging... Loneliness... Love...

  No, it wasn’t the words but the ideas they contained that spread the icy silences when I would endeavor to come up with something else to talk about, as if trying to avoid the iceberg whose reflection I saw gleaming in Ettu’s little eyes.

  One day he brought the first artist home. They talked for a while, Ettu listlessly and the other almost in a frenzy. Then Ettu invited him upstairs, and they spent a long time in his apartments. Not in the inner sanctum that he never let me enter, but in his bedroom, with the enormous bed that I knew he never slept in.

  Later the artist, a pompous little genius of the holoprojections, came down strutting around smugly, but with a strange expression on his face, a mixture of disgust and terror. And Ettu said goodbye with a sad—yet final—smile.

  I ran upstairs, with a horrible suspicion... The bed was unmade, as if someone very large and very heavy had been romping in the sheets. Strange liquids were staining the silk. And the smell of sex, which I knew so well, mixed with Ettu’s acrid and cloying scent.

  He surprised me there, and I said nothing. I don’t exactly know why, but I felt... betrayed. I thought it was because he had introduced the grownup world into the childhood paradise of the house. But, deep down, I knew it was something else.

  Jealousy.

  Why them and not me?

  I wasn’t such a little girl as I’d been months earlier...

  I tore the costly silk sheets in a fury, my eyes moist, like a wronged woman. And I peed on the mattress, vengeful as a hurt child. The following day, Ettu instructed the huborgs never to let me enter his suite until they had finished erasing all traces of his encounters with artists.

  I never again found traces of what I thought of as his repulsive xenoid lechery.

  Oh, if I had only suspected the truth...

  Artists continued to visit. After a while they became a routine. Always different, always urgent, hopeful, skeptical but clinging to that possibility. When I saw them arrive I’d withdraw, as if to express my disapproval of all that. Ettu always had long conversations with them. Sometimes they went upstairs, sometimes not. When he sent artists off without inviting them into his bedroom, their faces had the look of being devastated but, at the same time, sort of relieved. When artists came downstairs after a while, they seemed happy... but always with that shadow of disgust.

  As if they’d sold their souls to the devil, it occurred to me to think one time.

  I naturally pretended to be playing, though I was really spying all the while. I tried to find out what it was that made some of them eligible for his pleasure and so prizeworthy while others didn’t deserve that “honor.” My feminine instinct told me that the whole pantomime of a long conversation, then going upstairs or not, was very important to Ettu. And that the key lay in the questions he asked and the answers he got.

  One day, dying of curiosity, I dared to bring up the subject directly. What was all that? What was he up to? Why make them go upstairs if he was going to give them money? Couldn’t he do that just as well downstairs? Was this what he came to Earth looking for? Why the whole masquerade of acting mad for beauty, hiding the fact that he was only interested in easy, cheap sex, like all the others? Wouldn’t it have been easier, cheaper, and more sincere just to ask them?

  “Sometimes, especially when dealing with difficult issues, the easiest road isn’t the best,” he answered, very serious, looking me straight in the eye.

  That confused me.

  It was strange, contradictory. As if I’d suddenly discovered another Ettu. I’d been innocently living with him for months, and he’d never tried anything. I hadn’t seen that he had any lovers, either. And now, all this interest in sex.

  It all came down to sex, always: the perennial means of exchange between humans and xenoids. What every tourist came to find on Earth. But—my playmate, too? Practically my adoptive father, so taciturn at times and other times so communicative?

  We never brought up the subject again.

  As the scene was constantly repeated—artists showing up buried in debt, heading upstairs after the interview with Ettu and later coming down contented, or else being sent packing—I ended up accepting the inevitable. Yes, sex. He might be a very special sort, but it was still all about sex. Ettu only liked adult human artists. And his respect for me no longer seemed like respect but scorn. The only reason he didn’t touch me was that he wasn’t attracted.

  So why did he love me, then? The eternal question.

  That night I ran away. I didn’t have the platinum card, but I had a couple of regular ones. With enough money on them to...

  To do what? I knew all too well that I had no place to go home to. Even though my Abuela still lived in Barrio 13, accepting my frequent remittances so she could keep on happily destroying her liver, I no longer belonged there. And what’s even worse, after those months of traveling around the planet and living this new life in the Castle, I was starting to doubt whether I belonged anywhere.

  If there was any place in the world for me, it was with Ettu. If I cared about anyone and if there was anyone who cared about me, it was him. But that was precisely what I felt least disposed to accept.

  I rented a room in a third-rate hotel... In theory a minor shouldn’t be able to do that, but credits work wonders in practice.

  The first night, I could hardly sleep. I was restless, tossing and turning all night long. I was furious. Jealous. Of Ettu, much as it angered me to admit it. Why other men and women, and not me? Wasn’t I woman enough for him? Lots of guys would pay a fortune to enjoy a ten-year-old virgin eager to stop being one. That stupid Colossaur and his obsession with beauty—not that the artists were so handsome. Being able to create beauty didn’t make them special or better. They were rotten inside, and he knew it as well as I did. I was more beautiful than all of them together...

  The next night I put on my most womanly dress and went to Lolita, a nightclub known as a hangout for teenagers of both sexes—and for xenoids more or less interested in pedophilia.

  I drank one kind of wine after another, like that first night in the New Cali Galaxy restaurant. Maybe it was because I was so coldly determined to get drunk that I never fully lost consciousness of what I was doing.

  I danced for hours, with humans and grodos, Cetians and Centaurians. I put my whole soul, with all the anger and confusion I was feeling, into every movement; I was the star that night. Everybody was watching me, and I got plenty of propositions. Fewer than I was expecting, I admit. Apparently my obvious need for sex, here and now, frightened away most potential clients.

  I smiled politely at each offer, and that was all. I was waiting for him. Just him. Stupid me, completely forgetting that Colossaurs can barely grasp the meaning of music. He never would have gone to a place like that. Or maybe that was why I was so hoping he would come looking for me there... Even if just to have him bring me home like a naughty runaway girl. Because it would have meant that he cared a little about me. That he took me a little bit seriously. That he loved me a little... since I hated to admit that I was the one who loved him.

  He didn’t come. I wanted to forget. If it wasn’t him, somebody like him would do. That had to be my night, and no stupid armored Colossaur was going to mess it up for me by not showing up. I kept on drinking; I smoked pot, sniffed coke. I even let a Centaurian who showed mo
re interest than the others give me a dose of telecrack, which fortunately must have been fake.

  And at the break of dawn, when I was about to faint from sheer exhaustion, I left with him. For a third-rate hotel, the sort that stinks of half-rotten food and dry semen. Every city has hundreds of these hotels, where xenoids of few means rent one-night rooms to enjoy sex with humans.

  I hardly felt him make me a woman. It wasn’t as wonderful or as painful as I’d heard. I didn’t enjoy it much, and it didn’t make me ache. It just... happened. Afterwards I fell asleep, smiling about my triumph, but wanting to cry.

  In the morning the Centaurian was gone. Taking my cards and clothes with him, of course. I didn’t feel like reporting him—after all, he’d almost done me a favor. And it wouldn’t have done any good, anyway: apart from the fact that he was a real xenoid and I was just a human, if he’d ever told me his name I’d forgotten.

  My head ached as if some monster inside my brain were trying to enter the world through the bones in my skull. And I was dying of thirst, but there wasn’t even a glass of water in the room. My legs ached too, but not much. What did bother me was my stomach, where the humanoid’s blue semen had dried and formed a crust that was starting to itch. I took a shower, and with a few stitches turned the pillowcases into an improvised garment, not very elegant but good enough to pass for a poorly made dress. Luckily he had left my shoes. Maybe he thought he wouldn’t find them easy to sell...

  When I went downstairs, Ettu was waiting for me. Sitting calmly in the lobby. As if nothing had happened. He only asked, “Done? How was it? Happy now?”

  I looked at him with anger, with hatred. There were so many things I wanted to tell him. Why had he let me do it? Why hadn’t he ripped that Centaurian louse to shreds before he even touched me? Why hadn’t it been him?

  What was I? Why did he bring me with him, like one more object, since he didn’t need a guide to the planet, since he knew it better than most of us, its inhabitants?