A Planet for Rent

Restless Books | Brooklyn, NY

Step on up, ladies and gents, right this way!

But only if you’re xenoids, it goes without saying.

We don’t want any humans...

A once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity!

An offer you won’t be able to turn down!

For rent, one planet!

One whole planet, with its oceans and its mountains, with its glaciers and its deserts, with its plains and its forests.

For rent, one planet, with all its climates, its fauna, its flora, its minerals, and its moon.

And what’s more, with all its intelligent populations.

A real bargain!

For rent, one planet, with all its history, with all its monuments and wonders. With its works of art and its pride, with its spirit and its faith in the future.

For rent, one planet, to the highest bidder, for an indefinite period of time, no conditions, no restrictions, no scruples.

For rent, one planet, whole or by shares. Whether you’re an investor from Aldebaran or Regulus, or a tourist from Tau Ceti or Proxima Centauri, or a grodo or Auyar capitalist, you can’t let this opportunity slip away.

For rent, one planet that’s lost its way in the race for development, that showed up at the stadium after all the medals had been handed out, when all that was left was the consolation prize of survival.

For rent, one planet that learned to play the economics game according to one set of rules but discovered once it started playing that the rules had been changed.

For rent, one planet, for pleasure or spite, like an old social worker who’s fallen on hard times and who’ll let anyone be her master for a few hours in exchange for a couple of credits.

For rent, one planet whose inhabitants have stopped believing in the future... in any future, and all they have left is the pride of their solitary past to help them face up to their irksome, everyday, xenoid-filled present.

For rent, one planet, for you, innocent child of a culture and race that won the lottery, for you, privileged only because you’re from some other solar system, because you grew up under the light of some other star.

For rent, one planet!

Cheap!

Don’t miss your chance!

Sign your contract now!

Let’s just warn you, in good faith... you might want to read all the fine print first.

Because maybe, thinking you’ve just rented the planet, you’ll find out you’ve actually bought it. For all eternity. And, instead of paying with the credits you’ve rightly earned with your hard work and the sweat of your brow under the light of another sun, the purchase price was your soul.

But anyway... if none of that bothers you, come on: we’re waiting for you.

Don’t forget.

Tell all your friends, right away.

For rent, one planet.

The cybertaxi pulled up at the astroport entrance. Lifting the hatch, Buca extracted her long legs from the cab. First the right, then then the left. Then she straightened up with studied languor, hewing to her motto: Always be sensual.

On the other side, Selshaliman imitated her, and she envied his naturally dignified movements. With their shiny, grayish chitin exoskeletons, grodos had the rigid look of men wearing medieval armor. And majesty, plenty of it.

A Cetian would have looked nicer, in any case. Svelte, almost feline, so sensual; no wonder half the young people on earth imitated their way of walking.

But a grodo also had his advantages. She watched Selshaliman pay for the taxi with his credit appendage. His rapid, quasimechanical gestures were still extremely unsettling to Buca. Like he was a gigantic spider or praying mantis. But the image became more bearable when she recalled that she would soon have the human equivalent of a credit appendage: a subcutaneous implant reflecting the generous bank account that this exotic had just established in her name.

They went inside. Buca drank in the last terrestrial sights she would see for a long while. The microworld of the astroport.

The astroport and the neighborhood around it were swarming with traffic, as always. Xenoids just arriving, looking for excitement, and already being hailed by the network of tour operators from the Planetary Tourism Agency. Xenoids leaving the planet, exhausted and loaded down with cheap, picturesque souvenirs.

All sorts of them were there. Non-humanoids, like the enormous polyps of Aldebaran with their slow rolling motion on that one round, muscular foot; or the guzoids from Regulus, long, segmented, and scaly; or the Colossaurs, stout and armored. And also humanoids: Cetians and Centaurians. The former, svelte and gorgeous; the latter, blue and distant.

There were also humans, like that group getting off an astroport shuttle and practically racing to get inside. They looked like scientists, all of them very nervous. They were probably off to some conference, and they were all clustering around one fairly young guy who seemed to be the lead investigator. Though he looked pretty confused, too; this was obviously their first trip off the planet. But they were also privileged in their own way. Buca envied them a little. Earth allowed its citizens to leave only on very rare occasions, and only under very special circumstances. Probably some xenoid scientists wanted their human colleagues to attend their event and had paid all the travel costs and taken care of the paperwork.

You could even see a few mestizos here and there. Like that girl with the large eyes and the bluish skin. The Centaurian with her might be her father. Ramrod-straight, like all the rest.

The girl had to be famous, because her face looked pretty familiar to Buca. Maybe some simstim star, or a rich heiress... Or more likely a social worker like herself, but higher ranking. She couldn’t quite remember. Bah, it’d come back to her later. It wasn’t all that important, anyway.

Selshaliman moved his antennas nervously; he would rather have taken a teletransport booth to the central ring instead of crossing the whole thing on foot. He seemed uncomfortably aware of being the only grodo around.

These insectoids were crazy about security. They had their own network of teletransport booths and private communication circuits. A silly, overpriced whim, in Buca’s opinion. But if they could afford it... After the mysterious Auyars, the grodos were the most powerful race in the galaxy.

They were telepaths. That was the foundation of their vast commercial empire. Maybe they couldn’t read the thoughts of other species, but picking up on the moods and emotions of everyone they talked with put them at a very appreciable advantage in all their commercial deals.

She looked at him distrustfully. People said they were incapable of picking up and interpreting the thoughts of humans as sharply as they could those of their fellow grodos. But still... Selshaliman couldn’t seriously believe that she might be in love with him...

But just in case, she closed her mind, humming the opening bars of a catchy current technohit. A trick she had picked up from her friend Yleka.

A freelance social worker had to be very careful. Never let her guard down. She couldn’t rest till the hypership had taken off. So many stories were going around... Some social workers had put their trust in xenoids who later turned out to be humans, disguised with bioimplants. And they’d paid for their gullibility with months or years in Body Spares...

She looked around her. In the astroport, too, the unspeakable booths were everywhere. Inside them, bodies in suspended animation. Waiting for a client...

As if in reaction to her gaze, at that very instant the door to one opened and its occupant came wobbling out. Buca tried not to, but... she looked him in the eyes, as if hypnotized. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw it wasn’t him. Ever since Jowe had been arrested, every time she saw someone come out of a booth she was afraid of finding him with empty eyes.

Maybe it was stupid, but she couldn’t shake her guilt complex...

Some races, such as the Auyars, were biologically incompatible with the terrestrial biosphere. To enjoy the tourist paradises that the planet had to offer, they had created the system of Body Spares.

All of the parameters of the “client” (memory, personality, intelligence quotient, motor skills) were computer-encoded and then introduced into the brain of a host-human. The xenoid gained both mobility and access to all the skills and memories of the “spare body.”

There was just one “minor” detail: forty percent of the time, the person whose body and brain were occupied by the extraterrestrial remained conscious.

That must feel like being a marionette, moved by another’s will...

When the process was in its experimental phase, being a “horse” (a term derived from Voodoo) was voluntary, and almost well-paid. But there weren’t enough volunteers anymore, not once it became clear that there could be aftereffects. Nowadays, the sentence for any criminal offense was a certain number of days, months, or even years in Body Spares.

It was the modern equivalent of Russian roulette; not all “riders” took equally good care of their “horses.” Some tourists pushed them to exhaustion, then simply paid the resulting fine. It was so cheap... Many humans lost their minds after being treated that way for five or six weeks. There were even rumors floating around that at Body Spares they tried to get all the spares to lose their minds. A suspiciously ambiguous law stipulated that you only had full civil rights if you enjoyed perfect mental health. Any obligation to return the use of a body to its legitimate owner would automatically vanish if he went schizophrenic.

Buca thought of Jowe, so sensitive and delicate. He wouldn’t last two months. He was probably wishing he would die already...

But maybe—the idea was unlikely, she knew, but it was comforting—since he was young and graceful, some wealthy and powerful xenoid would have picked him. And now he’d be wrapped up in important negotiations with top officials from the Planetary Tourism Agency. That would be so ironic...

She only prayed that he wouldn’t be “mounted” by an Auyar. They didn’t mind paying the fines, no matter how steep, and they always destroyed the bodies they used as “horses.” The grodos seemed trusting and naïve by comparison with the Auyars, for whom paranoia seemed to be second nature. They were ultraprotective of their privacy. Nobody knew what they truly looked like, or many facts about them...

Human and grodo, they walked through a giant hologram of Colorado’s Grand Canyon. Ahead of them, two Aldebaran polyps were silently talking with their tentacle gestures, completely engrossed. Buca watched them in amusement: following the fluorocarbonate pollution of the twentieth century, and after being strip-mined for minerals by a mining corporation from Procyon, the place wasn’t even a shadow of that image.

She noticed with pride that Selshaliman was also stopping to admire the panorama. One of the few things the terrestrials could feel proud of was the well-oiled machinery of their advertising and xenoid tourism industries.

Buca had been with an ad designer for a couple of months, and she knew some of the tricks of the trade. Colors imperceptible to the human eye. Infrasound and ultrasound. And recently, even telepathic waves for the grodos...

What’s good for the goose... It was a bit of poetic justice if the Planetary Tourism Agency exploited the xenoids’ special abilities to drain their bank accounts.

They were coming up to the first checkpoint, which was surrounded by the inevitable Court of Miracles: self-employed businessmen, illegal moneychangers, drug peddlers, and freelance social workers. And, standing discreetly apart, waiting for offers, very elegant in their tight black synleather clothes, the tall, handsome young men who did male social work... It was completely against the law, and Planetary Security cracked down hard on it. In theory.

All of them struggling against each other and with the tourists to earn some credits. Just a month earlier, in a different astroport, Buca had been part of the show, not a witness to it.

But the show was always the same, and with the same actors.

The Disabled Veteran who would show you his radioactive stumps for a few credits. The Victim of Body Spares, drooling piteously and holding out a trembling hand for alms. The Persecuted Believer, begging for help to finish his sacred pilgrimage. The Poor Mother And Her Dirt-Stained Daughter, lying in a corner, both watching everything with the eyes of abused animals. The Rich Man Down On His Luck, feigning dignity to sell his skilled forgeries, the alleged remnant of a family inheritance. The Endangered Species Vendor, with his hidden cages full of solenodons, talking parrots, or leopard cubs. The Orphan Girl, who for a hundred credits would show off her family photos... and everything else, and then she’d try to con or assault her extraterrestrial benefactor. The Fun-Seeking Young University Student, who wasn’t poor (that had to be clear) but wouldn’t sneeze at a few credits or a polite invitation to eat, if some generous humanoid who shared his same-sex tastes were to invite him...

The fauna that all the tourism guides warned about.

They only existed because they were tolerated: Buca recalled Jowe’s words. A façade of false naturalness, a risky alternative for thrill-seeking tourists. The black market of self-employed tour operators. Their homemade products and services made the sophisticated efficiency of the Planetary Tourism Agency look good merely by contrast... and the agents of Planetary Security were keeping watch in the background, making sure the “self-employed” never became a real danger to the tourists.

Among them all, the freelance social workers stood out. Super-tall fluorescent platform shoes forcing them to walk with a gait that could look sinuous or simply unsteady, like balancing on stilts. Clothes tight as a second skin, too short, semi-transparent, or featuring a seductive play of light. Designs meant not to be suggestive but to put everything right out there on display. To leave just the smallest possible portion of the meat for sale to the client’s imagination.

Buca looked at the women, half amused and half repulsed.

They were her past.

She compared them with her reflected image in the polished plastometal walls. She wasn’t one of them anymore. She had ceased to dress in the lascivious uniform of desire.

She was wearing a pseudosilver ensemble that molded itself to her svelte form, suggesting it without clinging shamelessly to her body. The hues of the fabric shifted, interacting with her biofield. Only her face and hands were exposed; she had already displayed enough skin to last her a thousand years. This was the sort of dress the elegant humanoid ladies of Tau Ceti or Alpha Centauri wore.

Her skin was almost pallid enough for her to be taken for a Centaurian...

Maybe she should have bought that skin dye. Pastel blue. It would have heightened the illusion, and Selshaliman wouldn’t have minded. Over and above the childish cult for xenoids and for imitating their looks and customs, xenoid women were simply more... distinguished.

Being with Selshaliman was all it took for her to breeze through the second checkpoint without being bothered. Only authorized social workers could enter this ring freely. Freelancers had to be accompanied, at least for the time being, by a xenoid to get inside.

The sudden pandemonium of colors and sounds bewildered Buca for a second, as it always did.

The middle ring of every terrestrial astroport was a zone of carefully controlled tolerance, restricted to travelers passing through or tourists eager to take advantage of the reduced customs duties. Social workers of every race and size, each dressed more provocatively than the last. And their male counterparts, in their black uniforms. Native crafts, souvenir shops, all the tourist paraphernalia you found everywhere, all over the planet. But more artificial, cheaper, and more concentrated.

Buca stopped in front of a hologram of New Paris. Before it was a half-melted piece of metal that, according to the sign, had come from the actual Eiffel Tower.

She had never been there. There were so many places on Earth that she might never get to now...

It didn’t matter that New Paris was just a plastometal reconstruction of the old, authentic city, which had been leveled by a nuclear blast in the days following Contact. Like all terrestrials, Buca felt great pride in the Earth’s past glory.

In Greece and Rome and the Aztecs and the Incas and Genghis Khan and the Mongols and the pyramids and the Great Wall of China and the Indian rajahs and the Japanese samurais and Timbuktu and New York.

The present was grodos and all the other xenoids.

Selshaliman also stopped in front of the hologram of New Paris. Hadn’t he ever been there? It was ironic. Whatever the Earth was today, it was all due to them... and their money. And they didn’t take advantage of it.

“Welcome to Earth, the most picturesque planet in the galaxy. Hospitality is our middle name! We’re only here to make you feel better than you feel at home.” Laughing, Buca recited one of the omnipresent slogans of the Planetary Tourism Agency.