A Planet for Rent (17 page)

By the time I was I was ten, I realized I wouldn’t inherit so much as the dust from the little bit of land my father farmed. I wasn’t too fond of spending the whole day glued to the field, anyway. What I most wanted was to live in a real city, not die making scratches in the Earth. And since I was always pretty dense, and not even any good at sports in spite of having this big old body, the only way I could figure to make my dream come true and get out of there was the uniform. So as soon as I turned sixteen, I ran away from home, with my little bundle of clothes and my one pair of shoes. I listened to those holoposters that promise you heaven and Earth, and I enlisted in the Planetary Security corps. I would have done it sooner if I could’ve fooled them and pretended I was older than I was. Even though I looked twenty, they’d only have to run the numbers to figure out I wasn’t even eighteen yet.

Ah, Baracuyá del Jiquí. Sometimes I get nostalgic and wonder what my brothers and sisters are up to. Whether they ever got married, whether I have nieces and nephews, whether they got beaten to death by the Earth. Whether Mama and Papa are still alive. They must be really old. I never went back, never even sent them a holovideo. It was hard, but I told myself, “Romualdo Concepción Pérez, not one step back, not even to get a running start.” And I stuck to it.

Most of the old guard in Planetary Security came from places like my village—or worse. Our boss, Colonel Kharman, is from the Dayaks on Borneo. A tribe that still lives in primitive communities, bones through their noses, shrinking the heads of their dead enemies.

Back then, no wimp from the big city would want to wear this uniform or put on this badge. Well, not today, either—you’re the exception, not the rule. Your little city friends think anything’s better than being a “fink,” as some imbeciles still call us.

Did I have a hard time at the Academy? You bet I did. I had to learn how to use the sanitary facilities, the computer terminals... how to fight, like it or not. That’s something I had in my blood. If I hadn’t learned how to defend myself, to dish it out and to take it without crying, almost before I learned how to walk, my four older brothers would have beaten me to a pulp. Or my own father would have beaten the stuffing out me for being a wimp and a crybaby.

Back then, we only took one year of preparatory classes, and then they set us loose on the streets. There was real urgency. If we survived the first three months, it’s because we were good students. If we were left by the wayside... Well, the xenoids from the Selection Committee had millions of applicants to fill any vacancy in the corps.

At first, with no friends or acquaintances, without the slightest idea how things worked here in the cities, we tried to follow the Manual to the letter. Bringing the full weight of the law down equally on anyone who broke it, not taking anything into account. For anybody.

As for me, nobody was going to send me back to Baracuyá del Jiquí for going easy on a civilian. They might be as poor as me and as desperate as me—but if it was them or me, it was going to be them. Same with strikes. If you had to give a good dose of electroclub to a bunch of uranium miners who were asking for better antiradiation suits instead of working, you let ’em have it. They might be as wretched as us... but that’s why they were paying me, dressing me, and letting me live here. And in this life everything has its price.

Pickpockets, pushers, the Mafia, Triads, Yakuza? To me, they were all the same shit. Tough on everybody. Those were brutal times.

It was in those days that the legend of a street war between crime and us was born. Because they didn’t pull punches. For every Yakuza we sent to Body Spares, his friends rubbed out one agent. Till things started to even out.

It’s only now I realize how stupid I was. If it hadn’t been for that lesson old Aniceto taught me with the fish-eating critter in the aquarium in his apartment, I’d probably be dead now. Like lots of guys who graduated with me but who weren’t lucky enough to meet someone who could explain the rules of the game to them.

I can’t complain, for sure. I’ve made out like a prince.

When I’d already been working on the street for a couple of years, and the Yakuza and the Mafia knew who I was and looked out for me like I was pure gold, Amendment 456 came out and made everybody in Planetary Security an automatic citizen of the city where he worked. Me, Romualdo Concepción Pérez, born in Baracuyá del Jiquí... a citizen of New Miami!

I felt on top of the world. A couple months later, I made sergeant, they assigned me my own tiny apartment, and I moved out of the common dorm. That’s how I’ve lived all these years.

Why haven’t I moved up in the ranks? I’m going to let you in on a secret, Markus. Take it or leave it. The sergeant is like the keystone in the arch. Come on, son, I can’t believe a kid with your education doesn’t know what that is—the keystone, the stone that holds all the others in place. The one that goes right in the middle. The one that’s most secure.

Who gets it when some spoiled xenoid complains? The lowest-ranking agent. And who has to put his head on the chopping block when they kill some idiot tourist and the xenoids make human heads roll to calm their people? The top brass. And who are the obvious targets for the wack jobs from the Xenophobe Front, every time it they get the bright idea of orchestrating one of their little campaigns against the “finks and buglickers”? The officers. Not one of the guys who started out with me is still around. Oh, sure, some of them were intelligent types who rose like cream: lieutenants, captains, majors, colonels. One of them even made general. And where are they now? Retired without honor on half pensions, in prison, shot dead, begging on the same streets they used to rule over, or recycled like compost in the organoponics. The machinery swallowed them up.

Keep me a sergeant. Not too high, not too lowly.

Avarice broke the moneybag, Markus. Keep it small-scale, personal, and you can control things, and there isn’t too much danger of being turned in. When the racket gets big-time, Yakuza-style, you start getting competition. Sharks bigger than you want a piece of the action... and there’s always some xenoid organization that has more power and will break your back. If you knew how many times I’ve seen a syndicate rise up in Planetary Security, just to fall under the extraterrestrial boot, with these eyes destined for the recycler!

Meanwhile, a good old sergeant has plenty of authority. He’s the one who passes the orders down, the oil that lubricates the machinery. He’s guaranteed his piece of the pie, and nobody messes with him. I never get mixed up in the big operations, especially if I’m not asked to. Live and let live, that’s my motto, Markus. Things’ll go better for you, too, if you live by that rule.

Sometimes you have to play the heavy, that’s true. And it hurts. Man, does it hurt.

A few months back I had to arrest this young kid, and I still can’t get it out of my mind. A freelance protector—at least, that’s what he thought. Truth is, he was too naïve for that racket. His name was Jowe, and he was also an artist. I saw his paintings... Maybe they were good, but I didn’t like them. They were real strange, and I don’t understand all that stuff.

Well, seems like this little painter had forgotten to pay the Yakuza his monthly dues, because he had stopped charging this social worker who was living with him. Girl named María Elena.

I can’t really remember her face. To me, she looked like any old whore—tall and leggy, like all the rest. I didn’t even look at her; I like my women with some flesh on them, it’s the xenoids’ business if they prefer the bones. This Jowe, though, he looked at her like... Markus, I thought I’d done it all, but it broke my heart to have to bring him in. It was like hauling in the son I never had. I even stuck around for the trial, and that was after I’d clocked out for the day. It was over fast, like every trial since the central computer took over judging. He pulled three years in Body Spares... He won’t make it, I’m certain.

It was practically a hit job. Of course, I didn’t haul him in for not paying that debt, but because he was accused of giving money to the Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation. Accused by somebody from the Yakuza, it goes without saying. They used us to settle scores with him legally. And the worst part was, it was true... Imagine how idealistic, how stupid that poor kid was, wasting the little bit of money he had, sending it to those drugged-out wackos.

When I was hauling him off, he kept staring at that María Elena. Then she ran over, they hugged and kissed and cried and everything. But he was doing it for real, with all his heart. You could tell he really loved her, poor guy. As for her—well, I’ve seen better acting in our district talent shows.

It was so tough, I still get goosebumps and my eyes still tear up when I remember it... I felt like a rat, Markus. Really.

One last thing, this time I’m not talking as sergeant to agent but as a guy with some experience to a green kid. And take advantage now that I’m getting sentimental. Forget about the honor of the corps if things get really ugly. I really mean it.

Better a live coward than a dead hero. He who runs away saves his hide to fight another day, or do whatever. There’s lots of agents in Planetary Security, but not one of them will give you a new life if you lose yours fighting for a mistaken notion of glory or of taking one for the team. And autocloning is so expensive, it’s just for the top brass. Suckers like you and me only die once... and nobody brings us back.

I’m telling you this because the streets have been calm for years, and I know from experience that on this planet there’s always calm before the storm. I’m sure the pot’s going to start boiling again soon. And even though the electroclub is one of the strongest arguments ever invented, and Molotov cocktails roll off these Kevlar uniforms like water off a duck... details are the devil. An urban riot is serious business. That’s where you really realize how much this planet hates us.

One of those street revolts calling for xenoid blood can always be brought under control. We’ve always been able to control them. Until, every ten or twelve years, suddenly the day comes when the plebs are so desperate they don’t give a rat’s ass if we shoot all their hides full of holes. Until the day comes when they understand they’re so miserable they’ve got nothing left to lose but their messed up shithole lives. And not even that matters much to them, so long as they can take a few of ours with them.

Because it’s really the xenoids’ fault, but there are never any xenoids around to get bashed; those bugs can sniff out a disturbance better than a mutant bloodhound.

When you see the first riot get out of hand and overwhelm your friends in the antiriot squad, forget about corps solidarity and Greek legends. Run, hide your uniform, find yourself a safe hidey-hole—as far from the city as possible. It happens every ten or twelve years, and it always leads to the same result: Nothing.

The bugs from beyond Pluto show up with the heavy artillery, take their people out of there, and melt the place down. They don’t care if us “buglickers” are still here, risking our hides to keep their tourist paradise safe. After all, we’re the native cannon fodder. They cut the problem out at the root: they wipe out the whole city, or the whole continent, if things go too far. Look what they did to Africa in Contact times.

You wouldn’t want to see what a place that used to be a city looks like after everything in it is vaporized—just like that, in a couple of seconds. Not many ruins are left, and hardly any human remains. There’s no harmful radiation or toxic gas, the soil isn’t poisoned, the people who escaped before the disturbances can come back and resume normal lives. If they have anywhere to live. Because otherwise, their only choice is to grit their teeth, bow their heads, swallow their rage, and start working like mules to rebuild their leveled town.

But here and there on the ground, and on some walls that held up, who knows how, there are the shadows left by the volatilized bodies. Like ghosts, motionlessly accusing who knows who. Until the walls are knocked down or repainted.

And nobody cries over them, at least not publicly. The disturbance and the people who kicked it up are forgotten, and life goes on. Until the next explosion.

Once I saw a holovideo about some little animals that look like fat guinea pigs and that live up there in the Artic, eating moss and junk like that. The foxes, the polar bears, the owls, even the Eskimos, all the predators that don’t want to starve to death hunt them and eat them by the fistful. But they reproduce, they reproduce. Like guinea pigs, you follow me, Markus? And there’s more and more of them—until there’s no moss or anything left to eat.

Then they gather, armies of millions and millions of them, and migrate. Like crazy, and nobody can stop them. Not looking for more food or new territory, just looking for the sea. And the wolves, the foxes, all the predators follow them, gobbling them up by the thousands... until the fat guinea pigs dive head-first off the coast and swim out to sea. Then the sharks and seagulls keep on eating them, and thousands and thousands more drown... until there aren’t any left.

And the two or three that didn’t migrate go back to reproducing and getting eaten, until ten or fifteen years later the cycle repeats itself. And repeats, and repeats, and repeats.

I’d like to think, only until one day. Though I’m more of a fox or a hawk than one of them...

What’s that? Lemmings? If you say so. You’re the educated one here. Like I said, Sergeant Romualdo never...

Click
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“That’s enough.” Sweating, Colonel Kharman turned off the recording and wiped his forehead with a silk handkerchief. “The rest is half-baked biological and philosophical speculation. It would not interest you, Murfal, Your Excellency.

“Perhaps it would be... instructive,” the other wondered. His human body moved with the almost imperceptible time lag of a “horse’s” movements. Murfal was an Auyar.

“I don’t doubt it,” Kharman insisted, wiping the sweat from his broad brow. “But we already have more than enough evidence to send that poor devil of a sergeant to Body Spares for the rest of his life. And we know enough about the status and methods of corruption in our corps for us to take appropriate measures... I do not know how to thank you enough for your cooperation.”