A Planet for Rent (18 page)

“Rubbish,” the Auyar cut him off. “Even you should have realized that the disease has spread too far for home remedies, Colonel. Or perhaps we should investigate you, too?”

Kharman ignored the veiled threat, but started sweating again. It was only after a few seconds had gone by that he was able to ask, in a rather unsteady voice, “Do you... have some concrete proposal?”

“Of course.” The smile on the body of Murfal’s “horse” was like one on a badly built marionette. “Or did you think we supplied you with our huborg prototype just to test it out?”

“I thought that...,” Kharman began.

“I don’t care what you thought,” the Auyar again interrupted. “You’ve already learned that we are capable of building perfect biomechanical replicas of human beings. If we could fool even your sergeant, no Earthling will notice the difference.”

“I was very impressed with the way you were able to create an entire backstory for Markus. Parents, education, everything,” Kharman observed, still sweating.

“Simply routine... But we did not do it as a mere experiment...” Murfal took a long pause and smiled once more. “Your Planetary Security is worthless, Colonel Kharman. It is rotten to the foundations—and we do not like that. We need a sound and incorruptible police force that will fully guarantee tourists’ safety.”

“But... they’re only human,” Kharman tried to argue, wiping his forehead.

“Yes. Regrettably limited, as you all are,” the Auyar agreed. “Hence our idea is to replace you with our huborgs.”

“All of Planetary Security?” The human high official was terrified and started sweating for the third time. His olive skin had gone almost ashen. “But... That’s impossible. They are only biomechanisms... with flexible programming, of course.... but they’ll have to get orders from someone, be supervised, after all... And your tourists won’t want to be cared for by biomechanical replicas of humans, no matter how perfect they are.”

“They’ll never find out,” the Auyar shrugged. “Our huborgs can be
more
human than humans. Be everything a xenoid tourist expects from a police force officer, even one belonging to a primitive lower race. But don’t worry, Kharman. We’ll only replace your street patrol personnel. The higher officials will still be humans, of course. Though also supervised by our technicians. They will work together, for... technical reasons. Huborgs can be very delicate sometimes.”

“Ah,” was all that Colonel Kharman said, beaten.

“It will not be so terrible,” Murfal consoled him patronizingly. “And there are still many details in our huborgs’ programming that must be perfected. For now we will begin only here, in your district, as a pilot project. It may take a couple of years or longer before the system can be instituted all over Earth. And you cannot deny that we will be saving your planet quite a bit in the matter of salaries. Thanks to which, for example, your own salary could... double.”

Kharman smiled unenthusiastically and stood up. “Well, Murfal, Your Excellency... if everything has been said, I will be going.”

“Wait. I want to ask a favor of you,” the xenoid stopped him. “I am curious about something. Do you have any holoimages of this Sergeant Romualdo? I would like to see his face. He is a clever man, it cannot be denied. He was judicious enough not to lay all his cards on the table until they had gone inside the Body Spares depository. He knew that no electronic equipment could record his words in there...”

“Yes, but he wasn’t counting on your huborg prototype’s photographic memory,” Kharman fawningly reminded him. “He couldn’t have known. It precisely reproduced every word that Romualdo uttered.” The fingers of the former Dayak colonel from Planetary Security flew across a keyboard, and a holoimage materialized between him and Murfal. “Look. This is Sergeant Romualdo.”

The Auyar contemplated the man’s features. A leathery face with the melancholy of a man who’s seen it all and no longer has faith in anything. The face of a man who knows that if he doesn’t take care of the dirty work, somebody else will do it, though no better than he would. Who doesn’t enjoy it... Who’s just doing a painful duty.

“Enough. Turn it off,” Murfal sighed, seeming more human than ever. “Colonel... Could I ask you for another favor?”

“As you wish, Murfal, Your Excellency,” said Kharman, servile but uncomfortable.

“Destroy that recording. I want the secret to remain between you and me. Do not let Internal Affairs take any sort of steps against this Romualdo,” the xenoid said absently. “If possible, have him retire
now
. With full honors and a double pension. And I will pay for it, if the paperwork is too complicated. Can you do it?”

“Of course, Your Excellency,” Kharman replied, completely dumbfounded. “But... why?”

“Why have I decided to pardon him?” The Auyar stood up with a clumsy gesture. “Because I enjoyed listening to him. Because I like his images: the one of the anemone and the little fish; the one of the child, the organ grinder, and the monkey... And especially the one of the suicidal lemmings. Because, in the final analysis, if Planetary Security is the most venal organization on this terribly corrupt planet, it is not his fault. He said it himself: he never did anything other than follow the rules of the game. The good Sergeant Romualdo did not even invent them. We did. And he had no way of knowing that those rules had begun to change... right now. Goodnight, Colonel Kharman.”

“Goodnight, Murfal, Your Excellency,” said the former Dayak.

The Auyar halted again on the threshold. “One last minor detail... Do you think it would be very difficult to arrange a visit to that... Baracuyá del Jiquí? Now that I am on Earth already, I would very much like to see it. If what the sergeant said is true, it must be an interesting place. Perhaps I will be lucky. Human settlements as... primitive as that are growing rare, according to what I have read in the tourist guide...”

September 29, 1998.

As soon as they realize that the power actually controlling Earth is the Planetary Tourism Agency, xenoid financiers and investors ask their human hosts why one person isn’t in charge of the whole mechanism instead of the cumbersome Board of Shareholders, where nearly two hundred humans argue endlessly among themselves before reaching any agreement.

Upset by the delays that this decision-making process inevitably entails, the xenoids insist every so often that the body should name a single Majority Shareholder with plenary power. One individual, backed by his peers’ vote of confidence, who has full authority and responsibility to conclude deals with all non-human investors, discuss budgets and agreements directly, and so forth.

They base this proposal on the fact that the system of representative democracy, which humans always champion, is inevitably more agile than participatory democracy. Though they recognize that it is also less just, to be sure...

The more than two hundred shareholders on the Board always listen with respect to these proposals while glancing at each other with almost imperceptible smiles.

Of course a representative system would save time.

But saving time isn’t the key thing here; trust is.

None of them has enough trust in any of the others to think that, were one of them to become the Major Shareholder, he would defend the interests of all in an equitable way... rather than putting his own interests first.

That is the only reason the Planetary Tourism Agency has no Majority Shareholder or anything remotely similar. When the xenoid financiers who call so vociferously for creating the position think it over, they are actually glad that things continue as they do. Some of them even go so far in their change of heart that they speak of “excessive concentration of power”—and propose expanding the two hundred shareholders to four hundred or a thousand.

Earth divided by two hundred is perfectly controllable.

Earth unified under the will of a single man who has the confidence of all the others would be a different matter entirely.

That is why the most important Xenoid Emergency Plan of all, more important even than their general offensive against the infamous Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation, is their Karolides Project.

Karolides was a charismatic Greek statesman who came close to unifying the Balkan peninsula in the twentieth century. If he had succeeded, Germany might never have propelled Europe into World War I. But he was assassinated, the Balkans broke up—and ever since, whenever people talk about political fragmentation, the term they most commonly use is “Balkanization.”

In the unlikely yet conceivable case that a new Karolides should arise among the shareholders of the Planetary Tourism Agency... everyone knows what fate the true masters of the planet have in store for him. And how quickly it would fall.

Politics is implacable.

Divide and rule.

“Let’s get started... Identify yourself. Please state your full name.”

You might call me an accidental scientist. Despite what they call my “exceptional qualities,” I could have died and the world would never have found out if it hadn’t been for that lucky incident.

But let me tell you the whole story, since I think we have plenty of time, and the story of what happened that day is worth it...

I was fourteen years old when the antigrav balance system of that aerobus accidentally broke down in flight. Right when it was passing over my hometown, Baracuyá del Jiquí, in the Sierra Cristal mountains... Well, it’s more of a hamlet than a town.

The two professors from the Center for Advanced Physics and Mathematical Studies who were passengers in the vehicle must have been in for a bumpy ride... All the pilot could do was make a forced landing, the aerobus wobbling like a drunken duck. But we were in luck: it came to a rest right in front of our house, on the open field where my brothers and I used to play baseball.

I remember it like yesterday. We were all arguing. My brother Romualdo had just run away from home, and without him we were only six boys and three girls. Neither team wanted Giselita, who couldn’t hit a watermelon with an ironing board. Or me, either, even though I was an okay player, because they all said my head had some of its stuffing missing. Besides, I was the youngest boy.

By the time the vehicle stopped shuddering my three sisters had already run to hide with my mother in the kitchen. Just the way my father taught them that decent women do when strangers come calling. The three of us boys who were still young, Hermenegildo and Esbértido and me, ran over and climbed onto the aerobus engine, still hot. We’d seen machines like that before already, but never so close up, and we’d never been able to touch one.

After greeting them and offering them the
bacán
,
casabe
, and
pru
that they were afraid to even try, my father and my older brothers tried to explain to the pilot—so tall and skinny he looked like a pitchfork—and the two doctors that there weren’t any stores or repair shops nearby that carried spare antigrav balancers, and there was no holonet connection or any sort of electronic link to the outside world. And the fastest way to get a message to the slightly larger town of Songo Tres Palmeras was to ride his compadre Robustiano’s mare there, because my uncle Segismundo’s messenger pigeons were laid up with the pip they had caught after last month’s gullywashers...

The pilot opened the engine compartment, took a look, spat out fifteen or twenty cusswords, sighed, and said his name was Larsen, and that if that’s how things were, well, there wasn’t much they could do. Afterwards he did try some casabe and bacán and drank some pru and even the strong coffee, brewed country-style, that my mother gave him without looking him in the eye.

Since he had forgotten to close the engine casing, I got in and started nosing around. It was so pretty, lubricated with a transparent oil that smelled nice, not like the smelly mutton grease my father made me smear over the gears of the little sugar mill and the axles of the ox cart to keep them from sticking. It all looked perfect to me—except for what I later found out was the precious antigrav balance system.

Something about it was terribly off. I’d always been handy with tools, and I loved going around looking things over and fixing them up. And since I was the youngest, it was my job to sharpen the axes, machetes, and plowshares and keep the little mill greased. Without really thinking about it, I set to work on that thing. A bit of wire here, a tiny stick there, a dab of earth over there, a pebble between these two metal clips, and...

Yikes! Suddenly the gizmo started bucking like an untamed bronco. Standing in the doorway, Larsen, the pilot, spit out the sip of coffee he had in his mouth, and I got scared and took off running. In one second it was a full-blown chase scene.

But when my father, who was familiar with my habits, started cutting a nice big poplar rod to break over my rump for meddling where I didn’t belong, Larsen stopped him.

My father nearly blew his top. Imagine: nobody had ever even raised his voice to him in his own house, and now this gangly city slicker, who wasn’t even half his boxing weight, was acting like he knew better than him how he should be treating one of his own sons! It went to his head, and... Good thing my mother stepped in and whispered, “Celedonio, just let him talk”—otherwise he would have killed the man then and there.

Larsen spoke... and then my father was so proud, he threw down the poplar switch, gave me a hug, and said I was his son,
caray
. Said I’d always been that way, a little strange, but better than anybody with all that mechanical stuff...

It turns out I had fixed the antigrav balance system without even realizing it. The best part was, I found out later that in theory no human being could fix one of those units, which only you xenoids were able to manufacture. They were superdurable, built to last, but when one failed you had to chuck it all out and get a new one.

And that was when the two doctors there, with their beards and their wild hair and their crazy eyes, started asking me question after question. They told me that their names were Hermann and Sigimer and that they were astrophysicists. They asked me about electromagnetism, about the Unified Field Theory, about everything. And I didn’t know how to answer any of it. Good thing Hermann had the idea of giving me his laser pen, which had stopped working days earlier—and I fixed it right away, too, with a tiny piece of glass.

Then they both said at once that I had a special gift, that I was a natural genius, a diamond in the rough. And I stood there wide-eyed, not understanding a word of it, thinking they were making fun of me, too, like my brothers... But they started talking with my father and my mother. They went off, talked for a long time, and I could see they were giving my parents money... and finally Mama came back weeping, and she hugged me. She handed me a little suitcase with all my best clothes, six small bars of guava paste, and two big bottles of pru, gave me a kiss, and told me never to forget that they loved me and that they were my mother and father. The old man hugged me, too, and his eyes were wet, but he looked away because men don’t cry, and he told me that I would be leaving with those professors and that it would be for the best for everyone. And to be a man and come out on top.

At first I didn’t want to, but when Hermann and Sigimer told me I’d be going to the city to see things and machines and learn a lot so I could be like them and serve Earth, I stopped feeling about to cry, and I boarded the aerobus, happy as could be.

And can you believe it? Even though Larsen and the doctors were scared, my repair job on the antigrav balance system held up for the rest of the trip, no problem.

“Is that your real name, please?”

I’ve never been back to Baracuyá del Jiquí. I do miss the family, but ever since I reached civilization, I’ve been involved in so many secret projects, they don’t even let me go to the corner store to buy pru anymore. My brain is a strategic weapon, they say.

Now, they do get me everything I ask for. If I ask for a bird on the wing, they bring me a bird on the wing.

I did manage to locate Romualdo. He was the brother who’d always been nicest to me. Two years ago, I started to get nostalgic about him and asked for information. Since he’d run away from home, and he’d always talked about going to the city...

Well, even though they warned me I’d only be allowed to see him from a distance, in less than a week they gave me his whole dossier and a pile of holovideos that showed him talking. My brother’s a sergeant in Planetary Security now. He lives and works in New Miami.

Knowing that, and having the holovideos, was all I needed. Why see him from a distance if he would never know I’d been nearby? Why make myself feel more alone?

And I haven’t seen or heard from anyone else in my family.

“What is your current scientific specialty, please?”

Alex Gens Smith, scientist. Terrestrial, human. Height six feet one inch, weight 172 pounds, in case you want to check.

“Are you in frequent contact with your family, please?”

Well, no, but when Hermann and Sigimer brought me to the Center, the people there told me I’d need a more serious-sounding name if I wanted to be a scientist. And they changed it for me. I’ve been saying it this way for so many years that if anybody shouted “Alesio!” at me now, I wouldn’t react.

My real name is Alesio Concepción Pérez de la Iglesia Fernández Olarticochea Vallecillos y Corrales. So, Alex for Alesio, and since Concepción is the same as Genesis, I got Gens for short. And Smith is as common an Anglo name as Pérez is in Spanish, so they’re equivalents. Simple transposition of elements.

“Do you have any other sort of stable and/or permanent emotional relationships on Earth, please?”

For the past four years they’ve kept me busy with an incredibly boring project—military in nature, like almost everything I’ve done. Well, it was classified, of course, but if you people accept me, I won’t be able to keep it a secret.

I work on a principle that a theorist worked out, based on a toy I once built to amuse myself. I’m not very good at formulae or tensor calculus, but I can tell you it has to do with graviton resonator systems.

You know, of course, that the graviton is the elementary particle with the greatest concentration of momentum, making it possible, according to the Unified Field Theory, to convert any magnetic or electrical force into gravitational force. Any child knows that, but I only learned it after I fixed the balance system on that aerobus.

The toy I made was a graviton resonator-based matter miniaturizer. I’d stick any object between the poles of a triphase magnet, supercool it to just above zero degrees Kelvin while bombarding it with positrons in a pulsating ultrasound field, and poof! It would shrink instantly. The effect was caused by overstimulating the mutual attraction between gravitons in the piece of matter. According to the Law of Conservation of Mass, its original mass was unchanged. But it became harder than bicrovan. I had artificially produced hyperdense matter, like the kind in the nuclei of neutron stars. And it was stable; it only returned to its original volume if the process was inverted, at a great expenditure of energy.

The Center people were very excited. They had me create hyperdense projectiles capable of piercing any object, and superarmored plates of compressed cork that were dense as steel. Then it occurred to me to try shrinking things further, and I produced some nano-black holes, very cute. Of course, somebody got the idea into his head of building a weapon that would reduce the enemy to nothingness. They took everything related to black holes, which was what I was really interested in, away from me and gave it to a team of PhDs with a whole mouthful of titles, and they haven’t figured out anything after all this time. They told me I had to produce a miniaturizer that would work from a distance. No matter how much I explained to them that it was impossible, because it would violate the inverse square law and relativistic mass-energy conversion, they insisted, warning me that they wouldn’t allow me to work on anything else until I did it.

That’s another reason I came here—because I’m tired of sitting on my hands, and it makes no sense to waste effort on an impossible project.

But in the meantime, I’ve been working, in secret of course, on a few other little things...

“Alex... What is the official reason for your visit to our planet, please?”

No... not what you’d really call stable or permanent relationships, I don’t. Since my childhood I’ve been very shy around women... It always seemed to me that they talked a lot without saying anything. Like some theorists, for that matter. My mother said that’s why I was so good with machines, because they never talk.

But that’s not entirely true; when I was working on Artificial Intelligence I got along very nicely with an AI that I called Meniscus.

It all started because we were both getting bored, and we entertained ourselves by competing at mental calculations... I always lost on the simple arithmetic problems, but if we went on to topological or phase equations, I walloped Meniscus. Later, when we were on closer terms, we talked about all sorts of things: about life, the mind, what it was like to have sensations and not be just a bunch of electronic impulses inside a circuit box, self-conscious but not really alive.

They erased him three months into the research. They said he wasn’t “stable” any more. I’ve never forgiven them.

I think my problem with women is actually very different. Their scent, the way they have of looking at you, of moving. They make me nervous. They can’t be... reduced to logical parameters. I know it’s the hormones; I even know which hormones, one by one. But it’s the synergy of the hormones that throws me off. Even though I understand the effects of each part, I fail to be objective about the resulting whole. I spin out of control, I forget logic.

Of course, I have had experiences. Plenty. But very... particular. When I turned eighteen, the psychologists at the Center, who kept me under special monitoring, put me in contact with various... professionals.

Social workers, of course. All of them legal, safe, discreet, healthy. Beautiful. The psychologists felt my emotional stability would appreciate an opportunity to replace my theoretical uncertainty with practical experiences.

They were right.

It was great.

Sensorially, a woman is a being of astonishing perfection, who seems to be made for giving and receiving pleasure. The meetings, three times a week, with my new “girlfriends” and their erotic skills propelled me into a period of mental hyperactivity. During that time I produced the invisibility field and outlined the principles of what would later become the silence generator.

I also had a few homosexual experiences. Out of pure scientific curiosity, not genuine inclination. To have a way of judging. How can you say something isn’t for you if you’ve never even tried it?