A Planet for Rent (20 page)

But the invitation was so imperative, they had to put on their bravest face and grant me permission to travel to Ningando.

Not that they gave up easily. I knew from the outset that I wouldn’t be traveling alone, that an entire human delegation would accompany me, though at an astronomical cost.

I arrived with a huge entourage. Seventy percent were secret agents from Planetary Security responsible for keeping an eye on me, who don’t understand a word of what’s being said here; the other thirty percent are mediocre physicists responsible for explaining it to the agents as best they can, as well as to make sure I don’t reveal any of the secrets that they aren’t even in on themselves. At least the physicists are thrilled with everything they’re seeing, though they don’t understand much more than the agents do and they hate acting like scientific policemen. They probably don’t even care that their memories will be blocked by your people before you let them return to Earth, and will almost certainly be erased by our Planetary Security when they get home.

All the while I concealed my joy over the successful unfolding of my plan under my habitual mask of bewilderment and confusion in the face of the unknown. It didn’t take much effort: ever since I arrived in the astroport I’ve been completely terrified.

I didn’t open my eyes once during the entire trip from the shuttle to the orbiting hypership. I had undertaken the greatest adventure of my life, risking everything. And even though I could change my mind at the last moment, something inside me was whispering, “Alex, there’s no turning back now.”

When I got to Ningando, I knew I had won. With Jourkar’s help, it was easy for me to elude my guards and come here. Now... it all depends on you. There. I’ve laid all my cards on the table.

I don’t plan to return to Earth, and that’s my final word.

“What induced you to come here and request honorary Cetian citizenship, please?”

First of all, I’d like to make it very clear that I’m not the best suited to testify objectively as to the policies of the terrestrial government toward their scientists. Because I’ve never been considered a “real scientist.” I don’t have a degree from any university. Just a few postgraduate diplomas. And the people who gave them to me were almost always more eager to learn from me than to teach me.

They practically considered me an “idiot savant.” Are you familiar with the term? Good, good... A free electron, unfit to form a part of any think tank or scientific team, because my working methods were far too instinctive and unorthodox. I’m appreciated, I’m well taken care of... but I’m not understood or loved. I’m alone. Completely alone, as I tried to explain to you earlier. And the situation no longer seems right to me.

But although I’m more the exception than the rule, I’ve had enough dealings with “typical” scientists for me to gain a detailed idea of their conflicts and concerns. You may be better able to understand those concerns if I summarize the average career path of a human scientist for you. Though perhaps you already have ninety percent of this information, and your question is more in the line of probing my subjective politics...

In that case, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t know much about politics. I’ve never been interested. It isn’t... scientific.

The terrestrial government—that is, the major human shareholders in the Planetary Tourism Agency, under the guise of the World Parliament—has the good sense to guarantee a good, free education to ninety-nine percent of the children on the planet. And I do mean ninety-nine percent, not one hundred, because as you can see there are always exceptions. My village of Baracuyá del Jiquí, which has no continuous access to holonet or any other connectivity, must still lie completely outside the World Education System.

According to neurologists and psychologists, my mind’s almost complete “virginity” is one of the essential factors that turned me into the freak I am today.

Fine, then; when teenagers finish middle school, they have two choices awaiting them: either they are successful at their aptitude and IQ tests and get into college prep schools, or they fail and end up in tech school. Or they start working, which is what most people have no choice but to do.

For the fortunate few who get into college prep, the state doesn’t charge them anything... for the time being. But they’re racking up a debt that they’ll be forced to pay, to the last credit of accumulated interest, in the future.

There are two ways of enrolling in the university: for free... if you negotiate a second and even more exhaustive series of exams brilliantly enough. Or by paying and skipping the exams. If the student or the student’s family is willing to pay the cost of every class, book, and so on. The privileged few who are able to afford doing this are another matter. Paying automatically gives you certain rights, including the right to choose which career you want to study.

The fact is, the majority of future terrestrial scientists start out among the ranks of those who pass their entrance exams and gain free admission to the university. And when I say the majority, I mean only one out of every hundred college prep graduates.

In practice, only the few who have shown a potential for becoming absolute geniuses have any real possibility of choosing the field of science they will study. The academic fate of the rest depends on a sort of roulette, in which their qualifications play a role... but what mainly counts is the medium-term plans of the Planetary Tourism Agency, or of the government, which is the same thing.

It doesn’t matter if a young person has been dreaming since childhood of becoming an astrophysicist. If the “needs of Earth” demand
x
number of sociologists over the next seven years... he’ll have to study sociology, or drop out of the university.

Naturally, two out of three young people go unsatisfied into specialties that never interested them. If they are interested in learning, better something that nothing, don’t you think?

To be sure, it is always possible to change fields.

Though the mechanism was intended for students who discovered halfway through their studies that they have no vocation for the subject they selected, some thirty percent of students on Earth graduate in something completely different from what they started out studying. And according to conservative statistics, of the other seventy percent, nearly half wish they could do so... but their grades aren’t high enough to qualify them for a transfer request.

The only students who have a right to make such a petition, and only after completing the second year, are those who attain a grade point average of 9.5 or more out of ten. Even so, the deans of each school can turn down a petition for changing specialties at their own discretion, if they feel that the student will be of more use in the specialty he originally started out in.

The deplorable state of the lab equipment in universities on Earth is known throughout the galaxy. We’re a third-rate planet... Our College of High Energy Physics doesn’t even have a small particle accelerator, and future astronomers can only gaze at the stars through vintage two-meter, or at most three-meter, reflecting telescopes. They can’t even dream of modular orbiting field reflectors. Much less of off-world field trips.

Our next generation of biologists know such basic techniques as autocloning or body exchange only through crude simulations or well-worn holovideos. Nor do they have access to fauna from other worlds—live specimens are prohibitively expensive. Our geophysicists have fewer opportunities to send probes to the interior of our planet, and they know less about it, than any interested tourist.

Now, medical students do have the luxury of working with real patients from the start. Of course, those patients are humans on Social Assistance, which provides them with free medical care. New medications are also tested on them. Since a human life has so little value, while there’s always a need for doctors and new medicines, nobody complains... Maybe that’s why Earth’s doctors and medical system are so famous throughout the galaxy. They don’t lack for experience, that’s for sure.

Even sociologists are unable to implement real surveys to learn how to use the complicated skewed statistics programs that are fundamental to their science these days. Like everyone else, they work with simulators.

As might be expected, the lack of resources is slightly less grave at private graduate schools and at institutions directly connected with the Scientific Reserve, the places where those who can pay and the especially talented study... For the rest, hardly any university on Earth has access to resources other than simulations. And even those are necessarily four or five years behind the models sold everywhere else in the galaxy.

So there is no way for a future scientist to interact with the real world. Indeed, the terrestrial doctrine of higher education could be phrased more or less as follows: “Take these rudiments of theory, then go do your real learning on the fly—and good luck.”

It is upon graduation that the fledgling scientist begins his true odyssey. That is moment when Earth’s clever bureaucracy hands him the bill for his “free” education. To settle his debt, he’ll have to work for at least five years, not where he wants, but where the government deigns to assign him. And the salary he works for over those five years is almost laughable.

If he wants to change postings earlier, at the cost of having his title revoked, he’ll have to make a $trong ca$e for it, and even then only after piles of red tape that usually take years to sort out.

For better or for worse, the chaotic state of Earth’s economy cannot guarantee placements to more than sixty-five percent of its graduates. More and more young people enter the university every year. And fewer and fewer new graduates find work in their specialties.

There are biologists working as lab technicians in provincial hospitals. Physiochemists as quality inspectors in synthetic food factories. Sociologists underutilized as reporters on some third-rate holonet.

And that’s not the worst of it.

Many tour operators, guides, and aerobus drivers decorate their living room walls with the beautiful and useless holograms of their university degrees. Others, even more pragmatic or more cynical, forget about their titles forever, or they set up small enterprises to survive. The “Second-level Scientific Reserve,” they’re called, and presumably they’ll be in demand at some point... over the next millennium.

Meanwhile, since you have to make a living somehow and the Planetary Tourism Agency is always hungry for intelligent young people, especially the good-looking ones...

Working in the tourism sector isn’t as awful for a scientist as it might seem at first glance. At least you’re well-paid, and you come into contact with the genuine source of Earth’s wealth: xenoid tourists. Sometimes they learn more about the latest developments in the fields they no longer work in than their colleagues with government positions.

There are even frequent cases of daring to get a title revoked through shady dealings in order to snag a transfer. In order to drop science forever and work in tourism. It’s pathetic, but almost a third of the people working for the Planetary Tourism Agency are scientists frustrated in their careers.

“Why Tau Ceti and not Alpha Centauri, please?”

I’m a scientist, more or less. And there was a time when I believed in the future of my planet.

But how can a planet develop in any meaningful way when day after day it throws away its best minds? How absurd does your idealism have to be for you to keep on working as a scientist when you could make so much more as a tourist guide? What sense does it make for a recent graduate to work like a slave in a place he isn’t interested in, for five whole years? Surrounded by old men who see his dynamic initiative as a threat and who constantly leave him out of the loop, using his “inexperience” as their excuse? For poverty wages, after seven years of intellectual effort, dreaming of being useful to his planet?

The worst part—and it pains me to say it in this interview, under my special circumstances, but it’s true—the worst part is that you xenoids are perfectly well aware of these facts, and you take full advantage of them.

You didn’t invent the brain drain, but you perfected and institutionalized it.

It is obvious that a human scientist who refuses to give up on his science in spite of it all will find it much more attractive, most of all economically, to work in any minor branch office of a xenoid enterprise than in most similar terrestrial research centers. He will feel that he is making fuller use of his intellect there, he will see more of a future. So what if they only allow him partial access to data? At least it’s something... That smidgen of knowledge is worth its weight in gold to him.

He can travel off planet every now and then... even though he can never tell anyone what he saw afterwards. If he works hard and does a good job and shows how exceptional his gray cells are, is even possible—and this is the big dream for many—that they will ask him to emigrate definitively from Earth to work for them.

Do you like old music? No? That’s too bad... Well, you probably wouldn’t be familiar with the songs of Joan Manuel Serrat, anyway. A human, Catalan, twentieth century...

I thought not. His nearly forgotten recordings are the best things in my collection. One of the few things I’ll regret leaving behind if you accept me...

There’s a song of his, “Pueblo blanco,” that goes... No, don’t worry! I won’t sing it all. I have next to no sense of rhythm or melody. Just one verse:

Run away, gentle folk,
because this earth is sick.
Tomorrow it won’t give you
what it wouldn’t give before,
and there’s nothing to be done.
Take your mule, your lass, your saddle,
follow the road of the Hebrew people...

That is, the Exodus. You don’t know the Bible either?

Okay, at least. Yes, the Jews, the Promised Land, all that.

When he called it “sick” he was talking about a patch of earth, a piece of ground. But today, speaking of the planet with a capital E, his words have proved prophetic.

This Earth is sick...