A Planet for Rent (30 page)

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 more 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?

But I said nothing. And right then, the idea came to me.

If he doesn’t like virgins, maybe now...

That night I waited up for him. After the daily artist-beggar left, happy and disgusted, and before Ettu could shut himself up in his mysterious room, I ran upstairs and confronted him.

The huge round unmade bed lay between us like the arena between two gladiators. I had made myself up like I had always seen the social workers in my barrio do: waterproof cosmetics forming a virtual mask to cover my face, long fake eyelashes, shiny hair.

I was naked, the subtle allergen stiffening my nipples, the aroma of the perfume that I had spread over my carefully straightened pubic hair filling the whole suite.

I was tired of waiting. If he didn’t do it, I would take the first step.

“Ettu... I’m not a girl anymore,” I remember telling him.

And I stepped forward. My high-heeled shoes wobbling on the springy mattress.

I was ready to do anything.

“You’ve been very kind to me, Ettu. I want to pay you.” I kept talking. “I don’t want to owe you anything...”

Looking him in the eye the whole time, defiantly... but quite ready to start weeping if he scorned me.

Ettu said nothing. He walked right past, toward his secret room, opening the door.

I ran after him. I almost tripped because of the stupid stilettos that I didn’t know how to walk in.

I wanted to go in; he stopped me. I only got a slight glimpse of medical equipment, antigrav stretchers, and bottles of serum, before his enormous body blocked my view.

“Ettu, I love you...” I insisted, pressing my body against his reddish carapace, banging my fists against his armored abdomen, grinding my pubis against him. With the desperation of a cat in heat and the blind obstinacy of the young girl I still was. And crying unrestrainedly.

He stretched out his enormous tridactyl hand and picked me up, like on the first day. It seemed to take more effort. Either I weighed more, or he was weaker.

He looked at me for a long time, and his eyes shined.

Then, in one motion, he tossed me on the bed the way you might toss something that you disdain, that’s no good. The shoes with the stiletto heels clattered as they hit the floor, freed from my feet.

I thought he was furious and I shuddered, thinking of my grief. Then I suddenly remembered Dingo’s head and the twisted bodies of the triplets, and I grew afraid. I curled into a ball to protect myself. I realized I was naked as a worm, ridiculous, my precious mask of acting the grownup woman broken.

In one step he was there, and I closed my eyes, expecting the blow.

But his voice only sounded strangely sad when he said, “No. Liya... Not you. Forgive me, if you can... I think things with you haven’t turned out the way I planned. I’ve let myself go too far. Goodbye.”

Then he shut the door, and I stayed there crying, and fell asleep crying. But crying from happiness. He had forgiven me! Everything would go back to the way it was before, or better, and maybe, with time, he would...

The next day, when I woke up, I found the mysterious room open. And empty. There wasn’t a trace of the well-stocked medical lab I had glimpsed.

Ettu wasn’t there. Not in the room, not anywhere in the house.

I made inquiries. Planetary Security is very efficient in New York. They had seen him take a cybertaxi to Manhattan, the place where shuttles launch, late that morning. Walking slowly, as if he were tired. With no luggage.

His name was in the registry at the embarkation point for Colossa.

He had left Earth to return to his world.

Perhaps running away from me...

I knew I’d never see him again.

Then everything became a nightmare. Except for the educational programs and other details, the Castle and the animals and almost everything was in his name. I could hardly keep anything—it all went to the government. A ten-year-old girl has no legal personhood.

Less than two weeks later, with no more luggage than a few thousand credits and a box of educational holovideos, I was sent by a Planetary Security aerobus back to Barrio 13 in New Cali. Back to the tiny one-bedroom apartment, my Abuela, and her constant drinking.

Of course, I wasn’t the same any more.

We soon had to move. I had nurtured the hope that the gang and the rest of the barrio would forgive and forget. But when they scrawled the word “Buglicker” in excrement across our front door, after fleeting shadows on a street corner threw rocks at me twice, and a group on jetskates ran over my Abuela in one of her drunken stupors and broke her hip, I knew I was marked. Forever.

We left Barrio 13 for Barrio 5, higher rents and quieter neighbors. So quiet they didn’t even have gangs. I spent all day with the holovideos, learning, trying to fill the gaps in my education... trying not to think about everything I’d left behind. Especially not about Ettu. Now it really did all seem like a dream. A lovely dream, the sort you feel sorry to wake from when it ends. My Abuela was drinking up hundreds of credits every night and lurching home at dawn to beg for more. I never denied her; it was easier than listening to her complaints and threats if she didn’t have alcohol. Maybe I also had the cynical hope that she would drink enough that cirrhosis would soon free me from her... and I wasn’t wrong.

“There’s no hope, unless you can afford a liver transplant. And you don’t look like you could,” said the old doctor in Social Assistance when I took her to the hospital after finding her unconscious and burning with fever, and her aged skin as yellow as parchment. The doctor barely glanced under her eyelids before saying, cynically and harshly but without euphemisms, “Galloping cirrhosis, I’d say. How many bottles a day did she drink? Most likely she won’t regain consciousness. You’re the granddaughter, right? Well, you choose for her: a week of suffering and expensive drugs, or euthanasia now.”

I chose euthanasia. At the age of forty-two, my Abuela had drunk and lived enough. Now it was my turn. Without her, it would be easier.

Though I didn’t know what would become of me. I always knew that a girl born in Barrio 13 doesn’t have many options for the future... but it’s harder after seeing everything you’re going to lose.

I continued to miss Ettu. I felt it was my fault everything had gone wrong and come to an end. By trying to turn him into a lover, something tangible, I had lost the closest thing to a father or a friend I’d ever had. I didn’t really understand why I’d done what I did, why he was what he was... but I didn’t care. I was ready to do anything if it would bring him back... To follow him on foot to the end of the world, to make his bed every time he finished enjoying his repulsive artists, even to stop asking him any more questions, ever.