A Planet for Rent (6 page)

Absorbed in his memories, Moy nearly bumped into a group of Cetians whose somber gray clothing contrasted sharply with the explosion of forms and colors in the clothes of all their fellows.

Body Spares.

Earth wasn’t the only place where races with physiologies incompatible with local biosphere turned to using native bodies to be able to walk around without cumbersome life support systems. But among Cetians and other cultures, candidates for Body Spares were well-paid volunteers who considered it an honor to serve as “horses” for representatives of other races. Not criminals atoning for their crimes, as on Earth.

And in Ningando, like almost anywhere else in the galaxy, the procedure was prohibitively expensive. It included incredibly stiff insurance fees, given the possibility of damaging the host bodies. The pittance that the Planetary Tourism Agency charged on Earth was irresistible bait for any tourist eager to mix it up with the local population without being discriminated against.

Moy muttered a clumsy excuse in his rudimentary Cetian, stepped out of the way of the gray-garbed Cetians, and watched them. One of his favorite pastimes now was guessing the original race of the Body Spares customers by looking at how their “horses” moved. This was a group of seven, and they all walked holding hands. Though the way they walked would have been the envy of the most graceful human ballet dancer, they were clumsy compared to regular Cetians. And they gestured a lot. A lot. They were talking almost more in gestures than by vocalizing.

Aldebaran polyps, most likely. Their sign language gave them away. Moy watched them hopefully. Unfortunately, they were headed away from the plaza and from his performance. They were probably very rich. Their super-resistant anatomies adapted perfectly well to any biosphere, so taking Cetian bodies was just an expensive whim.

Someday he’d visit Aldebaran, too, he promised himself. Of course, it would have to be when he was very rich. Nobody but a polyp, or someone occupying the body of a polyp, could survive the tremendous pressures under the oceans of that world.

What would it be like to weigh nearly a ton, have hundreds of tentacles and one giant muscular foot, and move slowly across the bottom of the ocean? If nothing else, a very interesting experience...

Sigh. He’d probably never find out. More than likely there was some regulation or other stipulating that members of “inferior” races, as humans were considered, could not occupy the bodies of beings from species with full galactic rights.

No matter how much money he managed to amass, there’d be something he could never shake. His original sin: being human... And most of the universe would be out of bounds for him forever.

The idea was so depressing that for a second he seriously considered skipping his own act. Leaving it all and returning to Earth. He’d be poor forever, but at least he’d be among his equals.

Probably during the Union Day carnival they’d hardly even notice he was gone, and there wouldn’t be many consequences...

But at almost the same moment he remembered how he had gotten monumentally drunk barely a month before on a distillation of native algae that seemed acceptably similar to white wine from Earth. And how, thinking that being drunk was a perfectly acceptable excuse for skipping out on one of his two weekly performances, he had remained nonchalantly asleep in his tiny accommodations.

Three hours after his act was supposed to begin, two Colossaurs, next to whom Ettubrute had looked like a cream puff, woke him by bashing down the partition wall enclosing his room. He didn’t dare put up more than verbal resistance (they obviously did not understand Planetary, and they weren’t carrying translators) while they dragged him someplace that looked too much like a jail not to be one. There they literally threw him in head-first. It was all but a miracle he didn’t break his neck when he hit the floor.

A mere thirty hours later his agent deigned to show up, and Moy kept his mouth closed and hung his head while he got one of the harshest reprimands of his life before being set free. Along the way, he found out that Cetians considered breaking a promise an extremely serious offense. Whether you had an excuse or not. And that’s how they’d seen it when he skipped out on a show he had previously agreed upon. He was stunned when Ettubrute revealed the size of the fine he’d had to pay (which, of course, would come out of his honoraria) to free him... And even more so when he learned that if he did it again, the punishment might even include being expelled from Tau Ceti as an undesirable alien—and having everything he’d earned on the planet confiscated.

Obviously, being an alien was an enviable position only on Earth. Everywhere else in the galaxy it was as good as being garbage. Especially if you were an alien who didn’t belong to one of the powerful races like the grodos or the Auyars. Not even ignorance of the local law absolved you from obeying it.

“
Dura lex, sed lex
,” Moy uttered solemnly as he returned resolutely to his tent. The law is harsh, but it’s the law. He couldn’t let himself suffer artist’s block, the way things were. He’d act. “The show must go on,” he whispered. Though what he really felt like doing was shouting “Shit!” at the top of his voice.

He didn’t, because he couldn’t remember how to say it in Latin just then... And because of the harsh blow that his respect for the lovely dead language had suffered when he found out that greatest living expert in the language of Virgil wasn’t a human, but a segmented guzoid from Regulus who needed a voice synthesizer to be able to recite the Eclogues. Plus the blow to his already shaken human pride.

He looked up at the city clock, a gigantic holographic image that floated above the tallest buildings in Ningando like a long and oddly colorful cloud. There should still be a few minutes before it was time to start the show.

With those Cetian clocks, there was no way to be sure. The image had no numbers or hands: just one long bar that kept changing colors, section by section, as time went by.

At first Moy refused to believe the clock meant much beyond its decorative function, like any analogue dial on Earth. He smiled skeptically whenever he asked some Cetian for the time and the Cetian, after giving him a look of scornful superiority, glanced up and told him to the second. They must have other, hidden clocks—that was just for show.

But he soon learned he was wrong.

The natives of Tau Ceti had extremely sharp senses. Visually, every inhabitant of Ningando could differentiate ten or twelve shades of red that the most subtle human painters or illustrators would have thought identical. Any Cetian would make a human musician with so-called “perfect pitch” look ridiculous. The Cetians could distinguish not merely eighths but hundredths of a tone—a fact that made their language especially complex, since the intensity and modulation of the message often contained as much information as the message itself.

All this had been a further blow to Moy’s human pride. As if it weren’t enough to feel you were practically invisible when you were walking around among crowds of gorgeous and tremendously sexually attractive Cetians who were completely ignoring you, from that moment on he had to remain silent when any xenoid critic smugly observed that terrestrial arts were pitifully primitive and crude. Especially if the critic was a Cetian.

To a race with such subtle senses, even the
Mona Lisa
or
Guernica
must be little more than pathetically composed splotches of primary colors. Like practically all figurative art... No wonder almost all their art was purely abstract, coldly mathematical. Who wants reflections of reality when you can’t help but be aware that that’s all they are, mere reflections, always imperfect, falling sadly short.

“Too bad for them, poor people,” Moy muttered sarcastically as he reached his platform, and he felt better.

Perfection was a two-edged sword. Those beautiful humanoids would never be able to enjoy the simple pleasures of an outline drawing, the joyful distortion of forms in a caricature, the vibrant colors of expressionism.

Moy had even begun to suspect (and it was no small consolation) that he was the only living being in Ningando capable of appreciating the city’s harmonious orgy of colors and forms in all its magnificence. For its inhabitants, the city must be a collection of hopelessly crude attempts to achieve an impossible aesthetic ideal. The fate of the Cetians deserved more pity than envy: they were so perfectly well equipped to quest for beauty that they’d never find anything lovely enough to satisfy them entirely.

Even Colossaurs, not well known for their artistic abilities, their vision limited to black and white, must be more familiar with aesthetic pleasure than the sophisticated Cetians...

“Speak of the devil and his carapace will appear,” Moy muttered with amusement when he caught sight of a reddish bulk approaching the platform from the other direction.

Ettubrute’s massive frame cut a path through the motley Cetian multitude like a red-hot knife through butter. Not even in the carnivalesque confusion of a Union Day could he possibly be mistaken for a Cetian in disguise. It wasn’t the carapace, or the volume of his arms and legs, which afterall could be imitated by fake limbs—it was, rather, a certain gracefulness, rough and indefinite, but very much there. Powerful, curt, very unlike the fluid elegance of the Cetians’ gestures.

Besides, for a native it would have been in very poor taste to dress up as a Colossaur. They employed Colossaurs as guards or police officers, jobs that they considered base and dirty. But they despised them. For all Cetians, Ettubrute or any other member of his race was the epitome of vulgarity, bad taste, and boorishness. Coarse, unmannered louts, exhibitionists who disdained even the basic civilized courtesy of wearing clothes, determined at all costs to display the rough crimson surface of their armored plates.

Though when push came to shove, for a Cetian, a Colossaur was always preferable to a human, Moy reminded himself, with biting irony. Better the honest lout than the crooked savage...

Moy also knew that, beneath the Cetians’ outer guise of refinement, the Colossaurs’ brute power and vigorous, elemental culture exercised a strange fascination over the decadent sophisticates. Ettubrute had once taken him to a pornography screening (completely underground, of course) featuring several of his fellow beings. Nine out of ten in the audience were natives of Tau Ceti. Moy later learned that this sort of holorecording was the second currency of trade between Colossa and the Cetians. And, though Moy hadn’t found the show very appealing (it made him think of two battle tanks ineffectually attempting to make love), the Cetians got fired up. They screamed throughout the show, touching each other in a veritable collective frenzy that Moy found much more attractive than the main feature. Beautiful bodies twisting and writhing lewdly, trying in vain to imitate the Colossaurs’ formidable body language...

“Chill,” he told himself, feeling the onset of an erection. He smiled, shaking his head. He had turned into a total deviant. But nothing odd about that... The truth was, his sex life over the past several months had been anything but normal. Even for an Earthling who had grown accustomed, almost from childhood, to the idea of sex with any more-or-less humanoid (sometimes not even that) arriving from the depths of the galaxy.

His ideas about what constituted pornography and/or obscenity had changed a lot during these months of touring. Though he still laughed at jokes that were more or less about hybrid sex (such as the classic: “The Embassy of Aldebaran on Earth emphatically protests the public screening of holofilms on the cellular fission and budding of Pacific corals, considering them decidedly pornographic and therefore detrimental to the morals and good taste of its tourists visiting the planet...”), he already understood what Freud had expressed many years before: When it comes to sex, totem and taboo are very relative matters.

Fortunately for him...

Sex was a price that, though not explicitly listed in the clauses of his contract with Ettubrute, he always knew he would have to pay. Not just his occasional “relaxation sessions” with the Colossaur (which he had almost come to enjoy) but other things as well.

Such as a particularly humiliating party at the home of some rich collector of native arts who wanted to find out whether what they said about the animalistic nature of humans was true. Or being looked up and down, naked as a newborn, by a circle of inscrutable guzoids who had bought one of his works...

“Occupational hazards,” Moy muttered. Well, if he ever got tired of his performances at least he had a good shot at making it as a freelance social worker. Sure, the profession was strictly off-limits to males on Earth... but, as you might expect, there was a black market that kept growing larger and larger. And more dangerous...

“Ready? Prepare self. Soon now.” Ettubrute’s hoarse voice brought him back to the present. “Not looking good...” The Colossaur sounded worried, and his tiny pig eyes scrutinized Moy’s face closely from the depths of their armored sockets.

“No problem, Bruiser. It’ll all come off fine, like usual,” Moy sighed, giving his agent’s red armor-plated back a friendly punch. “Go to the console. These guys are obsessively punctual...”

When the Colossaur was at the controls, Moy furtively poked his head through the folds of synplast at the entrance to the tent and scanned the scene.

There sat his audience. Dozens and dozens of Cetians, wearing all sorts of costumes, all in animated conversation, patiently waiting for yet another Union Day show to begin. Some had seen it before and were coming back to enjoy it again. Others, excited by their friends’ descriptions or by the holovision ads (they’d better have been; those spots had cost an arm and a leg), had come with some skepticism to see if there was any truth in what they’d heard. Or, more likely, hoping to get a laugh out of the bumbling attempts at making art by a race as inferior as the humans.

Moy felt the familiar sensation of heartburn filling his esophagus. All a bunch of carrion vultures, disguised as birds of paradise. Beautiful, colorful plumes, but under their fine clothes, hungry birds of prey. And he was for dinner.