A Planet for Rent

by Yoss

  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.

  He was set. He’d gotten into just the right mood for doing his performance. The emptiness was eating away at him. And the rage, and the envy, and the pride.

  He sighed. Wearily lifting a hand, he gave Ettubrute the signal. At once the powerful fan mussed his short hair. He walked out.

  Then the charges went off.

  The amount of explosives had been calculated to the milligram. The four synplast walls that formed the tent went up in a cloud of atomized particles, which the jet of air from the fan scattered in a kind of reverse snowfall.

  A bit too much explosive, and the shock wave could have hurt the audience. A bit less, and the synplast fragments would have been too large for the fan to handle, and they might have even wounded the spectators.

  Ettubrute really knew his business.

  Moy cleared his throat to begin his discussion of theory, improvising on a set of basic ideas on each occasion, playing off the audience’s emotional state. He let his eyes wander over the sea of expensive costumes, and...

  Surprise. There, with her father, was Kandria, more beautiful than ever. Her presence pleased him and intrigued him: How had she gotten to Ningando? Had she been so successful with her Multisymphonies?

  Or was she, maybe, searching for him?

  Hope rang in his heart like a bell.

  She saw him and waved respectfully. She smiled.

  Her father, the cold humanoid, also saw him but didn’t move a muscle.

  Strangely embarrassed by the girl’s admiring gaze, Moy hated going back to performing while she watched. He felt like a trained circus animal, like a pitiful buffoon. Again he thought of canceling the performance.

  This was all a farce. He was no artist, just a poor mercenary...

  The silence stretched out. The courteous Cetians sat. Moy remembered how huge the fine would be if he didn’t perform, and, plucking up his courage, he began.

  It would all just look like another pause for effect...

  “Praised be Union Day, and long life and prosperity to Ningando and its people.” He had practiced the phrase a thousand times, even using the hypnopedia to help him memorize it. A couple of sentences in the native language, without translators, were just the ticket to win over any audience from the get-go.

  “But you must forgive me if I feel distressed in the midst of so much good cheer. I am so sad—because art is dead.” Ettubrute had just turned on his cybernetic translator. As always, Moy wondered whether a dead device could really catch and reproduce all the fine emotional and aesthetic nuances of his speech. He imagined not, but he had no other choice than to hope it would manage anyway—partially, at least.

  “Art is dead. It was killed by holoprojections, by cybersystem chromatic designs, by musical harmonization programs, by virtual dance simulations, by all the technological paraphernalia whose only aim seems to be to eliminate the need not only for the artist’s skills, but even for the artist’s presence.” He was bending theatrically lower and lower, as if defeated by the circumstances. This was the sign for Ettubrute to start the activation sequence for all systems.

  “But the artist refuses to be ignored! I refuse to fall into oblivion!” He lurched forward with a savage expression, and the Cetians drew back slightly.

  Moy suppressed a smile: they were getting what they’d come for. The human savage. The elemental madman. The brilliant naïf, all subconscious, no processing.

  “The artist cannot die. Because an artist enjoys the immortality of Prometheus. Because he dies in each of his works. Because he puts a piece of his life into each thing he creates. Because every bit of material that sprouts, transformed, from his hands is another piece of time that he has snatched from implacable entropy.” And Moy turned around to face the machine that was beginning to deploy.

  As always, he was momentarily enraptured by the inexorable, lethal beauty of the device he had designed himself. Straightening up and growing like the hood of a colossal cobra or the ominous shadow of a dragon, the mechanical joints slid silently, one over the next. Until the archetypal figure of a cross had formed. Rising threateningly and enormous over the human’s silhouette. As if waiting.

  Moy turned back to face the audience.

  Too bad they wouldn’t get the Christian reference...

  “The artist can and must die—in, through, and for his art. The artist is obliged to deconstruct himself in his art.” He noted with the usual satisfaction that the translator hesitated briefly at the word “deconstruct.”

  Deconstruction. He could have included the term in the cyberglossary... but he liked to know that he, a simple human, a child of one of the least sophisticated cultures in the galaxy, could make his masters’ most advanced technology waver.

  “The artist is a booster antenna. A funnel. He captures and guzzles the world’s pain and pours it out into his art,” and he took the apparently casual step backward that was the arranged signal.

  The machine, like a carnivorous plastometal flower, leaned down and trapped him.

  The Cetians stiffened with fright when the links and fasteners surrounded the human’s body and limbs like the tentacles of a giant polyp. Then they lifted him several yards above the stage without visible effort.

  “The artist’s works are his clones, his children. They are his lacerated flesh and blood, his message. His anguished cry to a world that no longer hears any voice but that of pain and blood!” Moy howled heartrendingly.

  The first five bleeders clamped onto his neck, thighs, and forearms, locating his veins with millimetric precision. Moy felt the shock of pain, masked almost immediately by the analgesics coating the needles. He winced; well, no one’s perfect. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, or do his performance without feeling some pain.

  The negative pressure regulators worked properly, and five streams of scarlet liquid shot out in precise arcs. First sprinkling the stage, then falling into tiny crystal vessels that sprang from the machine, until they were filled. Then the bleeding stopped.

  Moy made a fist with his right hand.

  “He can deny his hand, try to exchange it for mechanical fakery. But no device can equal the fertile pain this hand feels when it holds a brush and creates.” He tensed and took a deep breath. Another dose of analgesics was injected into his system.

  The semicircular blade sprang, swift and well-aimed as an axe blow, cutting the hand off and tossing it through the air. Another mechanism caught it before it could land. It connected electrodes to the convulsing nerves of the hand and put a brush in its fingers.

  The hand, writhing, drew meaningless lines across the canvas that formed the stage, dancing in uncontrolled paroxysms. More and more slowly, until at last it remained motionless.

  As usual, the spectacle drew murmurs from the well-mannered public. But Moy knew that the magic was already working. The audience was his. His slaves. He had them in his grip. He could do what he wanted with them.

  “The fragile, transitory body is not what makes the difference. Who cares about the hand that drew the line, if the genius that drove
it lives on in the line itself?”

  Feeling the subtle creeping sensation inside the coarse fabric of his trouser leg, Moy relaxed his sphincter to allow the nanomanipulators to penetrate him. He recited a yoga mantra to stave off nausea while the delicate mechanisms snaked up through the curves of his intestine.

  “Often, faced with the seeming perfection of the art, no one cares whether it was drawn by hand, claw, tentacle, or pincer. Some believe that art is art, whether made by a Da Vinci, by a Sciagluk, or by a computer.” Viewers waved their heads from side to side in agreement.

  Moy hated the abstract, frigid compositions of Morffel Sciagluk. Nothing but a three-dimensional imitator of Mondrian, in his opinion. He only mentioned him for practical reasons: few of these Cetians knew the first thing about Leonardo. Or his Last Supper, or the Mona Lisa.

  Through the veil of the analgesic drug, he felt the diffuse pain of the nanomanipulators penetrating him through arteries and capillaries, moving among muscles and tendons. Mobile fibers one molecule wide, spinning their web inside the edifice of his body. When the tickling reached his left arm, he gulped. The wave of analgesics that flooded his nervous system convinced him that Ettubrute was on the ball, that he could continue to the next step without risk.

  “But only flesh and blood, mind and manipulating organ, can give birth to art. And if that exact conjunction does not exist—no art is possible.” He relaxed, waiting.

  As always, the explosion surprised him as much as the audience. Though there was hardly any pain.

  The meticulously measured collection of volatile molecules in his left arm transformed into an explosion, spraying bones, tendons, and fingers into a spectacular bloody cloud. By a calculated manipulation of force fields, the heap of remains that had once been an arm floated in the air for a few seconds without spreading. Until Ettubrute turned off the antigrav effect. Then they fell to the stage, amid the fervent applause of the enthusiastic spectators.