Robert Silverberg - Tourist Trade

After a moment Eitel’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and the glare of the clashing crisscrossing spotlights. But he didn’t need his eyes to tell him what sort of bizarre zoo he had walked into. His sensitive nostrils picked up the whole astonishing olfactory blast at once: a weird hodgepodge of extraterrestrial body odors, offworld pheromones, transgalactic cosmetics, the ozone radiation of personal protection screens, minute quantities of unearthly atmospheres leaking out of breathing devices.

“Something wrong?” David asked.

“The odors. They overwhelm me.”

“The smoking, eh? You hate it that much?”

“Not the tobacco, fool. The aliens! The E-Ts!”

“Ah. The smell of money, you mean. I agree, it is very overwhelming in here.”

“For a shrewd man you can sometimes be very stupid,” Eitel muttered. “Unless you say such things deliberately, which you must, because I have never known a stupid Moroccan.”

“For a Moroccan, I am very stupid,” said David serenely. “And so it was very stupid of you to choose me as your partner, eh? Your grandfathers in Zurich would be shamed if they knew. Eh?” He gave Eitel a maddeningly seraphic smile.

Eitel scowled. He was never sure when he had genuinely offended the slippery little Moroccan and when David was merely teasing. But somehow David always came out of these interchanges a couple of points ahead.

He turned and looked the place over, checking it out.

Plenty of humans, of course. This was the biggest gathering-place for aliens in Morocco, the locus of the focus, and a lot of gawkers came to observe the action. Eitel ignored them. There was no sense doing business with humans any more. There were probably some Interpol types in here too, hoping to head off just the sort of deals Eitel was here to do. To hell with them. His hands were clean, more or less.

But the aliens! The aliens, the aliens, the aliens!

All over the room. Vast saucer eyes, spidery limbs, skins of grotesque textures and unnameable colors. Eitel felt the excitement rising in him, so un-Swiss of him, so thoroughly out of character.

“Look at them!” he whispered. “They’re beautiful!”

“Beautiful? You think so?”

“Fantastic!”

The Moroccan shrugged. “Fantastic, yes. Beautiful, no. Blue skin, green skin, no skin, two heads, five heads: this is beauty? What is beautiful to me is the money. And the way they like to throw it away.”

“You would never understand,” said Eitel.

In fact Eitel hardly understood it himself. He had discovered, not long after the first alien tourists had reached Earth, that they stirred unexpected areas of his soul: strange vistas opening, odd incoherent cosmic yearnings. To find at the age of forty that there was more to him than Panamanian trusts and numbered bank accounts—that was a little troublesome; but it was delicious, as well. He stood staring for a long ecstatic chaotic moment. Then he turned to David and said, “Where’s your Centauran?”

“I don’t see him.”

“Neither do I.”

“He swore he’d be here. Is a big place, Eitel. We go looking, and we find.”

The air was thick with color, sound, fumes. Eitel moved carefully around a tableful of leathery-faced pockmarked red Rigelians, burly, noisy, like a herd of American conventioneers out on the town. Behind them sat five sleek and sinuous Steropids, wearing cone-shaped breathers. Good. Steropids were easy marks. If something went wrong with this Centauran deal David had set up, he might want to have them as customers to fall back on.

Likewise that Arcturan trio, flat heads, grizzled green hair, triple eyes bright as blue-white suns. Arcturans were wild spenders, though they weren’t known to covet Eitel’s usual merchandise, which was works of fine art, or more or less fine art. Perhaps they could be encouraged to. Eitel, going past, offered them a preliminary smile: Earthman establishing friendly contact, leading perhaps to more elaborate relationship. But the Arcturans didn’t pick up on it. They looked through Eitel as though their eyes didn’t function in the part of the spectrum he happened to inhabit.

“There,” David said.

Yes. Far across the way, a turquoise creature, inordinately long and narrow, that appeared to be constructed of the finest grade of rubber, stretched over an awkwardly flung together armature of short rods.

“There’s a woman with him,” Eitel said. “I wasn’t expecting that. You didn’t tell me.”

David’s eyes gleamed. “Ah, nice, very nice!”

She was more than very nice. She was splendid. But that wasn’t the point. Her presence here could be a troublesome complication. A tour guide? An interpreter? Had the Centauran brought his own art expert along? Or was she some Interpol agent decked out to look like the highest-priced of hookers? Or maybe even a real hooker. God help me, he thought, if the Centauran’s gotten involved in some kind of kinky infatuation that would distract him from the deal. No: God help David.

“You should have told me there was a woman,” Eitel said.

“But I didn’t know! I swear, Jesus Mary Moses, I never see her yesterday! But it will be all right. Jesus Mary Moses, go ahead, walk over.” He smiled and winked and slipped off towards the bar. “I see you later, outside. You go for it, you hear? You hear me, Eitel? It will be all right.”

The Centauran, seeing the red carnation in Eitel’s lapel, lifted his arm in a gesture like the extending of a telescopic tube, and the woman smiled. It was an amazing smile, and it caught Eitel a little off guard, because for an instant it made him wish that the Centauran was back on Centaurus and this woman was sitting here alone. He shook the thought off. He was here to do a deal, not to get into entanglements.

“Hans Eitel, of Zurich,” he said.

“I am Anakhistos,” said the Centauran. His voice was like something out of a synthesizer, which perhaps it was, and his face was utterly opaque, a flat motionless mask. For vision he had a single bright strip of receptors an inch wide around his forehead, for air intake he had little vents on his cheeks, and for eating he had a three-sided oral slot like the swinging top of a trash basket. “We are very happied you have come,” he said. “This is Agila.”

Eitel allowed himself to look straight at her. It was dazzling but painful, a little like staring into the sun. Her hair was red and thick, her eyes were emerald and very far apart, her lips were full, her teeth were bright. She was wearing a vaguely futuristic metal-mesh sheath, green, supple, clinging. What she looked like was something that belonged on a 3-D billboard, one of those unreal idealized women who turn up in the ads for cognac, or skiing holidays in Gstaad. There was something a little freakish about such excessive beauty. A professional, he decided.

To the Centauran he said, “This is a great pleasure for me. To meet a collector of your stature, to know that I will be able to be of assistance—”

“And a pleasure also for ourself. You are greatly recommended to me. You are called knowledgeable reliable, discreet—”

“The traditions of our family. I was bred to my métier.”

“We are drinking mint tea,” the woman said. “Will you drink mint tea with us?” Her voice was warm, deep, unfamiliar. Swedish? Did they have redheads in Sweden?

Eitel said, “Forgive me, but it’s much too sweet for me. Perhaps a brandy instead—”

A waiter appeared as though by telepathic command. Eitel ordered a Courvoisier, and the woman another round of tea. She is very smooth, very good, he thought. He imagined himself in bed with her, digging his fingers into that dense red mane, running his lips over her long lean thighs. The fantasy was pleasing but undisturbing: an idle dream, cool, agreeable, giving him no palpitations, no frenzy. Good. After that first startled moment he was getting himself under control. He wondered if she was charging the Centauran by the night, or working at something bigger.