Хосе Гомес - A Planet for Rent

“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?