A Planet for Rent (19 page)

But it really didn’t work well at all. I guess the lessons in machismo that I’d been given as a child were ultimately stronger than any consciousness that it was all simply a matter of prejudices. Young men with waxed bodies, long limbs, smooth gestures, and fluty voices seemed like unnatural caricatures to me. Trying to imitate women and not succeeding. And the others, hairy and muscular, with booming, hypersexed voices, reminded me too much of my father to inspire any erotic notions in me.

I devoted myself fully to the female sex. Time went by... And in the end, even though they told me I was a real stud and that they were more fond of me than of any xenoid client, it started to seem... insufficient.

It was too easy. Too artificial. I wanted more.

And I thought I knew how to get it.

One of the few times they allowed me to leave the Center, I escaped from the pair of spies they had set to watch me (without my knowledge, or so they thought).

I had taken every precaution. I disguised my body odors so that the mutant bloodhounds couldn’t track me. I used interference to make the locator they had implanted subcutaneously in my sternum go haywire. In a word, I disappeared.

I wanted to live life on my own, for a little while at least. I had provided myself a phantom credit card that they couldn’t trace, so I had no lack of means. I flew to New Paris, the city of love. I rented a room and got ready to enjoy the
dolce far niente
. And I trusted to luck for finding the woman who would make my heart throb.

But regular women didn’t find me attractive. I’m no model of male beauty... Of course, I could have had plastic surgery, but I like this face. It reminds me of my family every time I look in the mirror.

After a week of solitude, when I was starting to adjust really well to everyday life, I went back to the pros.

For three nights I spent my money hand over fist, until I was bored once more of sex and of love for sale, and I returned to my inactive solitude.

One night, when I was walking through the recreation of the Latin Quarter, I met Yleka. A woman of emerald and chocolate on the outside, a panther of honey and fire on the inside, as a verse of Valera’s puts it. Are you familiar with him? I suppose not. What a pity. Try reading him.

Yleka had been left stranded in Paris by a smooth-talking Centaurian. She didn’t have a credit to her name or a roof to sleep under. I did, and I felt lonelier than ever... We slept together. And all the rest. But I didn’t tell her I was rich. I wanted to see if that was so important.

It was a great week. She was tender and funny, and she didn’t care too much that I wasn’t very good with anything but objects and machines. That I hardly talked. She talked for us both, and I loved listening to her.

For those seven days she stopped wearing her supertight plastiskin body stocking, and she didn’t go out looking for xenoids. She said I was enough. And it wasn’t enough for me to spend all day long with her.

I think we each lost several pounds.

Things could have gone on like this a lot longer, I guess. If I had managed to keep my restless brain calm. I tried to continue my work on the silence generator, using homemade tools in my rented room, but it wasn’t the same. I missed the labs at the Center and their almost unlimited resources. A habit’s a habit.

I think my subconsciousness betrayed me, and I started making mistakes, minor acts of negligence. Leaving a trail. Doing all my shopping at the same store, going to inventor fairs, stuff like that. I wanted them to find me... and, of course, they did.

Back at the Center, it wasn’t three days before they brought Yleka back to me. But it wasn’t the same. The magic was dead. Now that she knew the balance in my bank account, I only interested her as a client. Human, not xenoid, but otherwise identical. Her orgasms seemed fake to me, no matter how passionate they were. Though she insisted that she still loved me...

Maybe her coldness was her revenge on me for lying to her. For not being just what I pretended to be. For smashing her illusions of finding happiness with a good, simple man. Even a social worker can have dreams, can’t she?

When it was obvious that things weren’t working like before, I told her I wouldn’t be seeing her any more. It was a mistake. She cried buckets and swore she loved me. But how could I know if she loved me or my credits? I told her that her love was unprovable.

Then she called me a “damned autistic” and an “unfeeling monster.” That’s the only thing that has always made me angry. Call me a stupid idiot savant, I let it pass. But to say I’m cold and heartless... I used to fight my brothers over less than that until I was out of breath and covered with bruises. Until they also started fighting anyone in our town who said it to me.

I lost control, we argued, I yelled at her... I hit her. Just once, but I felt horrible. If I hadn’t restrained myself, I would have kept on beating her. For her own good, I asked the guards to take her away.

I hated her for forcing me to do that.

And my anger made me pressure the people at the Center: it wasn’t enough to get her out of my life; I wanted them to destroy her. Not kill her, but harm her badly, forever. Or else I’d never work again.

At first they ignored me.

Then Hermann and Sigimer tried to convince me the nice way.

Later on, they used drugs, but it’s impossible to force a brain to think if it doesn’t want to.

After not touching the machines for two weeks, they gave in. They’re capable of doing anything to get what they want. And I knew it, and took advantage. They were only interested in the stuff I could do. And only indirectly, in a secondary fashion, in how I felt. I was one more instrument. Expensive, like a radiotelescope or a synchrophasotron... and as such, they had to take care of me and keep me happy.

Another reason why I’m here. I got tired of wearing an invisible inventory number on my forehead...

One week later they showed me holovideos of Yleka. She had already become a human wreck. They had gotten her addicted to telecrack. I felt I had my revenge, but that didn’t make me any happier.

I worked and worked. All the years since, I’ve done nothing but work. Solving very interesting, morbidly fascinating problems in physics and math. To keep from thinking about her.

Every now and then I’d ask for a social worker, and we’d have sex—pure, paid for, and without any implications. Mere gymnastics to relax the body.

One day, months ago, when I was having a few drinks with Lieutenant Dabiel, an officer in Planetary Security’s Special Section at the Center and one of the few humans I can call my friend, he told me how easy it had been to get Yleka addicted. How she had received the drug as a blessing... because she only wanted to forget. To forget me.

That was when I knew she had really loved me.

Then I regretted the wrong I had done and wanted to undo it. I secretly ordered to have it checked into... I know that cures exist for any addiction, no matter how powerful, and I was ready to pay any price. What is money good for if not to satisfy your whims?

But Dabiel and his guys informed me that it was too late: Yleka had left with Cauldar, a Cetian who was recruiting workers for a slave brothel in Ningando. And Planetary Security’s power and jurisdiction stop at the border of Earth’s atmosphere.

So... no. I don’t have any stable or permanent emotional relationships. And I never have, actually.

But I’m here to remedy that...

“What is your opinion of the current science policies of the government of Earth, please?”

For years I’ve been practically an inmate in the Center for Physics and Mathematical Studies.

My work is ninety-nine percent secret in nature, and its results aren’t even leaked to the holonet. I don’t get published in the science journals and I don’t regularly attend conferences or symposia of any sort on the planet, much less off-world. The Special Section of Planetary Security keeps me under a close watch. My life is insured for millions of credits. I’m considered a Planetary Scientific Reserve.

I’ve never participated in any seminars or courses before, nor have I wished to. As an unknown in my field, I’ve never been invited before, either.

My trip to this planet of yours to attend the 309th Galactic Conference on Hyperspace Astrophysics is no accident. It came about through a carefully laid but seemingly random plan. The final objective of which was to get to this building and confront this assessment interview... and especially its consequences.

I do not wish to return to Earth.

I’m tired of being a puppet. Tired of being alone. Tired of being a freak, of being the precious songbird that is never allowed to leave its cage.

When a delegation of xenoid scientists were visiting the handful of non-secret areas at the Center for Physics and Mathematical Studies, I left my labs with Lieutenant Dabiel’s help. I was dressed in a maintenance man’s overalls and had disguised my features with some handy plastiflesh makeup, which the lieutenant himself applied to my face. And I was carrying a duster and a water bucket, like a regular janitor.

While the group of scientists from other worlds was listening attentively to the guide’s explanations of a device, which I had created myself, for replacing material walls with stable force fields at minimal expense, I struck up a conversation with one of the Cetian physicists.

I already knew that the 309th Conference would be held in Ningando, and my relative command of Cetian allowed me to whisper a few corrections into the Cetian ear of my conversation partner, a tremendous improvement over the arid cybernetic translation that he’d been listening to.

Intrigued and astonished to find such knowledge and such a command of his highly complex language in a simple janitor, the scientist, whose name was Jourkar—you can verify it, if you so desire—was soon engaged in a hypertechnical dialogue with me.

I told you earlier that I generally don’t do well with abstractions and theories, but on that occasion the subject was my own device, so...

In under a minute, Jourkar had focused the attention of about three quarters of the delegation on me. Meanwhile, the guide—who didn’t recognize me in my janitor’s uniform and plastiflesh prosthetics, thank heaven—was probably wondering what sort of dirty jokes the mop monkey was telling the xenoids.

His surprise must have gone through the roof when I risked everything, turned on the device, and gave the scientists a demonstration. Luckily for me, that left him so speechless that nearly a minute went by before he tried notifying his supervisors what was happening over his vocoder. The interference generator in my pocket kept his personal communicator from working, of course.

It was another half a minute before he decided he should leave us and run to find some Planetary Security people to inform them of the irregularity. Then, not by mere luck, but by careful arrangements on Dabiel’s part (although we were friends, this cost me a good few thousand credits), a couple more minutes went by before he located them.

That gave me more than enough time to remove my disguise, reveal my real face to the xenoid scientists, and put on the finest demonstration I could.

Once the device was running, in a matter of seconds I constructed a small room that floated half a meter above the floor without touching it. Its walls were pure force fields, not a milligram of matter. And when I concluded my “energy bricklaying” job and stabilized the whole system vibrationally, it was consuming scarcely more energy than a pocket flashlight.

And by fiddling with the topological properties of the Moebius strip and Klein bottle, I even made it so the space inside my “building” was almost twice the size classical Euclidean geometry declared it should be.

Astonished by that display of talent (all modesty apart), Jourkar and the others were of course thrilled to immediately offer me an official invitation to the 309th Conference. And they promised to bring all possible pressure to bear so the appropriate terrestrial organizations would understand how extremely important if was, if they did not want to mar their relations with the rest of the galaxy, to let me attend the event without any hindrance or obstacles.

Then I said goodbye, destroyed my force-field room, tossed the overalls and the duster into the empty bucket, left it in a corner, and got back to my labs... twenty seconds before the alarm went off throughout the Center.

Lieutenant Dabiel and several nanocameras (whose existence I had been aware of almost since they were installed, and which I easily had set to record on a closed loop) vouched for the fact that I hadn’t left my work desk for a single instant.

They still can’t understand what really happened that day.

The heads of the Center understood it even less when the invitation arrived a month later. Jourkar and the others had gone to great pains to keep their promise. The holovideo they sent bore so many priority marks and codes that it wasn’t an invitation so much as a virtual command to the government of Earth to allow me to attend the event... or take the consequences.

All the Center officials came to interrogate me. Various leaders from Planetary Security, too, and not just from the Special Section.

How had the xenoids learned of my existence and the work I had done, in spite of the curtain of strict secrecy with which they had surrounded me? Needless to say, I knew nothing.

And I continued knowing nothing when they analyzed my brainwaves, curve by curve, while repeating their questions. Neurology isn’t one of my fortes, but I had prepared myself far in advance for that test. I found it trivial to construct a brainwave-congruent nanointerferometer and manipulate it with a sublingual control pad to keep them from suspecting anything.

Though they suspected me anyway. Wouldn’t you have? It doesn’t make much sense for a human scientist to attend an elite astrophysics event if he won’t be able to talk about anything he sees there afterward... and in fact, nothing of the sort had ever occurred before in the field of astrophysics. When humans get invited to scientific events outside the solar system, it’s usually for sociology, psychology, or, much more often, history.