A Planet for Rent

Aptitude Assessment

You might call me an accidental scientist. Despite what they call my “exceptional qualities,” I could have died and the world would never have found out if it hadn’t been for that lucky incident.

But let me tell you the whole story, since I think we have plenty of time, and the story of what happened that day is worth it…

I was fourteen years old when the antigrav balance system of that aerobus accidentally broke down in flight. Right when it was passing over my hometown, Baracuyá del Jiquí, in the Sierra Cristal mountains… Well, it’s more of a hamlet than a town.

The two professors from the Center for Advanced Physics and Mathematical Studies who were passengers in the vehicle must have been in for a bumpy ride… All the pilot could do was make a forced landing, the aerobus wobbling like a drunken duck. But we were in luck: it came to a rest right in front of our house, on the open field where my brothers and I used to play baseball.

I remember it like yesterday. We were all arguing. My brother Romualdo had just run away from home, and without him we were only six boys and three girls. Neither team wanted Giselita, who couldn’t hit a watermelon with an ironing board. Or me, either, even though I was an okay player, because they all said my head had some of its stuffing missing. Besides, I was the youngest boy.

By the time the vehicle stopped shuddering my three sisters had already run to hide with my mother in the kitchen. Just the way my father taught them that decent women do when strangers come calling. The three of us boys who were still young, Hermenegildo and Esbértido and me, ran over and climbed onto the aerobus engine, still hot. We’d seen machines like that before already, but never so close up, and we’d never been able to touch one.

After greeting them and offering them the bacán, casabe, and pru that they were afraid to even try, my father and my older brothers tried to explain to the pilot—so tall and skinny he looked like a pitchfork—and the two doctors that there weren’t any stores or repair shops nearby that carried spare antigrav balancers, and there was no holonet connection or any sort of electronic link to the outside world. And the fastest way to get a message to the slightly larger town of Songo Tres Palmeras was to ride his compadre Robustiano’s mare there, because my uncle Segismundo’s messenger pigeons were laid up with the pip they had caught after last month’s gullywashers…

The pilot opened the engine compartment, took a look, spat out fifteen or twenty cusswords, sighed, and said his name was Larsen, and that if that’s how things were, well, there wasn’t much they could do. Afterwards he did try some casabe and bacán and drank some pru and even the strong coffee, brewed country-style, that my mother gave him without looking him in the eye.

Since he had forgotten to close the engine casing, I got in and started nosing around. It was so pretty, lubricated with a transparent oil that smelled nice, not like the smelly mutton grease my father made me smear over the gears of the little sugar mill and the axles of the ox cart to keep them from sticking. It all looked perfect to me—except for what I later found out was the precious antigrav balance system.

Something about it was terribly off. I’d always been handy with tools, and I loved going around looking things over and fixing them up. And since I was the youngest, it was my job to sharpen the axes, machetes, and plowshares and keep the little mill greased. Without really thinking about it, I set to work on that thing. A bit of wire here, a tiny stick there, a dab of earth over there, a pebble between these two metal clips, and…

Yikes! Suddenly the gizmo started bucking like an untamed bronco. Standing in the doorway, Larsen, the pilot, spit out the sip of coffee he had in his mouth, and I got scared and took off running. In one second it was a full-blown chase scene.

But when my father, who was familiar with my habits, started cutting a nice big poplar rod to break over my rump for meddling where I didn’t belong, Larsen stopped him.

My father nearly blew his top. Imagine: nobody had ever even raised his voice to him in his own house, and now this gangly city slicker, who wasn’t even half his boxing weight, was acting like he knew better than him how he should be treating one of his own sons! It went to his head, and… Good thing my mother stepped in and whispered, “Celedonio, just let him talk”—otherwise he would have killed the man then and there.

Larsen spoke… and then my father was so proud, he threw down the poplar switch, gave me a hug, and said I was his son, caray. Said I’d always been that way, a little strange, but better than anybody with all that mechanical stuff…

It turns out I had fixed the antigrav balance system without even realizing it. The best part was, I found out later that in theory no human being could fix one of those units, which only you xenoids were able to manufacture. They were superdurable, built to last, but when one failed you had to chuck it all out and get a new one.

And that was when the two doctors there, with their beards and their wild hair and their crazy eyes, started asking me question after question. They told me that their names were Hermann and Sigimer and that they were astrophysicists. They asked me about electromagnetism, about the Unified Field Theory, about everything. And I didn’t know how to answer any of it. Good thing Hermann had the idea of giving me his laser pen, which had stopped working days earlier—and I fixed it right away, too, with a tiny piece of glass.

Then they both said at once that I had a special gift, that I was a natural genius, a diamond in the rough. And I stood there wide-eyed, not understanding a word of it, thinking they were making fun of me, too, like my brothers… But they started talking with my father and my mother. They went off, talked for a long time, and I could see they were giving my parents money… and finally Mama came back weeping, and she hugged me. She handed me a little suitcase with all my best clothes, six small bars of guava paste, and two big bottles of pru, gave me a kiss, and told me never to forget that they loved me and that they were my mother and father. The old man hugged me, too, and his eyes were wet, but he looked away because men don’t cry, and he told me that I would be leaving with those professors and that it would be for the best for everyone. And to be a man and come out on top.

At first I didn’t want to, but when Hermann and Sigimer told me I’d be going to the city to see things and machines and learn a lot so I could be like them and serve Earth, I stopped feeling about to cry, and I boarded the aerobus, happy as could be.

And can you believe it? Even though Larsen and the doctors were scared, my repair job on the antigrav balance system held up for the rest of the trip, no problem.

I’ve never been back to Baracuyá del Jiquí. I do miss the family, but ever since I reached civilization, I’ve been involved in so many secret projects, they don’t even let me go to the corner store to buy pru anymore. My brain is a strategic weapon, they say.

Now, they do get me everything I ask for. If I ask for a bird on the wing, they bring me a bird on the wing.

I did manage to locate Romualdo. He was the brother who’d always been nicest to me. Two years ago, I started to get nostalgic about him and asked for information. Since he’d run away from home, and he’d always talked about going to the city…

Well, even though they warned me I’d only be allowed to see him from a distance, in less than a week they gave me his whole dossier and a pile of holovideos that showed him talking. My brother’s a sergeant in Planetary Security now. He lives and works in New Miami.

Knowing that, and having the holovideos, was all I needed. Why see him from a distance if he would never know I’d been nearby? Why make myself feel more alone?

And I haven’t seen or heard from anyone else in my family.

Alex Gens Smith, scientist. Terrestrial, human. Height six feet one inch, weight 172 pounds, in case you want to check.

Well, no, but when Hermann and Sigimer brought me to the Center, the people there told me I’d need a more serious-sounding name if I wanted to be a scientist. And they changed it for me. I’ve been saying it this way for so many years that if anybody shouted “Alesio!” at me now, I wouldn’t react.

My real name is Alesio Concepción Pérez de la Iglesia Fernández Olarticochea Vallecillos y Corrales. So, Alex for Alesio, and since Concepción is the same as Genesis, I got Gens for short. And Smith is as common an Anglo name as Pérez is in Spanish, so they’re equivalents. Simple transposition of elements.

For the past four years they’ve kept me busy with an incredibly boring project—military in nature, like almost everything I’ve done. Well, it was classified, of course, but if you people accept me, I won’t be able to keep it a secret.

I work on a principle that a theorist worked out, based on a toy I once built to amuse myself. I’m not very good at formulae or tensor calculus, but I can tell you it has to do with graviton resonator systems.

You know, of course, that the graviton is the elementary particle with the greatest concentration of momentum, making it possible, according to the Unified Field Theory, to convert any magnetic or electrical force into gravitational force. Any child knows that, but I only learned it after I fixed the balance system on that aerobus.

The toy I made was a graviton resonator-based matter miniaturizer. I’d stick any object between the poles of a triphase magnet, supercool it to just above zero degrees Kelvin while bombarding it with positrons in a pulsating ultrasound field, and poof! It would shrink instantly. The effect was caused by overstimulating the mutual attraction between gravitons in the piece of matter. According to the Law of Conservation of Mass, its original mass was unchanged. But it became harder than bicrovan. I had artificially produced hyperdense matter, like the kind in the nuclei of neutron stars. And it was stable; it only returned to its original volume if the process was inverted, at a great expenditure of energy.

The Center people were very excited. They had me create hyperdense projectiles capable of piercing any object, and superarmored plates of compressed cork that were dense as steel. Then it occurred to me to try shrinking things further, and I produced some nano-black holes, very cute. Of course, somebody got the idea into his head of building a weapon that would reduce the enemy to nothingness. They took everything related to black holes, which was what I was really interested in, away from me and gave it to a team of PhDs with a whole mouthful of titles, and they haven’t figured out anything after all this time. They told me I had to produce a miniaturizer that would work from a distance. No matter how much I explained to them that it was impossible, because it would violate the inverse square law and relativistic mass-energy conversion, they insisted, warning me that they wouldn’t allow me to work on anything else until I did it.

That’s another reason I came here—because I’m tired of sitting on my hands, and it makes no sense to waste effort on an impossible project.

But in the meantime, I’ve been working, in secret of course, on a few other little things…

No… not what you’d really call stable or permanent relationships, I don’t. Since my childhood I’ve been very shy around women… It always seemed to me that they talked a lot without saying anything. Like some theorists, for that matter. My mother said that’s why I was so good with machines, because they never talk.

But that’s not entirely true; when I was working on Artificial Intelligence I got along very nicely with an AI that I called Meniscus.

It all started because we were both getting bored, and we entertained ourselves by competing at mental calculations… I always lost on the simple arithmetic problems, but if we went on to topological or phase equations, I walloped Meniscus. Later, when we were on closer terms, we talked about all sorts of things: about life, the mind, what it was like to have sensations and not be just a bunch of electronic impulses inside a circuit box, self-conscious but not really alive.

They erased him three months into the research. They said he wasn’t “stable” any more. I’ve never forgiven them.

I think my problem with women is actually very different. Their scent, the way they have of looking at you, of moving. They make me nervous. They can’t be… reduced to logical parameters. I know it’s the hormones; I even know which hormones, one by one. But it’s the synergy of the hormones that throws me off. Even though I understand the effects of each part, I fail to be objective about the resulting whole. I spin out of control, I forget logic.

Of course, I have had experiences. Plenty. But very… particular. When I turned eighteen, the psychologists at the Center, who kept me under special monitoring, put me in contact with various… professionals.

Social workers, of course. All of them legal, safe, discreet, healthy. Beautiful. The psychologists felt my emotional stability would appreciate an opportunity to replace my theoretical uncertainty with practical experiences.

They were right.

It was great.

Sensorially, a woman is a being of astonishing perfection, who seems to be made for giving and receiving pleasure. The meetings, three times a week, with my new “girlfriends” and their erotic skills propelled me into a period of mental hyperactivity. During that time I produced the invisibility field and outlined the principles of what would later become the silence generator.

I also had a few homosexual experiences. Out of pure scientific curiosity, not genuine inclination. To have a way of judging. How can you say something isn’t for you if you’ve never even tried it?

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…

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.

But the invitation was so imperative, they had to put on their bravest face and grant me permission to travel to Ningando.

Not that they gave up easily. I knew from the outset that I wouldn’t be traveling alone, that an entire human delegation would accompany me, though at an astronomical cost.

I arrived with a huge entourage. Seventy percent were secret agents from Planetary Security responsible for keeping an eye on me, who don’t understand a word of what’s being said here; the other thirty percent are mediocre physicists responsible for explaining it to the agents as best they can, as well as to make sure I don’t reveal any of the secrets that they aren’t even in on themselves. At least the physicists are thrilled with everything they’re seeing, though they don’t understand much more than the agents do and they hate acting like scientific policemen. They probably don’t even care that their memories will be blocked by your people before you let them return to Earth, and will almost certainly be erased by our Planetary Security when they get home.

All the while I concealed my joy over the successful unfolding of my plan under my habitual mask of bewilderment and confusion in the face of the unknown. It didn’t take much effort: ever since I arrived in the astroport I’ve been completely terrified.

I didn’t open my eyes once during the entire trip from the shuttle to the orbiting hypership. I had undertaken the greatest adventure of my life, risking everything. And even though I could change my mind at the last moment, something inside me was whispering, “Alex, there’s no turning back now.”

When I got to Ningando, I knew I had won. With Jourkar’s help, it was easy for me to elude my guards and come here. Now… it all depends on you. There. I’ve laid all my cards on the table.

I don’t plan to return to Earth, and that’s my final word.

First of all, I’d like to make it very clear that I’m not the best suited to testify objectively as to the policies of the terrestrial government toward their scientists. Because I’ve never been considered a “real scientist.” I don’t have a degree from any university. Just a few postgraduate diplomas. And the people who gave them to me were almost always more eager to learn from me than to teach me.

They practically considered me an “idiot savant.” Are you familiar with the term? Good, good… A free electron, unfit to form a part of any think tank or scientific team, because my working methods were far too instinctive and unorthodox. I’m appreciated, I’m well taken care of… but I’m not understood or loved. I’m alone. Completely alone, as I tried to explain to you earlier. And the situation no longer seems right to me.

But although I’m more the exception than the rule, I’ve had enough dealings with “typical” scientists for me to gain a detailed idea of their conflicts and concerns. You may be better able to understand those concerns if I summarize the average career path of a human scientist for you. Though perhaps you already have ninety percent of this information, and your question is more in the line of probing my subjective politics…

In that case, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t know much about politics. I’ve never been interested. It isn’t… scientific.

The terrestrial government—that is, the major human shareholders in the Planetary Tourism Agency, under the guise of the World Parliament—has the good sense to guarantee a good, free education to ninety-nine percent of the children on the planet. And I do mean ninety-nine percent, not one hundred, because as you can see there are always exceptions. My village of Baracuyá del Jiquí, which has no continuous access to holonet or any other connectivity, must still lie completely outside the World Education System.

According to neurologists and psychologists, my mind’s almost complete “virginity” is one of the essential factors that turned me into the freak I am today.

Fine, then; when teenagers finish middle school, they have two choices awaiting them: either they are successful at their aptitude and IQ tests and get into college prep schools, or they fail and end up in tech school. Or they start working, which is what most people have no choice but to do.

For the fortunate few who get into college prep, the state doesn’t charge them anything… for the time being. But they’re racking up a debt that they’ll be forced to pay, to the last credit of accumulated interest, in the future.

There are two ways of enrolling in the university: for free… if you negotiate a second and even more exhaustive series of exams brilliantly enough. Or by paying and skipping the exams. If the student or the student’s family is willing to pay the cost of every class, book, and so on. The privileged few who are able to afford doing this are another matter. Paying automatically gives you certain rights, including the right to choose which career you want to study.

The fact is, the majority of future terrestrial scientists start out among the ranks of those who pass their entrance exams and gain free admission to the university. And when I say the majority, I mean only one out of every hundred college prep graduates.

In practice, only the few who have shown a potential for becoming absolute geniuses have any real possibility of choosing the field of science they will study. The academic fate of the rest depends on a sort of roulette, in which their qualifications play a role… but what mainly counts is the medium-term plans of the Planetary Tourism Agency, or of the government, which is the same thing.

It doesn’t matter if a young person has been dreaming since childhood of becoming an astrophysicist. If the “needs of Earth” demand x number of sociologists over the next seven years… he’ll have to study sociology, or drop out of the university.

Naturally, two out of three young people go unsatisfied into specialties that never interested them. If they are interested in learning, better something that nothing, don’t you think?

To be sure, it is always possible to change fields.

Though the mechanism was intended for students who discovered halfway through their studies that they have no vocation for the subject they selected, some thirty percent of students on Earth graduate in something completely different from what they started out studying. And according to conservative statistics, of the other seventy percent, nearly half wish they could do so… but their grades aren’t high enough to qualify them for a transfer request.

The only students who have a right to make such a petition, and only after completing the second year, are those who attain a grade point average of 9.5 or more out of ten. Even so, the deans of each school can turn down a petition for changing specialties at their own discretion, if they feel that the student will be of more use in the specialty he originally started out in.

The deplorable state of the lab equipment in universities on Earth is known throughout the galaxy. We’re a third-rate planet… Our College of High Energy Physics doesn’t even have a small particle accelerator, and future astronomers can only gaze at the stars through vintage two-meter, or at most three-meter, reflecting telescopes. They can’t even dream of modular orbiting field reflectors. Much less of off-world field trips.

Our next generation of biologists know such basic techniques as autocloning or body exchange only through crude simulations or well-worn holovideos. Nor do they have access to fauna from other worlds—live specimens are prohibitively expensive. Our geophysicists have fewer opportunities to send probes to the interior of our planet, and they know less about it, than any interested tourist.

Now, medical students do have the luxury of working with real patients from the start. Of course, those patients are humans on Social Assistance, which provides them with free medical care. New medications are also tested on them. Since a human life has so little value, while there’s always a need for doctors and new medicines, nobody complains… Maybe that’s why Earth’s doctors and medical system are so famous throughout the galaxy. They don’t lack for experience, that’s for sure.

Even sociologists are unable to implement real surveys to learn how to use the complicated skewed statistics programs that are fundamental to their science these days. Like everyone else, they work with simulators.

As might be expected, the lack of resources is slightly less grave at private graduate schools and at institutions directly connected with the Scientific Reserve, the places where those who can pay and the especially talented study… For the rest, hardly any university on Earth has access to resources other than simulations. And even those are necessarily four or five years behind the models sold everywhere else in the galaxy.

So there is no way for a future scientist to interact with the real world. Indeed, the terrestrial doctrine of higher education could be phrased more or less as follows: “Take these rudiments of theory, then go do your real learning on the fly—and good luck.”

It is upon graduation that the fledgling scientist begins his true odyssey. That is moment when Earth’s clever bureaucracy hands him the bill for his “free” education. To settle his debt, he’ll have to work for at least five years, not where he wants, but where the government deigns to assign him. And the salary he works for over those five years is almost laughable.

If he wants to change postings earlier, at the cost of having his title revoked, he’ll have to make a $trong ca$e for it, and even then only after piles of red tape that usually take years to sort out.

For better or for worse, the chaotic state of Earth’s economy cannot guarantee placements to more than sixty-five percent of its graduates. More and more young people enter the university every year. And fewer and fewer new graduates find work in their specialties.

There are biologists working as lab technicians in provincial hospitals. Physiochemists as quality inspectors in synthetic food factories. Sociologists underutilized as reporters on some third-rate holonet.

And that’s not the worst of it.

Many tour operators, guides, and aerobus drivers decorate their living room walls with the beautiful and useless holograms of their university degrees. Others, even more pragmatic or more cynical, forget about their titles forever, or they set up small enterprises to survive. The “Second-level Scientific Reserve,” they’re called, and presumably they’ll be in demand at some point… over the next millennium.

Meanwhile, since you have to make a living somehow and the Planetary Tourism Agency is always hungry for intelligent young people, especially the good-looking ones…

Working in the tourism sector isn’t as awful for a scientist as it might seem at first glance. At least you’re well-paid, and you come into contact with the genuine source of Earth’s wealth: xenoid tourists. Sometimes they learn more about the latest developments in the fields they no longer work in than their colleagues with government positions.

There are even frequent cases of daring to get a title revoked through shady dealings in order to snag a transfer. In order to drop science forever and work in tourism. It’s pathetic, but almost a third of the people working for the Planetary Tourism Agency are scientists frustrated in their careers.

I’m a scientist, more or less. And there was a time when I believed in the future of my planet.

But how can a planet develop in any meaningful way when day after day it throws away its best minds? How absurd does your idealism have to be for you to keep on working as a scientist when you could make so much more as a tourist guide? What sense does it make for a recent graduate to work like a slave in a place he isn’t interested in, for five whole years? Surrounded by old men who see his dynamic initiative as a threat and who constantly leave him out of the loop, using his “inexperience” as their excuse? For poverty wages, after seven years of intellectual effort, dreaming of being useful to his planet?

The worst part—and it pains me to say it in this interview, under my special circumstances, but it’s true—the worst part is that you xenoids are perfectly well aware of these facts, and you take full advantage of them.

You didn’t invent the brain drain, but you perfected and institutionalized it.

It is obvious that a human scientist who refuses to give up on his science in spite of it all will find it much more attractive, most of all economically, to work in any minor branch office of a xenoid enterprise than in most similar terrestrial research centers. He will feel that he is making fuller use of his intellect there, he will see more of a future. So what if they only allow him partial access to data? At least it’s something… That smidgen of knowledge is worth its weight in gold to him.

He can travel off planet every now and then… even though he can never tell anyone what he saw afterwards. If he works hard and does a good job and shows how exceptional his gray cells are, is even possible—and this is the big dream for many—that they will ask him to emigrate definitively from Earth to work for them.

Do you like old music? No? That’s too bad… Well, you probably wouldn’t be familiar with the songs of Joan Manuel Serrat, anyway. A human, Catalan, twentieth century…

I thought not. His nearly forgotten recordings are the best things in my collection. One of the few things I’ll regret leaving behind if you accept me…

There’s a song of his, “Pueblo blanco,” that goes… No, don’t worry! I won’t sing it all. I have next to no sense of rhythm or melody. Just one verse:

That is, the Exodus. You don’t know the Bible either?

Okay, at least. Yes, the Jews, the Promised Land, all that.

When he called it “sick” he was talking about a patch of earth, a piece of ground. But today, speaking of the planet with a capital E, his words have proved prophetic.

This Earth is sick…

The days when we thought the future belonged to us are over. Now we’re not even masters of our present day, and the glories of the past aren’t enough to live on.

Artists, athletes, scientists… every human who has some physical or intellectual talent dreams of using it as a ticket from Earth and toward making their way in the galaxy. Even if they have to swallow their pride and drink the bitter potion of exile and humiliation in lands of other races.

Women dream of being beautiful and brazen enough to become social workers and find a xenoid who will take them away from their home world forever. Some men do, too.

And the most desperate ones, the ones who aren’t young or beautiful and don’t know how to do anything, the ones who see no other way out, take the risk of playing Russian roulette in space. They’d rather face the infinitude of the cosmos in their homemade ships and float, frozen, perhaps in an eternal dream of arriving some day at some other, better, place.

That’s from the same song. Not the same “him,” of course.

The first “him” is you xenoids. The second “him” is us.

What sort of future can a planet have when its residents dream only of ceasing to reside there?

Exodus. Escape. Today that is every human’s obsession. Running away, forever if at all possible, from the parched, subjugated, defeated, sterile, sick Earth. And you people, the conquering xenoids, the masters of the galaxy, are the virus behind this sickness.

And still you ask me why I came down with it!

When a man is going to break with his entire past in order to begin a new life, he has to be very careful in selecting the where, the how, and the when. And small details sometimes take on huge importance.

I picked you for reasons of… biological affinity. Neither the Colossaurs nor the grodos are humanoids. My life among them would be much harder than among you people, or the Centaurians. And you are more beautiful, at least…

Oh, I have no illusions of being successful with your exquisite representatives of the female sex. I have already told you that I am not considered handsome even among my own people, and I know full well that the only thing that makes me exceptional, my brain, is something that no females of any race place much value on… at least, not at first sight.

I actually don’t really know why… Maybe there was some inherently masochistic element. I was always a pariah, someone apart, who participated in the game but knew he didn’t belong there. The moments when I was emotionally happy were the ones when I forgot such a thing… temporarily. And, living here in Ningando, amidst so much beauty, I don’t think I could ever forget it.

That sounds like a strange reason, I guess. The desire to feel that you are the only unblessed person in paradise…

And, also, I won’t deny it, I picked you because I’m a hopeless romantic. I suppose there must be thousands of slave brothels in this city, and perhaps hundreds of Cauldars. But I’ll check them out, one by one if need be. In spite of it all, I have hopes of finding Yleka, alive. I’m sure she’ll remember me… Perhaps we’ll get a second chance.

Don’t you think we deserve it?

I know perfectly well that the policy on Tau Ceti is not to grant citizenship to every human who comes here begging on his knees for it.

But I believe that you will make an exception for me…

I’m aware of the technoscience quarantine laws that have caused terrestrial science and technology to lag so far behind. I fully understand their true purpose, underneath all the altruistic demagoguery: to knock us out of the competition. To guarantee that we will eternally be a market, not a producer. A buyer, not a seller. Dependent, in a word. To sideline us in the galactic struggle for power.

They don’t allow us know the mechanics of controlled thermonuclear fusion, or how antigrav systems work, or the theory of hyperspace flight…

Especially that last one. Because… can you imagine what would happen to the delicate balance among the races if humans suddenly developed an instantaneous transport system that works across the universe? The chaos that would be unleashed if all the hyperspace shops that xenoids boast were suddenly rendered obsolete?

I have created such a system. Based on classical teletransportation, of course… but capable of transferring a virtually infinite mass between two points separated by galactic distances.

It does not require astronomical amounts of energy or special technical knowledge for installation. It does not even need a corresponding piece of equipment at the point of arrival, unlike systems currently in use. Of course you’d need one to return… but you could send it by teletransport, too. The system is, pardon my immodesty, simply brilliant. Or brilliantly simple, if you prefer the sound of that.

And if you do not grant me Cetian citizenship, I will publish all the details of my discovery.

Imagine every Earthling building his own galactic teletransport booth, and my race spreading across all your worlds like the plague you’ve always tried to contain.

I see that you’re smiling… Perhaps you are thinking that simply wiping my memory clean, or, if worse comes to worst, physically eliminating me will easily put an end to that possibility. Sorry, but I’ve already thought of that.

At a secret and secure location in my lab at the Center—and at five other sites, just in case—I have left computers with all the data stored in their memory. Each is connected to the holonet. If I return, or if I disappear; if my name or fingerprints or retinal scan show up on any list of passengers to Earth, or if I simply fail to send a specific signal each month, everyone will learn of my invention.

I suppose you could consider this blackmail. But at the same time… don’t you think that is more than sufficient reason to declare me suitable for becoming an honorary citizen of Tau Ceti right away?

My galactic teletransport system is really very simple. But it is based on a very original set of principles and theories, which run diametrically counter to the concepts that advanced science currently employs on Earth. This fact is a logical consequence of my characteristic mental model of reasoning…

As I have mentioned, I am one of that odd class of mental freaks that some call “idiot savants,” and others, such as Hermann and Sigimer, much more euphemistically call “natural geniuses.”

My emotional and social activity is almost entirely atrophied in favor of the disproportionate development of my logic, intuition, and memory skills. I have limitations, of course. For example, you will have noticed that my capacity for abstract thinking is merely… average. Although I have recently been getting better and better at expressing my thoughts in the abstruse system of physical and mathematical formulae that seem to be the lingua franca of science, I am still more comfortable working with physical objects or analogies than with hypotheses. My mind works better with images than with words or concepts. I’m a born empiricist, not a theorist. That was what allowed me to make my… discovery.

Of course, I also have a photographic memory… which means that I may have given you the impression of having a much greater facility for social analysis than I actually do. That was a purely involuntary effect; I merely repeated verbatim a few analyses of the situation on Earth that have fallen into my hands by means I would prefer not to mention—but whose points of view I share one hundred percent, though I admit that I would never be able to draw such conclusions on my own.

I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve no doubt caused you. Constantly drawing on my automatic memory predisposes me towards a bit of logorrhea and incoherence… towards digressing and answering questions that I haven’t been asked yet, or that I was asked long ago.

My mother always told me that I had all the answers. That my real problem was finding the questions that went with them.

Perhaps that is the dilemma of man and of all intelligent life.

But enough of cheap, sentimental philosophy. With regard to your question, specifically, I think that from a statistical point of view it would be simply impossible for another human being to have reached the same discovery at the same time as me.

Absolutely not.

“Fine… The assessment interview has concluded. Alex Gens Smith, you have been determined suitable for receiving honorary Cetian citizenship. Our colleagues will inform the rest of your delegation of this decision. Your personal belongings will soon be transferred from the accommodations reserved for humans where you have been staying. An official request will be sent to Earth asking to have any personal objects you wish to keep immediately sent to you. Including your recordings of Joanman Uelser Rat. You will be provided with all the information you will have to learn in order to adjust as quickly as possible to life in our society.

“Welcome to Ningando, Alex.

“Forgive my previous coldness. We are no Centaurians, but that is our… official attitude in cases such as yours.

“Now, speaking unofficially, I’d like to pass on some information to you that you are obviously unaware of… and to ask you a question of a more… private nature.

“Your ‘discovery’ of galactic teletransportation was made eight years ago by us—the xenoids. It is currently in the experimental, pilot project phase. If it hasn’t been widely deployed yet, that is because, as you inferred, it will drastically change the entire system of transportation lines across the galaxy, rendering the huge investments of various races in the hyperspace transport fleet useless and obsolete.

“Three years ago, another human physicist, Dr. Dien Lin Chuan of the University of Beijing—perhaps you have heard of him—appeared before our Centaurian colleagues with the same discovery. And he filed a request identical to yours. I am authorized to inform you that Dien Ling Chuan is currently a Centaurian citizen with full rights…

“My question is: Are you fully aware of the fact that this interview has concluded favorably for you exclusively because it is in the interest of the races you call xenoid to prevent the species to which you belong from having any chance of technological development?”

Madness is very relative, don’t you think?

An anonymous ancient Arabic poet and philosopher once said, “In this mad world, the greatest madness is to claim to be sane.”

I have also heard it said that madness is any behavior or way of thinking that diverges from what is “normal.”

My life can’t be considered very “normal,” I don’t think. And every man thinks as he has lived.

So, according to both these views, I must be crazy… and I don’t care. On the contrary, I’m proud of it.

“I would like to understand you, Alex, sincerely. You are a very peculiar individual. In all my years of experience here in the Bureau of Human Affairs, I have never met a terrestrial like you.

“Pardon me if my curiosity seems excessive. I am not a government official all the time. I also have my family, my hobbies… and one of them is human nature.

“But, tell me, Alex… Don’t you feel like… like a deserter? Like a traitor to your race and to your planet?”

Yes, I am fully aware…

But what am I supposed to do about it?

A person has to live, right?