A Planet for Rent

Mestizos

The genes of Homo sapiens are moderately compatible by nature with those of humanoid species with very similar biotypes and evolutionary histories, such as the Cetians and Centaurians. Species that, to be sure, cannot produce fertile cross-breeds with each other, a fact that has given biologists and anthropologists from across the galaxy a lot of room to debate about interstellar migrations of humanoid or prehumanoid races, and other more or less harebrained theories.

The possibility that two different germ cells could fuse and produce a viable zygote is vanishingly small. Of ten million potentially fertile couplings, only one will give rise to a hybrid.

Mestizos are always sterile, they usually lack developed sexual organs, and sometimes they do not even have a definite sex. But by the laws of genetics, they also possess what is called “hybrid vigor”: they are more robust, more disease-resistant, and often more handsome than the members of either of the races that gave birth to them.

The Centaurians’ blue skin and large eyes, combined with a human bone structure, produce spectacular results. Same with the feline elegance and vertical pupils of the lovely Cetians.

Likewise, hybrids seem especially gifted in the arts. Music, dance, visual arts are almost second nature to these exotic beings, whose ranks include some of the greatest talents in the galaxy today.

Cases of mestizo children can be found in every human social group. But, as is statistically logical, most mestizos are born to social workers, who are in most frequent contact with extraterrestrial humanoids.

It is a curious fact that, despite the risk of pregnancy, professional sex workers use no birth control methods in their relations with Cetians and Centaurians. As they normally do whenever they couple with a native of Colossa…

There are two main reasons for this “carelessness.”

The first is purely medical: while Colossaurs can transmit the incurable magenta disease, which is endemic among them and whose origins and structure are unknown, extraterrestrial humanoids suffer from almost no such illnesses. And any diseases they do have can easily be treated with conventional medicines, much like terrestrial syphilis, gonorrhea, or AIDS.

The second and more important reason is, well, economic. The Planetary Tourism Agency provides free medical care and pays large bonuses to any worker who gets pregnant by a humanoid—bonuses that grow even larger if the hybrid is born successfully.

In exchange for that generous pile of credits, the mother merely has to sign over all her legal rights to the newborn, who is handed over to the Agency’s specialized teachers and experts for raising and education.

Young mestizos are given a costly and painstaking education aimed at developing their inborn artistic talents. An education that might go on for a few years, or for many, and that only comes to an end when a buyer appears.

Well-to-do xenoids are more than willing to spend large sums to acquire, more or less permanently, the talents of a humanoid mestizo. Mestizos, for their part, due to the exceptional peculiarity of their births, not only automatically enjoy all the advantages of double citizenship, terrestrial and xenoid, such as freedom to travel and so on, but in view of their valuable talents they generally also have much higher incomes and life status than any ordinary human.

The large number of credits that all mestizos must regularly pay to the Planetary Tourism Agency, regardless of where they live, is considered a tax on extraterritorial citizenship, perfectly legal according to galactic norms. Or fitting compensation for the huge investment made in their artistic education.

The rental-purchase of mestizo artists is currently one of the most significant sources of revenue for Earth, which is thus amply paid back for its investments in their education. In fact, the ineffable Auyars are investigating a project to achieve hybridization (artificially, at least at first) between non-humanoid races and terrestrial genes. Though the project is still in its experimental phase, they have already received thousands of requests for human-Colossaur mestizos, grodo-human mestizos, and other, yet more exotic combinations.

The Planetary Tourism Agency’s only concern is the high risk of the “human” factor in their investment. The psychological stability of hybrids is abnormally low. Despite all efforts to the contrary, it appears that the predisposition of mestizos toward depression, neurosis, and other psychic complaints remains very high, though the relevant statistics are kept secret.

Some social psychologists hypothesize that the very sense of non-integration, of uprootedness, of having one foot in each camp, of not belonging, the very identity crisis that makes hybrids seek a solitary refuge in art, is also responsible for the fact that they have the highest suicide rate and the lowest life expectancy of any known “human” group.

Nevertheless, the Planetary Tourism Agency is conducting encouraging studies on the subcortical implantation of suicide blockers, similar to the blockers that xenoids implant in all humans who travel beyond Earth to prevent them from revealing what they’ve seen when they return.

Some behavioral specialists doubt the effectiveness of this method and suggest that depriving mestizos of the “relative escape” of suicide could result not only in the total collapse of their own psyches, but might also place their masters or purchasers in great danger. Unable to take their own lives, they might become highly aggressive toward others, seeking death by any means.

Despite these objections, which really come from a few isolated voices, the Agency is confident that this new technology will eliminate that deplorable problem forever and that it will no longer have to face claims for damages from xenoids who have seen the mestizos they paid so much for destroy themselves, without their being able to do anything about it…