A Planet for Rent

Performing Death

“Being on top of game today. There being much audience,” Ettubrute said on entering the tent, speaking in the hoarse rattle that was his voice. Then he added, standing next to Moy, who was adjusting the equipment for the umpteenth time, “Not needing more checking… Me having done it two times already.”

“I’ll be on the top of my game, don’t you worry. And let me make one thing clear: I’ll check it a thousand times if I feel like it; it’s my life on the line—not yours, Bruiser,” Moy grumbled without looking up.

The Colossaur growled, more out of habit than because he was actually offended. And it was a matter of habit: from the first, it had bothered him a lot every time the human called him Bruiser.

By the standards of his race, Ettubrute was small and weak. That’s why he’d become an art agent. Like all professions that don’t call for physical strength, dexterity, or aggression, the art business was held in low esteem by the natives of Colossa. The only honorable, ideal jobs for a “normal” Colossaur were bodyguard, law enforcement officer, or soldier. Ettubrute was a poor oddball, to his fellows.

The funny part was that Moy didn’t call him Bruiser to mock him. The “weak” Colossaur who was his agent had a natural armor of bony reddish plates that few weapons could penetrate, and he stood nearly ten feet tall by five wide. Maybe he was a yard short and a hundred pounds too light to be normal-sized for his race… but he was way more than strong enough to beat any human into a pulp with a single blow from his arm, as thick as Moy’s thigh.

“Being better if all turning out better today than ever. If you failing, contract ending.” The Colossaur made a threatening gesture with his enormous tridactyl hand. “Not even earning returning ticket.” He turned and stalked out so violently that the tent’s thin, tough walls of synplast vibrated and nearly shattered.

“Idiot,” Moy muttered, but only after the xenoid’s heavy footsteps had faded away outside. Colossaurs had a keen sense of hearing, and they could be very spiteful.

What he was afraid of wasn’t Ettubrute’s armored fists and huge muscles—the Colossaur would never dare smash him. He was the goose that laid the golden egg, the Colossaur’s best investment.

What truly terrified him was what his agent could do with his earnings, according to that one-sided contract he’d been forced to sign as a sine qua non for that ticket off Earth. Some of its clauses would literally make him Ettubrute’s slave if the xenoid ever decided to put them into effect. And the worst of it was that, since Moy had voluntarily signed it with his fingerprints, voice print, and retinal ID, he had no legal standing to lodge a complaint.

Luckily, you might say that something like a… friendship had developed between him and his agent. Though that was too grand a word to describe any relationship between a xenoid and a human.

Even so, if Ettubrute ever wanted to hurt him…

Better not even go there.

“I’m trapped, trapped, trap-trap-trapped,” he hummed, a habit he’d picked up through months of relative isolation. How long had it been since he’d laid eyes on another human face? Months. Since Kandria, on Colossa. And not even all human; she’d been half Centaurian…

His own face had even started looking weird to him in the mirror. Well, naturally, after seeing so many mugs covered with hair, or scales, or feathers, or stuff that was just indescribable, all up and down the galaxy.

“Didn’t you want to see other worlds, kid? Be careful what you wish for. Tell ’em you don’t want soup, they’ll give you three bowls; tell ’em you do, they’ll give you three hundred. To make you to stop wanting it,” he thought sarcastically. “Only pity is, I’ll never be able to tell anybody about it. I’ve seen so many things…”

His tour with Ettubrute had put him in contact with beings and places you never heard anybody mention on Earth. Some amazing, some terrifying. Beings any biologist or sociologist on Earth would have given ten years of their lives just to meet.

The morlacks of Betelgeuse, with their phosphorescent hides. The two-headed birds of Arcturus. The marsupials of Algol, with that natural teleportation. A hundred other races. The cosmos was a lot bigger than they ever supposed on Earth, and it held more beings that they’d ever imagined.

Beings he could never talk about: the laws of the galaxy kept strict control of the flow of scientific and technological information that was permitted to the “backward” races. For instance, Homo sapiens. And when he signed his contract, Moy knew that his memory would be blocked before he could return to Earth. To preserve the anonymity of races that didn’t want Homo sapiens to know about them. To keep him from telling anyone about his experiences. A basic precaution to keep Earthlings from getting their hands on information and technologies that they weren’t capable of using “rationally” yet.

“The important thing is what I’ve experienced and what I can remember, even if I can’t talk about it,” he muttered. “Lucky thing I never went to Auya…”

He stopped recalibrating the nanomanipulators for a moment and glanced outside the tent, over his shoulder. The blue, red, and black triple-diamond hologram rotated slowly, floating over the tallest buildings on the plaza. The Auyar symbol.

The wealthiest race in the galaxy. And the most protective of its privacy. Nobody knew what they really looked like. Nobody knew the location of their worlds. Those who visited them always got their memories completely erased….

Or they got death.

He stared at the triple diamond for several seconds, like a defenseless bird peering into the hypnotic eyes of a cobra. The Auyars paid really well. Better than anyone. A contract from them could make him rich forever. But at a price: being left with a mind as blank as a newborn child’s. Stripped of the only true wealth he had managed to amass in his not-very-long life: his memory.

Moy trembled and tore his gaze from the triple diamond with an almost physical effort. “I should think about something else or I won’t be able to do anything today,” he mumbled, feeling beads of sweat slide down his forehead. “It’d be so nice right now to take a hit…”

A hit, a hit… No.

Shouldn’t even think of it.

Telecrack had nearly scrambled his brain. Ettubrute had sworn he’d tear him to pieces if he caught him using it again, after all it had cost to rehab him. And the worst thing about Colossaurs was that they always made good on their promises.

“It was all his fault… He shouldn’t have let me feel so lonely,” Moy grumbled bitterly. “I had to find company in the tele—”

He gulped. Just mentioning the drug and remembering the incomparable feeling as it entered his veins had set him to trembling. He had to lean against a corner of the tent to keep from tottering over.

Of course it had been the Colossaur’s fault.

Why hadn’t he ever told him that telecrack’s supposed ability to grant you telepathic powers was all a fake? If he was his manager, why hadn’t he helped him manage his earnings better those first few months? Invest them, like he did himself?

Well, the truth was, the only thing Ettubrute could have done to keep him away from telecrack and the other easy pleasures would have been to forbid them outright. But Moy had been so eager to have credits and spend them however he wanted, maybe that wouldn’t have worked either…

“It’s hard to learn from somebody else’s veins,” he muttered, smiling.

With a sad smile, he recalled the consumerist frenzy of his early months. Amazed by the utter novelty of his performance, the xenoids were perfectly happy to lavish their credits on him. And he was perfectly delighted to squander them.

Everything he’d ever yearned for on Earth but had never had. Everything he thought of as a symbol of status, of power, of wealth. Expensive clothes. Exotic food. Sensuous Cetian hetaerae. He bought gifts for his whole family and sent them by teletransport. A condominium in the most expensive neighborhood. Credits, credits… And, finally, telecrack.

The excuse he gave himself for trying it was pitifully trite. It went something like this: after a certain point every creative artist has to develop his parapsychological faculties if he wants to keep going further. What great performances he could have created if he could read the audience’s mind! The perfect, divine feedback loop…

“Ha,” Moy laughed drily. “The divine zilch.”

Deep down inside, he’d always guessed that telecrack was a fraud. Turning a human being into a temporary telepath was ridiculous, impossible. What he found attractive about the drug wasn’t so much its dubious effects as its ability to create permanent addiction. And the brain damage it could cause as a side effect. Playing with death…

Hits and more hits. Russian roulette by drug.

Telecrack, even off Earth, was an expensive drug.

He spent thousands and thousands to fill his veins with venom.

Until one day Ettubrute, tired of bearing witness to his self-destruction, forcibly locked him up in a detox center. Moy was barely a shadow of a man, down to ninety wretched pounds and lucky he could even breathe.

They took care of him at the center. Real good care.

They freed him from his addiction forever.

Well, they were supposed to. That’s what they were there for.

The incredible thing was, they did it in just eight days.

Eight days during which he came to know all the colors and flavors of hell. It had been bad. Real bad.

Knowing that was more than enough.

He didn’t want to remember the details… Or, he couldn’t. The Auyars weren’t the only ones who could erase memories.

He got out, restored to health, having put on sixty pounds and gotten back almost all of his old self-control. Having gained total respect for xenoid medicine, which had done the miraculous and freed him from a drug that nobody on Earth ever escaped.

And a feeling of gratitude mixed with resentment toward Ettubrute. He’d saved his life, true… But he charged the full cost of the treatment to Moy’s account.

It was only once he’d combed through his finances that he understood how much money he had wasted. Between the detox center’s bill (effective treatment was expensive anywhere in the galaxy) and what he had spent on telecrack, he owed the Colossaur nearly half a million. And the worst of it was, his agent was close to washing his hands of the whole business and suing him for breach of contract. Leaving him stranded in a foreign world, without a credit… It would have been almost like murdering him.

It had taken begging, pleading, and invoking the “old friendship” between them — and a promise to pay off his debt in full, plus fifty percent — to get Ettubrute to loan him enough to be able to eat and fix up the equipment for his performance piece. The bare minimum he needed to start over. From zero…

The Colossaur had bled him with the skill of a parasite. And the ironic thing was, he was still supposed to be grateful to him for agreeing to keep on bleeding him for a while.

Naturally, he’d had to sell his tailor-made clothes and his luxury condo and give up the expensive whores and the exotic food. But, lesson learned. Once and for all.

“And here I am, in the thick of it,” he sighed. At least he’d been strong enough not to give up. He’d already lived it up enough. Maybe too much. He knew everything you could do with money. And he knew he would be able to earn more. Next time would be different.

At least there’d be a next time.

He’d had to tighten his belt, the last few months… but he’d already practically covered his debt to the Colossaur. Before long, what he earned would be his again… minus the agent’s usual twenty-five percent.

“Leech,” he muttered, but without real anger. Yes, it was an exorbitant percentage. No xenoid artist turned over more than ten percent to his agent. But he was human, a terrestrial… Trash, that is. And he could never give enough thanks to his good luck and to Ettubrute for allowing him a chance to leave the cultural and financial hole-in-the-wall that was Earth.

There were thousands of human artists who would envy his situation, that he was sure of. Many artists, better and more original than him, would have sold their souls to the devil just to get out.

He thought with satisfaction about his upcoming triumphal return visit, with enough credits to buy a whole city on Earth. And enough firsthand experience of xenoid art to put his own work light-years ahead of any competitor’s, in concept, theory, and development.

They could stop him from talking about what he’d seen, but they couldn’t stop those experiences from seeping into his art…

He had nothing to complain about. It could have been a lot worse. Ettubrute, after all, was almost his friend.

He thought again about Kandria, that holoprojection artist he had met on Colossa. A beautiful mestizo woman, half-human, half-Centaurian, truly talented. Some of her “Multisymphonies” were genuinely good. And the girl was just fantastic at making love. Too bad they’d barely had two weeks together. Moy wouldn’t have complained about getting involved in a longer and more serious relationship with her. Though Kandria’s Centaurian agent might have.

Her agent was her own father. And even though she swore to Moy a thousand times that the blue-skinned humanoid truly loved her, even a blind man could tell that her father’s supposed “filial love” was nothing more than a well-planned maneuver to make tons of money off his bastard daughter’s talent. Enough money to get his world’s rigid society to pardon him for the sin of mixing his blood with a species as inferior as Homo sapiens.

The affection and considerateness Kandria’s father showed her in public were too exaggerated to be real. Especially coming from a member of a race as cold and distant as the Centaurians. People said they had icicles for hearts and computers for brains. And in Moy’s opinion, that was an understatement.

But he never commented on it. If it made the poor girl happy to believe her daddy loved her, he wasn’t going to break the illusion. At least not while he was enjoying her splendid body every night.

He recalled those meetings with another sigh. Kandria… Her skin, that gorgeous turquoise hue, so flexible, her huge eyes. Her passion… Kandria was a magnificent example of what Ettubrute would cynically call “optimal utilization of installed capacities.” Which were few: like almost all hybrids, she was congenitally sterile. The funny part was how, without a vagina or functioning ovaries, she could show such sexual enthusiasm…

“When it comes to sex, nothing is written in stone.” Moy shrugged and checked the skinners. Everything was perfect. Ettubrute was not only a skillful agent (maybe too skillful) but also a very competent assistant when it came to technology. You could almost say he fully earned his twenty-five percent.

If not true friendship, the two of them had developed a very special relationship. Love-hate was too crude a term to define it.

It all started with the nickname Moy had given the Colossaur around the time he had signed the contract, when he admitted he was couldn’t pronounce his real name, which sounded like Warrtorgrowrrtrehrfroarturr. “Et tu, Brute” was just a sophisticated way of saying “that old thing” or “you there.” The Colossaur didn’t really appreciate it. Since then, they had spent half their time making fun of each other, acidly. Maybe to forget how much they needed each other.

“Maybe if I stopped calling him Bruiser, the alien might stop mangling his Planetary syntax,” Moy reflected out loud, checking the pendulums and bleeders.

Even though his race wasn’t known for its language talents, Ettubrute had always refused to use a cybernetic translator. He preferred to mangle the Earthling language in his own barbarous fashion. Moy had finally gotten used to it, and he almost enjoyed it. At least it was more… personal, or Colossaurian?… than a translator’s mechanically perfect pronunciation.

Though neither of them complained to the other, Ettubrute was as alone as he was. Or more so.

In Ningando, the Cetian capital, there weren’t even five humans apart from Moy. Meanwhile, pairs of Colossaur police patrolled everywhere. But those perfect specimens of their race despised Ettubrute for his “weakness” and his “dishonorable” line of work. They even ignored him when their paths crossed, as if he didn’t exist. To them, he was a virtual leper. Though Ettubrute pretended not to notice, he obviously found it much more painful when his fellows ostracized him than it would have been if they simply hadn’t been there.

That’s probably why the two of them had ended up becoming so close.

“The solidarity of pariahs,” Moy thought ironically, checking the explosive charges one by one and finding no mistakes.

He’d never found out whether Ettubrute was male or female. He’d always called him “he”… He unconsciously identified his strength and brusque manners with maleness.

Not that it made much difference. From the little he knew, Colossaurs came in something like seven sexes… In any case, they kept their genitals hidden under the plates of their armored carapaces 99.99 percent of the time. In the rare moments of sexual intimacy they had shared, pretty much compelled by their mutual loneliness, the human had always found it safer and more soothing to let himself be caressed by those big tridactyl hands and that sensitive forked tongue than to pay much attention to the flaps of skin, tinged violet like faded flowers, that he guessed were his agent’s genitals. He’d never found out whether Ettubrute expected him to penetrate them or to let himself be penetrated by them… Nor did he have any intention of finding out.

Caressing Ettubrute’s armor-plated bulk was a strange sensation. Like feeling a machine, or a stone statue. Moy had always heard that Colossaurs had almost no sense of touch in their carapaces. But Ettubrute seemed to like that most of all. It didn’t cost Moy much trouble to satisfy him. It was like petting a dog. Just slightly bigger…

From his earliest years, Moy, like all terrestrials, had discovered that sex was the common coin humans used to repay their obligations to the xenoids. Though it had never even crossed his mind to take up freelance social work, he figured the time he had spent satisfying the Colossaur’s strange appetites was a valuable investment… emotionally. It probably had made the difference in Ettubrute’s decision to give him a second chance with his debts.

In this life, everything has its price.

Everything was okay. Whistling, Moy left the tent and stepped out into the teeming plaza. The bustle, the noise, the smells, the colors hit his senses like a whack across the face. He took a deep breath and kept walking.

A short walk before each performance had become a habit for him. The lovely spectacle of the Cetian capital and its people calmed him, and motivated him, too. It functioned more or less like: “Look at all the stuff you can have, if you work hard and don’t spend too much.”

Normally there weren’t many pedestrians on the wide esplanade, but today was special. With the outrageous sense of aesthetics that only the Cetians could pull off (when they felt like it), a planetary-scale carnival was ringing in Union Day. The most important anniversary for every race. Commemorating the day they joined the community of the minds of the galaxy. Something like a coming of age.

Cutting through or circling around groups of Cetians and other xenoids decked out in exotic polychrome costumes, Moy wondered whether someday humans would be able to celebrate something like this, instead of Contact Day. Or would it be better to say, Conquest Day?

“Karhuz friz!” He was so lost in thought, it took him nearly a second to become aware of the words a Cetian had enthusiastically directed point-blank at him.

He stared at him. The xenoid had used an ingenious system of holoprojections to make the right half of his body look completely transparent. The half-person had apparently mistaken Moy’s human physique for a particularly hilarious costume and had made some witty comment on it. Or maybe he had only asked where he’d gotten it because he wanted one, too.

Moy only knew a few words in Cetian, and he didn’t have a translator on him. Like the Colossaur, he wasn’t crazy about them.

He hugged the Cetian warmly, almost yelling into his ear.

“Your half-mother sells herself to polyps!” And he laughed.

The humanoid looked at him for an instant. Then he shook his head sideways, the Cetian gesture for nodding in agreement. He let out a crystal-clear laugh and gamboled off, happy.

Seemed male. Pity.

Though ninety-nine percent of the time they were refined aesthetes who treated all beings other than their own race with distant, solemn, and courteously disdainful manners, on Union Day they let their hair down completely. For these twenty-six hours, every sort of joke was allowed, and the Cetians turned to amusements they would consider obscene to even think about the rest of the year.

The patchouli-scented aphrodisiac that he’d picked up by hugging the Cetian stimulated Moy’s pituitary and nearly gave him an erection.

He stared after the Cetian, with half a mind to follow him.

He must be a male (and Cetians hated and punished homosexuality), and he had never much liked his own sex. But if everything was permitted today… why not?

The half-person had already disappeared among the crowd.

Moy sighed. Maybe after the performance he’d find a female who was more… communicative. And who wouldn’t charge. Because Cetian hetaerae were magnificent but ridiculously expensive.

Cetian humanoids had a rare beauty that hinted at their feline ancestry. Terrestrials were especially drawn to them. When the first males of their species visited Earth they provoked true waves of enthusiasm and passion, next to which the cults of any of the music or film stars of the past paled in comparison.

And the females… Moy would never forget the tug on the groin he felt at the age of fourteen when he first set eyes on one of them, a female Cetian who had, probably by accident, attended an exhibition of his drawing teacher’s works. Her tall, gracefully proportioned figure, the slash of the vertical pupils in her eyes, her lithe and nimble gestures, the caressing tone of her voice. That air of exotic sensuality, which seemed to emanate from her body… And her scent.

It wasn’t much consolation to know that there were pheromones any Cetian male or female could produce at will. The effect was the same: a burning desire to rub against their skin, to pet them, to dominate them and be dominated by them… and at the same time, an almost divine respect for them, which kept anyone who wasn’t a total idiot, or a sex maniac, or lobotomized, from ever attempting to have sex with a being born under the rays of Tau Ceti—unless you had a clear invitation from them first.

The most interesting thing was that this effect of respectful fascination wasn’t exclusive to humans. Centaurians, Colossaurs… even the hermaphroditic, telepathic grodos seemed to lose some of their commercial aplomb in the presence of the exquisitely beautiful Cetians. One of the many riddles of the cosmos.

After living among them for several months, Moy had reached his own conclusion: the refined Cetians, those avid supporters of the arts, had perfected what they considered the highest art of all: the art of sexual attraction. Beauty-crazed, they had turned themselves into beauty itself. It was their weapon, their secret trump card in the great poker game of power being played out among all the races in the galaxy. Just as telepathy was for the grodos, total secrecy for the Auyars, and massive bodies for the Colossaurs.

But don’t let their looks fool you. They were angels from hell. Underneath their distant, serene charm you would almost always find cruel, calculating minds that yearned to win it all, that shrewdly cashed in on the slightest advantage. Behind the mantle of beauty they were implacable beings, capable of seducing humans just to get them to work as slaves in their brothels or sell their organs for transplants. Or worse.

So, they might be the Judases of the galaxy… but nobody beat them in artistic sensibility.

It had been very clever of Ettubrute to pick Ningando as the grand finale of his tour. The capital of Tau Ceti was like the New York of Earth’s golden age, the art mecca of the galaxy. If you made it among the Cetians, you had made it among all the xenoids (save, perhaps, for the enigmatic Auyars). And the reports he had seen seemed to speak very highly of his performances. Maybe his Colossaur agent didn’t know much about art, but at least he knew where to find the people who did understand it… and who, moreover, paid well for it.

Paying for art. Money. Credits. Everything boiled down to that.

Moy strolled lost in thought, wandering down one of the streets that spun out like curving spokes from the wheel’s central hub: the plaza. The shadows of the tall buildings lining the pedestrian avenue fell across him.

They were irregular structures, seemingly built in a thousand different styles, each one distinct. Yet the general effect was strangely harmonious. The Cetians had realized the impossible dream of Michelangelo, Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, and other great human city planners: the city as sculpture. The city conceived as a single whole, as a living organism that grows while maintaining a perceptible, natural order. After Ningando and the other Cetian cities, the cities of other xenoid races, no matter how magnificent, seemed identical to those of the humans: giant cancers, chaotic, sickly, putrid growths. Merely failed attempts at urban design.

Moy recalled Colossa, Ettubrute’s home world, the first he had visited after leaving Earth. Massive city walls. Stout towers. Buttresses and bastions. Fortress-cities, conceived and built as temples to force and solidity by a powerful warrior race. Cities of excess, powerful but lacking any beauty, any grace, any rhythm. Any life.

Here, curved or straight, volumes and surfaces combined harmoniously yet dizzyingly.

Ningando. What wouldn’t human artists and architects give to see its structures! How avidly all his friends would have drunk in all its glorious forms. How much Jowe, for example, would have enjoyed every inch of those buildings…

Moy stopped and looked back. Jowe…

Brilliant, delicate, sincere, pure, uncompromising… moron, misfit, destined for failure: Jowe.

The one with the greatest talent. The one with the most original ideas. The one who hewed most loyally to his theories of art. The one who cared the least about the market. The one who had the greatest disdain for agents and dealers.

The one who sold the fewest works, because he never lowered himself to flattering the tastes of the xenoid tourists who came in search of exoticism and local color among human artists, and who kept his distance from testing or experimenting with form. The one who never wasted his talents on painting voluptuous social workers in provocative microdresses, or landscapes brimming with fake touristic radiance. The one who most hated the accommodating choirs of mediocre critics. Because his works delved deeper than empty provocations or the sterile masturbation of theory and countertheory. Because he made art.

Jowe was a born loser. One who had never come to terms with selling his work for a ticket from Earth to success. A failure proud of his losses. And happy.

Happy… The last Moy had heard of him, he was still creating, as tireless and unappreciated as ever. And to keep from prostituting his art, he had gotten into the semilegal protection racket. So he wouldn’t die of hunger.

Hope it went well for him. Few deserved success more than Jowe.

But life had taught Moy that success never goes to those who deserve it, but to those who seduce and cheat and fight for it, whatever it takes. For those who wink at Mammon with one eye and at the Muses with the other.

Idealists like Jowe always fall by the wayside. The protection racket is tough. He probably owed megacredits to the Yakuza or the Mafia because his heart had gone out to some freelance social worker and her teary eyes. Or, much more likely, he was stuck in Body Spares for a few years, paying for his stupid collaboration with the dreamers in the Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation… a bunch of fanatics that Planetary Security only allowed to keep going because they’d have to give up most of their inflated antiterrorism budget if they broke up the gang once and for all.

Jowe. What a pity that at the crossroads of life he’d picked the wrong path, the one of defeated martyrs, not the one of triumphant heroes. Moy, himself, on the other hand, had only had a little talent and a certain business savvy. But together, the two of them could really have gone far…

And he would have loved just to be able to share Jowe’s astonishment at the exquisite architecture of Ningando, at the delicate embroidery of the clothes its people wore, at the throbbing pulse of its cosmopolitan heart…

Absorbed in his memories, Moy nearly bumped into a group of Cetians whose somber gray clothing contrasted sharply with the explosion of forms and colors in the clothes of all their fellows.

Body Spares.

Earth wasn’t the only place where races with physiologies incompatible with local biosphere turned to using native bodies to be able to walk around without cumbersome life support systems. But among Cetians and other cultures, candidates for Body Spares were well-paid volunteers who considered it an honor to serve as “horses” for representatives of other races. Not criminals atoning for their crimes, as on Earth.

And in Ningando, like almost anywhere else in the galaxy, the procedure was prohibitively expensive. It included incredibly stiff insurance fees, given the possibility of damaging the host bodies. The pittance that the Planetary Tourism Agency charged on Earth was irresistible bait for any tourist eager to mix it up with the local population without being discriminated against.

Moy muttered a clumsy excuse in his rudimentary Cetian, stepped out of the way of the gray-garbed Cetians, and watched them. One of his favorite pastimes now was guessing the original race of the Body Spares customers by looking at how their “horses” moved. This was a group of seven, and they all walked holding hands. Though the way they walked would have been the envy of the most graceful human ballet dancer, they were clumsy compared to regular Cetians. And they gestured a lot. A lot. They were talking almost more in gestures than by vocalizing.

Aldebaran polyps, most likely. Their sign language gave them away. Moy watched them hopefully. Unfortunately, they were headed away from the plaza and from his performance. They were probably very rich. Their super-resistant anatomies adapted perfectly well to any biosphere, so taking Cetian bodies was just an expensive whim.

Someday he’d visit Aldebaran, too, he promised himself. Of course, it would have to be when he was very rich. Nobody but a polyp, or someone occupying the body of a polyp, could survive the tremendous pressures under the oceans of that world.

What would it be like to weigh nearly a ton, have hundreds of tentacles and one giant muscular foot, and move slowly across the bottom of the ocean? If nothing else, a very interesting experience…

Sigh. He’d probably never find out. More than likely there was some regulation or other stipulating that members of “inferior” races, as humans were considered, could not occupy the bodies of beings from species with full galactic rights.

No matter how much money he managed to amass, there’d be something he could never shake. His original sin: being human… And most of the universe would be out of bounds for him forever.

The idea was so depressing that for a second he seriously considered skipping his own act. Leaving it all and returning to Earth. He’d be poor forever, but at least he’d be among his equals.

Probably during the Union Day carnival they’d hardly even notice he was gone, and there wouldn’t be many consequences…

But at almost the same moment he remembered how he had gotten monumentally drunk barely a month before on a distillation of native algae that seemed acceptably similar to white wine from Earth. And how, thinking that being drunk was a perfectly acceptable excuse for skipping out on one of his two weekly performances, he had remained nonchalantly asleep in his tiny accommodations.

Three hours after his act was supposed to begin, two Colossaurs, next to whom Ettubrute had looked like a cream puff, woke him by bashing down the partition wall enclosing his room. He didn’t dare put up more than verbal resistance (they obviously did not understand Planetary, and they weren’t carrying translators) while they dragged him someplace that looked too much like a jail not to be one. There they literally threw him in head-first. It was all but a miracle he didn’t break his neck when he hit the floor.

A mere thirty hours later his agent deigned to show up, and Moy kept his mouth closed and hung his head while he got one of the harshest reprimands of his life before being set free. Along the way, he found out that Cetians considered breaking a promise an extremely serious offense. Whether you had an excuse or not. And that’s how they’d seen it when he skipped out on a show he had previously agreed upon. He was stunned when Ettubrute revealed the size of the fine he’d had to pay (which, of course, would come out of his honoraria) to free him… And even more so when he learned that if he did it again, the punishment might even include being expelled from Tau Ceti as an undesirable alien—and having everything he’d earned on the planet confiscated.

Obviously, being an alien was an enviable position only on Earth. Everywhere else in the galaxy it was as good as being garbage. Especially if you were an alien who didn’t belong to one of the powerful races like the grodos or the Auyars. Not even ignorance of the local law absolved you from obeying it.

“Dura lex, sed lex,” Moy uttered solemnly as he returned resolutely to his tent. The law is harsh, but it’s the law. He couldn’t let himself suffer artist’s block, the way things were. He’d act. “The show must go on,” he whispered. Though what he really felt like doing was shouting “Shit!” at the top of his voice.

He didn’t, because he couldn’t remember how to say it in Latin just then… And because of the harsh blow that his respect for the lovely dead language had suffered when he found out that greatest living expert in the language of Virgil wasn’t a human, but a segmented guzoid from Regulus who needed a voice synthesizer to be able to recite the Eclogues. Plus the blow to his already shaken human pride.

He looked up at the city clock, a gigantic holographic image that floated above the tallest buildings in Ningando like a long and oddly colorful cloud. There should still be a few minutes before it was time to start the show.

With those Cetian clocks, there was no way to be sure. The image had no numbers or hands: just one long bar that kept changing colors, section by section, as time went by.

At first Moy refused to believe the clock meant much beyond its decorative function, like any analogue dial on Earth. He smiled skeptically whenever he asked some Cetian for the time and the Cetian, after giving him a look of scornful superiority, glanced up and told him to the second. They must have other, hidden clocks—that was just for show.

But he soon learned he was wrong.

The natives of Tau Ceti had extremely sharp senses. Visually, every inhabitant of Ningando could differentiate ten or twelve shades of red that the most subtle human painters or illustrators would have thought identical. Any Cetian would make a human musician with so-called “perfect pitch” look ridiculous. The Cetians could distinguish not merely eighths but hundredths of a tone—a fact that made their language especially complex, since the intensity and modulation of the message often contained as much information as the message itself.

All this had been a further blow to Moy’s human pride. As if it weren’t enough to feel you were practically invisible when you were walking around among crowds of gorgeous and tremendously sexually attractive Cetians who were completely ignoring you, from that moment on he had to remain silent when any xenoid critic smugly observed that terrestrial arts were pitifully primitive and crude. Especially if the critic was a Cetian.

To a race with such subtle senses, even the Mona Lisa or Guernica must be little more than pathetically composed splotches of primary colors. Like practically all figurative art… No wonder almost all their art was purely abstract, coldly mathematical. Who wants reflections of reality when you can’t help but be aware that that’s all they are, mere reflections, always imperfect, falling sadly short.

“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?

Or was she, maybe, searching for him?

Hope rang in his heart like a bell.

She saw him and waved respectfully. She smiled.

Her father, the cold humanoid, also saw him but didn’t move a muscle.

Strangely embarrassed by the girl’s admiring gaze, Moy hated going back to performing while she watched. He felt like a trained circus animal, like a pitiful buffoon. Again he thought of canceling the performance.

This was all a farce. He was no artist, just a poor mercenary…

The silence stretched out. The courteous Cetians sat. Moy remembered how huge the fine would be if he didn’t perform, and, plucking up his courage, he began.

It would all just look like another pause for effect…

“Praised be Union Day, and long life and prosperity to Ningando and its people.” He had practiced the phrase a thousand times, even using the hypnopedia to help him memorize it. A couple of sentences in the native language, without translators, were just the ticket to win over any audience from the get-go.

“But you must forgive me if I feel distressed in the midst of so much good cheer. I am so sad—because art is dead.” Ettubrute had just turned on his cybernetic translator. As always, Moy wondered whether a dead device could really catch and reproduce all the fine emotional and aesthetic nuances of his speech. He imagined not, but he had no other choice than to hope it would manage anyway—partially, at least.

“Art is dead. It was killed by holoprojections, by cybersystem chromatic designs, by musical harmonization programs, by virtual dance simulations, by all the technological paraphernalia whose only aim seems to be to eliminate the need not only for the artist’s skills, but even for the artist’s presence.” He was bending theatrically lower and lower, as if defeated by the circumstances. This was the sign for Ettubrute to start the activation sequence for all systems.

“But the artist refuses to be ignored! I refuse to fall into oblivion!” He lurched forward with a savage expression, and the Cetians drew back slightly.

Moy suppressed a smile: they were getting what they’d come for. The human savage. The elemental madman. The brilliant naïf, all subconscious, no processing.

“The artist cannot die. Because an artist enjoys the immortality of Prometheus. Because he dies in each of his works. Because he puts a piece of his life into each thing he creates. Because every bit of material that sprouts, transformed, from his hands is another piece of time that he has snatched from implacable entropy.” And Moy turned around to face the machine that was beginning to deploy.

As always, he was momentarily enraptured by the inexorable, lethal beauty of the device he had designed himself. Straightening up and growing like the hood of a colossal cobra or the ominous shadow of a dragon, the mechanical joints slid silently, one over the next. Until the archetypal figure of a cross had formed. Rising threateningly and enormous over the human’s silhouette. As if waiting.

Moy turned back to face the audience.

Too bad they wouldn’t get the Christian reference…

“The artist can and must die—in, through, and for his art. The artist is obliged to deconstruct himself in his art.” He noted with the usual satisfaction that the translator hesitated briefly at the word “deconstruct.”

Deconstruction. He could have included the term in the cyberglossary… but he liked to know that he, a simple human, a child of one of the least sophisticated cultures in the galaxy, could make his masters’ most advanced technology waver.

“The artist is a booster antenna. A funnel. He captures and guzzles the world’s pain and pours it out into his art,” and he took the apparently casual step backward that was the arranged signal.

The machine, like a carnivorous plastometal flower, leaned down and trapped him.

The Cetians stiffened with fright when the links and fasteners surrounded the human’s body and limbs like the tentacles of a giant polyp. Then they lifted him several yards above the stage without visible effort.

“The artist’s works are his clones, his children. They are his lacerated flesh and blood, his message. His anguished cry to a world that no longer hears any voice but that of pain and blood!” Moy howled heartrendingly.

The first five bleeders clamped onto his neck, thighs, and forearms, locating his veins with millimetric precision. Moy felt the shock of pain, masked almost immediately by the analgesics coating the needles. He winced; well, no one’s perfect. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, or do his performance without feeling some pain.

The negative pressure regulators worked properly, and five streams of scarlet liquid shot out in precise arcs. First sprinkling the stage, then falling into tiny crystal vessels that sprang from the machine, until they were filled. Then the bleeding stopped.

Moy made a fist with his right hand.

“He can deny his hand, try to exchange it for mechanical fakery. But no device can equal the fertile pain this hand feels when it holds a brush and creates.” He tensed and took a deep breath. Another dose of analgesics was injected into his system.

The semicircular blade sprang, swift and well-aimed as an axe blow, cutting the hand off and tossing it through the air. Another mechanism caught it before it could land. It connected electrodes to the convulsing nerves of the hand and put a brush in its fingers.

The hand, writhing, drew meaningless lines across the canvas that formed the stage, dancing in uncontrolled paroxysms. More and more slowly, until at last it remained motionless.

As usual, the spectacle drew murmurs from the well-mannered public. But Moy knew that the magic was already working. The audience was his. His slaves. He had them in his grip. He could do what he wanted with them.

“The fragile, transitory body is not what makes the difference. Who cares about the hand that drew the line, if the genius that drove it lives on in the line itself?”

Feeling the subtle creeping sensation inside the coarse fabric of his trouser leg, Moy relaxed his sphincter to allow the nanomanipulators to penetrate him. He recited a yoga mantra to stave off nausea while the delicate mechanisms snaked up through the curves of his intestine.

“Often, faced with the seeming perfection of the art, no one cares whether it was drawn by hand, claw, tentacle, or pincer. Some believe that art is art, whether made by a Da Vinci, by a Sciagluk, or by a computer.” Viewers waved their heads from side to side in agreement.

Moy hated the abstract, frigid compositions of Morffel Sciagluk. Nothing but a three-dimensional imitator of Mondrian, in his opinion. He only mentioned him for practical reasons: few of these Cetians knew the first thing about Leonardo. Or his Last Supper, or the Mona Lisa.

Through the veil of the analgesic drug, he felt the diffuse pain of the nanomanipulators penetrating him through arteries and capillaries, moving among muscles and tendons. Mobile fibers one molecule wide, spinning their web inside the edifice of his body. When the tickling reached his left arm, he gulped. The wave of analgesics that flooded his nervous system convinced him that Ettubrute was on the ball, that he could continue to the next step without risk.

“But only flesh and blood, mind and manipulating organ, can give birth to art. And if that exact conjunction does not exist—no art is possible.” He relaxed, waiting.

As always, the explosion surprised him as much as the audience. Though there was hardly any pain.

The meticulously measured collection of volatile molecules in his left arm transformed into an explosion, spraying bones, tendons, and fingers into a spectacular bloody cloud. By a calculated manipulation of force fields, the heap of remains that had once been an arm floated in the air for a few seconds without spreading. Until Ettubrute turned off the antigrav effect. Then they fell to the stage, amid the fervent applause of the enthusiastic spectators.

Taking advantage of the pause, Moy sought out the mestizo girl’s eyes. They were filled with admiration—and horror. Good. Now she was as much his as the rest of them. Or more so.

He strained his ear to try and figure out whether Ettubrute had already turned on the mechanical womb. It wasn’t really necessary yet; they had the best model on the market, and the synthesizing process was very quick. But it was always a relief to know that if something, anything, unexpected happened, then…

He pushed the thought from his mind and continued.

“Art is self-mutilation. It is the deliberate extraction of our most secret innards: our dreams.”

The razor-thin blade of a semicircular pendulum (a reference to the Edgar Allan Poe story, which they would never catch) swung three times before opening the artist’s abdominal cavity with surgical exactitude. The bleeders automatically reversed their function, and not one drop of blood clouded the view of the organs.

In anticipation, the nanomanipulators had injected different colorings into each organ, and Moy’s guts were a living symphony of exposed and pulsing colors. The analgesic drug circulated through his veins, preventing him from losing consciousness or going mad from sheer agony before the climactic moment. But the sensation of lying open, defenseless, strangely empty, was not something that derived from pain. And it was incredibly uncomfortable.

“Dreams are the intangible substance that gives life, depth, and sentient volume to a work of art. What projects it beyond its narrow material frame.” Moy closed his glottis, concentrating on breathing through his nose.

The pressurized hydrogen was injected into his intestine. The loops of the intestine, left clean by the nanos, inflated. Ghostly, semitransparent, rising from their place like the spirals of a horrendous larval snake. A surprising play of light glowed from within them, thanks to the gas.

“Although the light of art is always ephemeral, that light is the artist’s breath of life, his soul, which expires in each work of art.”

A nano punctured an intestinal loop and the superinflammable gas escaped with an audible hiss. Then the spark triggered flames, and for an instant Moy’s body was engulfed in a burning cloud.

Only for one second. Any more would have been dangerous; it might have burnt his skin and flesh. The volume of hydrogen was calculated to the cubic centimeter.

“And every critic, every exegesis, every interpretation of a work of art is a self-reflection, a journey to the inner self of the person who gave birth to it and clothed it in the flesh and skin of concepts.” Whenever he got to this point, Moy always regretted not being a woman. With a shredded uterus, this part of the monologue would have been much more powerful.

Even so, the vision was pretty stunning.

The knives of the nanoskinners sliced his epidermis, and the strips of skin fluttered in the wind like a macabre fringe. Bloodless. The surface capillaries were nearly empty; the bleeders were working at full capacity, concentrating the vital fluid in his essential organs.

Moy felt dizzy and nearly fainted. But the neurostimulant circulating through his system instantly revived him. He smiled, pleased. Ettubrute was one hundred percent alert to his slightest vital signs. And he now heard the dull rumble of the mechanical womb doing its job. Everything was going fine. As always.

“Behind the flesh and blood of emotions, the skeleton of theories and grand schemes is laid bare, the subtle framework of sex and power in mixed substrates.”

In perfect synchrony, both of the artist’s legs—first the muscles, sliced from within, then the bones, breaking with an audible crack—fell onto the stage. There they kicked convulsively for several seconds before falling still.

A few liters of blood flowed from the cut femoral arteries, streaming over the strangely empty trouser legs. Then the nanos stopped the flow. This wasn’t a mistake, but another well-calculated and inconsequential effect. With his body reduced practically to head and trunk, Moy simply did not need so much fluid. Besides, it might overwhelm the bleeders.

Moy followed a Tibetan breathing pattern.

Pain does not exist. Pain is an illusion.

I exist. I am real.

“What remains of art without the hidden alphabet of sex?” he howled.

At that cry, the nanos cut away the bloodied rag to which his trousers had been reduced, and his sex stood erect, as if defying death. Not from artificially high blood pressure in the corpora cavernosa, nor from a timely dose of hormones. Moy was aroused, as always. It was the old irony. Eros and Thanatos.

The proud exhibition only lasted a couple of seconds.

Moy relaxed. Now, the most difficult part…

The erect phallus exploded in a cascade of blue liquid. The nanos dissected the testicles from within and made them fall with a dull thud onto the stage.

When the effects of the analgesic overcame the pain and emptiness that burned in his mutilated groin, Moy breathed more calmly. The worst was over now. The rest would be more impressive than painful.

Kandria was watching him in genuine adoration. He had to take advantage of this mood of the girl’s. They were going to have a great time together, after all…

“It is the artist’s sacrifice, his spirit, that makes his work soar with creativity.” Moy gulped.

The artificial oxygenation system was set in motion, swapping out oxygen for carbon dioxide in his red blood cells without the mediation of his lungs. The nanos penetrated his bronchial tubes, and more hydrogen was injected into his pulmonary tissue. The pendulum again laid him open, this time at the thorax, and his swollen respiratory organs rose like balloons.

They lifted his tortured body even higher above the plaza, as if fighting to break his chains. At last they did so, and he floated freely above the plaza.

More applause, now almost frenzied.

Scornfully, Moy thought they not only knew nothing about human anatomy, they seemed to know nothing of basic physics either. It was totally obvious that the volume of air displaced by his lungs was insufficient to lift his body—even without arms or legs. Only the antigrav field, carefully managed by Ettubrute, made this extraordinary spectacle possible.

He gulped again. With no air in his lungs, only careful pumping by the pneumatic nanomachine attached to his larynx allowed him to keep talking. And he never lost his fear of how ridiculous he would look if the device failed.

“But always, inevitably, after the last brushstroke the artist falls back to hard reality!” Moy closed his eyes, and the chill of another dose of analgesics relieved his veins.

The lungs exploded with another burst of flame, and his body plummeted from up high. Below, the machine awaited him, deploying spikes and ridges, like the jaws of some terrible shark.

Poe’s other terror: the pit. A skillful intertextuality, wasted on all these xenoids, completely ignorant of human culture.

Even so, the audience shrieked.

The fall looked accidental, but it was meticulously managed by the antigrav fields. Several spikes impaled the remains of the artist’s body. One ran through an ear. Another went in through his cheek and came out through an eye socket, popping out his right eye.

“Looking at the external surfaces of this world of illusions is not what matters most to an artist! There’s much more than that!” Moy roared, and he felt his veins relax with the last, huge dose of analgesics. Prelude to the end.

He smiled.

His left eye burst from the pressure, splattering vitreous and aqueous humor, one tinted green, the other purple. Then it dangled from the optic nerve like a faded flower.

“The essence, what no machine can imitate, is the artist’s absorption into the universal, the final annulment of the ego that he suffers in creating art!” Moy relaxed entirely.

“Alea iacta est,” he thought, the die is cast, and he greeted the darkness.

The nanos that had penetrated his brain suddenly cut the supply of blood and glucose to its neurons, while hitting his major synapses with well-calculated electrical shocks. Moy sweetly lost consciousness.

Clinically, he was already dead, though his heart continued to beat. No one in the audience had realized that what the machine was displaying to them was a cadaver. It was essential for the final act. No analgesic drug could even lessen the supreme pain of that finale.

The pneumatic nanomachine injected air at high pressure into Moy’s larynx, modulating the horrific posthumous scream that made the vocal cords vibrate until they broke.

Prelude to apotheosis.

The explosive charge went off in his heart, and a fraction of a second later, the one in the corpus callosum of his brain.

The two most important organs in the body flew to bits. The spikes and ridges of the machine fell upon the remains like hungry hyenas. They danced their frenzied choreography, mincing the remnants of the body like the teeth of some gigantic cannibal. And when there was nothing left to cut, they rose, oscillating menacingly, as if looking for their next victim.

Moy’s recorded voice, reverberating deeply, could then be heard:

“The world is the machine. Devouring art, it devours its creator. It always thirsts for blood, pain, and art—and there are always new artists yearning to become its food. This is life, and this is history. This is the great cycle.”

And the machine folded up, slowly, deliberately. The lights came on and the applause exploded, more fervent than ever.

Most of the audience left. Whispering, overwhelmed, looking eager to go back outside, back to reality.

Kandria waited longer. With tear-filled eyes, she exchanged views, brightly at first, then forcefully, with her agent-father. She wanted to see Moy and congratulate him—it had simply been perfect.

The Centaurian felt there was no need to overpraise the competition. Besides, this Moy wasn’t decent company for her. They might establish an emotional relationship that could distract her from her artistic path. And he was her father, and she owed him her obedience…

They argued until Kandria, furiously disengaging from the Centaurian, ran into the crowd without a backward look. Her father-agent smiled: this was just another form of respect.

He calmly followed her. Outside, his large purple eyes met the beady eyes of Ettubrute, and the two agents exchanged knowing looks and a shrug of the shoulders.

Yes, human artists were very difficult to deal with. Whether it was your child or your lover-friend… You often had to be hard on them, for their own good.

The art dealers and collectors, Cetians and members of other races, flocked to the platform like flies to the scent of a fresh cadaver. The Colossaur, cold and professional, responded to their offers and organized an auction, quickly and efficiently.

The great canvas that served as stage, plastered with Moy’s limbs and viscera, was sprayed with epoxy resin by an automated mechanism. The fast-drying substance formed a thin, transparent layer that would protect the work from time and putrefaction.

After a short bidding war with two grodos, an Auyar bought it for seventy thousand credits, cash. He then offered half a million credits for the machine, but Ettubrute was unshakeable. No, it wasn’t for sale. He wouldn’t even listen to proposals.

The Auyar made another offer. Magnificent…

Ettubrute’s little eyes shone with greed.

Well, he’d have to confer with the artist…

A hologram of Moy taken at the start of the performance, with a succinct biography in the Cetian syllabic alphabet, was projected in the space above the platform. The audience members who still remained, as if reluctant to leave, applauded once more. For fifteen credits, anyone interested could have a copy of the documentary. For 150, a holorecording of the entire performance.

There were more than fifty buyers. The show was a resounding success.

Moy, of course, only found out an hour later, once the autocloning was complete and his new body was available. Ettubrute, solicitous, gave him the whole story as he helped him from the mechanical womb hidden under the platform.

Despite the news, Moy felt no better. He coughed repeatedly to clear the mucilaginous pseudoamniotic fluid from his lungs. His hair and body felt disgustingly sticky, and he had a horrible taste in his mouth. All his muscles were shaking. He urgently needed to shower, to eat… and to sleep.

These cloned rebirths were wearing him out more and more.

“Having sold very well. Your debt being paying off,” the Colossaur encouraged him. “Having very interesting Auyar offer. They pay much.”

“Forget about it. I’m not going to Auya. I don’t trust guys who don’t show their faces, and I like my memory too much to let them erase it.” Moy shook his head, blinking to improve his vision. In spite of high-speed cloning, this business of changing bodies twice a week had its disadvantages. It always took you at least six hours to get totally used to your new anatomy.

“Not being on Auya, being here in Ningando,” the Colossaur persisted. “For Auyar diplomatic staff. The erasing of memory being only… partial. Lasting one month the contract. Eight thousand credits per performance… not counting profits from selling canvas at end.”

Moy whistled: that was nearly five times what he earned in a typical performance. The Auyars were loaded, for sure.

“Well, that changes everything,” he smiled. “With those kinds of earnings, we could both retire. You told him yes, of course, we’d love to do it, I imagine, Bruiser?” He playfully slapped his pectoral plate.

“There being one detail,” Ettubrute clarifies, almost timidly. “Requesting daily performances, and double performances weekends, or being no contract.”

“Shit on a spaceship,” Moy muttered, gulping as he mentally calculated as quick as he could. That made nine times a week. Thirty-six deaths and resurrections in a month. At eight thousand per, plus the canvasses—it was a tempting offer. But all those autoclonings…

All that discomfort, half the time adapting to a new body… plus the chance of brain damage from abusing the process, which wasn’t trivial.

On the other hand—he’d be able to return to Earth a potentate, make whatever art he wanted without ever having to worry anymore about whether it sold or not.

Two scales, one balance.

And the scales weighed practically the same. Hard to decide.

Without really knowing why, he thought of Jowe. Jowe never would have ended up in a situation like this, but… he wished he knew what Jowe would have done in his place.

“You think it’s worth it, Bruiser?” He looked at Ettubrute.

The Colossaur stared at him in turn, then shrugged. “I not risking anything. Being your life. Deciding you. Thinking that getting better price possible from Auyar? Being hard bargainers they…”

“I’ll try, but eight thousand’s pretty good,” Moy sighed. “Hey… Did you see that girl… you know, Kandria? The mestizo girl, human and Centaurian? She didn’t wait for me?”

Ettubrute looked at him slowly, for a long time. “No,” he finally grunted, shifting his gaze. “Leaving almost right away. Arguing with father-agent about possibility her doing something similar. Differing opinions.”

“Oh! So she’s a plagiarist,” Moy said, and something broke inside him. Suddenly the world looked and tasted like ash. “Alright… I think I’ll take their offer, Bruiser.”

The Colossaur lay his enormous paw delicately on his shoulder. “Moy…” It was the first time in months that he had pronounced his name. “You… you… being able taking it… so often?”

“I’ll get used to it,” Moy replied nonchalantly, but as if from a great distance. Like a robot. “Know something, Bruiser? Life’s a piece of shit. We ought to plan something special if those Auyars are going to pay so well. Before that mestizo chick and others like her start copying me. I’ll be the first, ahead of my time. That has to be made clear. All the rest are just following the path I blazed.”

“Perhaps,” the Colossaur mused. “What having in mind?”

“Something more… spectacular.” Moy was talking, feeling like his mouth didn’t belong to him. “Maybe use acids. Or poisons. Or nanocharges to send teeth flying through my cheeks, one by one…” He clicked his tongue. “You might try to think up something yourself, Bruiser! You know as much about human anatomy as I do, I’m sure… Oh, and you know something else, Bruiser? I think I told you one time, I had this friend on Earth, a guy named Jowe… A brilliant kid. Well, I just had a great idea: with all that money, when I go back, I’m going to find him, wherever he is… You’ll help me, won’t you, Bruiser? When it comes right down to it, you and I are in this together…”

The Colossaur stopped walking for a moment, while Moy kept going.

Ettubrute watched him move on, away. The artist was still talking. Excited, gesticulating, not realizing he was alone. Cutting a path through the crowd of Cetians, who stared at him in surprise. Some pointed, shaking their heads reproachfully. Others, who had possibly witnessed his performance, made way for him with respect.

“Yes… When it comes right down to it, you and I are in this together, Moy,” the Colossaur whispered, so low that the artist, walking far ahead, never noticed that he had used perfectly correct Planetary syntax.

Nor, of course, that his agent’s tiny pig eyes had a suspiciously moist sheen…