A Planet for Rent (29 page)

Then I began to comprehend Ettu.

His tragedy was to have been born in the wrong star system, under the wrong sun, in the wrong time.

Not long ago, much later, I read about a king, Ludwig of Bavaria, and I realized that one of the descriptions applied to him would have fit Ettu perfectly: mad for beauty.

He was a stranger among his own kind, a freak, a leper, a pariah. And the arts of the rest of the galaxy were too elevated, abstract, and perfect for his crude yet refined and terribly heightened sensitivities. The history of human art was exactly what he would have wanted his own history to be. Elemental, imperfect, sometimes naïve, feeling and stumbling its way to what others already knew from the start. But vital, never giving up...

And of course, there was his human friend, the mysterious Moy...

In Barrio 13, nobody asks questions about anybody’s past. I didn’t either, but curiosity demanded that I learn more, and I simply listened more closely.

Sometimes he talked to Moy as if he were there. At first it terrified me—a crazy Colossaur isn’t exactly the safest person in the universe to be around. But later, picking up bits here and bits there, putting together this monologue and that, the puzzle began to take shape, and I calmed down.

Moy had been a human artist, he was dead, and Ettu knew it perfectly well. He had been Moy’s agent, the one who made him famous. He was also, after a fashion, his friend. No matter where they went, they were each as lonely as a drop of water in the desert... They ended up getting intimate. Logical, right?

That would have been enough for me, once. In Barrio 13, a girl learns that when you dig until you get to the bottom of anything, you’ll find sex... and that’s it. It can be dangerous to your sanity to wonder what lies beyond. It’s almost always something slobbery, gross, malignant, yet pathetic. Like a wad of phlegm that comes to life and tries to speak.

All the same, I felt I knew enough about Ettu for nothing to gross me out. I kept listening between the lines.

That’s how I found out it was Moy who named him Ettubrute, early in their relationship. Later, what started off as a caustic joke must have turned into a kind of affectionate nickname.

In any case, it was clear that their relationship was never obvious or easy. They pretended at mutual hatred, but they needed one another. Moy was always complaining that his agent exploited him, but he never questioned any of his numbers. Ettu pretended to put up with the human only because of the money he made from him, but it was his vitality and his very presence that gave him the strength to bear his fate as a hopeless creampuff from a race, a world, and an ethic of brutal titans like Colossa.

I never found out what kind of art Moy made. I suppose he was a painter or an architect, given Ettu’s tastes. Colossaurs may have very keen ears, but they have no sense of rhythm or melody, so they lack even the most basic skills needed for producing or appreciating music. And among humans, the olfactory arts were never our forte.

Moy, the painter or architect, did something with his body, something impressive, savagely beautiful and risky. Something that wore him out so much that he almost died every day, or something like that. Ettu admired his talent and his complete devotion. And his bravery. But he was always ready to protect him from anything—especially from himself. Moy became addicted to telecrack, and Ettu got him over his dependence.

I guess neither of them really realized how much they needed each other... until it was too late.

But I only discovered the why and the how of that “too late” afterward. At the end.

When we’d been all over Earth, when Ettu seemed to realize that a thousand lives wouldn’t be enough for him to see the whole history of human art, only then did we settle in New York. The house he rented on Staten Island was remote, huge, and safe, and I immediately christened it the Castle. And he devoted himself to artists.

It seemed logical to me. After the dead art of past eras, the living creators.

Logical. I couldn’t imagine how terribly logical it was.

We started frequenting exhibits and performances by the most famous artists of the moment. Well, not exactly the most famous. The most famous ones who still lived on Earth.

I learned the meaning of the word “patron” when I saw him in action. Though he was a very odd patron.

He gave his credits away lavishly, without drawing up contracts, without committing himself to support anyone’s career. But they were just small contributions—“to relieve the artist’s situation,” as he put it himself while smiling his toothy grin.

I couldn’t see the sense in what he was doing. Was he planning to devote himself seriously to the art business? The big xenoid dealers had cornered the market on exports from Earth, as everyone knew. Ettu could buy all the art produced on the planet; if he didn’t get the okay from the galactic sharks in the field, no collector would buy any of it from him.

And if he was really aiming to help human artists, why toss around these relatively insignificant amounts, which might relieve their lives for a month or two but not longer? Why not pick three or four truly talented artists and give them some real support?

Not long ago I saw the fishers in the Bay of Fundy. Before spreading their nets, they dumped the guts and scraps from their previous catch into the water. This clever operation, which attracted all the fish eager to devour the blood and entrails of their unfortunate peers, is called “baiting.”

Ettu did know exactly what he wanted. And how to get it. But I did not understand what that was until later. Much less why he wanted it. Though in practice, those amounted to the same thing.

During the time when the Colossaur was playing patron, our trust blossomed again. As if trying to make up for lost time, we became closer than ever.

After pretending to be distant and pretentious at every art show, Ettu would let off steam with me. He enjoyed being just as childish as me, dropping the serious talk and the businessman mask. We played a lot. I soon realized that under that armored carapace of his, he was more of a playful puppy than a terrible machine of destruction like the one I’d seen when he saved my life from the attack by my former gang.

He loved to carry me on his back, playing horsey with me. Day by day, I found it easier to see him not as a dangerous, almighty xenoid but as my ideal accomplice in all sorts of games and pranks. Slowly, without imposing himself, he pulled off the miracle of getting me to stop missing the companionship of Dingo and the others, which I could never get back now.

When we went to art shows and the high-society afterparties, he dressed me like a miniature woman, like a living doll, and I went along with the masquerade, feigning a grownup’s serious and affected dignity and taking great care of my clothes. When I got bored of all the chatter about abstruse theories like transmodernism and holofigurative representation, all it took was a glance at Ettu’s tiny eyes for me to understand that it was all a kind of secret grand masquerade, in which only we were real and only we knew there was nothing behind the others’ masks. A brief annoyance we had to put up with before going on with genuine life. The life of games and jokes in the Castle.

When I turned ten, he threw a surprise party for me that caused a commotion all over New York. All the artists and their minions came. Many of them gave me works of theirs as presents... I still have some: today they’re worth hundreds of thousands of credits, given that the artists who made them won’t produce any more...

Only one thing was missing: children. It wouldn’t have cost Ettu anything to invite three or four dozen kids from any gang in Queens or Harlem, but he didn’t want to. In any case, I had already learned my lesson. Childhood is too precious to share with someone just because you both share the same age.

All my apprehensions about his intentions died once and for all that day. The following week, as a magnificent post-birthday celebration, he skipped exhibits and inaugurations and devoted all his time to me. We went to a thousand amusement parks around the city, bought or rented all sorts of pets and riding animals, which wandered grunting and stamping around the enormous lawns of the Castle, practically driving to distraction the efficient and expensive huborg servants that Ettu had gotten from the Auyars, paying six month’s rent in advance.

Because it soon became obvious that things might go on much longer than the “couple of months” he had mentioned to me at first. Ettu seemed to be in no hurry.

On the contrary, he grew more interested each day in my desires and plans for the future, as if he were expecting us to spend several years together.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be. Ballerina, painter, shuttle flight attendant, executive? Professions that were only a dream for a girl from Barrio 13 now seemed within my reach. And boringly real.

“Liya, one way or another, you have your whole life ahead of you,” he always told me, stroking my head and cutting short my indecisive ruminations. “For now, enjoy life, find out about things, learn. You’ll have to choose later, when you’re grown.”

And did I ever find out and learn! Ettu found the best alternative education programs for me. Education through play, which only the children of the big shareholders in the Planetary Tourism Agency had access to, the sort of education I’d never even dreamed of in Barrio 13.

He even arranged to have some facts about the history of Earth translated for me from the educational materials of other races. That could have cost him some stiff fines, maybe even a memory erasure, if he’d been caught. The facts about how xenoids viewed my race were stark and cruel in their schematic coldness. But they only confirmed what Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation leaflets constantly repeat, what every human learns almost subconsciously from childhood: they weren’t our friends, they were our masters.

But to see it written by the xenoids themselves, without all their altruistic rhetoric, was very hard. You always dreamed that it was all just slander, mistakes in Earth’s administration, problems with the transfer of power...

At first I didn’t understand why Ettu revealed it all to me. Revealed the truth, no less terrible for always having been intuitively known.

“Do you feel guilty for me?” I asked him in a fury after stomping on one of the more explicit and difficult holovideos about the political economy of the galactic races toward Earth. “Because just being born on Colossa gave you all the privileges I’ll never aspire to as a human?”

And he smiled.

But I wanted to wound him, and I kept at it. “Do you think adopting me as your daughter will make me forgive the whole galaxy in your name? Do you think I’ll ever love you?”

Then he got serious and told me in a carefully neutral tone of voice, “Liya, I don’t like talking about this. There’s something I’ve never told you: I can’t have children. I’m not... fit. On Colossa, only the biggest and strongest have the right to leave descendants. They let me live—but they sterilized me.”

Of course, I already knew in practical terms what “sterilized” meant: what the Planetary Security guys did when they flew over my barrio with their radiation transmitters “so the shit won’t overflow,” as they put it. Lots of adults protested, yelled, got angry. But the social workers and most of the young people just shrugged and laughed, joking that at least they wouldn’t have to worry about the venereal disease that lasts nine months, followed by a lifelong convalescence.

After my tantrums and my hatefulness, I always went back to him. He was the only one I had... And in a way, I felt... pity? affection?... for him. Those aren’t as different as you might think.

I knew he was alone, much more alone than me. I was on my own planet at least, where I wasn’t anybody, but I was one of many nobodies. He was a stranger, and always would be. A stranger on his own world, where they didn’t consider him Colossaur enough to let him reproduce, a stranger here on Earth, where he was too Colossaur to be anything else.

We didn’t talk much about it. In the middle of our talks about games, about the human history that I was starting to find more fascinating than the best stories, because on top of everything else it was real, sometimes a word about it slipped in. It always sounded strangely alien, and it would practically paralyze us to hear it. Like we were trying to understand the odd word, wondering where it had come from and what it meant, as if we didn’t both know perfectly well.

Children... Friends... Race... Belonging... Loneliness... Love...

No, it wasn’t the words but the ideas they contained that spread the icy silences when I would endeavor to come up with something else to talk about, as if trying to avoid the iceberg whose reflection I saw gleaming in Ettu’s little eyes.

One day he brought the first artist home. They talked for a while, Ettu listlessly and the other almost in a frenzy. Then Ettu invited him upstairs, and they spent a long time in his apartments. Not in the inner sanctum that he never let me enter, but in his bedroom, with the enormous bed that I knew he never slept in.

Later the artist, a pompous little genius of the holoprojections, came down strutting around smugly, but with a strange expression on his face, a mixture of disgust and terror. And Ettu said goodbye with a sad—yet final—smile.

I ran upstairs, with a horrible suspicion... The bed was unmade, as if someone very large and very heavy had been romping in the sheets. Strange liquids were staining the silk. And the smell of sex, which I knew so well, mixed with Ettu’s acrid and cloying scent.

He surprised me there, and I said nothing. I don’t exactly know why, but I felt... betrayed. I thought it was because he had introduced the grownup world into the childhood paradise of the house. But, deep down, I knew it was something else.

Jealousy.

Why them and not me?

I wasn’t such a little girl as I’d been months earlier...

I tore the costly silk sheets in a fury, my eyes moist, like a wronged woman. And I peed on the mattress, vengeful as a hurt child. The following day, Ettu instructed the huborgs never to let me enter his suite until they had finished erasing all traces of his encounters with artists.