A Planet for Rent (28 page)

I ate as much candy and ice cream as a nine-year-old girl can digest without any stomach disasters. I bought enough toys for a whole elementary boarding school. Magazines and books I’d always wanted to read, from holographic comic books to the classics that grownups talk about, which I didn’t have the time or the desire to do more than leaf through.

I wore myself out in the hotel’s magnificent gym, more playing with the equipment than really exercising my childish muscles.

I spent hours in front of the suite’s enormous holoscreen, flipping from channel to channel among the thousands that I had free holonet access to as a hotel guest. I saw holodramas that were on their thousandth episode, documentaries about the flora and fauna of Earth and other worlds, dance and theater spectaculars that bored me, concerts of those traditional music groups that all the xenoids love, cartoons, and all sorts of pornography for every taste.

During my frenzy of trying everything and acquiring everything, Ettu was only a fleeting reddish presence I barely glimpsed when he was entering or leaving my suite and locking himself behind his secret door. I gave him friendly smiles, but I didn’t know what to say to him, and I couldn’t think of any good topics of conversation. An indiscrete question might put an end to this fantastic dream forever, and I wasn’t about to risk it. He seemed very busy, but he was always observing me. And that toothy grin of his seemed permanently painted on his thickset face. As if to say, “Keep it up, Liya—what you’re doing is great, but there’s still more...”

And there was more.

By the fifth day, I was like that grodo in the fable who, after crossing a vast desert, thought his thirst was endless, so he dived headfirst into a lake, planning to drink it all. And after drinking for three days and three nights, he discovered that the lake level hadn’t gone down so much as a centimeter. And yet, not only had his thirst disappeared... so had his desire to drink any more water, ever.

The material world, the world of luxuries and objects I’d never had, didn’t do me any good if I was alone. My new possessions were worthless if I couldn’t show them off, brag about them, share them with others, watch them be astonished about it all. And most of all, the fact that it had been so easy to get it all, the fact that I hadn’t had to pay anything for the treasures cramming my room, took away most of their value.

On the sixth day I ran away. I used my platinum card to get a cybertaxi, a wide aerobus that I packed full of toys, clothes, candy, books... and even so, I had to leave some behind. And I went back to Barrio 13. Where else?

I had already talked with my Abuela, but she was prudent and as allergic to the mob of kids as any other woman, so in the middle of her drunken stupor she’d had enough common sense not to tell anyone where I was. Whereas I was so naïve, I asked them to let me off right there on the street, instead of at my house, when I saw the gang—my gang—playing.

Everything would be just like before, except better...

I was ready to forgive them. I had to.

They had sold me to a Colossaur. They were worse than rats, but they were my rats. The only real family I had—much more family than my alcoholic Abuela. Ettu, in spite of his tolerant generosity, was nothing but a strange xenoid who was up to something weird with all the interest he showed in me...

For Dingo and the rest of the gang, my return was a total surprise. Alive, happy, and loaded with marvels. When the cybertaxi let me off in front of them, they stopped playing soccer and just stared at me. As if they didn’t believe it, as if I were just a ghost. As if I had to be dead.

“Hey, guys,” I said, happy. “Did you miss me?”

Then, without a word, without Dingo giving them any sort of signal, they all ran at me. I thought they were going to hug me, to congratulate me for my cleverness and my good luck. But, too late, I saw the anger twisting their faces.

They fell on me. Kicking me, biting me, spitting on me, shouting at me. Ripping everything I had so happily brought to share with them out of my hands. I felt their hatred, their envy, and their simple need to destroy me so they could keep on being themselves. And those feelings were like a monstrous shell that turned them into something very different from the gang, my gang.

I wasn’t one of them anymore, and this was their way of showing me. In a way they had killed me by selling me to that xenoid. They had thrown me out of their world, which up until five days earlier had also been mine. I should have at least had the decency to stay dead. Not to remind them of what they hadn’t had any choice but to do.

We children are capable of endless cruelty. Because we don’t have anything to tell us, deep down inside, “That’s enough, stop.” And in Barrio 13, grownups tend not to get involved in kids’ business. If they kill one? Okay... one less mouth to feed. One less who’ll end up with the Triads or the Yakuza when he grows up.

At first, greed made Dingo and the others restrain their rancor. They controlled themselves to keep from breaking any of the “riches” that I had so naïvely brought them. Perhaps if I had shown complete submission it would have appeased them—I now know that this is how it works in the group rituals of lower primates such as baboons. But when Babo tried to rip the clothes off of me, when I kept my platinum card in my pocket, and I resisted, they forgot everything else and turned into bloodthirsty rats.

Surrounded by the smells of broken perfume bottles, trampled chocolates, caviar dumped on the ground, and wine spilling from smashed bottles, thirty hands and thirty feet went at my body. I fought like mad, like the girl accustomed to Barrio 13 gang fights that I was. But when I tasted my own blood running from my broken lips and split nose, and I realized that they would never stop, I was terrified like never before in my life. I screamed, begging for the help I feared would never come.

I screamed and shouted for my Abuela, for my mother, for the neighbors, for Planetary Security, for anyone who would help me, for mercy.

I screamed for Ettu, when I couldn’t take the pain any more.

It was killing me.

Then he showed up.

He was swift, brutal, and effective. Two swipes of the tail, one blow of the hand, two kicks, and one snap, and the gang fled in terror. My Colossaur angel, without a word, led me by the hand like a father leads his daughter, and practically dragged me out of there.

I was bleeding, had a dislocated shoulder, and felt dazed by the pain and the shock, but I’ll never forget the spectacle of two of the triplets twisted into unnatural, broken positions on the asphalt, and the body of Dingo, headless.

Dingo, the leader of my gang.

The same gang that had attacked me...

It couldn’t be. If it had all been a dream before, this had to be a nightmare.

When I got back to the suite, I slept almost fifteen hours straight. Maybe they gave me some drug, but I needed it. I have a vague memory of Ettu and the three hotel doctors caring for me, the sharp jab of pain when they snapped my arm back in place. Afterwards, through a fog, being moved and lifted somewhere.

When I woke up, I was in another almost identical suite, but half a world away. According to the brochure, it was also the Galaxy—but in Tokyo. I dug into my pocket, looking for the blessed card... and it wasn’t there.

I remembered that Babo and the others hadn’t managed to snatch it from me. So it had been him. The Lord gave it to me, the Lord took it away... Cursed be the Lord. Cursed be the xenoid Lord, who saves my life and takes from me the possibility of enjoying it.

That was the end of my buying frenzy. And the ice floes that had almost completely melted loomed up once more between us.

Ettu continued to pay unflinchingly for every meal, every item I needed—or that he realized or thought I needed—though I never asked him for anything again. I felt that when he took away the platinum card, he took away his trust, so why should I give him mine? He was a xenoid, I was a human. No trust was possible...

The silent, roving period had begun.

After Tokyo there was no more rest. We traveled as if we were pursuing something, or fleeing something. Ettu talked and talked, revealing the world to me, the Earth I had never known. I just followed him everywhere, quiet, but like an affectionate puppy that follows in its master’s footsteps. Though it was less affection than fear. Fear of losing him, too, after he had taken my gang away from me.

Fear because I knew how useless I was, since Ettu could manage on his own perfectly well. He didn’t need anyone’s help to rid himself of the moochers who crowded around in every city, or the people offering him a “pretty girl, real cheap, will do everything,” or a “good room with antigrav and holonet connection, good price,” or “traditional food, satisfaction guaranteed, cooked naturally, organic ingredients.” He didn’t even pay attention to the ones who came up to him pretending to be old friends or to have a predilection for his race, much less to those who talked about terrestrial hospitality and then wanted at all costs to invite him to their house. None of the vultures who always circle round the xenos, all the same in every city on Earth, could faze him.

We never slept two nights in the same hotel. After the Tokyo Galaxy he preferred simpler, more anonymous hostels. Maybe he wanted to go unnoticed... or he might have had some other reason. He never consulted with me about his decision. It couldn’t have been to save money, because he kept spending it hand over fist.

In any case, even the grubbiest hotel (and we never spent the night in one that was actually grubby) would have been much better than my tiny apartment in Barrio 13. Ninety-seven square feet, including bath and kitchen, filled with the smell of my Abuela’s alcohol, vomit, and old age, day and night...

Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, New Bombay, Beijing, Florence, Berlin, Stockholm, New Paris, Barcelona, New York, Havana, New Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires... In less than a month, we tied a bow around the world.

The key question was still the same: what did Ettu need me for? It wasn’t to be a guide for him: at the age of nine, I’d never left New Cali, hardly even the microworld of Barrio 13. He knew how to get around better than me in every city we passed through.

In each city we repeated the same routine. Arrive, find a hotel, eat, drop off the luggage... and wander. We walked around looking at everything, for hours at a time, snubbing the taxis and aerobuses. Until my legs started to ache, when he, always perceptive, would carry me on his armored shoulder, though I never complained. Or thanked him.

He was never interested in the nightclubs where his people hung out, or the shows for tourists, or any part of the well-planned spider’s web for emptying xenoid bank accounts that the Planetary Tourism Agency had woven around the planet.

His thing was the past. And of the past, art.

He seemed thirsty to look, to touch, to measure step by step every portion of Earth’s artistic past. He knew so much about human architecture and its convoluted relationship with history! He talked to me about every fountain, every palace, every plaza and monument, with a sense of wonder, of respect, and at the same time of bitterness, which at the time I grasped or understood only in the vaguest way.

He seemed to know it all. Whichever city it was, he knew where to go and what to find.

The austere sand gardens of the Zen monasteries and the graceful palaces of the Japanese. The lovely pagodas and ornate wooden palaces in China. The stupas and the temples bursting with reliefs in India. The orgy of curves in the Arab mosques and minarets, the orgasm of color in Florentine marbles and cupolas. The solidity of German cathedrals, the profuse richness of the Spanish Baroque, the fake Eiffel Tower and its steel stylishness, the symphony of cement and glass in Scandinavian and Catalan modernism. The fusion of European spirit and indigenous patience in Brazil, the pretentious Europeanization of the palaces and avenues in Buenos Aires, the fiesta of colors in Caribbean eclecticism. And to sum up the world, the Steel Babel, where all styles cross paths and are refined by their dizzying combinations.

New York. That’s where we would stay...

There was still much more...

Ettu talked about the bold human feat of conquering height and volume, overcoming the resistance of form, using only inadequate primitive materials. But he passed by the ultramodern living edifices of grodo architecture, not built but grown, without a glance. He disdained the perfect glass-steel and synplast angles of astroports in favor of the musty glory of medieval European castles. For him, human architecture had had its childhood, youth, mature adulthood... and its senile decay was the obscene and perfunctory perfection that had been brought to Earth by all the races of the galaxy.

In museums, he looked at paintings and sculptures, and sometimes even talked to them, with the sort of affection and familiarity you see between old friends. The Chinese bronzes, the delicate Japanese calligrams, the erotic reliefs of the Hindu temple at Konark, the Greek Orthodox icons and the unique brilliance of Flemish primitives—for him, it was all a cause of wonder. The unbridled colors in paintings by the blacks of Africa and America, the abstractions of European modernism... he preferred it all to the cold geometry of the Cetians’ networks of lights, the Centaurians’ fractal kaleidoscopes, the living surfaces of grodo bioarchitecture. The beauty of imperfection, of life, was what human pictorial art was all about for him.

I’ve lost many of his words, but some of them remain etched in my memory, like drops of water that splash from the stream and sprinkle the rock and so remain for a while. Insufficient in themselves, isolated, but giving an idea of the torrent.

I listened shyly, amazed that an all-powerful xenoid would pay so much attention to our dead and obsolete art. I didn’t understand his obsession with unearthing our past glories. It made no sense in him, one of the masters of the present and future. His rapture over colors was stupid, since as everybody knew, his species could only see shades of gray, not the miracle of colors.

I understood a little better when I met some other Colossaurs, beasts concerned only with force and power, for whom art was a waste of time and a stupid weakness.