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 alclass="underline" 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.