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.