Выбрать главу

Working in the tourism sector isn’t as awful for a scientist as it might seem at first glance. At least you’re well-paid, and you come into contact with the genuine source of Earth’s wealth: xenoid tourists. Sometimes they learn more about the latest developments in the fields they no longer work in than their colleagues with government positions.

There are even frequent cases of daring to get a title revoked through shady dealings in order to snag a transfer. In order to drop science forever and work in tourism. It’s pathetic, but almost a third of the people working for the Planetary Tourism Agency are scientists frustrated in their careers.

“Why Tau Ceti and not Alpha Centauri, please?”

I’m a scientist, more or less. And there was a time when I believed in the future of my planet.

But how can a planet develop in any meaningful way when day after day it throws away its best minds? How absurd does your idealism have to be for you to keep on working as a scientist when you could make so much more as a tourist guide? What sense does it make for a recent graduate to work like a slave in a place he isn’t interested in, for five whole years? Surrounded by old men who see his dynamic initiative as a threat and who constantly leave him out of the loop, using his “inexperience” as their excuse? For poverty wages, after seven years of intellectual effort, dreaming of being useful to his planet?

The worst part—and it pains me to say it in this interview, under my special circumstances, but it’s true—the worst part is that you xenoids are perfectly well aware of these facts, and you take full advantage of them.

You didn’t invent the brain drain, but you perfected and institutionalized it.

It is obvious that a human scientist who refuses to give up on his science in spite of it all will find it much more attractive, most of all economically, to work in any minor branch office of a xenoid enterprise than in most similar terrestrial research centers. He will feel that he is making fuller use of his intellect there, he will see more of a future. So what if they only allow him partial access to data? At least it’s something… That smidgen of knowledge is worth its weight in gold to him.

He can travel off planet every now and then… even though he can never tell anyone what he saw afterwards. If he works hard and does a good job and shows how exceptional his gray cells are, is even possible—and this is the big dream for many—that they will ask him to emigrate definitively from Earth to work for them.

Do you like old music? No? That’s too bad… Well, you probably wouldn’t be familiar with the songs of Joan Manuel Serrat, anyway. A human, Catalan, twentieth century…

I thought not. His nearly forgotten recordings are the best things in my collection. One of the few things I’ll regret leaving behind if you accept me…

There’s a song of his, “Pueblo blanco,” that goes… No, don’t worry! I won’t sing it all. I have next to no sense of rhythm or melody. Just one verse:

Run away, gentle folk, because this earth is sick. Tomorrow it won’t give you what it wouldn’t give before, and there’s nothing to be done. Take your mule, your lass, your saddle, follow the road of the Hebrew people…

That is, the Exodus. You don’t know the Bible either?

Okay, at least. Yes, the Jews, the Promised Land, all that.

When he called it “sick” he was talking about a patch of earth, a piece of ground. But today, speaking of the planet with a capital E, his words have proved prophetic.

This Earth is sick…

The days when we thought the future belonged to us are over. Now we’re not even masters of our present day, and the glories of the past aren’t enough to live on.

Artists, athletes, scientists… every human who has some physical or intellectual talent dreams of using it as a ticket from Earth and toward making their way in the galaxy. Even if they have to swallow their pride and drink the bitter potion of exile and humiliation in lands of other races.

Women dream of being beautiful and brazen enough to become social workers and find a xenoid who will take them away from their home world forever. Some men do, too.

And the most desperate ones, the ones who aren’t young or beautiful and don’t know how to do anything, the ones who see no other way out, take the risk of playing Russian roulette in space. They’d rather face the infinitude of the cosmos in their homemade ships and float, frozen, perhaps in an eternal dream of arriving some day at some other, better, place.

She dreams of him, He dreams of going far away…

That’s from the same song. Not the same “him,” of course.

The first “him” is you xenoids. The second “him” is us.

What sort of future can a planet have when its residents dream only of ceasing to reside there?

Exodus. Escape. Today that is every human’s obsession. Running away, forever if at all possible, from the parched, subjugated, defeated, sterile, sick Earth. And you people, the conquering xenoids, the masters of the galaxy, are the virus behind this sickness.

And still you ask me why I came down with it!

“Why do you think we will find you a suitable candidate for us to confer our honorary citizenship upon, please?”

When a man is going to break with his entire past in order to begin a new life, he has to be very careful in selecting the where, the how, and the when. And small details sometimes take on huge importance.

I picked you for reasons of… biological affinity. Neither the Colossaurs nor the grodos are humanoids. My life among them would be much harder than among you people, or the Centaurians. And you are more beautiful, at least…

Oh, I have no illusions of being successful with your exquisite representatives of the female sex. I have already told you that I am not considered handsome even among my own people, and I know full well that the only thing that makes me exceptional, my brain, is something that no females of any race place much value on… at least, not at first sight.

I actually don’t really know why… Maybe there was some inherently masochistic element. I was always a pariah, someone apart, who participated in the game but knew he didn’t belong there. The moments when I was emotionally happy were the ones when I forgot such a thing… temporarily. And, living here in Ningando, amidst so much beauty, I don’t think I could ever forget it.

That sounds like a strange reason, I guess. The desire to feel that you are the only unblessed person in paradise…

And, also, I won’t deny it, I picked you because I’m a hopeless romantic. I suppose there must be thousands of slave brothels in this city, and perhaps hundreds of Cauldars. But I’ll check them out, one by one if need be. In spite of it all, I have hopes of finding Yleka, alive. I’m sure she’ll remember me… Perhaps we’ll get a second chance.

Don’t you think we deserve it?

“Are you certain that no other Earth scientist has heard of this… discovery of yours, please?”

I know perfectly well that the policy on Tau Ceti is not to grant citizenship to every human who comes here begging on his knees for it.

But I believe that you will make an exception for me…

I’m aware of the technoscience quarantine laws that have caused terrestrial science and technology to lag so far behind. I fully understand their true purpose, underneath all the altruistic demagoguery: to knock us out of the competition. To guarantee that we will eternally be a market, not a producer. A buyer, not a seller. Dependent, in a word. To sideline us in the galactic struggle for power.