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.