She said, “I love the Moroccan tea. It is so marvelous, the sweet. Sugar is my passion. I think I am addicted.”
The waiter poured the tea in the traditional way, cascading it down into the glass from three feet up. Eitel repressed a shudder. He ad-mired the elaborate Moroccan cuisine, but the tea appalled him: lethal hypersaccharine stuff, instant diabetes.
“Do you also enjoy mint tea?” Eitel asked the alien.
“It is very wonderful,” the Centauran said. “It is one of the most wonderful things on this wonderful planet.”
Eitel had no idea how sincere the Centauran was. He had been studying the psychology of extraterrestrials about as closely as anyone had, in the decade since they had begun to descend on Earth en masse after the lifting of the galactic quarantine, and he knew a lot about a lot of them; but he found it almost impossible to get a reading on Centaurans. If they gave any clues to their feelings at all, it was in the form of minute, perhaps imaginary fluctuations of the texture of their rubbery skins. It was Eitel’s theory that the skin slackened when they were happy and went taut when they were tense, but the theory was only preliminary and he gave it little value.
“When did you arrive on Earth?” Eitel asked.
“It is the first week,” the Centauran said. “Five days here in Fez, then we go to Rome, Paris, and afterwards the States United. Following which, other places. It is greatly exciting, your world. Such vigor, such raw force. I hope to see everything, and bring back much art. I am passionate collector, you know, of Earthesque objects.”
“With a special interest in paintings.”
“Paintings, yes, but I collect many other things.”
That seemed a little blatant. Unless Eitel misunderstood the meaning, but he doubted he had. He glanced at the woman, but she showed no reaction.
Carefully he said, “Such as?”
“Everything that is essential to the experience of your world! Everything fine, everything deeply Earthesque! Of course I am most fastidious. I seek only the first-rate objects.”
“I couldn’t possibly agree more,” said Eitel. “We share the same philosophy. The true connoisseur has no time for the tawdry, the trivial, the incompletely realized gesture, the insufficiently fulfilled impulse.” His tone, carefully practised over years of dealing with clients, was intended to skirt unctuousness and communicate nothing but warm and sincere approbation. Such nuances were probably lost on the Centauran, but Eitel never let himself underestimate a client. He looked suddenly towards the woman and said, “Surely that’s your outlook also.”
“Of course.”
She took a long pull of her mint tea, letting the syrupy stuff slide down her throat like motor oil. Then she wriggled her shoulders in a curious way. Eitel saw flesh shifting interestingly beneath the metal mesh. Surely she was professional. Surely. He found himself speculating on whether there could be anything sexual going on between these two. He doubted that it was possible, but you never could tell. More likely, though, she was merely one of the stellar pieces in Anakhistos’s collection of the high-quality Earthesque: an object, an artifact. Eitel wondered how Anakhistos had managed to find her so fast. Was there some service that supplied visiting aliens with the finest of escorts, at the finest of prices?
He was picking up an aroma from her now, not unpleasant but very strange: caviar and cumin? Sturgeon poached in Chartreuse?
She signaled to the waiter for yet another tea. To Eitel she said, “The problem of the export certificates, do you think it is going to get worse?”
That was unexpected, and very admirable, he thought. Discover what your client’s concerns are, make them your own. He said, “It is a great difficulty, is it not?”
“I think of little else,” said the Centauran, leaping in as if he had been waiting for Agila to provide the cue. “To me it is an abomination. These restrictions on removing works of art from your planet—these humiliating inspections—this agitation, this outcry for even tighter limitations—what will it come to?”
Soothingly Eitel said, “You must try to understand the nature of the panic. We are a small backward world that has lived in isolation until just a few years ago. Suddenly we have stumbled into contact with the great galactic civilizations. You come among us, you are fascinated by us and by our artifacts, you wish to collect our things. But we can hardly supply the entire civilized universe. There are only a few Leonardos, a few Vermeers: and there are so many of you. So there is fear that you will sweep upon us with your immense wealth, with your vast numbers, with your hunger for our art, and buy everything of value that we have ever produced, and carry it off to places a hundred light-years away. So these laws are being passed. It is natural.”
“But I am not here to plunder! I am here to make legitimate purchase!”
“I understand completely,” Eitel said. He risked putting his hand, gently, compassionately, on the Centauran’s arm. Some of the E-Ts resented any sort of intimate contact of this sort with Earthfolk. But apparently the Centauran didn’t mind. The alien’s rubbery skin felt astonishingly soft and smooth, like the finest condom imaginable. “I’m altogether on your side,” Eitel declared. “The export laws are absurd overreactions. There’s a more than ample supply of art on this planet to meet the needs of sophisticated collectors like yourself. And by disseminating our culture among the star-worlds, we bind ourselves inextricably into the fabric of galactic civilization. Which is why I do everything in my power to make our finest art available to our visitors.”
“But can you provide valid export licences?” Agila asked.
Eitel put his finger to his lips. “We don’t need to discuss it further just now, eh? Let us enjoy the delights of this evening, and save dreary matters of commerce for later, shall we?” He beamed. “May I offer you more tea?”
It was all going very smoothly, Eitel thought. Contact made, essential lines of agreement established. Even the woman was far less of a complication than he had anticipated. Time now to back off, relax, let rapport blossom and mature without forcing.
“Do you dance?” Agila said suddenly.
He looked towards the dance floor. The Rigelians were lurching around in a preposterously ponderous way, like dancing bears. Some Arcturans were on the dance floor too, and a few Procyonites bouncing up and down like bundles of shiny metal rods, and a Steropid doing an eerie pas seul, weaving in dreamy circles.
“Yes, of course,” he said, a little startled.
“Please dance with me?”
He glanced uneasily towards the Centauran, who nodded benignly. She smiled and said, “Anakhistos does not dance. But I would like to. Would you oblige me?”
Eitel took her hand and led her out on the floor. Once they were dancing he was able to regain his calm. He moved easily and well. Some of the E-Ts were openly watching them—they had such curiosity about humans sometimes—but the staring didn’t bother him. He found himself registering the pressure of her thighs against his thighs, her firm heavy breasts against his chest, and for an instant he felt the old biochemical imperative trying to go roaring through his veins, telling him, follow her anywhere, promise anything, say anything, do anything. He brushed it back. There were other women: in Nice, in Rome, in Athens. When he was done with this deal he would go to one of them.
He said, “Agila is an interesting name. Israeli, is it?”
“No,” she said.
The way she said it, serenely and very finally, left him without room to maneuver. He was full of questions—who was she, how had she hooked up with the Centauran, what was her deal, how well did she think Eitel’s own deal with the Centauran was likely to go? But that one cool syllable seemed to have slammed a curtain down. He concentrated on dancing again instead. She was supple, responsive, skilful. And yet the way she danced was as strange as everything else about her: she moved almost as if her feet were some inches off the floor. Odd. And her voice—an accent, but what kind? He had been everywhere, and nothing in his experience matched her way of speaking, a certain liquidity in the vowels, a certain resonance in the phrasing, as though she were hearing echoes as she spoke. She had to be something truly exotic, Rumanian, a Finn, a Bulgar—and even those did not seem exotic enough. Albanian? Lithuanian?