A Planet for Rent (7 page)

He was set. He’d gotten into just the right mood for doing his performance. The emptiness was eating away at him. And the rage, and the envy, and the pride.

He sighed. Wearily lifting a hand, he gave Ettubrute the signal. At once the powerful fan mussed his short hair. He walked out.

Then the charges went off.

The amount of explosives had been calculated to the milligram. The four synplast walls that formed the tent went up in a cloud of atomized particles, which the jet of air from the fan scattered in a kind of reverse snowfall.

A bit too much explosive, and the shock wave could have hurt the audience. A bit less, and the synplast fragments would have been too large for the fan to handle, and they might have even wounded the spectators.

Ettubrute really knew his business.

Moy cleared his throat to begin his discussion of theory, improvising on a set of basic ideas on each occasion, playing off the audience’s emotional state. He let his eyes wander over the sea of expensive costumes, and...

Surprise. There, with her father, was Kandria, more beautiful than ever. Her presence pleased him and intrigued him: How had she gotten to Ningando? Had she been so successful with her Multisymphonies?

Or was she, maybe, searching for him?

Hope rang in his heart like a bell.

She saw him and waved respectfully. She smiled.

Her father, the cold humanoid, also saw him but didn’t move a muscle.

Strangely embarrassed by the girl’s admiring gaze, Moy hated going back to performing while she watched. He felt like a trained circus animal, like a pitiful buffoon. Again he thought of canceling the performance.

This was all a farce. He was no artist, just a poor mercenary...

The silence stretched out. The courteous Cetians sat. Moy remembered how huge the fine would be if he didn’t perform, and, plucking up his courage, he began.

It would all just look like another pause for effect...

“Praised be Union Day, and long life and prosperity to Ningando and its people.” He had practiced the phrase a thousand times, even using the hypnopedia to help him memorize it. A couple of sentences in the native language, without translators, were just the ticket to win over any audience from the get-go.

“But you must forgive me if I feel distressed in the midst of so much good cheer. I am so sad—because art is dead.” Ettubrute had just turned on his cybernetic translator. As always, Moy wondered whether a dead device could really catch and reproduce all the fine emotional and aesthetic nuances of his speech. He imagined not, but he had no other choice than to hope it would manage anyway—partially, at least.

“Art is dead. It was killed by holoprojections, by cybersystem chromatic designs, by musical harmonization programs, by virtual dance simulations, by all the technological paraphernalia whose only aim seems to be to eliminate the need not only for the artist’s skills, but even for the artist’s presence.” He was bending theatrically lower and lower, as if defeated by the circumstances. This was the sign for Ettubrute to start the activation sequence for all systems.

“But the artist refuses to be ignored! I refuse to fall into oblivion!” He lurched forward with a savage expression, and the Cetians drew back slightly.

Moy suppressed a smile: they were getting what they’d come for. The human savage. The elemental madman. The brilliant naïf, all subconscious, no processing.

“The artist cannot die. Because an artist enjoys the immortality of Prometheus. Because he dies in each of his works. Because he puts a piece of his life into each thing he creates. Because every bit of material that sprouts, transformed, from his hands is another piece of time that he has snatched from implacable entropy.” And Moy turned around to face the machine that was beginning to deploy.

As always, he was momentarily enraptured by the inexorable, lethal beauty of the device he had designed himself. Straightening up and growing like the hood of a colossal cobra or the ominous shadow of a dragon, the mechanical joints slid silently, one over the next. Until the archetypal figure of a cross had formed. Rising threateningly and enormous over the human’s silhouette. As if waiting.

Moy turned back to face the audience.

Too bad they wouldn’t get the Christian reference...

“The artist can and must die—in, through, and for his art. The artist is obliged to deconstruct himself in his art.” He noted with the usual satisfaction that the translator hesitated briefly at the word “deconstruct.”

Deconstruction. He could have included the term in the cyberglossary... but he liked to know that he, a simple human, a child of one of the least sophisticated cultures in the galaxy, could make his masters’ most advanced technology waver.

“The artist is a booster antenna. A funnel. He captures and guzzles the world’s pain and pours it out into his art,” and he took the apparently casual step backward that was the arranged signal.

The machine, like a carnivorous plastometal flower, leaned down and trapped him.

The Cetians stiffened with fright when the links and fasteners surrounded the human’s body and limbs like the tentacles of a giant polyp. Then they lifted him several yards above the stage without visible effort.

“The artist’s works are his clones, his children. They are his lacerated flesh and blood, his message. His anguished cry to a world that no longer hears any voice but that of pain and blood!” Moy howled heartrendingly.

The first five bleeders clamped onto his neck, thighs, and forearms, locating his veins with millimetric precision. Moy felt the shock of pain, masked almost immediately by the analgesics coating the needles. He winced; well, no one’s perfect. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, or do his performance without feeling some pain.

The negative pressure regulators worked properly, and five streams of scarlet liquid shot out in precise arcs. First sprinkling the stage, then falling into tiny crystal vessels that sprang from the machine, until they were filled. Then the bleeding stopped.

Moy made a fist with his right hand.

“He can deny his hand, try to exchange it for mechanical fakery. But no device can equal the fertile pain this hand feels when it holds a brush and creates.” He tensed and took a deep breath. Another dose of analgesics was injected into his system.

The semicircular blade sprang, swift and well-aimed as an axe blow, cutting the hand off and tossing it through the air. Another mechanism caught it before it could land. It connected electrodes to the convulsing nerves of the hand and put a brush in its fingers.

The hand, writhing, drew meaningless lines across the canvas that formed the stage, dancing in uncontrolled paroxysms. More and more slowly, until at last it remained motionless.

As usual, the spectacle drew murmurs from the well-mannered public. But Moy knew that the magic was already working. The audience was his. His slaves. He had them in his grip. He could do what he wanted with them.

“The fragile, transitory body is not what makes the difference. Who cares about the hand that drew the line, if the genius that drove it lives on in the line itself?”

Feeling the subtle creeping sensation inside the coarse fabric of his trouser leg, Moy relaxed his sphincter to allow the nanomanipulators to penetrate him. He recited a yoga mantra to stave off nausea while the delicate mechanisms snaked up through the curves of his intestine.

“Often, faced with the seeming perfection of the art, no one cares whether it was drawn by hand, claw, tentacle, or pincer. Some believe that art is art, whether made by a Da Vinci, by a Sciagluk, or by a computer.” Viewers waved their heads from side to side in agreement.

Moy hated the abstract, frigid compositions of Morffel Sciagluk. Nothing but a three-dimensional imitator of Mondrian, in his opinion. He only mentioned him for practical reasons: few of these Cetians knew the first thing about Leonardo. Or his
Last Supper
, or the
Mona Lisa
.

Through the veil of the analgesic drug, he felt the diffuse pain of the nanomanipulators penetrating him through arteries and capillaries, moving among muscles and tendons. Mobile fibers one molecule wide, spinning their web inside the edifice of his body. When the tickling reached his left arm, he gulped. The wave of analgesics that flooded his nervous system convinced him that Ettubrute was on the ball, that he could continue to the next step without risk.

“But only flesh and blood, mind and manipulating organ, can give birth to art. And if that exact conjunction does not exist—no art is possible.” He relaxed, waiting.

As always, the explosion surprised him as much as the audience. Though there was hardly any pain.

The meticulously measured collection of volatile molecules in his left arm transformed into an explosion, spraying bones, tendons, and fingers into a spectacular bloody cloud. By a calculated manipulation of force fields, the heap of remains that had once been an arm floated in the air for a few seconds without spreading. Until Ettubrute turned off the antigrav effect. Then they fell to the stage, amid the fervent applause of the enthusiastic spectators.

Taking advantage of the pause, Moy sought out the mestizo girl’s eyes. They were filled with admiration—and horror. Good. Now she was as much his as the rest of them. Or more so.

He strained his ear to try and figure out whether Ettubrute had already turned on the mechanical womb. It wasn’t really necessary yet; they had the best model on the market, and the synthesizing process was very quick. But it was always a relief to know that if something, anything, unexpected happened, then...

He pushed the thought from his mind and continued.

“Art is self-mutilation. It is the deliberate extraction of our most secret innards: our dreams.”

The razor-thin blade of a semicircular pendulum (a reference to the Edgar Allan Poe story, which they would never catch) swung three times before opening the artist’s abdominal cavity with surgical exactitude. The bleeders automatically reversed their function, and not one drop of blood clouded the view of the organs.

In anticipation, the nanomanipulators had injected different colorings into each organ, and Moy’s guts were a living symphony of exposed and pulsing colors. The analgesic drug circulated through his veins, preventing him from losing consciousness or going mad from sheer agony before the climactic moment. But the sensation of lying open, defenseless, strangely empty, was not something that derived from pain. And it was incredibly uncomfortable.

“Dreams are the intangible substance that gives life, depth, and sentient volume to a work of art. What projects it beyond its narrow material frame.” Moy closed his glottis, concentrating on breathing through his nose.

The pressurized hydrogen was injected into his intestine. The loops of the intestine, left clean by the nanos, inflated. Ghostly, semitransparent, rising from their place like the spirals of a horrendous larval snake. A surprising play of light glowed from within them, thanks to the gas.

“Although the light of art is always ephemeral, that light is the artist’s breath of life, his soul, which expires in each work of art.”

A nano punctured an intestinal loop and the superinflammable gas escaped with an audible hiss. Then the spark triggered flames, and for an instant Moy’s body was engulfed in a burning cloud.

Only for one second. Any more would have been dangerous; it might have burnt his skin and flesh. The volume of hydrogen was calculated to the cubic centimeter.

“And every critic, every exegesis, every interpretation of a work of art is a self-reflection, a journey to the inner self of the person who gave birth to it and clothed it in the flesh and skin of concepts.” Whenever he got to this point, Moy always regretted not being a woman. With a shredded uterus, this part of the monologue would have been much more powerful.

Even so, the vision was pretty stunning.

The knives of the nanoskinners sliced his epidermis, and the strips of skin fluttered in the wind like a macabre fringe. Bloodless. The surface capillaries were nearly empty; the bleeders were working at full capacity, concentrating the vital fluid in his essential organs.

Moy felt dizzy and nearly fainted. But the neurostimulant circulating through his system instantly revived him. He smiled, pleased. Ettubrute was one hundred percent alert to his slightest vital signs. And he now heard the dull rumble of the mechanical womb doing its job. Everything was going fine. As always.

“Behind the flesh and blood of emotions, the skeleton of theories and grand schemes is laid bare, the subtle framework of sex and power in mixed substrates.”

In perfect synchrony, both of the artist’s legs—first the muscles, sliced from within, then the bones, breaking with an audible crack—fell onto the stage. There they kicked convulsively for several seconds before falling still.

A few liters of blood flowed from the cut femoral arteries, streaming over the strangely empty trouser legs. Then the nanos stopped the flow. This wasn’t a mistake, but another well-calculated and inconsequential effect. With his body reduced practically to head and trunk, Moy simply did not need so much fluid. Besides, it might overwhelm the bleeders.

Moy followed a Tibetan breathing pattern.

Pain does not exist. Pain is an illusion.

I exist. I am real.

“What remains of art without the hidden alphabet of sex?” he howled.

At that cry, the nanos cut away the bloodied rag to which his trousers had been reduced, and his sex stood erect, as if defying death. Not from artificially high blood pressure in the corpora cavernosa, nor from a timely dose of hormones. Moy was aroused, as always. It was the old irony. Eros and Thanatos.

The proud exhibition only lasted a couple of seconds.

Moy relaxed. Now, the most difficult part...

The erect phallus exploded in a cascade of blue liquid. The nanos dissected the testicles from within and made them fall with a dull thud onto the stage.

When the effects of the analgesic overcame the pain and emptiness that burned in his mutilated groin, Moy breathed more calmly. The worst was over now. The rest would be more impressive than painful.