Tourist Trade

The Centauran, seeing the red carnation in Eitel's lapel, lifted his arm in a gesture like the extending of a telescopic tube, and the woman smiled. It was an amazing smile and it caught Eitel a little off guard, because for an instant, it made him wish that the Centauran were back on Centaurus and this woman were sitting here alone. He shook the thought off. He was here to do a deal, not to get into entanglements.

"Hans Eitel, of Zurich," he said.

"I am Anakhistos," said the Centauran. His voice was like something out of a synthesizer, which perhaps it was, and his face was utterly opaque, a flat, motionless mask. For vision, he had a single bright strip of receptors an inch wide around his forehead; for air intake, he had little vents on his cheeks; and for eating, he had a three-sided oral slot, like the swinging top of a trash basket. "We are very happied you have come," he said. "This is Agila."

Eitel allowed himself to look straight at her. It was dazzling but painful, a little like staring into the sun. Her hair was red and thick, her eyes were emerald and very far apart, her lips were full, her teeth were bright. She was wearing a vaguely futuristic metal-mesh sheath, green, supple, clinging. What she looked like was something that belonged on a 3-D billboard, one of those unreal, idealized women who turn up in the ads for cognac or skiing holidays in Gstaad. There was something a little freakish about such excessive beauty. A professional, he decided.

To the Centauran he said, "This is a great pleasure for me. To meet a collector of your stature, to know that I will be able to be of assistance--"

"And a pleasure also for ourself. You are greatly recommended to me. You are called knowledgeable, discreet--"

"The traditions of our family. I was bred to my métier."

"We are drinking mint tea," the woman said. "Will you drink mint tea with us?" Her voice was warm, deep, unfamiliar. Swedish? Did they have redheads in Sweden?

The waiter poured the tea in the traditional way, cascading it down into the glass from three feet up. Eitel repressed a shudder. He admired the elaborate Moroccan cuisine, but the tea appalled him: hypersaccharine stuff--instant diabetes.

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 shift interestingly beneath the metal mesh. Surely she was professional. Surely. He found himself speculating on whether or not 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' 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 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."

"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.T.s resented any intimate contact of this sort with Earthfolk. But apparently the Centauran didn't mind. The alien's rubbery skin felt soft and smooth, like the finest condom imaginable.

"Do you dance?" Agila said suddenly.

He looked toward 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 in dreamy circles.

"Yes, of course," he said, startled.

"Please dance with me?"

He glanced uneasily toward 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 onto the floor. Once they were dancing, he was able to regain his calm. He moved easily and well. Some of the E.T.s 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.

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 instead. She was supple, responsive, skillful. 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--a Finn, a Bulgar, and even those did not seem exotic enough. Albanian? Lithuanian?

Most perplexing of all was her aroma. Eitel was gifted with a sense of smell worthy of a perfumer, and he heeded a woman's fragrance the way more ordinary men studied the curves of hip or bosom or thigh. Out of the pores and the axillae and the orifices came the truths of the body, he believed, the deepest, the most trustworthy, the most exciting communications; he studied them with rabbinical fervor and the most minute scientific zeal. But he had never smelled anything like this, a juxtaposition of incongruous spices, a totally baffling mix of flavors. Some amazing new perfume?

And then he understood. He realized now that the answer, impossible and implausible and terrifying, had been beckoning to him all evening and that he could no longer go on rejecting it, impossible or not. And in the moment of accepting it, he heard a sound within himself much like that of a wind beginning to rise.

Eitel began to tremble. He had never felt himself so totally defenseless before.

He said, "It's amazing how human you seem to be."

"Seem to be?"

"Outwardly identical in every way. I didn't think it was possible for life forms of such a degree of similarity to evolve on different worlds."

"It isn't," she said.

"You're not from Earth, though."

She was smiling. She seemed almost pleased, he thought, that he had seen through her masquerade.

"No."

"What are you, then?"

"Centauran."

Eitel closed his eyes a moment. The wind was a gale within him; he swayed and struggled to keep his balance. He was starting to feel as though he were conducting this conversation from a point somewhere behind his own right ear. "But Centaurans look like--"

"Like Anakhistos? Of course we do, when we are at home. But I am not at home now."

"I don't understand."

"This is my traveling body," she said. (continued on page 286)Tourist Trade(continued from page 226) "Yes," he said. "Of course."

"Tell me: When was it that you first saw through my disguise?"

"I felt right away that something was wrong. But it wasn't until a moment ago that I figured it out."

"No one else has guessed, I think. It is an extremely excellent Earth body, would you not say?"

"Extremely," Eitel said.

"After each trip I always regret, at first, returning to my real body. This one seems quite genuine to me by now. You like it very much, yes?"

"Yes," Eitel said helplessly.

•

Eitel withdrew four paintings and an Olmec jade statuette from the false compartment of his suitcase. The paintings were all unframed, small, genuine and unimportant. After a moment, he selected The Madonna of the Palms from the atelier of Lorenzo Bellini: plainly apprentice work but enchanting, serene, pure, not bad, easily a $20,000 painting. He slipped it into a carrying case, put the others back--all but the statuette, which he fondled for a moment and put down on the dresser, in front of the mirror, as though setting up a little shrine. To beauty, he thought. He started to put it away and changed his mind. It looked so lovely there that he decided to take his chances. Taking your chances, he thought, is sometimes good for the health.

•

Seeing Agila standing in the doorway of her hotel room, Eitel was startled again by the impact of her presence, the overwhelming physical power of her beauty. Eitel looked from Agila to Anakhistos, who sat oddly folded, like a giant umbrella. That's what she really is, Eitel thought. She's Mrs. Anakhistos from Centaurus, and her skin is like rubber and her mouth is a hinged slot and this body that she happens to be wearing right now was made in a laboratory. And yet, and yet, and yet ... the wind was roaring; he was tossing wildly about--

What the hell is happening to me?

"Show us what you have for us," Anakhistos said.

Eitel slipped the little painting from its case. His hands were shaking ever so slightly. In the closeness of the room, he picked up two strong fragrances, something dry and musty coming from Anakhistos and the strange, irresistible mixtures of incongruous spices that Agila's synthetic body emanated.

"The Madonna of the Palms, Lorenzo Bellini, Venice, fifteen ninety-seven," Eitel said. "Very fine work."

"Bellini is extremely famous, I know."

"The famous ones are Giovanni and Gentile. This is Giovanni's grandson. He's just as good but not well known. I couldn't possibly get you paintings by Giovanni or Gentile. No one on Earth could."

"This is quite fine," said Anakhistos. "True Renaissance beauty. And very Earthesque. Of course it is genuine?"

Eitel said stiffly, "Only a fool would try to sell a fake to a connoisseur such as yourself. But it would be easy enough for us to arrange a spectroscopic analysis in Casablanca if--"

"Ah, no, no, no, I meant no suspicioning of your reputation. You are impeccable. We unquestion the genuinity. But what is done about the export certificate?"

"Easy. I have a document that says this is a recent copy, done by a student in Paris. They are not applying chemical tests of age to the paintings, not yet. You will be able to take the painting from Earth with such a certificate."

"And the price?" said Anakhistos.

Eitel took a deep breath. It was meant to steady him, but it dizzied him instead, for it filled his lungs with Agila.

He said, "If the deal is straight cash, the price is four million dollars."

"And otherwise?" Agila asked.

"I'd prefer to talk to you about that alone," he said to her.

"Whatever you want to say, you can say in front of Anakhistos. We are absolute mates. We have complete trust."

"I'd still prefer to speak more privately."

She shrugged. "All right. The balcony."

Outside, where the sweetness of night-blooming flowers filled the air, her fragrance was less overpowering. It made no difference. Looking straight at her only with difficulty, he said, "If I can spend the rest of this night making love to you, the price will be three million."

"This is a joke?"

"In fact, no. Not at all."

"It is worth a million dollars to have sexual contact with me?"

Eitel imagined how his father would have answered that question, his grandfather, his great-grandfather. Their accumulated wisdom pressed on him like a hump. To hell with them, he thought.

He said, listening in wonder to his own words, "Yes. It is."

"You know that this body is not my real body?"

"I know."

She smiled quickly, on-off. "I see. Well, let us confer with Anakhistos."

•

When they were in Eitel's room, Agila said, "First, I would please like to have some mint tea, yes? It is my addiction, you know. My aphrodisiac."

Sizzling impatience seared Eitel's soul. God only knew how long it might take room service to fetch a pot of tea at this hour, and at $1,000,000 a night, he preferred not to waste even a minute. But there was no way to refuse. He could not allow himself to seem like some panting schoolboy.

"Of course," he said.

The waiter--a boy in native costume, sleepy, openly envious of Eitel for having a woman like Agila in his room--took forever to set up the glasses and pour the tea, an infinitely slow process of raising the pot, aiming, letting the thick tea trickle down through the air. But at last he left. Agila drank greedily and beckoned to Eitel to have some also. He smiled and shook his head.

She said, "But you must. I love it so--you must share it. It is a ritual of love between us, eh?"

He did not choose to make an issue of it. A glass of mint tea must not get in the way, not now.

"To us," she said, and touched her glass to his.

He managed to drink a little. It was like pure liquid sugar. She had a second glass and then, maddeningly, a third. He pretended to sip at his. Then, at last, she touched her hand to a clasp on her shoulder and her metal-mesh sheath fell away.

They had done their research properly in the body-making labs of Centaurus. She was flawless, sheer fantasy: heavy breasts that defied gravity; slender waist; hips that would drive a Moroccan camel driver berserk; buttocks like pale hemispheres. They had given her a navel, pubic hair, erectile nipples, dimples here and there, the hint of blue veins in her thighs. Unreal, yes, Eitel thought, but magnificent.

"It is my fifth traveling body," she said. "I have been Arcturan, Steropid, Denebian, Mizarian--and each time it has been hard, hard, hard! After the transfer is done, there is a long training period, and it is always very difficult. But one learns. A moment comes when the body feels natural and true. I will miss this one very much."

"So will I," Eitel said.

Quickly he undressed. She came to him, touched her lips lightly to his, grazed his chest with her nipples.

"And now you give me a gift," she said.

"What?"

"It is the custom before making love. An exchange of gifts." She took from between her breasts the pendant she was wearing, a bright crystal carved in disturbing alien swirls. "This is for you. And for me--"

Oh, God in heaven, he thought. No!

Her hand closed over the Olmec jade figurine that still was sitting on the dresser.

"This," she said.

It sickened him. That little statuette was $80,000 on the international antiquities market, maybe $1,000,000 or $2,000,000 to the right E.T. buyer. A gift? A love token? He saw the gleam in her eye and knew he was trapped. Refuse, and everything else might be lost. He dare not show any trace of pettiness. Yes. So be it. Let her have the damned thing. We are being romantic tonight. We are making grand gestures. We are not going to behave like a petit bourgeois Swiss art peddler. Eitel took a deep breath.

"My pleasure," he said magnificently.

•

He was an experienced and expert lover; supreme beauty always inspired the best in him, and pride alone made him want to send her back to Centaurus with incandescent memories of the erotic arts of Earth. His performance that night--and performance was the only word he could apply to it--might well have been the finest of his life.

With the lips and tongue, first. Everywhere. With the fingers, slowly, patiently, searching for the little secret key places, the unexpected triggering points. With the breath against the skin, and the fingernails, ever so lightly, and the eyelashes and even the newly sprouting stubble of the cheek. These were all things that Eitel loved doing, not merely for the effects they produced in his bed partners but because they were delightful in and of themselves; yet he had never done them with greater dedication and skill.

And now, he thought, perhaps she will show me some of her skills.

But she lay there like a wax doll. Occasionally she stirred; occasionally she moved her hips a little. When he went into her, he found her warm and moist--why had they built that capacity in? Eitel wondered--but he felt no response from her, none at all.

He went on working at it, knowing he would not get it. But then, to his surprise, something actually seemed to be happening. Her face grew flushed and her eyes narrowed and took on a new gleam and her breath began to come in harsh little bursts and her breasts heaved and her nipples grew hard. All the signs, yes: Eitel had seen them so many times, and they had never been more welcome than at this moment. He knew what to do. The unslackening rhythm now, the steady building of tension, carrying her onward, steadily higher, leading her toward that magical moment of overload when the watchful conscious mind at last surrenders to the surging deeper forces. Yes. Yes. The valiant Earthman giving his all for the sake of transgalactic passion, laboring like a galley slave to show the star-woman what the communion of the sexes is all about.

She seemed almost there. Some panting now, even a little gasping. Eitel smiled in pleasant self-congratulation. Swiss precision, he thought: Never underestimate it.

And then, somehow, she managed to slip free of him, between one thrust and the next, and she rolled to the side, so that he collapsed in amazement into the pillow as she left the bed. He sat up and looked at her, stunned, gaping, numbed.

"Excuse me," she said, in the most casual way. "I thought I'd have a little more tea. Shall I get some for you?"

Eitel could barely speak. "No," he said hoarsely.

She poured herself a glass, drank, grimaced. "It doesn't taste as good as when it's warm," she said, returning to the bed. "Well, shall we go on?" she asked.

Silently, he reached for her. Somehow he was able to start again. But this time, a distance of 1000 light-years seemed to separate him from her. There was no rekindling that brief flame, and after a few moments he gave up. He felt himself forever shut away from the inwardness of her, as Earth is shut away from the stars. Cold, weary, more furious with himself than with her, he let himself come. He kept his eyes open as long as he could, staring icily into hers, but the sensations were unexpectedly powerful, and in the end, he sank down against her breasts, clinging to her as the impact thundered through him.

In that bleak moment came a surprise. For as he shook and quivered in the force of that dismal ejaculation, something opened between them--a barrier, a gate--and the hotel melted and disappeared and he saw himself in the midst of a bizarre landscape. The sky was a rich golden green; the sun was deep green and hot; the trees and plants and flowers were like nothing he had ever seen on Earth. The air was heavy, aromatic and of a piercing flavor that stung his nostrils. Flying creatures that were not birds soared unhurriedly overhead, and some iridescent beasts that looked like red-velvet pillows mounted on tripods were grazing on the lower branches of furry-limbed trees. On the horizon Eitel saw three jagged naked mountains of some yellow-brown stone that gleamed like polished metal in the sunlight. He trembled. Wonder and awe engulfed his spirit. This is a park, he realized, the most beautiful park in the world. But this is not this world. He found a little path that led over a gentle hill, and when he came to the far side, he looked down to see Centaurans strolling two by two, hand in hand, through an elegant garden.

Oh, my God, Eitel thought. Oh, my God in heaven!

Then it all began to fade, growing thin, turning to something no more substantial than smoke, and in a moment more, it was all gone. He lay still, breathing raggedly, by her side, watching her breasts slowly rise and fall.

He lifted his head. She was studying him. "You liked that?"

"Liked what?"

"What you saw."

"So you know?"

She seemed surprised. "Of course! You thought it was an accident? It was my gift for you."

"Ah." The picture postcard of the home world, bestowed on the earnest native for his diligent services. "It was extraordinary. I've never seen anything so beautiful."

"It is very beautiful, yes," she said complacently. Then, smiling, "That was interesting, what you did there at the end, when you were breathing so hard. Can you do that again?" she asked, as though he had executed an intricate juggling maneuver.

Bleakly, he shook his head and turned away. He could not bear to look into those magnificent eyes any longer. Somehow--he would never have any way of knowing when it had happened, except that it was somewhere between "Can you do that again?" and the dawn--he fell asleep. She was shaking him gently awake then. The light of a brilliant morning came bursting through the fragile old silken draperies.

"I am leaving now," she whispered. "But I wish to thank you. It has been a night I shall never forget."

"Nor I," said Eitel.

"To experience the reality of Earthian ways at such close range--with such intimacy, such immediacy--"

"Yes. Of course. It must have been extraordinary for you."

"If ever you come to Centaurus--"

"Certainly. I'll look you up."

She kissed him lightly, tip of nose, forehead, lips. Then she walked toward the door. With her hand on the knob, she turned and said, "Oh, one little thing that may amuse you. I meant to tell you last night. We don't have that kind of thing on our world, you know--that concept of owning one's mate's body. And in any case, Anakhistos is not male and I am not female, not exactly. We mate, but our sex distinctions are not so well defined as that. It is with us more like the way it is with your oysters, I think. So it is not quite right to say that Anakhistos is my husband or that I am his wife. I thought you would like to know." She blew him a kiss. "It has been very lovely," she said. "Goodbye."

•

When she was gone, he went to the window and stared into the garden for a long while without looking at anything in particular. He felt weary and burned out, and there was a taste of straw in his mouth. After a time, he turned away.

His hands felt cold; his fingers were quivering a little. He became aware that he wanted more than anything else to see those things again.

He wondered what it was like to go to bed with a Vegan or an Arcturan or a Steropid. God in heaven! Could he do it? Yes, he told himself, thinking of green suns and the unforgettable fragrance of that alien air. Yes. Yes. Of course he could. Of course.

There was a sudden strange sweetness in his mouth. He realized that he had taken a deep gulp of the mint tea without paying attention to what he was doing. Eitel smiled. It hadn't made him sick, had it? Had it? He took another swig. Then, in a slow, determined way, he finished the rest of it and went outside to look for a cab.

"They had given her a navel, pubic hair, erectile nipples. Unreal, Eitel thought, but magnificent."