Free A Planet for Rent by Yoss Page A

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