A Planet for Rent Read Online Free PDF Page B

want to be in her place then...”
    Buca couldn’t take it anymore. Removing her arm from Selshaliman’s with a violent gesture, she gave a half-turn to confront the sergeant.
    The man had already taken off his helmet.
    Those leathery features...
    Buca gulped, recognizing him.
    Those eyes, sick of seeing all the world’s misery, gave her such a look that she was only capable of muttering, indistinctly, but with a calm that she never would have thought herself capable of:
    “True. But I’m leaving, and you two are stuck here.”
    And she went back to her grodo lord and master. Rage and impotence burned in her eyes. Fortunately the makeup she had on was waterproof. Tearproof, too. And it formed a veritable mask over her face.
    The day they took Jowe away she hadn’t been wearing makeup.
    It wasn’t likely the sergeant had recognized her... Even so, the prudent thing was to get away.
    As soon as she found an opportunity, she would beg Selshaliman to use his influence to have him... punished, somehow. She was sure he’d do it, to please her.
    Just by thinking about this, she could feel the calm returning to her soul. Though maybe she would be coming down too hard on the man... He seemed to know a lot about grodos, and he had confirmed what Selshaliman had told her: until his grayish carapace turned completely dark, the time hadn’t come yet.
    Several years. And then...
    What would it be like? Selshaliman had told her something...
    The ovipositor stinger, smoothly and painlessly penetrating her vagina to deposit its precious cargo in the best protected of human organs, the uterus. It could even be pleasant.
    And the eggs, so delicate they sometimes took years to hatch... and for some girls, they never did. Maybe she’d be lucky, like she’d been so far. Or maybe she could even, with some metabolic poison...
    She looked at Selshaliman out of the corner of her eye and went back to repeating the catchy lyrics of the technohit in her head. Better not to try anything. Better not even think about it. If the grodo suspected she’d even considered such a possibility, he’d drown her in acid. Or worse.
    Several years...
    It’d be better to resign herself to the idea right now. After all, she had enjoyed the best part of her youth. And as the saying goes, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. It wouldn’t hurt; from what the grodo told her, the larvae secreted a very powerful analgesic. She’d enjoy it all right up to the very end, with the same dying vitality as a guy doped up on feline analogue...
    And how she’d enjoy it! All her whims would be fulfilled. It was hard to imagine how big Selshaliman’s fortune was. In any case, more than enough to buy the best dresses in the universe, to eat the most exotic delicacies, to travel to the most exquisite and most fashionable resorts. She’d have all the lovers she wanted... She’d already talked it over with the grodo: the very concept of faithfulness made no sense to a hermaphrodite being. She could even afford to take one of those pale, perverse, and beautiful Cetians.
    She’d only be forbidden to have children. For the good of her expensive and precious uterus... But who would think of wasting time giving birth?
    She’d learn to present herself well in galactic high society, to which Selshaliman, who no doubt had a prominent position in the caste hierarchy of his race, would be delighted to introduce her.
    Of course, it was about time she convinced him to dump that horrid Arab name of his. He needed something trendier, more impressive, more modern, something to wow her girlfriends. Because he was going to pay to have some of them travel from Earth, you bet. And maybe, if he was still alive, Jowe... She owed him that.
    Smiling, Buca walked through the last doorway in the astroport and boarded the shuttle that would take her to the orbiting hypership.
    A Japanese name would sound nicer... Those are all the rage now. Four syllables, the way they like. Horusaki, something