Multiples (1983-87) Read online

  [“Something wrong?” David asked.]

  Alice phoned a couple of days later. She liked the new version, but it still needed some cutting, and she had some further plot quibbles. Could I see my way to one more rewrite?

  Yes, I said despondently. The hook was in me now for sure. I told her to send me a list of the quibbles. But you do the cutting, I said. I’ve worked this one over so much that I’m losing my way in it.

  On 1 March I got an annotated copy of the manuscript from her, with huge slashes on almost every page, slicing out exposition that echoed things already said in dialog, authorial explanation of the characters’ motives, and other sorts of fatty tissue. Her plot quibbles seemed pretty major too. After all these drafts she still could find six separate places where the twists of the plot weren’t really plausible. I was appalled. But she sweetened her letter by telling me at the end, “Bob, again I want to congratulate you on the fine job you’ve done with this rewrite. Though you’ve been feeling inadequate, this is much more than an adequate job; it’s a real change, and only a thorough professional could do it. As you see, these are only minor quibbles, the story is here, and I’m most grateful.”

  Four days later—I was working weekends now, a rarity for me—I got yet another draft back to her. You’ll find the text of it beginning on the next page. I had made nearly all the cuts she wanted and had tidied up the plot. “I think the story now answers all of your objections and it may even answer mine; at any rate I hope I’m through writing it,” I told her. “Nobody said this business is easy, but I shouldn’t goof up a story as badly as I goofed up the earlier versions of this one, not at my age.”

  And a couple of days afterwards, there was Alice on the phone. The story was fine and she was putting through the check (a very nice one, by the way.) She would use it in the December, 1984 Playboy.

  To her astonishment and mine, I came close to breaking into tears as I realized that I was at last done with the damned thing.

  “Oh,” she said. “One little change. I’d like to call it ‘Tourist Trade’ instead of ‘A World of Strangers.’”

  At that point she could have called it “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and I wouldn’t have raised objections. But in fact her clever punning title was more suitable than mine, as you’ll see when you read the story, and I’ve retained it in all reprints of it.

  There’s one final twist to this flabbergasting tale.

  Years later—December of 1988—Playboy published its thirty-fifth anniversary issue. “Tourist Trade” was one of eight stories chosen to represent the fiction Playboy had published over those thirty-five years. (The others, I noted smugly, were by Ray Bradbury, Ian Fleming, Walter S. Tevis, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Robert Coover, and Joyce Carol Oates.) In phoning me to ask permission to reprint it, Alice said that because of space limitations it would, like the other, have to be abridged. The cutting would be done by her, since time was short.

  “Where are you going to cut it?” I asked.

  “I’ve already done it,” she said. “I took David out.”

  And so she had—slicing away one of the three major characters, along with close to half the text. To my utter astonishment the story still seemed coherent and effective—a testimony to really brilliant editing. I look at it from time to time in wonder. Of course, I’ve chosen to use the complete text here—Alice’s stunt was just a stunt, amazing because it hadn’t really damaged the story, but I can’t say that it improved it. So here it is, along with this lengthy prolog, which I hope demonstrates that those finely polished stories you see in the magazines don’t necessarily bear much resemblance to the first version that came white-hot from the forge of creativity. There can be plenty of blood, sweat, and, yes, tears in writing short stores—even for a veteran who is widely believed to know what he’s doing.

  ___________

  After a moment Eitel’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and the glare of the clashing crisscrossing spotlights. But he didn’t need his eyes to tell him what sort of bizarre zoo he had walked into. His sensitive nostrils picked up the whole astonishing olfactory blast at once: a weird hodgepodge of extraterrestrial body odors, offworld pheromones, transgalactic cosmetics, the ozone radiation of personal protection screens, minute quantities of unearthly atmospheres leaking out of breathing devices.

  “Something wrong?” David asked.

  “The odors. They overwhelm me.”

  “The smoking, eh? You hate it that much?”

  “Not the tobacco, fool. The aliens! The E-Ts!”

  “Ah. The smell of money, you mean. I agree, it is very overwhelming in here.”

  “For a shrewd man you can sometimes be very stupid,” Eitel muttered. “Unless you say such things deliberately, which you must, because I have never known a stupid Moroccan.”

  “For a Moroccan, I am very stupid,” said David serenely. “And so it was very stupid of you to choose me as your partner, eh? Your grandfathers in Zurich would be shamed if they knew. Eh?” He gave Eitel a maddeningly seraphic smile.

  Eitel scowled. He was never sure when he had genuinely offended the slippery little Moroccan and when David was merely teasing. But somehow David always came out of these interchanges a couple of points ahead.

  He turned and looked the place over, checking it out.

  Plenty of humans, of course. This was the biggest gathering-place for aliens in Morocco, the locus of the focus, and a lot of gawkers came to observe the action. Eitel ignored them. There was no sense doing business with humans any more. There were probably some Interpol types in here too, hoping to head off just the sort of deals Eitel was here to do. To hell with them. His hands were clean, more or less.

  But the aliens! The aliens, the aliens, the aliens!

  All over the room. Vast saucer eyes, spidery limbs, skins of grotesque textures and unnameable colors. Eitel felt the excitement rising in him, so un-Swiss of him, so thoroughly out of character.

  “Look at them!” he whispered. “They’re beautiful!”

  “Beautiful? You think so?”

  “Fantastic!”

  The Moroccan shrugged. “Fantastic, yes. Beautiful, no. Blue skin, green skin, no skin, two heads, five heads: this is beauty? What is beautiful to me is the money. And the way they like to throw it away.”

  “You would never understand,” said Eitel.

  In fact Eitel hardly understood it himself. He had discovered, not long after the first alien tourists had reached Earth, that they stirred unexpected areas of his soul: strange vistas opening, odd incoherent cosmic yearnings. To find at the age of forty that there was more to him than Panamanian trusts and numbered bank accounts—that was a little troublesome; but it was delicious, as well. He stood staring for a long ecstatic chaotic moment. Then he turned to David and said, “Where’s your Centauran?”

  “I don’t see him.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “He swore he’d be here. Is a big place, Eitel. We go looking, and we find.”

  The air was thick with color, sound, fumes. Eitel moved carefully around a tableful of leathery-faced pockmarked red Rigelians, burly, noisy, like a herd of American conventioneers out on the town. Behind them sat five sleek and sinuous Steropids, wearing cone-shaped breathers. Good. Steropids were easy marks. If something went wrong with this Centauran deal David had set up, he might want to have them as customers to fall back on.

  Likewise that Arcturan trio, flat heads, grizzled green hair, triple eyes bright as blue-white suns. Arcturans were wild spenders, though they weren’t known to covet Eitel’s usual merchandise, which was works of fine art, or more or less fine art. Perhaps they could be encouraged to. Eitel, going past, offered them a preliminary smile: Earthman establishing friendly contact, leading perhaps to more elaborate relationship. But the Arcturans didn’t pick up on it. They looked through Eitel as though their eyes didn’t function in the part of the spectrum he happened to inhabit.

  “There,” David said.

  Yes. Far across
the way, a turquoise creature, inordinately long and narrow, that appeared to be constructed of the finest grade of rubber, stretched over an awkwardly flung together armature of short rods.

  “There’s a woman with him,” Eitel said. “I wasn’t expecting that. You didn’t tell me.”

  David’s eyes gleamed. “Ah, nice, very nice!”

  She was more than very nice. She was splendid. But that wasn’t the point. Her presence here could be a troublesome complication. A tour guide? An interpreter? Had the Centauran brought his own art expert along? Or was she some Interpol agent decked out to look like the highest-priced of hookers? Or maybe even a real hooker. God help me, he thought, if the Centauran’s gotten involved in some kind of kinky infatuation that would distract him from the deal. No: God help David.

  “You should have told me there was a woman,” Eitel said.

  “But I didn’t know! I swear, Jesus Mary Moses, I never see her yesterday! But it will be all right. Jesus Mary Moses, go ahead, walk over.” He smiled and winked and slipped off towards the bar. “I see you later, outside. You go for it, you hear? You hear me, Eitel? It will be all right.”

  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 was back on Centaurus and this woman was 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 reliable, 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?

  Eitel said, “Forgive me, but it’s much too sweet for me. Perhaps a brandy instead—”

  A waiter appeared as though by telepathic command. Eitel ordered a Courvoisier, and the woman another round of tea. She is very smooth, very good, he thought. He imagined himself in bed with her, digging his fingers into that dense red mane, running his lips over her long lean thighs. The fantasy was pleasing but undisturbing: an idle dream, cool, agreeable, giving him no palpitations, no frenzy. Good. After that first startled moment he was getting himself under control. He wondered if she was charging the Centauran by the night, or working at something bigger.

  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.