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  But it was a living, and anyway she’d found no place worth staying, no place from which she really regretted moving on. And at the moment here she was, starting an interview with what appeared to be a willing subject, and a story with a readymade angle. Things could be worse. She sighed.

  “Spent some time in the service here,” Gordon Simms was saying. “Bought my early discharge in order to stay on. I know an opportunity when I see one. Developed my contacts, did a little start-up promotion, and that was all it took. My wares sell themselves. All I have to worry about is keeping up the inventory.”

  Candelaria moved away from him among the dusty boxes, turning up the mike as she went. “I notice that not much of your overhead goes to — appearances.”

  He chuckled. “Ah, but Celia, that’s what my business is all about. Appearances.”

  “You know what I mean.” She waved her hand testily, rapped her knuckles against the side of a box so that dust flew. “This place is a mess. A lot of your merchandise is dirty and damaged.”

  “I used to worry about that,” he agreed. “Professional pride or something. Business ethics. But my customers don’t care what shape the stuff is in, and I certainly don’t need to lure them with clever displays. Usually they know what they want when they come in, and they find me by word of mouth. And actually they’ll pay more for damaged goods. They like to think of it as being more used, more authentic, more personal. You ought to hear some of the conversations about who might have used this or that and for what purpose.”

  “Like slavefans,” she said, both to him and into the microphone. “Tearing off a piece of the holo-star’s shirt so they can feel close to their idol.”

  “I’d thought about worshippers,” he said, “and their religious relics that, for some reason, make it easier for them to pray.”

  Candelaria shook her head and laughed. She was fascinated, almost despite herself. She was interested in Gordon Simms. She liked him, wanted to know him better than would be necessary in order to produce the slightly-better-than-puff piece her editor was expecting. Such feelings were unwise. They would get in the way, and deadline was fast approaching.

  Frowning, she picked up a bent and dusty left arm from the floor and turned it over in her hands, getting used to the cold-flesh feel of it as she said to him, “Some people think your little enterprise here is immoral, Mr. Gordon Simms.”

  “Immoral?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Pandering to some grotesque need of these poor people. Creatures. Whatever. Exploiting a cultural neurosis. Demeaning the human body.”

  He shrugged, and for some reason she thought it a clumsy motion. “I don’t think much about human morality anymore. It doesn’t seem to have much point in an alien culture. But now that you mention it, I guess I’d be more likely to say there’s something morally right about what I do. I think I’m performing a service. Facilitating communication. Making it possible for there to be meaningful contact between species.” He chuckled and waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Not that that’s why I do it, of course.”

  “Why do you do it?” Candelaria demanded, though she would have thought the answer would be obvious.

  “To make money,” he said. “I know an opportunity when I see one.”

  Candelaria nodded. Carefully she laid the arm back into its box. Its fingers grazed her own, and both real and artificial digits moved slightly in response to the unexpected contact between them.

  Simms stood up. “I was just going to close up and go to dinner when you came. Would you care to join me? I know a little place that specializes in old-fashioned Terra food, cheeseburgers and eggrolls, that sort of thing. It’s kind of a nice change.”

  She looked at his hands, outstretched toward her again, and for a moment the skin looked mottled, as if it had been bruised or inexpertly painted on. She avoided his touch, but said, “Sounds good. I am tired of space food,” and preceded him to the door.

  “Wait!” he called.

  She stopped and turned, her hand on the door swinging it partway open. The motion of the door sent a swatch of bright light back and forth across the interior of the Emporium, so that boxes and appendages and mannequins and Gordon Simms himself were alternately lit and shadowed.

  “Wait,” said Simms again, and came toward her smiling. “Wear this. In honor of your visit, a gift from the Emporium.”

  He handed her a pair of cat’s-eye sunglasses with iridescent sparkles in their pale-lavender frames. She stared at them, then shook her head and held them out to him. “I don’t accept gifts from subjects. Corrupts professional objectivity. Makes me beholden.”

  “Please.” She could see that he was still smiling, but the smile had gone out of his voice. “A bit of local color, then. For verisimilitude.”

  “I hardly think they’re my style.”

  “Please,” he said again. “They’ll look lovely on you.”

  When she still hesitated, he took the sunglasses from her and settled them firmly on the bridge of her nose, reaching under her hair to hook the earpieces in place. For some reason, though they dimmed her vision considerably, Candelaria left them on.

  The neighborhood around the Emporium was poor and rundown and colorful, with crowded open markets and a cacophony of voices. There’d been at least one spot like that on every planet she’d visited. The streets were teeming, practically impassable in places. Aliens were everywhere, bits of their blue skin shining through bizarre disguises. Huge glasses over their tiny semi-circular pink eyes. Massive thighs squeezed into “suntan” pantyhose riddled with runs and tears. A stout female sporting several wigs of different colors, a handlebar moustache, and a goatee. At the mouth of an alley, a spirited wrestling match over a mechanical knee joint between a short middle-aged female and a very old male who wore four multicolored brassieres and a glass eye dangling from one earlobe.

  Simms and Candelaria walked through the alley, something she would not have done by herself, for unfamiliar alleys anywhere seemed dangerous whether they actually were or not. At the other end of this one was a vendor’s stand with a gay striped canopy. Simms slowed as they approached it, and Candelaria saw that the counter was crowded with artificial eyes. The vendor — who wore at least four whining and crackling hearing aids on a string around his neck — touched the eyes one after another with a long, thin, pointed instrument, causing them to blink crazily; Candelaria guessed that he was applying minuscule electric shocks, and she was impressed by the ingenuity of the system as well as by its oddity. The crowd murmured and cheered.

  Watching a child pop a handful of artificial eyes into its pocket like marbles, Candelaria found herself leaning against Simms, his hand lightly at her waist. She straightened and adjusted the sunglasses. “What’s it about, do you think? Why this fascination with human body parts?”

  “I think it has something to do with an obsessive need to make contact. Ever since the first explorers dropped out of the sky with their sleek ships and wealth, the natives have been fascinated by humans, and they seem to have both a terrible need and a terrible fear of being in intimate contact with us.”

  “But they’re not ‘in intimate contact.’ All those prosthetic devices make any contact phony.”

  “Exactly. And that makes it safer. They can pretend that they’re really communicating while they make sure they really don’t. They can have it both ways.” She was struck, touched, by how much thought he’d obviously given this puzzle.

  A labor robot stopped beside them; as they passed it, the head unit stayed rigid, but the strip holding the visual sensors rotated slightly to keep Simms and Candelaria in view. She imagined trying to make intimate contact with a thing like that, and shuddered. But in a way it would be easier, she thought, because you’d know from the beginning what you were dealing with.

  Simms glanced at her, glanced away. “In all the years I’ve been here,” he said, “I’ve never once seen a native without a human prosthesis of some kind attached to its body. Never on
ce.”

  The meal was surprisingly good, the restaurant charming with its thoroughly anachronistic eclecticism. It was altogether a pleasant hour, and Candelaria hated to spoil the mood by asking questions. She sipped the pale heady wine and almost reflexively checked the mic with a quick touch to the front of her shirt, reminding herself sternly that she was here on business and, after all, an expense account.

  But she could think of nothing sensible to ask. Her prepared questions now seemed totally irrelevant. She smiled a little sheepishly at Simms and with disproportionate pleasure concentrated on finishing her pepperoni pizza.

  They walked together back to her hostel. Not knowing the customs, she had left the sunglasses on in the restaurant, and she didn’t remove them now either though the streets were nearly dark. At first the few passersby didn’t look to her to be disguised at all, and that was a little unnerving. She wondered why, and decided to wonder about it later, when she was alone.

  She took off the glasses to see better and, feeling oddly exposed, rubbed her eyes. Then she began to see that every native they passed was indeed wearing all sorts of prosthetic devices — wigs, teeth, bands, hips, feet. But these appendages had been constructed and attached far more skillfully than any she’d seen before. Maybe nighttime fashion standards were more sophisticated.

  She slipped the glasses back on and edged a little closer to Simms. Welcomingly, he put his arm around her. The stars were a hazy cloud of milk drops, the buildings a moody jumble across the deep blue of the sky. Everything was unfamiliar. Arousing. She stopped, turned, looked up into Simms’ shadowed face. She could hardly make out his features, and she wanted to see him, so she took off the glasses again. Then she put her hands on his shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him.

  He stiffened, did not return the kiss or the embrace. Shocked, she stepped back. “I—I’m sorry,” he said hastily. “I guess I’m just not used to being so close to a pretty woman anymore.” She regarded him carefully. She couldn’t read his expression. He looked to her like no man she’d ever known.

  During the next weeks, Candelaria found herself seeing more and more of the little creatures who inhabited the planet — and more and more of Gordon Simms. In the daytime she walked the streets by herself, filling the storage area of her recorder with notes and observations. The natives stared at her, especially the children. Some of the bolder ones reached out and fingered her hair, stroked the exposed skin on her arms and neck.

  Once a group of them trapped her in an alley; both exits were blocked by their squat little bodies, and at her back was a wall. For awhile she was frightened, and to calm herself she kept talking into the microphone. “One of them is wearing an Afro wig that’s half as big as she is. One of them has long fake nails on every finger and toe. I suppose they could be used as weapons, although they’re so long they’d probably bend and break. One of them has braces that are too big for him on both legs, and a gigantic neck brace that keeps his bead from moving. One of them —”

  She was still talking when the squealing, tittering crowd disgorged one of its smallest members toward her. This child came racing and leaped into her arms; she was so startled that she nearly dropped him and had to lean against the wall for support. She gazed into the blue face of the little creature, which was unadorned except for sequined false eyelashes glued all around his semi-circular pink eyes, extending almost to the tip of his wide flat nose. “Hello there,” Candelaria said softly. “What do you want from me, little one?”

  Chittering under its breath, the child reached up, took off her glasses, and dropped them onto the ground. Then he placed his palms on her cheeks and spread his long flat fingers. She closed her eyes and held her breath. The child moved his fingers over every part of her face, lightly probing her eye sockets, her mouth, the soft spots behind her ears. Then he pulled her close and briefly laid his own cheek against hers. His skin was soft and cool. Candelaria was moved to the brink of tears, though she had no idea what any of this meant or what she was expected to do in return. Apparently finished or filled, the child wriggled free of her and scampered back to his peers, who had been quiet and who now exploded into shrieks of laughter and scattered out of the alley, letting her go.

  Her deadline came and went. She sent a message explaining that the assignment had turned out to be more complex than they’d thought and requesting an extension; by the time the grudging approval made its way back, nearly half the approved extension period was already gone. “My editor won’t know what to do with all this stuff,” she told Simms, laughing, showing him the bulging stack of notes edited from the tape by the portable processor set up in her rooms. “Infonet isn’t exactly known for its in-depth features.”

  He was lying on the bed in her hostel room. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor not far from him. They passed back and forth a pipe of some sweet-smelling native vegetation, and quiet music from home played in the background. The scene had all the makings of intimacy, but Candelaria knew better than that by now. This man was not easy to get close to, physically or otherwise.

  Especially physically, she reflected ruefully. He would take her hand to guide her when they walked the dark night streets, or put an arm protectively on her shoulder, and once or twice when they’d parted for the night he’d touched his lips to the top of her head. That was all. Candelaria had been confused, frustrated, hurt. Now she was acutely curious, a woman attracted to an enigmatic man, a reporter on the trail of the angle to her story.

  “Why don’t you give your editor what she’s used to?” he asked now, eyes closed above the pipe. “A little sensationalism? A little — ‘yellow journalism,’ I believe it’s called?”

  She laughed, almost startled. “I haven’t heard anyone use that since my History of Journalism professor.”

  Gordon was silent. Candelaria was thinking how oddly humorless the man was, when he spoke up again, “I was only suggesting that perhaps you could give your editor what she wants, and satisfy your own boundless curiosity at the same time.”

  She waited, holding her breath, longing to switch on the mic under her shirt but afraid he’d notice. Instead, she adjusted the shoulder pads he’d found for her in a shipment last week; she wasn’t used to wearing them, and they itched and chafed, but she liked the square angles they gave to her silhouette.

  When Simms said nothing, she asked carefully, “What is it you’re offering?”

  “I’m not sure.” He stood up abruptly, swayed a little, caught himself. “But come to the shop tonight after dark. Maybe we can wrap this thing up.”

  Wordlessly, Candelaria watched him go. Conscious of being hurt and angered by his apparent eagerness to have her done with the assignment and out of his life, she wondered again if she’d completely misread him. That was a fruitless line of thought, of course, because she had no clear reading of him at all and no way of checking out her constantly shifting perceptions.

  With a sigh she turned off the music, turned up the lights, extinguished the pipe. Then she seated herself at the cramped little desk to begin the laborious process of pulling notes together into a coherent form.

  It was barely dusk when she approached the Emporium, but she was too eager to wait any longer. The shop’s shabby grotesquerie was almost welcoming. She stepped inside and closed the rattling door behind her. It swung a few times and then was still. From out of the shadows Gordon Simms came toward her. She knew it was Simms because she didn’t think it could be anyone else, and because something about his walk was familiar, but otherwise she would not have recognized a single thing about him. She gasped, stared, and was chilled.

  He was much shorter than she knew him to be, coming barely to her shoulder; looking down at his bare feet, she guessed he’d always before worn platform shoes. He was almost completely bald, and the skin of his head where it had been sheltered so long by the wig was a much paler blue than that of his face and neck. His gums were bleeding and be had no teeth; his mouth cavity had collapsed inward so that his chi
n jutted forward, and his flat wide nose had spread halfway across his face. She saw that both his hands were gone, one above the elbow and one just below, and that his squat body was twisted so that not all of it seemed to be facing her at once.

  “Celia?” he said, and she would not have known his voice. She tried to see the place in his smooth blue neck where a voice synthesizer had been inserted and recently removed, but the light was too dim.

  “Gordon?” she asked shakily.

  He came closer, nodding erratically. “This is who I am. Without prostheses. Without the disguise. Without anything between us. This is who I really am.” He held out his arms.

  He was offering her something that terrified her. She was breathless with the enormity of what he was offering, the bareness. She was horrified by the naked alien sight of him, when she’d thought he was one of her own kind.

  Abruptly Candelaria turned away from him. Though she couldn’t move very fast in the clutter of the Emporium, she felt as though she were running. Boxes and crates closed in around her. Dust filled her eyes and nose, coated and numbed her skin. Human body parts were everywhere. Frantically she told herself that they were fake, and then touched her own arms and lips and breasts to make sure they were still there.

  A swarm of glass eyes tilted toward her out of the dimness. Watching her. Winking in a sordid way. She swung the flat of her hand against the corner of the crate, and the eyes spilled out in a deluge, each for a split-second glinting like a hard round tear, clattering and rolling away from her feet. Countless hands reached out to caress her, to hold her, to keep her from moving past; she could shake them off, but they fell with a disgusting rubbery sound, bouncing a little against her ankles.