Read A Planet for Rent for Free Online Page B

violently that the tent’s thin, tough walls of synplast vibrated and nearly shattered.
    “Idiot,” Moy muttered, but only after the xenoid’s heavy footsteps had faded away outside. Colossaurs had a keen sense of hearing, and they could be very spiteful.
    What he was afraid of wasn’t Ettubrute’s armored fists and huge muscles—the Colossaur would never dare smash him. He was the goose that laid the golden egg, the Colossaur’s best investment.
    What truly terrified him was what his agent could do with his earnings, according to that one-sided contract he’d been forced to sign as a sine qua non for that ticket off Earth. Some of its clauses would literally make him Ettubrute’s slave if the xenoid ever decided to put them into effect. And the worst of it was that, since Moy had voluntarily signed it with his fingerprints, voice print, and retinal ID, he had no legal standing to lodge a complaint.
    Luckily, you might say that something like a... friendship had developed between him and his agent. Though that was too grand a word to describe any relationship between a xenoid and a human.
    Even so, if Ettubrute ever wanted to hurt him...
    Better not even go there.
    “I’m trapped, trapped, trap-trap-trapped,” he hummed, a habit he’d picked up through months of relative isolation. How long had it been since he’d laid eyes on another human face? Months. Since Kandria, on Colossa. And not even all human; she’d been half Centaurian...
    His own face had even started looking weird to him in the mirror. Well, naturally, after seeing so many mugs covered with hair, or scales, or feathers, or stuff that was just indescribable, all up and down the galaxy.
    “Didn’t you want to see other worlds, kid? Be careful what you wish for. Tell ’em you don’t want soup, they’ll give you three bowls; tell ’em you do, they’ll give you three hundred. To make you to stop wanting it,” he thought sarcastically. “Only pity is, I’ll never be able to tell anybody about it. I’ve seen so many things...”
    His tour with Ettubrute had put him in contact with beings and places you never heard anybody mention on Earth. Some amazing, some terrifying. Beings any biologist or sociologist on Earth would have given ten years of their lives just to meet.
    The morlacks of Betelgeuse, with their phosphorescent hides. The two-headed birds of Arcturus. The marsupials of Algol, with that natural teleportation. A hundred other races. The cosmos was a lot bigger than they ever supposed on Earth, and it held more beings that they’d ever imagined.
    Beings he could never talk about: the laws of the galaxy kept strict control of the flow of scientific and technological information that was permitted to the “backward” races. For instance, Homo sapiens. And when he signed his contract, Moy knew that his memory would be blocked before he could return to Earth. To preserve the anonymity of races that didn’t want Homo sapiens to know about them. To keep him from telling anyone about his experiences. A basic precaution to keep Earthlings from getting their hands on information and technologies that they weren’t capable of using “rationally” yet.
    “The important thing is what I’ve experienced and what I can remember, even if I can’t talk about it,” he muttered. “Lucky thing I never went to Auya...”
    He stopped recalibrating the nanomanipulators for a moment and glanced outside the tent, over his shoulder. The blue, red, and black triple-diamond hologram rotated slowly, floating over the tallest buildings on the plaza. The Auyar symbol.
    The wealthiest race in the galaxy. And the most protective of its privacy. Nobody knew what they really looked like. Nobody knew the location of their worlds. Those who visited them always got their memories completely erased....
    Or they got death.
    He stared at the triple diamond for several seconds, like a defenseless bird peering into the hypnotic eyes of a cobra. The Auyars paid