A Planet for Rent Read Online Free

telecrack. Buca thought of Yleka. This is how it must start...
    Telecrack was incurably addictive. Supposedly it heightened your telepathic potential, letting you establish temporary bonds of empathy, even exchange isolated thoughts with others. According to Jowe, that was all bunk. Human beings lacked telepathic receptors, and nothing could change that. The only effect of telecrack was to overcharge your neural circuits and cause hallucinations. Period.
    Yleka used to take a dose before starting with each client. She said it “tuned her in,” and she claimed she worked better that way. Maybe it was true... for the first two or three hours of the night. Later on she always ended up bawling and babbling incomprehensibly about an Alex guy “who was working on something hush-hush, very important.” Her friend’s secret bugged Buca a little at first (she had told Yleka her whole life story), but she soon came to the obvious conclusion that this Alex was just another dumb and meaningless lost love. And all that about his “important hush-hush work,” just Yleka’s romantic idealization.
    Poor kid, she must have loved him a lot if she was turning to telecrack to try and forget him. Though perhaps the horse-pill doses she consumed were just an attempt to get out of her own body while she was being subjected to all sorts of degrading manipulations. Being a social worker had a few points in common with being sentenced to Body Spares. In either case, a girl wasn’t in total control of her body...
    Yleka took the slow road to self-destruction. Her body deteriorating from addiction, she’d reached the inevitable moment when she could no longer attract clients the way she once had. At least she had managed to get that Cetian, Cauldar, to take her, and she left the planet with him. Where could she be now? And how was she?
    Cetian humanoids were the galactic species most like Homo sapiens. But more beautiful, more seductive... and more dangerous. Males and females roamed all over Earth, always searching for candidates for their slave brothels. They paid very well. And nobody made love like they did... Buca had come this close to leaving with Yleka, going off with her and Cauldar. But she decided to take the rumors seriously.
    There were horrible stories going around about the dives of Tau Ceti. About girls forced to couple unnaturally with the polyps of Aldebaran or the segmented guzoids of Regulus, leading to their death, mutilation, or exotic, repugnant, and incurable venereal diseases. And there were worse things than the slave brothels. Rumors told of lots of young people, seduced by the Cetians’ angelic looks, who ended up on the organ traffickers’ chopping blocks.
    A lot of those stories must have been just made up. How could humans be of any interest, even zoophile interest, to beings that reproduced asexually, like polyps or guzoids?
    But after prudently considering that there’s a kernel of truth in every rumor, at the last minute Buca let Yleka leave by herself. Her friend, in a best-case scenario, would now be subject to Cauldar’s every whim. All Cetians concealed an implacable iron will under their sweet external appearances.
    A real pity: before she filled herself with drugs, Yleka had an enviable body. Maybe Selshaliman would have taken both of them. For a grodo, two would do better than one girl alone...
    Almost without her realizing it, they had entered the inner ring of the cosmodrome, reserved strictly for arriving and departing passengers. The grodo’s movements had grown calmer. He was much more familiar with this area, and he felt safer here than outside.
    Though only a human who hated his fellow man would attack an insectoid. The only time a grodo had become the innocent victim of a group of armed robbers, the geophysical weapon spoke again and New London disappeared, swallowed by a tsunami. Lesson learned. Grodos could travel safely anywhere on the planet.
    Moreover, if anyone were crazy and suicidal