Condomnauts Read online

  This was a really big deal. Maybe even the biggest deal in the past fifty years of human history, the biggest thing since the day when, thanks to Quim Molá’s cleverness and lack of scruples, we got those first twenty-five hyperengines from the Qhigarians and reached the stars.

  The first reaction on board the Gaudí was total celebration. As we had suspected from the beginning, it had to be some sort of Alien spaceship. Then we got scared, just thinking about how powerful its antigrav generators would have to be to lift its massive bulk off the ground. And we scared ourselves even more by trying to picture what sort of beings could build a ship as huge as this—especially since our brilliant Amaya couldn’t get her usually superexact biometer to resolve even roughly where they were located inside the immense ship.

  In the end, of course, ambition and excitement erased our fears. Nobody had ever heard of such an enormous spherical structure, so maybe we’d hit the jackpot, found what every known intelligent species (a tasteful way to say: any species with commercial ambitions) in the Milky Way, Alien or human, has always been looking for: an extragalactic species. From the Andromeda Galaxy, or the Triangulum Galaxy, or at least one of the Magellanic Clouds.

  Our trade opportunities, if we can become the first of the tens of thousands of races in today’s Galactic Community to make Contact with beings from beyond the Milky Way—and, by the way, the first to wheedle or purchase the secret to the hyperjump engine that allowed them to cross the currently insuperable chasm between galaxies (and maybe even get our hands on a functional ansible!), putting us on an equal footing to compete with the Qhigarians or even to beat them at their own trade game—would be practically limitless.

  Especially for us humans. We’re such latecomers to the cosmos that almost every planet in the Milky Way fit for colonization by oxygen-breathing races was already taken by the time we started exploring. The right engine would give us access to practically the entire universe. And with that, we’d come up with not just one, but dozens of worlds that could be turned into New Catalonias, for sure.

  Plus, the other races would have to pay us, the way everybody now pays the Unworthy Pupils for Taraplin technology, on which they hold an unbreakable monopoly. And they wouldn’t find the new hyperjump drive cheap—we aren’t as gullible as the Qhigarians!

  It’s in this hope that every ship setting out from a human enclave tries to have a Contact Specialist like me on board. Or several, if the shipowner can afford to pay them.

  Besides, if they make Contact with some new Alien species on their travels, as happens frequently enough, even with one from our own galaxy, they can let them know that humans come with good intentions. Then they can start off with a relationship of peaceful understanding, trade in goods and technology, as beneficial to both sides as possible—rather than hostile misunderstandings and war, always a bad thing.

  Now it’s right here in front of me, looming up between the system’s reddish sun and myself, its dull shadow spreading across everything as far as I can see.

  I’ve never faced a possible First Contact with extragalactic Aliens before.

  What a chance. What a responsibility. I’ve got equal odds of covering myself in glory or in shit.

  Most likely this is just the latest false alarm. But maybe not.

  For a long moment I gloat over the thought that these Aliens might really be from beyond the Milky Way. Due to my skills in “sleeping” with Aliens, negotiations with them will be stunningly successful. Nu Barsa will get exclusive rights to the first intergalactic-range (and first non-Taraplin) hyperjump engine in the Human Sphere, indeed in the entire Galactic Community, overcoming once and for all the obstacles to intergalactic travel that have so far prevented us from spreading beyond our own pinwheel of stars.

  What will the other members of the union say then? All those snobs in the Department of Contacts who can barely hide their disdain for my not being Catalan and for my “plebe” background?

  They’ll have to eat their words, en masse.

  For example. That stuck-up, envious nanoborg, Jürgen Schmodt. Just hearing that it was me—the immigrant, the plebe, the Third-World condomnaut, the first-generation “natural” talent, the contract worker—and not a member of his team who was lucky enough to make Contact with the first extragalactic Aliens: that will no doubt fry all the high-tech Nazi’s nanocircuits, out of sheer spite.

  On the other hand, though my obese buddy Narcís Puigcorbé would have happily given his many rolls of fat to be here, I’m sure he’ll be glad if it’s me, his Cuban socio, who wins the lottery.

  He’s a good friend, the best I’ve got—maybe because he’s ready to retire and he doesn’t see me as a threat. If only all the Catalans were like him.

  Lovely Nerys, for her part, will also feel proud to the tips of her fins that it was none other than her unmodified first-gen “boyfriend” who took this first step. A small step for me, a giant leap for all mankind. And maybe my self-centered girlfriend will finally give some serious thought to the marriage proposal I made to her six months ago.

  That slippery siren is driving me nuts…

  Apart from prestige, I’ll probably also get the Nu Barsa citizenship I want so bad, and with it the security of a steady job. No more freelance contracts. Who knows, I might even stop waking up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat from my recurring nightmare about my disgusting old home sweet home, the Caribbean pigsty of my childhood. City of Havana. Good old CH.

  So let me concentrate on my business here. On the here and now, no more distracting memories. Even though I’ve always found it helpful, centering, to reminisce about stuff that has nothing to do with whatever concrete challenge I’m confronting.

  To each his own, you know? Every condomnaut has their own way of making Contact. Some use yoga. Others groove to music. Me, I let my mind ramble while I try to figure out how we got here, humanity and me. Not necessarily in that order.

  But. Don’t waste your time dreaming about melons when your ass is in the ditch, old Diosdado used to say.

  According to our sensors, the local gravity on Hopeful Encounter is slightly greater than Earth’s, but still, though we haven’t yet managed to catch a glimpse of any of the crew members, judging from the dimensions of their ship and the size of the three or four equally spherical surface vehicles we saw moving around from orbit, it wouldn’t be crazy to assume that these presumptive extragalactics are physically much larger than we are.

  But will they be slow-moving leviathans with hydrostatic endoskeletons, like the Arctians? Living blobs of undifferentiated cytoplasm, like the Continentines, which I happened to be the first to Contact? Restless, muscular titans that could squash me flat with one false move, like Furasgans when they’re still young?

  Could be anything. You never know what to expect on First Contact. That’s something every condomnaut always does well to bear in mind.

  Right now, alone and barely five hundred meters from the mountainous sphere, I’m none too happy at the possibility of getting flattened into two dimensions.

  The worst of it is, there’s nowhere for me to run if things turn ugly. This dull planet didn’t even have the good taste to develop the sort of rough terrain where you might find a cave to hide in. Not even a cleft or two. The rock’s too hard. Basalt, is my guess. Not that I’m a planetologist.

  I feel like I stick out here like a flea on a shaved dog’s bum.

  Oh, well. That’s how I feel with almost every Contact.

  Though this time the danger is a little too overwhelmingly clear.

  If I believed in them, I’d be praying to Shangó, Obbatalá, and all the old Afrosyncretic gods of my faraway native Cuba. Praying that these Aliens’ idea of a safe distance isn’t too different from our own, however huge they may turn out to be.

  Instead, I just climb slowly out of the Drag d’Algol and start walking forward at an equally measured pace, holding my hands in the air to show I’m not armed.

  I’m doing everythin
g to appear friendly and non-threatening, except flashing a smile. Best not to do that.

  Though only my remote mission officer can now see my face, hidden under the helmet, the Qhigarians, who know their way around the Alien races of the galaxy better than anyone, always say that we humans are the only known sentient creatures who display our teeth to each other in order to show we are friendly.

  Well, I like to comfort myself with the thought that, if the Qhigarians know this about us, why should everyone else know, too? And be tolerant about it.

  So, no smiles. The corners of my lips still try to turn up, of their own accord. I must look totally ridiculous. More and more ridiculous by the minute, the more dignified I try to appear.

  I move forward in the deliberate, dignified, fearless manner stipulated by the ancient Protocol for First Contact—which was supposedly established by the mythical Taraplins millions of years ago—displaying the absolute calm of a model professional condomnaut. In reality, I feel exposed, vulnerable, even prematurely naked, in spite of my ultraprotect suit.

  But at least its triple shielding means that my coworkers from the Gaudí, who must be following my every move from the safety of orbit, can’t see that I’m sweating buckets and trembling like a leaf in a windstorm. This always happens to me during the preliminary phase of Contact, when I reveal myself for the first time to the Aliens that I’m supposed to make friends with.

  Contact Specialist or not, I’m shitting myself with fear. And I don’t care.

  I was ashamed of these feelings until Narcís confessed to me even he, with hundreds of successful missions on his service record and all the honors a Catalan condomnaut could ever dream of winning, still feels the same pangs in his gut every time he approaches another Alien species.

  Nerys also once hinted at something of the sort, in her typically feminine, elliptical way.

  I imagine that even pedantic nanoborg, Jürgen, must get some discreet nervous twinges when he makes a new Contact, though I suppose he’d rather be boiled alive than admit it. Stuck-up Prussian.

  Yep. Who said that professional daredevils have no fear?

  There’s a few things I know perfectly well:

  That all this is a simple matter of psychology.

  That up inside that enormous ship, the Aliens’ own condomnaut (or whatever the potential extragalactics call their Contact Specialists, assuming they have such a thing) is most likely feeling at least as scared as I am.

  That if I come under attack by disintegrators or hyperobliteration armaments (if they’ve got such things and aren’t born pacifists like the Qhigarians, who don’t dare touch any weapon more sophisticated than a slingshot), the thin monomolecular ceramic shield of the Dralgol won’t provide anywhere near as good a defense as my ultraprotect suit.

  That if some misunderstanding makes them fire their heavy artillery, the guys on my own ship up in orbit will train all its destructive firepower on the Aliens to avenge me (I want to believe this with all my heart), so there’ll be some real hell stirred up right here.

  And since nobody who initiates a Contact and has two grams of brains would want to stir up such a disaster, seeing as it would send all their potentially advantageous trade relations down the tubes, the chances of such a catastrophe taking place are slim to none.

  But what can I do? I’m sweating and trembling anyway.

  Because this could be the one time that the most unlikely possibility comes true, right?

  Long ago and far away, when I used to play streetball in Rubble City, CH, with the rest of Diosdado’s orphans in El Viejo López’s back lot, fearlessly defying the residual radioactivity of the soil, I remember that whenever somebody hit a home run over the fence, one of the older kids would always jokingly say (imitating some old-time announcer, I guess), “And it’s going… going… gone! Adios, my sweet Lolita!”

  In this case, it’d be more like, “Adios, Josué!” In other words, much worse. Because, what the hell do I care about Lolita? This is my own life I’m talking about. Okay, true, I risk my life week after week in this funny little business of being a Contact Specialist, which seems the only job I have any talent for. Thing about my life is, I’ve only got one. And I’m kind of fond of it.

  Don’t try telling me about the “challenge of the unknown,” or my “sense of duty,” or how I should feel proud to be in “the human vanguard in the conquest of the Cosmos.” Let’s be clear: like all my select, envied, and reviled brothers in the trade, I’m in it for the money. Ideals and intellectual gymnastics are fine, but you can’t live in the twenty-second century without making a few credits, you know.

  Especially not in Nu Barsa, rightly considered the most expensive habitat in the Human Sphere.

  So I’m none too fucking relieved to know that, if some paranoid Aliens happened to disintegrate me, the pompous hypocrites would try to wash their hands of it the way they usually do when colleagues die on Contact missions. By slapping my name on some street (not that I’d ever see it) or even on a whole sector of the latest archology.

  I’d rather not have any official ceremonies, which my pragmatic Nerys would just exploit to assert her rights as my quasi-widow consort and (most important) as my quasi-heir to grab any bonus pay I might have coming.

  So: they can stick all the honor and glory up their…

  Me being me, I’ll take the money and the plaque right now.

  But here I am. I’ve finally come to a complete stop a good hundred meters from the Alien ship.

  So I take a deep breath, whisper, “¡Arriba, compatriotas!” like Elpidio Valdés, the hero of comics and cartoons from my Cuban childhood, who rode his inseparable horse Palmiche into battle, wielding his machete to make our island independent from Spain, and—

  “Quit dragging your feet, coward.”

  Damn. I forgot that the mic inside my helmet would automatically reconnect when I left the Dralgol. And I especially forgot who’d be listening to me. Wouldn’t it have to be Jordi Barceló. And they say there’s no such thing as bad luck.

  “It’s okay if you take your time to make sure they know we have no hostile intentions. But keep walking, fuck it! You’ve been standing there with your hands in the air for like a whole minute. They’re going to think we’re vegetables and you’ve stopped to do some photosynthesizing or put down roots. Come on, Cubanito, shithead, move it or you’ll lose your First Contact bonus. And if you make me lose mine, I swear to God I’ll cut your servos and make you crawl back to the ship in that lightweight suit of yours.”

  So charming, so laconic, so homophobic. So tolerant of lower life forms like me, who didn’t learn Catalan before we could crawl.

  Sometimes I think that if he wasn’t the owner of Antares—the lazy, selfish charmer of a ginger cat who’s now the whole ship’s beloved mascot—I would have tried strangling him long ago.

  If none of the other crew members beat me to it, that is.

  For instance: Amaya, our sensor tech, who was as taken by Gisela’s fire-red mane as I was. She still hasn’t forgiven Jordi for being the one who finally got Gisela’s juices flowing.

  A pointless grudge, in my humble opinion. After all, the one who chose between the two lovers (not counting me, of course; everyone on the Gaudí knows I don’t go for females—not human females, anyway) was Gisela herself, right?

  The worst of it is, apart from Amaya and Gisela and his own bad temper, Third Officer Barceló has his own reasons for feeling angry with me.

  It’s taken for granted that, given the peculiar nature of our trade, we condomnauts have certain… intimacy skills that can make a favorable impression on regular humans, to the point that some grow slightly addicted to our humble selves.

  That may or may not be true, depending on the condomnaut. But the trouble is, all astronauts, who tend to be a pretty superstitious lot, believe it blindly. So it’s taken for granted that if a Contact Specialist shows an obvious preference for any of the members of his crew, that favoritism will automatically gener
ate awkward jealousies and suspicions in any small group of humans isolated for long periods. And a hyperjump ship crew is necessarily a small group of people.

  So we’ve been ordered—well, to be fair, that’s too strict a term, even for a directive from overbearing Miquel; let’s say—it has been earnestly recommended of us that we try to “avoid certain group dynamics.”

  But what with the immensity of space, and how far we are from home, and how lonely watch duty can be, and how weak the flesh is, and on the other hand how hard and appetizing Jordi Barceló’s flesh is…

  The fact of the matter is, one night something on the not recommended list did happen. And it was definitely worth it.

  With all that brawn, Jordi Barceló turned out to be quite the sex bomb. For a Catalan.

  I enjoyed our hookup so much that I opened up to him that night, telling him a few things about my past that I tend not to let on to, such as the bit about Elpidio Valdés, one of my childhood idols.

  The catch was, the selfish brute then got the idea that he could enjoy my “services” every now and then—which wouldn’t have been very disagreeable, after all—but also that I had to be his secret and exclusive property. Always be available, that is, for his and only his sexual whims. And without letting anyone else know about our arrangement, too.

  Of course I refused that sort of secret slavery, but then the great big whiner went to the captain himself and accused me of having seduced and raped him—and him always such a strict heterosexual until I used my Caribbean wiles to lure him into the bunk, blah blah.

  Ha. Needless to say, regardless of his feudal Catalan name, Captain Ramón Berenguer proved to be eminently just and open-minded. Instead of automatically siding with his fellow Catalan against the foreigner, he merely reminded Jordi in a voice dripping with irony and diplomatic tact that he, Jordi, stands six foot three and looks like Hercules’ twin brother, whereas I’m barely five foot seven. So, Berenguer figured, the claim about a rape was just a crude lie from a spiteful lover.