Condomnauts Read online

  As for getting himself seduced, good for him! Welcome to the flexible-views club. About time he gave up his narrow, old-fashioned ideas, which are especially anachronistic in an astronaut. The captain heartily congratulated him, because the life of a poor heterosexual on a ship crewed by women and men who are as bisexual as most humans in the twenty-second century must have been hell. Especially considering that three of the four women on the ship could hardly look at him without feeling an automatic urge to smack him.

  The reprimand worked, of course. When a jealous, spiteful coworker tries to undermine you, it tends to help if you’ve had an earlier fling (brief but warm) with your captain.

  I feel nervous as fuck. Still thinking about stuff that has nothing to do with Contact. As if the crew of this mountain-sized silver sphere cared about the gossip among our crew.

  And what if they’re telepaths? Shit.

  Great first impression I’d be making.

  But it’s not like I can change the course of my rambling thoughts. I’m only human, damn it. Could you keep from thinking the word “rhinoceros” for fifteen seconds if you were told your life depended on not thinking it?

  If so, then by all means, come trade places with me. For the good of all humanity, and especially of one very scared-shitless guy.

  No takers? Just as I expected.

  All up to me.

  “Yes, I’m moving, Jordi. The Dralgol is a two-seater, and they must already have an estimate on our body size, so I just wanted to give them time to see that I’m here alone.”

  That’s not good enough for the touchy bastard; in fact, the cure is worse than the disease. His close-shaven, big-jawed face trembles with offended dignity in the tiny holographic image inside my helmet visor.

  “Don’t call me Jordi, Cubanito! It’s Third Officer Barceló to you. In fact, better make that Third Officer Barceló, sir.”

  Yeah, my bad luck I went to bed with him. I won the elephant in the lottery, as Diosdado used to say.

  Fortunately for me, Barceló’s pompous scolding gets cut off by a swift series of flashing lights that come from the Alien ship, backed up by matching sounds. Smart idea: they don’t know if we’re a visual species. I can’t make heads or tails of it, but the computer in my suit says it’s a string of prime numbers (and presumably Jordi can confirm this on the Gaudí’s computer if need be). The classical mathematical sequence, one that no natural process generates. Your typical Contact code.

  Apparently they also think I’m dawdling.

  As if to underscore the point, an entrance mysteriously opens at the bottom of the ship, down where it nearly touches ground. A huge entrance, like five hundred meters high. So this is how their vehicles were entering, those times when it looked like they were simply fusing with the ship: temporary hatches. Controlled surface tension, perhaps?

  A sudden suspicion consequently strikes me: what if the entire ship isn’t made of matter but energy, like my pet, Diosdadito?

  Hell, why’d I have to think about my little pet? What I wouldn’t give to be back home in Nu Barsa, safe and sound, playing with him.

  But somebody’s gotta put the frijoles on the table.

  Hmm, energy. That could be why Amaya hasn’t been able to pick out individual crew members on the ship: it’s all energy, they’re all energy. Living energy.

  The possibility of understanding between creatures composed of matter—such as humans and almost all Aliens we’ve met so far—and creatures of pure energy are next to null. We simply move on different frequencies, even if we do so in the same universe.

  Fortunately, so far we haven’t discovered any intelligent energy-based species.

  Or maybe Diosdadito is intelligent, and we just haven’t figured it out yet.

  For that matter, if he is, would he have noticed our reasoning ability?

  Fragile bags of protoplasm—not like we’d seem rational to him.

  Anyway. Then there’s the even worse possibility of running into creatures made of antimatter.

  That would make for a truly explosive Contact.

  Good thing humanity hasn’t gotten mixed up in such an incident, yet.

  The Furasgans say they once went through that experience. It’s not something they want to repeat.

  Luckily, Amaya hasn’t detected the peculiar sort of photon emissions you’d get from matter–antimatter annihilation, or any Cherenkov radiation. No, I shouldn’t be thinking about antimatter, or energy, or even Diosdadito. Though… oh, how clearly I can picture him, moving with his beautiful, constantly shifting forms and colors along the ceiling of my comfy Nu Barsa apartment. At home. Every time I see that purring, affectionate, lazybones kitty Antares, it reminds me so much of him…

  No, I shouldn’t be thinking about my energy pet, or remembering Antares or Antares’s owner. I should be concentrating on Contact. Empty your mind…

  Okay, this is good: the sensors in my suit aren’t picking up any changes in the electromagnetic fields of this XXXXXL-size ship. One less thing to worry about. Simple, solid, conventional matter. If these guys aren’t pure energy, could it be a bioship, like the ones the Kigrans and the Algolese use? That also would render the biometer pretty much useless.

  A chill runs down my back. Could be out of the frying pan, into the fire.

  Last year I got to make Contact with the monstrous rorquals of Kigrai. That is, of Alpha Ophiuchi, according to the naming system of ancient Earth star charts. They also use biotech. But each individual grows up to half a kilometer long (females, slightly less). As if that’s not enough, their genitalia are to scale.

  That was a tough job, making that Contact. Ever since that day, I’ve had a rough idea of how a sperm feels inside a vagina.

  Well, a Contact Specialist’s job comes with thorns as well as roses.

  That’s why the few of us crazy enough to do it get paid the big bucks.

  I keep moving with the mechanical industriousness of a beetle, climbing up a small ramp that has emerged from the opening. A welcome sign of courtesy. Apparently they realized that if I’m walking, I must not be able to fly.

  The interior of the colossal Alien ship begins to glow a dull red. Lovely. Add some teeth and it’ll remind me uncomfortably of a giant, hungry mouth. Or of another less often seen bodily opening with teeth, which I’ve always assumed was just a black legend in our profession.

  Ah. Now it’s not just glowing, it’s pulsating. All it needs next is a voice howling, “Get inside already, idiot!”

  Strangely, this starts to make me feel better about them. Big or small, at least they share one trait with us humans: impatience.

  So, with my hands still in the air (hoping they don’t interpret this as a threatening gesture), I sign off with Jordi and enter the bowels of the Alien ship. I even take the trouble to smile at his little holoimage. “I suppose we’ll lose our connection when I go inside this Alien monster. Just in case: it was a pleasure working with you, Third Officer Barceló, sir. Say goodbye to Antares for me—and to Gisela.”

  His tiny face hardly moves a muscle when he replies, “Condomnaut Josué Valdés, I’ll pass on your regards to my cat and my girlfriend. I hope to see you again, though. Really, I do. I’d hate it if anybody else took care of you. But just in case—adieu.”

  Yeah, that’s real friendship for you.

  Just as I guessed, it’s a bioship. As soon as I’m inside, the ramp tucks itself away behind me and the entrance closes with remarkable fluidity. It seems like the opening never existed. At the same instant, the holographic window with Jordi’s image goes haywire and flits off, and I’m left in a reddish, unmistakably organic penumbra.

  My helmet sensors tell me the ammonia atmosphere of the planet outside is rapidly being replaced in here by oxygenated air. Could they have identified the kind of gas I breathe from the carbon dioxide I’m exhaling? These guys are good.

  I start sweating and trembling again.

  A test of professional self-discipline: don’t think about the vag
ina dentata, don’t think about…

  Situation analysis: roughly spherical chamber, approximately two thousand meters in diameter; quite large, yet relatively insignificant in relation to the ship’s total volume. If it’s an airlock, or some sort of decontamination chamber, what does it lead to? I can’t see any other doors, though of course the interior layout of a bioship is incomparably elastic and flexible.

  But you’d at least hope…

  Dull red remains the predominant visible hue. Flesh, or what? Do they see better in infrared light? That would make sense: this nondescript little planet isn’t exactly well-lit by the weak red star it has for a sun. There must be a reason they chose to stop here.

  Well, hopefully I’ll get a chance pretty soon to figure out why they did that, and many other things, too.

  I recalibrate my helmet visors. Just in time.

  A shadow is approaching. It’s on the other side of the translucent membrane surrounding the chamber I’m in. A good guess is that the guys from the Contact’s home team are stepping up to the plate.

  Or the guy. Looks like there’s just one of them. Well, in any case, here he is, passing through the last barrier. As he approaches, I take mental notes of his appearance with the swift precision gained from long practice.

  What I can see at first blush bodes well: not too big; in fact, just about my height, which is always agreeably convenient. Bipedal posture. Two arms, two legs: definitely anthropoid. ¡Viva Shangó! ¡Viva Obbatalá! One head, narrow waist, wide hips, large breasts—so this is a female. I generally prefer them when dealing with other species, maybe to make up for my forced abstention from human women for so many years. Though some Alien males or hermaphrodites aren’t bad at all. Thin arms, long legs, blond hair…

  Hair? And blond, to boot? Wow. Fortune isn’t just smiling on me, it’s grinning wide and laughing out loud.

  No doubt about it: this Alien isn’t just a female, she’s 100 percent humanoid. And what a humanoid!

  A perfect beauty, and not an inch of fabric covering her gloriously naked flesh.

  Not just any woman, she’s a Real Woman. Elegant, beautiful, voluptuous, refined, all in a single package. Extragalactic or not, this Contact Specialist could win any Miss Humanoid contest.

  And to top it off, she reminds me of someone. How odd.

  Yes. Someone I know very well. A model, an actress, a Nu Barsa holovision host? Now that I look at her, she reminds me a little of Nerys…

  No. Definitely not. She doesn’t even have green skin or gills. This isn’t my mermaid, or any other Catalan public figure; she reminds me of someone from my more distant past, but also someone who was closer to me. Someone from my childhood, yes. From CH.

  At last, I’ve got it. Of course: Evita!

  Uh-oh. Turns out they’re telepaths. How embarrassing. I hope they can take a joke. Or at least not consider it a capital crime. Evita… the little beauty, the only blond and blue-eyed girl in Rubble City, the daughter of Pablo Vargas, the greatly envied, powerful, arrogant director of Transplutonic Travels. A designer conception, she had been incubated in a sophisticated genetic womb up in Northia for a price that could have kept a hundred CH families living in luxury for practically a year. The rebellious hothouse flower who escaped her golden prison whenever she got the chance and played with us, the humble and happy orphans in the outer district.

  And we watched over her, not just like she was our adopted little sister, but like she was made of glass. And not merely because we sensed that her father (what we wouldn’t have given to have a father ourselves!), who prudently turned a blind eye to her adventures beyond the cage, would have boiled us alive if she came home with so much as a scratch on her perfect skin. Most of all, because it was such a pleasure to serve her, like knights serving their lady: helping her wade across the muddy stream, helping her hunt and maybe kill the enormous, omnipresent mutant scorpions, centipedes, and cockroaches that made her scream with fright and disgust, saving the best fruit that we stole from old blind Margot’s garden for her.

  Because even though we were just kids, she was even more of a child: she still had an innocence about her, while most of us already knew all about sex. And we were secretly thinking that when she grew up, having her as a girlfriend would be like being friends with the princess of heaven. So we were already trying to buy shares in the banking system of her affections.…

  Or maybe it was just friendship. Clean, simple childhood friendship. Why not? If anything so pure and innocent could exist among the children of Rubble City, I mean.

  Evita, my secret childhood crush. I suppose that, apart from my “little problem” with women, it was the memory of her and a slight resemblance between her face and Nerys’s that made me fall for my snooty mermaid.

  Evita, my forever impossible love. Right after I turned ten, some enterprising kids from the local chapter of the Pancaribbean Mafia kidnapped her, and her father decided not to pay the astronomical ransom they were demanding but instead to leave the neighborhood, abandoning her.

  The next week she turned up dead in a rubbish dump. They had raped her first, of course. She was eight. The sort of thing that happens every day in CH—but all the same, what a pity. We all cried and cried over her, and maybe I cried more than most.

  The upshot is, if Evita Vargas had survived to become a full-grown woman, she would have looked a lot like this extragalactic goddess.

  Two and two make four. The creatures who control this ship, whether from the Milky Way or beyond, must be telepaths. A good thing, too. No matter how sophisticated the translation software behind my earplugs is (one of the few points of pride for our none-too-advanced human technology), it only works with known languages.

  Oh, for the miraculous automatic translators that ancient science fiction writers used to depict. One of those would come in so handy for us condomnauts!

  Apparently, just as they knew I breathe oxygen, these Aliens were able to extract the image of my childhood friend from my mind. And the speed with which they molded this adult version of her indicates that they’re either natural shape-shifters or incredible biotech experts. As if the door and the entire ship don’t already prove as much.

  The situation isn’t entirely unheard of: five years ago, the Pravda Pobeda, a neo-Russian scouting ship from the planet Rodina, made Contact with the Guzoids, colonizing polyps from a dark planet in a globular cluster in Radian 56, Quadrant 12. Near the equatorial constellation Sextans, I think. I don’t quite recall whether Guzoids used spherical ships (in any case, the ship the Russians encountered must not have been as huge as this one, or they’d have made a note of it in their report). I do remember, though, that the uterus of the only sexed individual in the nest, the “queen,” proved to be the most sophisticated genetic splicer yet discovered: it rapidly created several specialized individuals for making Contact that were such perfect imitations of humans that no one could have told them apart from us at first glance. And it did so just by looking, before gaining access to our precious DNA, a doubly impressive feat.

  I figure the Russian condomnaut must have gone to town on that Contact, if he was lucky enough to get a partner even half as divine as this Alien pseudo-Evita standing now before me.

  “No, Josué Valdés, we aren’t extragalactic, nor are we the Guzoid polyps from Sextans you’re thinking of. We haven’t met them yet. But we have made Contact with a Qhigarian worldship that visited our home planet. They were the ones who sold us the Taraplin hyperengine that allowed us to reach this planet, along with a few facts about their species and others that are actively exploring the galaxy at this moment. That is the reason we did not come completely unequipped to this Contact.” The contralto voice reaching me through the headphones in my suit is the sort of voice an angel must have, if angels exist: musical, melodious, at once innocent and sensual, with an accent that reminds me of the best of my childhood in CH.

  And it’s undoubtedly the voice Evita would have had, if she had grown up. At least, so far as
I can remember. Maybe they’re only partial telepaths, telereceivers, since so far they haven’t sent me their thoughts, preferring to speak to me.

  “No, we are in fact complete telepaths. And we are not bothered by jokes about us: obviously, we already have heard them all. In fact, we find the concept rather interesting. But we will discuss that, and many other things, we hope, later.

  “But now we fear you will not be able to understand our thoughts. You can take off your helmet, however, Josué Valdés. Don’t be afraid; as you have guessed, we picked up on your respiratory needs and have therefore modified the atmosphere around you. The air does not have any type of bacteria, virus, prion, or other pathogen that might harm your bodily functions, not even if your immune system were compromised.”

  Wow, really good telepaths. They’re learning too much about us.

  Every condomnaut facing a First Contact does so with a few little extra layers of protection. First, an immune system amped to the max. We stimulate our natural ability to repel infectious agents to such a degree, using biopharmaceuticals, that no bacteria can even survive in our intestines unless it shares at least 10 percent of our DNA.

  It’s a little uncomfortable, to be sure. Especially at first, with the constant diarrhea. But after a while you get used to it, and it’s pretty reassuring to know you can reject almost any Alien parasite or pathogen that might make its way into your body without resorting to other drugs.

  The second layer of protection is a little device we call the Countdown. The way it works is more or less incomprehensible for a layman like me, though for a change our human physicists have a better understanding of it than they do of hyperjump travel. This ingenious Algolese invention protects our valuable genetic heritage from being copied or stolen. When activated, it emits imperceptible ultrasonic vibrations that synchronize within an hour with the bearer’s biofield, in such a way that the DNA of any cell that strays out of range will degrade in a matter of seconds.

  This means that the vast majority of Contact Specialists use the device (some species can’t withstand ultrasound waves and have to use other systems, which I don’t know enough about to describe) so that they won’t stay up at night worrying that the Aliens they make Contact with will get their hands on their most valuable treasure, the most treasured aspect of any species: their genetic code. Because if Aliens get your DNA, they can manipulate it (at least in theory) in the sort of unethical ways the Qhigarians are said to have used long ago to create entire slave-clone races.