Condomnauts Read online

  Worn as a collar, the ultrasound transmitter has become the hallmark of my profession. In fact, one of the many theories circulating about the origins of the humorous nickname everybody calls us by is that it comes from the pronunciation of the English word Countdown as we hispanicized it: countdown, coundóun, condón, “condom.”

  Contact Specialists: condom-nauts.

  Personally, I find this hypothesis is as good as any other. As an Italian might say, se non è vero, è ben trovato. More or less: “maybe it’s not true, but it makes a good story.”

  Anyway, they call us condomnautas. Maybe it sounds better in Spanish. But the truth is, it’s all talk: things have changed a little since the day Quim Molá pulled on a real condom, and nowadays we usually make Contact without any physical protection other than our own skin. No rubbers. What sense does it make? After all, nobody worries about getting pregnant from “sleeping” with an Alien.

  “Thanks,” I say to my statuesque counterpart, keeping it short (words aren’t really necessary when you’re dealing with a complete telepath). I open the valve on my helmet before taking it off and for the first time breathe in the Alien air—which indeed proves to be completely odorless. They understand our respiratory parameters as well as we do ourselves.

  I’m starting to get over my disappointment about missing the huge bonus I would have made for making First Contact with extragalactic Aliens. I lost the bonus, but today is still my lucky day. A humanoid! Miss Human Sphere! What a babe! And she looks like Evita, too—a childhood erotic fantasy made real. I’m one lucky guy. Who cares if she’s not a real human, when I’ve got such a fantastic Contact waiting for me?

  Well, I care, of course. If she really were human, I wouldn’t be able to function, either as a Contact Specialist or as a man. That’s the cross I bear, and at the same time it’s the best thing I have going for me and the source of my greatest talent.

  Naturally, nobody on the Gaudí knows this, and nobody in Nu Barsa either except for jolly old Narcís Puigcorbé. But I can count on his discretion, whether or not he finally retires this year.

  I also toss the translation earplugs and am more than ready to kick off the rest of my suit as soon as I can. One good thing about even the most heavily armored condomnaut suits is how easy they are to remove. A necessity for doing the job right, of course.

  However, when a beauty like this, no matter how Alien she might be (or rather, precisely because she’s so Alien), steps up to help me remove this little obstacle between her flesh and mine, everything becomes much simpler—and much more enjoyable.

  “We hail from the third star in the constellation that you call Crater, the Cup. It is a quintuple blue sun with no planets. Radian 3278, Quadrant 6 in the current cartography. We are a unitary being, made not of energy but of an elastic bioplasm that evolved in the system’s thin asteroid ring,” the lovely pseudo-Evita tells me, while gently fingering the Countdown collar with her perfect hand as soon as I am as naked as she.

  No wonder the biometer couldn’t distinguish one crew member from another inside the ship: the whole ship is a single entity. Not a bioship but a creature capable of traveling among the stars. Making Contact with Aliens is a source of constant surprises, and it forces you to rethink what had seemed to be the most solid paradigms.

  Another reason I love this job.

  The gorgeous unitary being continues her speech, warm but fearless. “We assimilate radiant energy directly, and given our form of metabolism, we are virtually immortal, so we reproduce only rarely, by budding or fission. Therefore, the diplomatic ritual of Contact through sexual intercourse, of Taraplin origin, which almost every life form in this galaxy observes, strikes us as fairly… meaningless.” If she’s extracting all these words from my mind, she’s doing a good enough job of arranging them to sound convincingly human. That body and that face help a bit, too, of course. “Nevertheless, we are prepared to respect the tradition, just as we respected it on our First Contact with the Qhigarians. This… humanoid body, which we have molded based upon your memories, is only a partial projection, intended to facilitate your physical interaction with us. Shall we proceed, Josué Valdés?” Her final words follow the proper Protocol for First Contact. Maybe she learned them from the Qhigarians, maybe she grabbed from my brain; who cares.

  I’m all for keeping the old traditions, this once. In fact, right now I’m a stickler.

  I approach the fascinating “partial projection” of the Alien single bioplasm unit and tell her, in my most loving voice, something that could not have been very clear in my thoughts: “She was Evita to me, but perhaps as a species you would prefer to be known by some more formal name.”

  “Excellent.” Her words ring in my mind, not my ears. “We shall be the Evita Entity.”

  Well, there’s more than one way to leave your mark on history. I won’t be the first or the last Contact Specialist to do so, whether by chance or by design. Since the Five Minute War, almost all of human history for the past half century bears the stamp of the condomnauts.

  Josué Valdés, Contacter of the Evita Entity. I rather like the sound of it.

  Reciprocating her earlier gesture, now I am the one placing my hand on her delicate neck. It’s pure heaven, her rosy skin trembling under my fingertips. It’s just as silky soft as I remember it. I spend nearly ten seconds simply enjoying the feeling, then at last I say the ritual words, my libido quaking with every syllable: “Welcome therefore to the realm of humanity and of the Nu Barsa enclave, Evita Entity. May this First Contact and its intercourse mark the beginning of a fruitful trading relationship between our species. Let us proceed.”

  And, wow, do we ever proceed. My hand slips down to her erect breasts, I kiss her, embrace her, and slowly we let ourselves fall to the floor in a tight knot of arms and legs. I have a huge erection. Thinking of how human she looks without being human in reality is the best aphrodisiac I could imagine.

  So everything goes wonderfully well. Even before her thighs hit the soft organic floor, I’m inside her, and for a long time, as we move in unison, rolling across the bioplasmic bed, I feel her, wet, soft, exquisitely welcoming…

  I’m nine years old, skinny, grubby, barefoot, half naked, surrounded by other kids as filthy as me. We’re in a muddy, unpaved little street that’s baking in the sun, flanked by shanties cobbled together from plastic paneling and recycled sheets of galvanized iron.

  The street is named Tu Madre También. “So’s Your Mother” Street. It’s the main thoroughfare of Rubble City, the most impoverished district on the outskirts of CH, the beggar-queen metropolis, capital of poverty-stricken post-Five-Minute-War Cuba. The place I swear I’ll never come back to so long as I live. And to which I return regardless, night after night, in my recurrent nightmares.

  So I know this is a dream. For all the good it does me. All the good it ever does me. I can’t wake up. Much less control what’s happening to me. The worst thing is, since this isn’t the first time I’ve relived this scene, I already know everything that comes next.

  It’s a tragicomedy, being stuck in your own body, in your own past, which keeps repeating over and over until… until when?

  As always, unaware of any drama, I jump around, make a racket, scream and shout along with all the other kids, like any poor but happy kid anywhere in the world would do, with the excitement you only feel when the games are about to begin.

  Because we’re going to play—and I know full well what it is we’ll be playing.

  Several of us are holding small multicolored cages woven from braided polystyrene fibers. These aren’t industrial products but a sampling of homemade children’s handicrafts that we’ve skillfully fashioned out of rubbish patiently recovered from the huge trash mounds surrounding Rubble City. Some kids even manage to sell them to outsiders, six for a CUC—the devalued Cuban monetary unit dating back, I’m told, to the early twenty-first century.

  And inside those handwoven cages, we’ve got our runners.

 
I haven’t looked at them yet. I’d rather concentrate on the characters from my early years, who in this dream look exactly like I remember them.

  It’s like settling a debt I owe to my nostalgia for a childhood I’ll never get back. Fortunately.

  Here’s Yamil Check-My-Biceps, the bronze-skinned, green-eyed kid with the kinky hair who, at the tender age of twelve, is bursting with pride in his steroidal muscles. Well-dressed, attractive in the dangerous way bad kids can be. Kids born wicked. Not that I ever found him attractive, sexually speaking.

  He always beat up on the little kids and dreamed of the big ones letting him into their gang. He’ll die without ever getting there, at the age of fifteen, from an overdose of wildwall. For now, though, he’s alive and kicking right here in front of me, showing off his magnificent Afro.

  Standing next to him is his shadow, his scale-model replica, down to the miniature Afro, looking up at him like a minion at his god: his little brother, Yotuel Fullmouth. He hardly ever speaks and always keeps himself meticulously clean and good-smelling. He likes to dress in pristine white clothes, though he’s not a yabó. People say he pays for his beloved older brother’s vices and pleasures with the CUCs he picks up at night, sucking off the lonely, rich old men who park in the highway rest stop near Rubble City. Apparently, if you want to attract those perverted fat cats, you’ve got to smell really good and look healthy.

  Yeah, life is hard here in CH, and everybody deals with it as best they can, without judging anybody else.

  Evita is here, too, of course. Not up front but in back of the crowd. She’s just six now, and her blond hair and blue eyes contrast almost comically with the thick layer of dirt clinging to her milk-white skin. Amazing how much grime she’s managed to get on her in just two hours since she escaped her house.

  Later, so she can get back into her good clothes without making her strict father, Big Boss Vargas, suspicious about her running away, Abel and I will have to bathe her conscientiously, happily wasting the water that we worked so hard that morning to haul up, bucket by bucket, from the only unpolluted potable water tap in the neighborhood, energetically scrubbing her while she laughs with delight and not a trace of shame, never suspecting that we’re no longer staring at her naked body quite as innocently as we had the year before.

  Abel, my best friend. Mi amigo del alma. The first kid I secretly shared the pleasures of sex with, our mutual discovery of having an orgasm, which was more than an extension of our friendship. Skin as black as night, soul as pure as heaven. I wouldn’t be where I am today if not for him. At the age of fifteen, as soon as his born skill with computers began to pay its first dividends, he loaned me the money for my ticket into orbit, trusting that someday I’d pay him back.

  I have no idea what’s become of him. When I climbed on board the shuttle to the Clifford Simak Geosynchronic Transit Station, those thousand CUCs seemed like a fortune, and I promised to give them back to him as soon as I could. But eight years have gone by, I’ve made a thousand times that much money, and I’ve never even tried.

  I’m an ungrateful, egotistical bastard, I know.

  Maybe he’s already dead, Abel. The life of a hacker in Rubble City isn’t worth much. The Pancaribbean Mafia considers them disposable personnel.

  Or maybe he left his risky job, got married, has kids of his own, and…

  But no, I can’t let myself think about such things, not even in my dreams.

  Also jumping around and making a racket with the rest of us is Little Ramiro Flyface, the boy who was born without eyes because his mother abused broncodust when she was pregnant with him. The funny thing is that after he was born, Lina became the best mother in the world (maybe she felt guilty), and for years she saved up every CUC she earned from selling her body until, when her son was five, she was able to buy him the artificial eyes he needed. They might have been the cheapest on the market, a pair of multifaceted North Korean holoprostheses that only let him see in black and white and gave him his nickname, but all the same he preferred it to what they used to call him: Little Ramiro Flatface.

  And here’s Yamy, a glowingly healthy, precocious girl, the only professional worker in the neighborhood. Professional sex worker, that is. She’s with Marré el Gordo’s housecall girls. At the age of eight, she’s already forgotten more about sex than most women in Nu Barsa will learn in their whole lives. The nipples of her skinny breasts, still more those of a child than of an adolescent, barely covered by a thin T-shirt, translucent as onionskin, are more expressive than her big, mascara-coated eyes. She glances at me every now and then, mischievously. She’s promised me that when I turn ten in a few months, she’ll initiate me for free into the mysteries of hetero sex, and I won’t have to go through the sweaty, greasy ordeal so many other boys endure with lusty Karlita.

  She’ll never fulfill that promise. The brilliance of nocturnal butterflies fades quickly in Rubble City, and Marré el Gordo pays well—but only because he doesn’t do much to keep his girls safe. Some dissatisfied client will let something slip about Yamy’s perfect health, a very valuable exception in the polluted environment of CH; organ traffickers from the Pancaribbean Mafia will catch her one night on her way home from making the rounds, and all we’ll find later will be the remains.

  The police? Don’t bother. The easiest way to keep law and order in CH is to pretend the outer districts simply don’t exist and let us kill each other ourselves.

  There’s also Ricardito, nicknamed the Octopus because some nasty trick of chemistry, radioactivity, and sensitive genes made him be born with two tiny extra hands jutting from his elbows. No surgeon dares to amputate them, for fear that doing so might make him lose mobility in his regular hands.

  Also, there’s the one I’ll never forget. Slow and easygoing because of the extra weight her mutant metabolism gives her, sweating acrid buckets from every pore, there’s Karlita the Tub, who later on will always remind me of my friend Narcís—though he’s well over seven feet tall and he lets himself weigh three hundred kilos from pure laziness, while Karlita, like it or not, already weighs two hundred kilos at the age of eight, and she’s barely five foot four.

  Worse, the poor girl knows her condition will worsen year by year until she finally suffocates under her own rolls of fat before turning twenty-five. So, wishing to make the most of her short life span, she’s always available for the craziest sex games.

  And there’s Damián, better known as Legs the Orphan. So-called because his father, hooked on wildwall, the curse of our neighborhood (one of many; here, drugs grow like weeds), sold his son’s legs to an organ trafficker when the kid was three. After the father came down from his high, he felt so ashamed he killed himself. He left behind Rita, a pay guide dog he’d picked up cheap when Aid for the Disabled discarded it for being a mutant. Not so much for its three eyes as for always being in heat.

  In other words, the whole gang’s here. Because today is Racing Day.

  Not horse racing, of course. Not dog racing, or steroid-pumped human racing like you can see on holovision or in the fancy stadiums of luxurious downtown CH. No. Here in Rubble City, the populated zone with the highest background radioactivity level anywhere on our already polluted planet Earth, none of those well-trained or genetically engineered runners would last one day.

  The tenement house where I grew up is a hellhole at the end of the tunnel. Only the most desperate or the most highly resistant creatures can survive there. No wonder, then, that both the poor little mutants that do the racing and we humans who do the betting on them are all amply endowed with resistance and with desperation.

  Boasting, howling, and pounding on one another’s backs, half-jokingly and half deadly serious, like mischievous or perhaps lecherous monkeys, those of us who’ve brought our little cages end up in the front row, ready to set our captives loose when old Diosdado gives the signal.

  Diosdado Valdés, heart and soul of So’s Your Mother Street and respected throughout Rubble City, is the adoptive father or
grandfather—nobody knows which and nobody cares—of dozens of orphans. He takes in lots of newborns abandoned by their mothers, raising them and watching over them in his home to repay his orishas for the generosity someone showed him when he was little. Until they’re five and can fend for themselves. Then he frees us, to die in the streets—or grow into adults.

  But all of us who survived were proud to bear his last name, which he told us was, once upon a time, the only surname fatherless children were allowed to bear in Cuba.

  The old man is one of the most highly respected babalawos, priests in the syncretic Yoruba religion of the orishas, in all Rubble City. Some say, in all CH. Nobody knows how old he really is. They say that though he now seems like a harmless fellow, he was in Special Ops when he was young, and he got injured in an explosion. They also say he sacrificed part of his body to the jealous African deities. It might all be true. He’s thin, always wears white, has only one eye and one leg, and constantly jokes that any day now he’ll cut off an arm to finally look like his favorite orisha: one-legged, one-eyed, one-armed Olofi. Diosdado is the only adult whose authority we kids unquestioningly recognize is the eternal judge and arbiter of our most serious games and arguments.

  “Goddamn kids, stop screwing around and set your racers on the tracks! Helpers, put out the sugar!” Diosdado thunders in his rum-soaked bass, an incongruously deep tone for someone as short and thin as him, while he hobbles over on his bullwood crutch.

  “Josué, guess what: Diosdado has a ‘hey, man’ body and a ‘yes, sir’ voice!” Evita whispers mischievously into my ear, clever as always. She plants a wet kiss on my cheek before adding, “I want Atevi to win. I know you named her after me.”