Condomnauts Page 6

  Talk to me about colorful fish? What?

  And cojons? I think that’s Catalan.

  Stop right there. Karlita never would have said that. Tubs didn’t speak Catalan.

  That had to be… that is… Narcís. Yes. Narcís Puigcorbé. A sight for sore eyes.

  I’m not eight, I’m twenty-three. This isn’t Rubble City, it’s Nu Barsa.

  I got you, subconscious. Dream’s over for today.

  I emerge from my deep slumber with a long groan of relief. I wake up, as I always have for the past few years, on my stomach, my hands clenched as if grasping something. If I didn’t sleep floating naked on an antigrav board, my fingers would now be tightening around my bedclothes as if to strangle them.

  I had to buy this overpriced Algolese bed to keep from spending a fortune constantly replacing the mattresses, pillows, sheets, and covers I shredded night after night. And to keep from waking up drenched in my own sweat. Now the droplets float weightlessly around me. Nice.

  But I think there’s a lot fewer drops today than other nights. That’s progress.

  Enough to raise my hopes I may get over it in the near future.

  Let’s say, optimistically, at some point in the next two thousand years.

  A few centimeters from my face, my Catalan condomnaut friend’s enormous humanity is squeezed into a twenty-inch hologram. I watch him gesticulating impatiently at my door.

  It’s just nine in the morning. Disgusting.

  The AI that controls my home has instructions to wake me at this ridiculous hour only if one of three people is calling or visiting: Nerys, my mermaid girlfriend; Miquel Llul, the feared head of the Nu Barsa Department of Contacts; and this fat fellow with the heart of gold, or his wife, Sonya.

  “Coming, damn it, you elephantine early riser,” I grumble. Then I yawn, lazily turning over to enjoy the effect of the gesture in weightlessness. “Whatever you’re bringing better be really important.”

  “Cojons, Josué, don’t be such a fucking narcissist. Wrap up your damn exercises. At this rate, you won’t get to the Central del Govern till the day after tomorrow,” Narcís says while stuffing his face, as he does whenever he has half a chance.

  This time he’s eating pork tamales. Not the slop that pops out of the autochef (a German invention, of course; when were there ever any good German chefs?), but real tamales that I made myself. In a real kitchen. Following the old Rubble City recipe.

  “You people don’t know anything about punctuality, but man, you sure know how to cook!” my friend says with his mouth full, polishing off the last tamale.

  Ymala, who taught me how to make them, died when she was ten. Broncodust.

  “Chill, Fats,” I mutter, absorbed in finishing my last series of bench presses with the variable gravity bar, now set to a respectable 115 kilos. “Gimme time… After all… it’s officially just… five minutes since… I got the… urgent call… Won’t look good if… I get there first… now, will it?”

  Allergic to anything that smells like physical exertion, the expansive Catalan condomnaut looks on with visceral disapproval as, bathed in sweat, I replace the ingenious device on its stand. “I don’t know why you insist on this nonsense, Cubanito,” he points out, again. “At your age, with your complexion and your undernourished past, and refusing to use steroids, you’ll never have a hot bod or win Mr. Nu Barsa. So what’s the point?”

  “It helps me… to think,” I only half-lie to him, as I lie on the bench doing pec flies with the variable gravity dumbbells, dialed down to a manageable twenty kilos.

  In Rubble City, since I was the age when any boy with an imagination aspires to grow up to be a brawny he-man and look like a superhero (for example, like that nasty, unbearable, but delicious specimen of masculinity, Jordi Barceló), I dreamed of having a set of gym equipment like this.

  My set of ultratech variable gravity bars handily replaces a roomful of traditional weights while taking up much less space. They’re superlight when turned off, so I can take them with me almost anywhere. The only drawback, for a poor kid from Rubble City, is that like all sophisticated devices, especially those that use Alien technologies such as Algolese gravity control, they’re almost a hundred times more expensive.

  So one of the first things I did when I became a Contact Specialist in Nu Barsa eight years ago and got my first credit chip was to run out and make a childhood dream come true by buying this superadvanced gym set.

  It isn’t totally wrong to say exercise helps me to think. Mainly to think about how far I’ve come since I was a starving brat on the streets of Rubble City, CH. And about how much it cost me to get here and how far I’ll go to keep this life. And acquire more stuff, if I can.

  On the other hand, it’s true that I’ll never look like the third officer of the hyperjump frigate Antoni Gaudí, much less like the professional bodybuilders he used to work out with. Human mounds of genetic privilege, two hundred kilos of pure muscle and barely 5 percent body fat, sweating and panting in the enclave’s gyms, metabolisms so altered by hormone and steroid cocktails that they rarely live to see the age of sixty.

  I’ll pass. But I’m not planning on becoming a flabby mass like my elephantine friend Puigcorbé, either. And if it sounds like I’m making a big deal of his weight, well… yeah. I am. Can’t help it. That’s how it is. Like, I love the guy, but I’m not blind: he’s fat. Gargantuan. And it’s his own doing. Not like Kar—eh, best to not think about her, after that nightmare.

  Narcís has one major advantage, though: as my friend, he’s exempt from the category of “fucking whale,” which is what I call everybody with a BMI over 35.

  In my mind only. I’m not so suicidal as to call them that to their faces. Some obese guys are surprisingly strong. Hot-tempered, too. Potential threats to the health of anyone who rashly reminds them of their condition.

  Well, let them kill me—if they can catch me, because I can sure outrun them. But that doesn’t change a basic fact: I’ll never be like them. I’d rather die than let my body go.

  No, I’m planning to retire someday and enjoy life.

  I’m not making this up. To be a condomnaut, you don’t necessarily have to be a muscle freak or a gymnast or an expert in martial arts, but you should be able to control your own body—especially the body parts that bodybuilders, gymnasts, and martial arts masters tend to neglect.

  To be a condomnaut, you don’t necessarily have to be a muscle freak or a gymnast or an expert in martial arts, but you should be able to control your own body—especially the body parts that body builders, gymnasts, and martial arts masters tend to neglect.

  Nothing wrong with looking fantastic, of course.

  “¡Completo Camagüey!” I pant, marking the end of my exercise routine with a Cuban phrase that must have already been ancient when I heard it from the grown-ups back in Rubble City, though I never really understood what it meant. “Listen, if you’re all that impatient, why don’t you play with Diosdadito for a while. Just leave me alone. I need a couple of minutes to take a shower and get dressed, and then we’ll go. Bet I’ll get there at practically the same time as everyone else, but unlike them I’ll be… ”

  “… fresh and unstressed, right?” Narcís finishes my sentence for me. Then he smiles and raises his colossal right arm toward the ring of magnetic fields that runs around the entire perimeter of my apartment, a couple of inches from the ceiling. That’s the energy cage of my biovort, Diosdadito. “You’re a calculating scoundrel, Josué. You not just scheming to make Miquel think you’re always ready for anything; you also don’t want anyone to suspect you were tipped off due to my good ear and exceptional deductive abilities,” he says with false modesty, while the approach of his biofield sends my pet scurrying to investigate, with a fabulous display of colors. “Cojons, I love your creature. What a pity you refuse to sell it to me—it’s always so affectionate.”

  Sell it? Dream on. Not even to Narcís, my best friend.

  That is, unless I have to face s
ome catastrophe. Such as not having my contract renewed, which would make my economic situation go downhill, fast.

  A biovort—short for biovortex—is a small creature composed of energy. Biovorts live in the coronas of a handful of rare stars in the Milky Way. Though not rational beings, they are among the very few plasma-based life forms, or lifelike forms, that exist. So their price is literally astronomical. So high that I never could have allowed myself to own one, except that a certain Kigran was so satisfied by my performance during Contact that she decided to give me an extra gift for my skill and dedication to interspecies fraternity. This was in spite of our brutal difference in size: her, more than three hundred meters long; me, just under five foot seven tall.

  With my usual amalgam of nostalgia and guilt, I named my plasmic gift “Diosdadito” in honor of the old babalawo from my Rubble City childhood. It cost me an arm and a leg to set up a containment system inside my apartment to safely hold a creature that could vaporize the whole building in an instant if ionized gas were to escape from one of its magnetic branches. But the truth is, it really impresses my visitors, the way it darts across the ceiling and puts on spectacular shows of shifting shapes and colors. Too bad I can’t pet it like Antares. All the same, it’s proof of how well things are going for me. Quite the status symbol.

  And it really helped me impress that materialist, Nerys.

  Exobiologists tell me that some biovorts even come to recognize their owners. So I still have hopes that one of these years Diosdadito will stop offering its dazzling displays of pleasure to every stranger who pops by (even if it’s a regular visitor, such as Nerys or Narcís and his wife Sonya) and reserve all or at least most of its affections for its master. What’s the point of having a pet, whatever its price, if not only you’re unable to touch it, but it’s not even going to pay you any special attention?

  “It definitely likes you, Narcís. One of these days I’m going to go crazy and, forget about selling it, I’ll give it to you. But back to what we were saying: man, I still don’t believe a bit of what you told me,” I reply from the bathroom, pulling off my gym shorts.

  I show off my muscles in the mirror, then run my fingers over my face, content. In spite of all the recent (and costly!) plastic surgery I’ve had done to get rid of my childhood scars from Rubble City (acne, insect bites), I’m still no Adonis. Especially not in Nu Barsa, one of the epicenters of beauty in the Human Sphere, where few people die without ever retouching the body and face that Mother Nature gave them.

  But with these biceps and deltoids, which Yamil would have died for, and the dreadlocks I’ve been patiently cultivating for the past few years, at least nobody will call me “Zero” now.

  Also, the light skin that drove me to despair in my childhood is perfectly normal here.

  Yes, I’ve left all my childhood traumas behind. Except one. From which I make my living.

  I step into the shower, leaving the door ajar so I can keep talking to Narcís—and keep enjoying my pet’s amazing color show.

  I turn on my sophisticated Tornado shower system, which immediately surrounds me with rotating jets, shooting ten times more water at my body in one minute than I could have consumed in a whole month in Rubble City.

  Who cares if the water, like almost everything else in this enormous habitat, has been recycled a thousand times? Point is, I get to use as much as I want. And the massage feels so good.…

  “What is it you don’t believe?” Narcís asks from the living room.

  I raise my voice in the midst of the aquatic storm to answer, “I don’t believe you’re going to retire, and I especially don’t believe Aliens have finally appeared from beyond the Milky—”

  “Shush, Josué!” paranoid Narcís whisper-shouts, scaring Diosdadito who frenetically pulsates purple and Prussian blue, transforming from its usual round shape into a sort of electric serpent, its demented angles zigzagging throughout the apartment at top speed. “In Nu Barsa, and in the home of a foreign condomnaut freelancer, the walls may have ears. Prudent Miquel doesn’t even trust us Catalans; imagine someone like you! But, hey, would you really give it to me?” He watches Diosdadito thoughtfully, letting his breath out in a pachydermic sigh. “Forget it. If I brought it home, Sonya would scream to high heaven—and toss me into the street, no doubt about it. Apart from the expense of installing all this magnetic fencing, with our boys it would be like letting an atomic bomb wander around the ceiling.” He shook his head and went on talking in his regular fat and happy baritone. “Well, it’s true, friend. Believe it or not, I did resign. I hung up my saber. Quit the whole shebang. I’m not a Contact Specialist anymore. Shit, I’m forty-two years old and I have two boys, aged five and three, you know, whose mother still manages to tell them lies about what their father really does for a living, but the truth is, they barely recognize me when they see me.”

  It’s true: some double standards refuse to die.

  It’s a tricky problem. There are still adults who haven’t figured out how to tell their kids what exactly it is we condomnauts do that makes us so famous and important. It’s especially hard when they’re your own kids, and you’re the guy who’s famous for, you know, doing nobody-really-wants-to-say-what. For all our sex appeal to some, for all our fame and money, the fact is, there still aren’t as many mixed marriages (between condomnaut and non-) as some people suppose.

  And as for the kids—let’s just say, I admire Narcís’s tenacity. But I feel more certain every day that I’ll never follow in his footsteps. I find it hard enough to justify what I do to myself.

  Of course, I never say any of this out loud. Narcís is my friend. But I figure he knows it as well as I do.

  “Yeah, Sonya’s a saint,” I agree, thinking about my friend’s wife, as tiny and quiet as he is fat and outgoing, but equally headstrong. I switch the Tornado from thick streams of water to comforting jets of heated air, which have me warm and dry in an instant.

  “She likes you, too, Josué—but she’ll still never agree to keep your energy pet in our home.” He brightens up and continues, radiating a sincere contentment that Diosdadito must be able to perceive clearly, because it glows a cheerful pink and green and returns to its spherical shape. “So I thought to myself, this business of waltzing all over the cosmos, willing and able to go to bed at any time with any Alien life form that might sell us some new appliance, was starting to feel like it wasn’t what had fascinated me at first. Maybe the time had come for me to devote myself to being a normal father and raising my kids without shameful secrets coming between us. And since I’ve saved enough for my family to live on for a few years, until I can find another profession, I put in for retirement. And there I was, signing the papers—retinal patterns, fingerprint scans, DNA, all the forms of ID they require for you to get your pension—when suddenly there’s all this excitement, everybody running around. I’ve never seen the office in such a state, or Impassive Miquel so animated. So I put two and two together, and started feeling as happy as a clam that it wasn’t my problem anymore. Then I remembered my little Cuban friend and zipped straight over to give you the news. It was as clear as could be that this could only mean one thing. Oh, and congratulations, by the way! I heard how well you did on your last Contact. The Evita Entity, eh? It isn’t every day you make Contact with a new telepathic, biotech, polymorph species.”

  “Thanks, not that I deserve it; it was sheer luck. And thanks for the tip, too, brother.” I emerge from the bath completely dry, perfumed, and talcum-powdered, but still naked (an old joke with my friend, who loftily ignores my attempts to seduce his massive self), and pat Narcís on his back, as broad as a buffalo’s.

  At ceiling level, thrilled with our harmonious friendliness, Diosdadito has now become a rapidly spinning ring, pulsating between sky blue and baby-chick yellow. If it were a cat it would be purring, I suppose. “Do you think one of our ships found them?” I ask, suddenly worried, as I put on my lavender-blue underwear.

  This color choice proba
bly would have earned me a stoning in Rubble City. Funny how when I was a kid in the Caribbean, which became one of the pioneering regions on Earth for gay and bi as the dominant patterns of sexuality, machismo still clung stubbornly to an antiquated notion of strict heterosexualism. Just like Jordi—before he got mixed up with me, that is.

  The biovort empathically picks up on the anxiety concealed behind my tone and turns olive green, taking on the vague shape of an anvil—not a bad imitation of a storm cloud.

  “My guess is, it was much ado about nothing. Or maybe just a rowdy office party,” Narcís reflects, trying to calm my pet and me at the same time.

  Pleased, I open my wardrobe and after a moment’s hesitation tug on a lavender-blue shirt and a spider-silk smartsuit, then put on a pair of autoadaptable shoes of Sirian dolphin leather (Sirius: Radian 167, Quadrant 14; best leather in the galaxy; too bad the Kigrans exploit it). My outfit is worth more than all of Rubble City put together.

  In this getup, and with only my Countdown collar for jewelry, nobody will mistake me for anything but what I am. Why hide it? Lots of people imitate us; in Nu Barsa, and throughout the Human Sphere, we Contact Specialists are the trendsetters, like movie stars and musicians used to be.

  “Just another wild goose chase, then. The gazillionth.” I breathe easier, closing my eyes, the better to luxuriate in the delicious sensation of sophisticated fabrics and expensive footwear adapting themselves millimeter by millimeter to my exact shape. Now I’m the one who’d be purring if he could. “Probably somebody saw, or thought they saw, yet again, the phantom extragalactic Aliens, or found traces of them, but they still haven’t made Contact. So I could still be a hero for Nu Barsa if I pull it off.”

  “Bravo for your spirit, Cubanito. But that may not be so easy.” Narcís’s qualms bring me down again. “I thought I heard the word ‘Qhigarians.’ If those polymorphic hoodwinking hobos are in on this… ”