by Yoss
I tremble, just thinking of what that might possibly mean. Diosdadito blazes red and violet on the ceiling, reflecting my worries.
But no. Think positive. That’s another essential for being a good condomnaut. With an almost physical effort, I push all thoughts about the asshole Alien Drifters and their thousands of shapes and worldships out of my head. I manage to crack a reasonably nonchalant smile, and my sensitive biovort dials its color back to pure sky blue.
“You must have misheard,” I speculate, standing at my apartment’s door. “Anyway, however it turns out, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“We’ll cross it, Josué. We will cross it,” Narcís says emphatically, waddling over after saying goodbye to my pet, who glows a happy red. If it were a dog, I’m sure it would be wagging its tail now. Its lack of selectivity is so inappropriate for a companion animal. Especially such an expensive one.
Maybe I should find myself a cat, like Antares.
“I thought you said you just retired,” I tease. Locking the DNA-controlled door behind us, we step onto the slow, narrow moving pathway that takes us to the much faster moving hallway outside.
“Did you think Cheapskate Miquel would let me go, just like that?” My enormous friend shrugs comically, and, as we are in a bit of a rush, we walk at a brisk pace on the building’s internal transport system, which does barely two kilometers an hour through the wide vestibule. “I had to make a couple of concessions, buddy. But I came out ahead: I’ll still be working for the powerful Department of Contacts, except I’ll be a consultant. And for this mission, I’m afraid they’re going to need all my experience and advice.”
A teenager from the second floor steps out of the elevator, recognizes me, and (staring at my outfit, a cheap imitation of which he will wear tomorrow to impress his friends) calls me by first name.
I don’t respond, just as I didn’t respond to Narcís, but not because I’m playing the big star.
I’m simply concentrating on the semiacrobatic feat of stepping quickly from the building’s slow walkway to the outer belt of the public Rambla Móvil, which does five kilometers an hour, an average pedestrian’s speed.
A great invention, these moving sidewalks, though people always complain the maintenance costs a fortune. But at least in this exclusive residential neighborhood, Ensanche Nuovo, one of the most expensive in Nu Barsa, they run like clockwork.
Narcís and I advance almost mechanically, with scarcely a second between transitions, from the outer belt to the innermost ones on the Rambla Móvil. Each belt runs five kilometers an hour faster than the last. The last one, in the center, moves at a respectable fifty kilometers an hour, with double grab rails on posts every four meters. We find one to hold on to, just in case, and in less than two minutes we reach the maglev monorail terminal. Hardly moving a muscle. Viva New Barcelona. Viva la technology.
Narcís and I wait silently on the maglev platform for the next car to arrive. Just takes ninety seconds. It isn’t rush hour; it’s never rush hour in the enclave, especially not in Ensanche Nuovo. The artificial sun above the enclave goes through a twenty-four-hour brightness cycle, but it never turns off, and good planning has divided the habitat’s population into three shifts for work and time off.
We get on and, as we’re the only passengers on the sleek, swift car, we take advantage of one of our privileges as Contact Specialists to key in a top priority destination, turning the already fast public transportation system into our own private superexpress train.
Having no need now to turn aside or stop at any other platforms, the AI controlling the maglev readily accelerates and after a few hundred meters hits eight hundred kilometers an hour. Not its top velocity, just normal cruising speed. We’re in a rush, but it’s no emergency.
The car has no windows. Enormous panoramic holoscreens equipped with dizziness filters allow us to enjoy the outside view perfectly well, without running the risk of motion sickness from looking directly at the blurred landscape rushing past.
As in old Barcelona on Earth, here, too, the Catalans have built an enviable transportation network. This organizing business comes easily to them, almost like with the Germans, I’m told.
Hopefully I’ll get to visit Neue Heimat someday and find out for myself. See if that conceited ass Jürgen Schmodt wasn’t exaggerating when he bragged about his home planet.
Our destination, the Central del Govern, administrative heart of Nu Barsa, is a dense cluster of towers (red and gold, of course: Viva Catalonia!) visible in the distance. So tall that, if it were on Earth, Gaudí’s original Sagrada Familia would look like a chunky stump next to them.
In fact, the complex includes a replica of the great basilica that once symbolized historic Barcelona. Twice the original size, yet still dwarfed by its sleek descendants.
Catalans feel such reverence for their brilliant Catholic architect, there must be at least six replicas of Park Güell in Nu Barsa. And I’ve counted like fifteen Casas de la Pedrera. Not to mention the hyperjump frigate I serve on, named after him. I wouldn’t be surprised if any day now they present the New Vatican with a petition to beatify and canonize him. If they haven’t done so already. Saint Gaudí—got a ring to it, you know.
The lightweight, highly resistant carbon-tubule internal structures of these graceful gold and scarlet towers (heraldic colors of the historical Counts of Barcelona), plus the Algolese gravitic systems that control them, allow them to rise as high as ten kilometers in some areas. The skeletal buildings are interconnected by countless bridges and walkways, like an elegant oversized tribute to the Metropolis of twentieth-century director Fritz Lang’s visionary film.
It’s such an impressive sight, I sometimes forget that Nu Barsa, like most human colonies beyond the Solar System, isn’t an authentic planet but an artificial habitat.
In other words, a space station. But what a station!
Neither Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, nor Robert Goddard, nor Lynn Poole, nor Wernher Von Braun, nor Arthur C. Clarke, nor any of the other daring pioneers of astronautics or of science fiction who fantasized wildly in the twentieth century, imagining orbital rings, excavated asteroids, and a variety of other permanent human habitats in space, ever conceived of a structure this immense.
I savor once more the magnificence of the spectacle. There’s a reason it’s so expensive to live here.
The small asteroids containing the force field and the artificial sun, a triad of barely visible black spots at the zenith, surrounding the constant fusion blaze of our “pocket star,” are exactly fifty kilometers up in the sky.
Not technically sky, but whatever. What matters is that the volume under the “roof” is not only big enough to holoproject a full sky but for genuine water vapor clouds to form and float overhead, along with helicopters, turbocopters, gravimobiles, and all sorts of aerial vehicles, and plenty of room to spare.
The “ground” is a simple layer, two or three meters thick, of organic topsoil over an expansive force field that knits together the dozen or so small asteroids containing the generators. All Algolese technology. We use it even though we don’t understand the mathematics behind it, and our physicists swear up and down that no Unified Field Theory is possible.
Well, our physicists haven’t exactly been the most brilliant ones in the universe lately. We treat Algolese “gravitic witchcraft” pretty much like we do the Taraplin hyperengines that the Qhigarians sell us: nobody is dumb enough not to use it just because we can’t understand it.
From edge to edge, the huge Catalan orbital enclave measures almost five hundred kilometers across. So, using the simple formula for the area of a circle, pi times the radius squared, that makes…
How much? I’m not up to doing it in my head, and I don’t feel like distracting the monorail’s AI with trivia. Let’s say, about two hundred thousand square kilometers. That’s the figure the authorities on this gigantic archology always bandy about when they’re showing it off to their generally stunned visitors
.
Perfect Caribbean dimensions. Somewhat larger than my own native island, or a little smaller than all the Antilles put together.
A real space island, floating in one of the Lagrange points around Pi y Margall, a yellow dwarf in Radian 457, Quadrant 12, invisible from Earth and with only three planets—all gas giants with no satellites, and therefore absolutely inappropriate for colonization. That’s the only reason the greedy Arctians allowed us to occupy this system for a modest sum, and even let us rename its primary after the Catalan statesman, even though it lies well within their sphere of influence.
Zipping over on the monorail, the only thing that reminds us we’re on a man-made orbital habitat and not a planet is the uncanny flatness of the horizon.
Nu Barsa isn’t the largest human orbital enclave; that would be Commonwealth, belonging to the Anglo-Indo-Australo-Jamaicans, which orbits Bannard, a star much closer to Earth. It measures 750 kilometers in diameter and has seventy kilometers of “sky with atmosphere” from ground to zenith.
Once again I reflect that, while we humans may have conquered space thanks to the Aliens, especially the extinct Taraplins, their generous Qhigarian heirs, and their marvelous hyperengines, it’s also true (and I can’t help but feel proud at the thought) that we couldn’t have done it without the selfless hard work of Contact Specialists such as Narcís and myself.
No technology available to humanity in the twenty-second century would have made it possible for us to construct a space archology as enormous and as distant from the Solar System as this one—or, for that matter, even to transport the eleven million Catalans and the four million representatives of other nationalities who live here today. Especially not in such short order.
Thank goodness for Algolese gravity tech. And Arctian high-efficiency biorecycling systems and many more Alien technologies, without which humanity might be nothing but a sad memory today, just another line on the long galactic list of extinct civilizations, starting with the Taraplins. A list dutifully maintained by their Qhigarian heirs.
Likewise, the Russians, Canadians, Brazilians, South Africans, Japanese, and Germans—the only nations that have managed to either buy (at very steep prices) or discover and then occupy planets that are more or less terraformable—could never have reached their new and very distant worlds of Rodina, New Thule, Nova Saudade, Krugerland, Amaterasu, and Neue Heimat, were it not for the Taraplin-designed hyperjump engines sold by those same Qhigarians.
Well. Narcís fell asleep. Par for the course when he rides the monorail. And now he’s snoring up a storm.
I, for my part, am staring absentmindedly at the panoramic holoscreen, watching woodlands, towns, lakes, and fields stream past. It almost seems natural to think about travel when you’re moving this fast through a habitat as impressive as Nu Barsa.
After an impasse that lasted nearly a century and a half (due to the Five Minute War, among other things), the second and most dazzling stage of the human adventure in space began. It got started by sheer chance, as is often the case. One fortunate day, May 19, 2154, the distinguished Catalan astronaut Joaquim Molá was on a one-man exploratory mission for the European Union, looking for water-ice comets in the Oort cloud, when he made First Contact with an Alien species.
Or it might be more accurate to say that it all started when the wily Quim got the first twenty-five hyperjump engines ever acquired by humanity from the Qhigarians in exchange for nothing more than his cat and a Catalan–Spanish–English dictionary. (The cat, by the way, was named Aldebaran, according to his log; apparently it was already a custom back them to give Arabic star names to the cats that ships kept as pets and mascots.) This was probably the most profitable and providential trade anyone’s heard of since the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Indians for twenty-two dollars.
Nobody denies that cats are the best mascots a ship could have, as Antares reminds me every time I travel. So maybe the Qhigarians didn’t make such a bad deal in the long run. Not to mention that the Catalan–Spanish–English dictionary must have been a real gem for them; they’re completely obsessed with learning new languages. They’re still trying to talk us into selling them our most current translation software. No deal, of course: that is our main trump card for making Contact.
Still, every time I think about that episode, I don’t know why, but it brings to mind that old joke about how copper wire was invented: two Catalans picked up a one-peseta coin at the same time, and they each tugged on it, both refusing to let go.
Molá was a sharp negotiator and a hero for all humanity, yet he is nonetheless despised as nearly a traitor and a flaming idiot, both in the reduced remnant of old Catalonia on Earth and in this flourishing Catalan enclave of Nu Barsa.
I can understand. Every self-respecting Catalan must get angry at the thought that their fellow countryman could have kept them all of those precious hyperengines for his own people instead of giving (not even selling!) twenty of them to the rest of humanity. Then they’d probably be living on an entire planet of their own, New Catalonia, and not this orbital habitat. Sure, it’s a big habitat, but pitifully limited.
The rest of the human race would have had to pay the Catalans for the rights to use the Taraplin-Qhigarian hyperengine, just as now they pay the Russians for the high-efficiency biorecyclers they got from the Arctians. Otherwise, fuck them.
Whether or not Quim Molá was a traitor, we humans were very lucky.
In what had looked like our darkest hour—not long after the terrible Five Minute War between China and North America in 2136, with the consequent radioactive contamination, entire cities completely wiped out or partially destroyed (including Madrid and Barcelona, by the way), and even worse, the catastrophic climate change that followed, with floods and droughts unleashing the worst famine in history and reducing the swarming population of seven billion in less than a decade to a scant, starving nine hundred million—just when it seemed like a Solar System with no colonizable planets would be our grave, the Aliens and their new technologies opened up the Galaxy to us.
And today, almost five decades later, on the brink of the twenty-third century, if we play our cards right, other Aliens—this time, extragalactic—may open up the entire Universe.
The maglev car begins to decelerate. Too soon, it seems. The heart of the city, the Central del Govern, which old Catalans prefer to call El Govern, the complex of tall buildings from which Nu Barsa is run, is just beginning to come into focus, still kilometers away.
“Impressive, isn’t it, Josué?” The change of velocity wakes Narcís, who guesses what I’m thinking. Not too hard to do, as I’m staring at the majestic spectacle of the distant stylized towers and suspension bridges we’re heading for.
The labyrinthine yet elegant Central buildings defy the artificial gravity generated underneath the enclave, spreading their almost calligraphic filigree across woodlands, fields, rivers, even lakes. Narcís gazes at them and sighs, contented. “Every time I ask myself why the devil I have so many more Alien than human females on my list of sexual partners, I look at all this and, knowing it’s our home because of people like me, I feel… let’s say, rewarded.” He yawns, settling comfortably on the wide double seat of the maglev car, which his monumental backside fills almost entirely.
Once more he’s managed to make his words sound as they’re imbued with a genuine spirit of sacrifice. Well, after all, he may really feel that way.
So all I say is, “Yes, it’s a lovely habitat. Hopefully I’ll soon be one of its proud and happy citizens.” And I hold back the rest of my comments.
A second later my friend is snoring again, placid as an angel.
I watch him. It’s funny: every time I try to imagine this adipose mass, Narcís, having sexual relations with any living creature, whether it’s an Alien female or his own heroic wife, my brain simply blocks me.
His remarkable success as a condomnaut is the greatest mystery in the Department of Contacts. He takes the job with such a quiet sense of duty,
it simply leaves no room for anything else. Libido during Contact? Don’t even dream of it. Asexual Narcís, some sardonically call him. Behind his back, of course. You don’t make a joke like that to the face of someone who weighs in at 300 kilos, even if it’s not exactly all muscle.
The gossips also speculate, half as a joke and half seriously, that Narcís Puigcorbé owes the many profitable trade deals he’s achieved in the course of his brilliant career to the fact that the Alien Contact Specialists wanted to recognize his boundless goodwill, or that they felt sorry for his incompetence as a lover. Or both.
Because as to being a good person, few are in his league. In the orgasm department, however, most doubt that he even felt one when he fathered his children with his wife. Much less gave her one.
To be sure, one of those mocking skeptics—I’m almost ashamed to admit this—is me. Perhaps because he’s never propositioned me, or reacted to my subtle provocations.
Well, let’s not exaggerate. I’m even ready to accept that he and Sonya must enjoy it, at least a little, because they have two sons. Besides, if they didn’t…
Thing is, without sexual pleasure, however twisted it may be, our profession is simply unimaginable.
I’m standing as I’ve done so often and watching the fake Montjuïc in the distance. One of these days I really should get myself together and go there. I’ve been saying this for years. It’s a fairly faithful copy of the original. Barcelona was defined, before the Five Minute War, as a city lying between the sea and the mountain. But it would have been too expensive and fruitless to try and create a convincing replica of the Mediterranean in the enclave. Farmland and pastureland, which alternate like a patchwork quilt in the distance, were much more necessary. You can’t feed fifteen million inhabitants on nothing but hydroponics. Not to mention that the weight of so much water on the force field under the “ground” might have overtaxed the gravity generators, Algolese tech and all.
The best deal that nostalgic environmentalists could cut with the engineers, cattle raisers, and farmers was to install the beautiful string of ponds I see stretching to the horizon.
