Condomnauts

by Yoss

  Nuria, the blue-eyed astrophysicist and Amaya’s former lover, is also our computer programmer, though Captain Berenguer himself could do a respectable job of it if he had to.

  I’m the only one with just one job. Condomnaut, and that’s it. No other technoscientific skills worth mentioning. So when there’s no Aliens around to make Contact with, and no need for unskilled assistance (like holding a hydraulic wrench while someone changes the gyroscope on an inertial engine), I can kick back and relax. Like now.

  It’s surprising how long a minute can stretch and how many things you can do in fifty seconds if you know every inch of the confined space on your ship. Just twenty seconds and I’m sitting in my armchair, safety mesh in place, pleasantly surrounded by the greenery of the ample onboard greenhouse-garden-gym. At forty-five seconds I’m joined by Rosalía, the trade economist and the second exobiologist on board (the first is Pau, our life-support tech, of course). A big blond, built square like a football linebacker, but very feminine—from what Jordi told me one night.

  I really have to work on my bisexuality. Or homosexuality. Lately I’ve really been noticing women. More than men, in fact. Sweet Jordi, forgive me. I promise to be better. If you give me lots of kisses.

  Come to think of it, could it be that I’m getting over my Karla-Rita complex? Or maybe I’m just turning into a hopeless gossip.

  “Josué, por Deu! I don’t know… how you can… stay so calm,” she gasps, still panting from the run, while fastening her seat’s safety mesh. “Did you catch the poison dig Amaya made at Gisela? And at Nuria, before? What an unbearable butch.”

  “We’re all on edge, what with one random jump after another coming up dry,” I try to excuse her. Keeping the peace. As an enemy, Amaya Serrat would be worse than Jordi Barceló.

  “If we don’t find something soon, the gravitic batteries won’t be the only things that need recharging.” Rosalía loves playing the alarmist, though when push comes to shove you can count on her calmness and professionalism. Besides, she’s got a nose for good trade deals.

  An unmistakable laxness in my body tells me the artificial gravity’s turned off, and mentally I count down: nine, eight…

  “Locating the Qhigarians or the extragalactics isn’t my problem,” I reply, trying to sound even-keeled, though jumps through hyperspace always get on my nerves a little. “When we find them, though, you’ll all get to rest easy while I’m out there sweating buckets.”

  … four, three…

  “Or out there pleasuring yourself.” The understudy exobiologist winks at me, perhaps remembering my recent encounter with the Evita Entity. And to think that for months I thought she was playing on Amaya’s team. I like her, but one time on night duty I had to reject her with all the diplomacy I could muster. I didn’t want to offend her, but two platonic relationships on one ship were more than I could handle. This bisexualism business has really complicated things for crews. Especially for me. Nobody has more complex complexes than I do. At least, that’s what it feels like, which amounts to the same thing. “Besides, what makes you think we can just sit around calmly waiting while you make Contact? Too much depends on your sexual and diplomatic abilities, condomnaut Josué Valdés.”

  … one, zero!

  Sometime back, in Rubble City, I read a description of hyperjumping in an old science fiction novel I’d gotten hold of. The guy who wrote it, Asinov or something, said that it felt funny, like suddenly being turned inside out.

  Not bad, coming from someone born in an era when they’d only gone as far as the moon, using antediluvian chemical combustion engines.

  Years ago, when my physicist “friend with benefits” Jaume Verdaguer tried to explain the hyperjump process, about which we actually know so little, he used a slightly different metaphor; he told me that the jump through hyperspace was like falling into yourself while doing a somersault. Clear as mud, right?

  The point is, every time I’ve had to go through it—and in my eight years as a Contact Specialist, I’ve done it thousands of times—that’s exactly how it’s felt: like my skin was trying to trade place with my guts, then suddenly jumping back into place, leaving everything still throbbing.

  It isn’t much fun, for all that hardened old space dogs brag about finding it invigorating, and especially stubborn ones even speculate that it rejuvenates their cells. But in the end, it’s a small price to pay for a form of travel that can almost instantaneously transport ships with tonnages in the tens of thousands for distances of hundreds of lightyears, you know.

  Over the past three weeks, though, I’ve started to think that I’ve simply gone through too much “falling into myself.”

  “Pau, Manu, and Rosalía—you’re on bridge duty until our next jump. General maintenance and recharging the gravitic batteries. The rest of the crew can visit the sensor chamber if you don’t have anything more urgent to do.” It’s Captain Berenguer’s voice, sounding tired.

  “This better not be the time we get lucky or I’ll miss it,” the trade economist complains, mischievously slapping me on the butt as we split up and head down different corridors.

  Some women just don’t understand that a man can tell them no.

  It’s our twenty-sixth day on an exhaustive search of the sector assigned to us by the great Miquel Llul, Radiants 2034 and 2035, and still coming up empty. More than four hundred jumps through hyperspace, hundreds of lightyears traveled, and zilch. Nada. The Qhigarian worldships that usually swarm almost every quadrant you go in the galaxy are conspicuously absent. Weird.

  And judging by the three radio beacons we’ve picked up when we’ve approached the neighboring sectors, the other vehicles in the Nu Barsa exploratory fleet are having as much luck as we are in the rest of the galaxy.

  There are currently 1,053 ships with hyperengines registered in the Catalan orbital habitat’s astroport, between corvettes, frigates, and cruisers. More than a thousand of them are engaged in this veritable Qhigarian hunt, with the aim of catching an extragalactic next. This is what I call an all-out effort.

  It’s a little scary to calculate the volume of trade this flurry of exploration has cost us. If we don’t find those extragalactics soon, the other human enclaves are going to start suspecting what we’re up to. Then Aliens, and if everybody gets in on it…

  We’re running a big risk. If anybody but us finds those extragalactics, the Nu Barsa economy could go into a tailspin before the end of the year.

  But if, on the other hand, one of our ships gets to them first, we could be the first living beings in the galaxy to travel beyond the Milky Way.

  One of our ships? What am I saying. It’s got to be the Gaudí that finds them, and me who makes First Contact. That way I’ll earn Catalan citizenship once and for all, get married to Nerys, and crush the hopes of that bastard Jürgen Nanobot and his little pet, Bitter Yotuel.

  “There’s 18,250 hyperjumps into the system, and not a single one out!” Amaya’s astonished voice greets me when I walk into the sensor chamber, where I also find Captain Berenguer, Nuria, Gisela, Rómulo, and Jordi petting Antares—as ginger, lazy, pampered, and busy purring as ever, in spite of the excitement in the air.

  “Who’s throwing the party?” the Captain thinks out loud, then asks, “How many planets?”

  “None, according to the catalog,” Nuria is quick to answer.

  “I’m going to look that up for confirmation,” Amaya adds distrustfully as she diligently consults first her computer, then her pandemonium of instruments. “But, Captain, I find it suspicious to see so many hyperjumps in. Our last leap may have thrown the sensors off. I’d better check the hypergraph. It’s more sensitive.”

  “Save it,” Nuria insists, checking a couple of data points over her former lover’s shoulder and pointing them out with retaliatory smugness. “The catalog isn’t wrong. Gamma Hydri is a triple star; the gravitational tides must be complex and constant; there was never any chance for a protoplanetary nebula to form in this system. Your instruments
are working properly.”

  “But not a single ship shows up in the telescopes or on the gravimeter,” Amaya protests weakly. “Could it be… ?” And after a couple of quick manipulations, she triumphantly announces, “It turns out the catalog sometimes does make mistakes after all. There is a planet. And it’s a big one. It’s a solitary, at one of the system’s Lagrange points. I’m running a spectrograph analysis on it now… Wow, this is strange. It’s nearly the diameter of our Jupiter, but it’s more than 90 percent metal! A real treasure. Too bad we won’t have time to stake a claim on it.”

  “True—but there shouldn’t be a planet there at all,” Captain Berenguer points out in turn, intrigued. “Nuria’s right: it’s almost impossible for a planet to develop spontaneously in a triple system.”

  “It could be a rogue planet,” Jordi speculates thoughtfully, still stroking his ginger tabby. “There aren’t many of them in this zone, but if the star only captured it recently, it wouldn’t show up in the catalog.”

  “Captured? Nuh-uh. It would have been attracted straight into one of the three stars and burnt up in its corona. You know how slim the odds are that a wandering planet—and a metal one, too!—could fall exactly into one of the Lagrange points of a triple system? And then happily remain there, if it didn’t have an active course-correction system?” Amaya furiously brushes off his idea, completely in agreement for one fleeting instant with her former lover, Nuria.

  “Negligible,” the captain declares, then adds, raising his voice, “Pau. Leave the battery recharging for later. Manu. Activate inertial thrusters. Amaya will send you the coordinates.” Then, looking at us all, he concludes in a worried tone, “I suspect this isn’t a planet, but a bunch of Qhigarian worldships. No other species has so many. Or so much metal. So I greatly fear they’ve already learned the secret of the intergalactic hyperengine. I think they’re gathering here, planning to use what they learned to escape the galaxy. All of them, all at once. And if there are 20,410 known worldships on record, I’d say we got here just in time.”

  “Less than one kilometer to docking. Approach is normal,” I transmit after checking the telemeter on my space suit. I float without activating the jets; the minimal gravity intrinsic to the giant conglomeration of thousands of Qhigarian worldships is enough to attract me slowly toward the open airlock, the coordinates of which were almost reluctantly given to us by the Unworthy Pupils only a few minutes ago. Made of some translucent material, it’s practically invisible against the starry background. “Amaya, you copy?”

  “Perfectly, there’s no interference at all. You know they don’t have to use radio waves and they don’t trust field technology. That airlock must be completely transparent to electromagnetic waves,” Amaya replies. She’s my remote Contact operator today, praise Shangó. As a little hologram on my helmet visor, she smiles as if ready to instill all the confidence I need in me. “Josué, I really do wish you luck. You’re a good guy. If only you were a woman… Well, nobody’s perfect, right?”

  “Then I’d be heterosexual.” I parry her joke, sticking out my tongue. “We could have been the couple of the millennium, but as things stand, impossible.”

  “¡Viva la tolerancia! We’ll talk it over in my cabin after you get back.” Amaya keeps the joke going with a wink. “But for now, heads up, you’re almost there.”

  On my final approach to the inlet hatch for the titanic Qhigarian complex, I break my momentum with a brief flaring of my initial engines and alight on the threshold of the lock.

  One more tiny jump, which in this microgravity takes only a quick flex of my muscles, and I’m inside.

  The hatch, made of the same translucent material as the rest of the airlock, seals quickly and silently behind my back as soon as I advance a few meters across the nearly invisible material, to which the magnetic soles of my boots nonetheless adhere perfectly well.

  Wow. A metallic plastic? It’s going to turn out these Qhigarians are also experts at polymers. Did they inherit that from their Taraplin mentors, along with almost everything else? Or maybe they picked it up from trading with the Furasgans, who have a reputation for being good chemists.

  The sensors in my suit tell me there’s enough external pressure for me to take off my helmet. I do so. I don’t take off my translation earphones, though. Qhigarians have an almost morbid curiosity in every language they run across, including our universal translation software. That’s weird for a telepathic species, isn’t it? Also weird that they have as many spoken languages as they do worldships.

  Yes, there are plenty of odd things about these Unworthy Pupils of the Wise Creators.

  As was to be expected, the air has the “previously used” smell typical of something that’s been recycled a thousand times. It must have passed through the breathing sacs of billions of Qhigarians before it got to my lungs. But as if to make up for that, its oxygen content is slightly higher than that on Earth.

  Once more it occurs to me that Quim Molá didn’t have such a hard time of it on that mythical First Contact when he got the hyperengines. Almost humanoid, breathing nearly terrestrial air. Lucky Catalan devil.

  I keep moving forward. One lone man, wearing an ultraprotect suit but holding his helmet under his arm, walking to make Contact through a small patch of atmosphere trapped between nearly invisible walls, beyond which stretches the vacuum of space. The daily grind, in other words.

  To my left, the three stars of the Gamma Hydri system, intent on their endless ballroom dance. Ahead of me, the immense sphere made from the agglutination of thousands upon thousands of enormous Qhigarian worldships. They’ve got 20,034 here already, and more keep arriving every minute. If Captain Berenguer is right and they’re just waiting until they’re all together in one place before they take off, I’d better hurry.

  This Contact will be admirably brief.

  A vague shadow approaching from the other end of a long series of translucent partitions, which open as it reaches them and close as it passes through. Here comes my partner for the day.

  Now I get the usual sweating, itching, and trembling. I was wondering when it would start.

  What’ll it be like? I’ve made Contact with Qhigarian worldships a dozen times in my career, and I’ve met with almost everything, from a worm with a huge composite eye and ten pairs of vestigial legs to blue humanoids with scales in continuous motion, and between them there was a sort of blind, fuzzy bear with just six limbs. There were two of the bears, now that I think of it…

  The worst was the starfish-octopus with the slimy tentacles all covered with eyes. Hope I don’t get that one today.

  I can see it now. Purple, a little smaller than me, central body, multiple extremities branching out through bifurcation, covered with eyes, doesn’t touch the ground. That would explain the microgravity. Shit.

  My luck’s run out. It is that thing. The most disgusting symbiosis you can imagine, a starfish joined to a slimy octopus, nearly six meters from tip to eye-encrusted tentacle tip.

  “God damn fucking shit,” I mumble, annoyed.

  “What is it, some new form?” Amaya’s holographic image, now projected directly in the air before my eyes, frowns with worry. “Calm down, Cubanito, your heart is racing. Listen, Josué, if the translation software doesn’t recognize its language, I can always call on the full processing power of the ship’s central computer to help you out.”

  It’s good to feel like someone has your back at times like this, even at a distance.

  “No,” I sigh, resigned. “It won’t be necessary. It’s not a new morphology. Not new at all.”

  Nerys might have enjoyed it, I guess. After all, it looks like an aquatic form.

  But as for me—yuck! We all have a right to our own preferences, don’t we?

  I remember Contact with the last little fucker like this as one of the most difficult, most disgusting I’ve ever experienced. Lacking any sexual orifices of its own, the damn “Unworthy Pupil” spent the whole time slowly coiling its myriad
slimy, bifurcating ocular tentacles all over my body, and not just on the outside. Good thing its mucus serves as a lubricant, because otherwise I would have gotten hemorrhoids and esophagitis at a minimum. That’s right, a Contact Specialist’s job isn’t always a pleasant one.

  But the automatic translator clearly understands its language. At least that’s something.

  “Hello. Josué, human ship Antoni Gaudí, Nu Barsa. We wish to negotiate trajectory coordinates of extragalactics,” I say, trying to be as concise as possible to make it easier on the translation software, which turns my words into a cacophonous series of squeaks and chirps, like a cricket making sweet love to a high-tension wire.

  The tentacular creature gently moves its multiple eye-encrusted arms with a certain ethereal grace that sort of reminds me of a patch of seaweed stirred by a slight current.

  And here comes the second storm of click-squeaks: “Valaurgh-Alesh-23, worldship Margall-Kwaleshu, Qhigarian. Barter-deal, offer, what?” The sentences come over my earphones in the usual twisted and mutilated syntax. This is the best the automatic translator can do: plain verbs, no prepositions, no conjunctions. And in an incongruent soprano pitch.

  I’ll have to remind Nuria, who programmed the translator, that dubbing a purple octopus with a porn star’s voice doesn’t sweeten the bitter draft of making Contact with it.

  At least this isn’t the same octostar as last time, or it might think I like playing this game.

  “Deuterium 180 tons and tritium 120 tons,” I toss back to Valaurgh-Alesh-23, in order to impress it with how much fusion fuel we are offering, and to maintain my advantage I immediately follow with, “Do we proceed?”

  “Material no-proceed.” The “no” sounds worse in this voice. “Deal no-interest.”

  Amaya makes no comment, but her clenched teeth and furrowed brow show more clearly than a thousand words that she wasn’t expecting such a clean refusal, either.