by Yoss
To be sure, they’re teeming with edible fish. Catalans sure know how to squeeze every last drop of economic juice out of each little detail, even if it seems merely decorative.
Must be in their genes.
Whether or not his fellow Catalans despise him, I’ve always thought that Joaquim Molá was not only a good negotiator but a quick mind for grasping new situations, an imaginative improviser, and, fortunately, someone with few moral scruples, too.
Or a sexual pervert of such magnitude that he makes all of his enterprising heirs in the Nu Barsa Department of Contacts look tiny, regardless of which generation we are lumped with. Though it seems the Qhigarians on the ship with which Quim made Contact weren’t terribly different from us humans.
They had two arms and two legs, at any rate, and when you’re dealing with Contacts, that’s saying a lot.
Molá was also smart enough that, on his triumphant return to Earth minus one cat and one dictionary, but with the addition of the first twenty-five Taraplin hyperengines from the Qhigarians safely stowed in his storage room, he abstained from telling every last detail about the trade meeting in which he had obtained them.
It was only later on, when we were spreading out across space thanks to thousands of those engines, purchased one by one from the “generous” Qhigarians, and humanity was beginning to have more frequent and necessarily closer relations with the Galactic Community, that it became clear how Molá had sealed the deal with those first Qhigarians by…
The journalists of the day, as fond of euphemisms as they were of scandals, referred to it as “sleeping with” a crew member from the Alien ship.
Asked about it shortly thereafter by a famous satirical weekly, Molá said only that it hadn’t been all that difficult: a female’s a female, he told them, Qhigarian or human, and of course he had used a condom!
Many believe that the colloquial term for my trade comes from that brief admission by Quim.
Bad joke, right?
Well, just think of it as theory number 23,456 about the origin of our name. As valid as any of the previous 23,455 theories, in my humble opinion.
And as many more new theories have been thrown out since that time, you know.
The Protocol for First Contact has nothing to say about condoms or other such crudely physical protective barriers or filters.
The number of intelligent species found in the Milky Way comes to twenty-nine thousand so far. That is if we count the wide variety of beings that live on the Qhigarian worldships as belonging to a single species, contrary to the opinions of skeptical exobiologists. Otherwise the total would nearly double.
So if you bear in mind that the list continues to grow by several dozen new species a year (and the older species tell us, with relief, that centuries ago new Contacts numbered in the hundreds per year), such as my newfound Evita Entity, as well as that most of these new civilizations also set off to explore the galaxy in new directions, it’s easy to understand that finding ships, planets, colonies, or representatives of other intelligent species has come to be as unremarkable an event as meeting a neighbor on the moving walkway.
The importance of allowing the accepted norms to regulate such encounters should be obvious.
Much more ancient than humanity, and supposedly Taraplin in origin (since the Qhigarians insist that they inherited this curious custom from their mentors), the odd interspecies etiquette known as the Protocol for First Contact has been well received by almost all the sentient species in the Milky Way.
Briefly stated, here’s how it works: if you meet the representatives of an Alien species off in space for the first time—and if you want to make your peaceful intentions clear, in case some mutually advantageous trading might take place between your two kinds at some future date, as opposed to immediate mutual destruction—you show them that you decline to consider them Aliens, at least for a while.
In other words, you happily “sleep” with them. Or at least pretend you’re doing it happily. Even if afterward, paradoxically, you can’t sleep for days just thinking about it.
On the other hand, if you already know them and you want something from them, that’s simply a Contact, not a First Contact. That makes matters even simpler: whether it’s information, technology, merchandise, or anything else they have that you want, first you negotiate the deal, pay them with something they want—and then, you guessed it: it really helps keep the exchange flowing if you show them one more time that, at least for a while, you will cease to consider them Aliens. So in the name of goodwill and better trade relations present and future, you “sleep” with them, happily or not. Preferably while staying as wide awake as possible.
There’s obviously no rule against using nonbiological protective barriers; sometimes you have no choice but to turn to them, such as when your oxygen-based body has to get together with a fluorine-based life form. But aside from such extreme cases, anything as crude as a physical barrier or filter such as a condom is generally considered an unpleasant discourtesy, as well as evidence of the underdeveloped medical sciences in the culture whose representatives resort to such crude measures.
The Countdown, which only protects the integrity of your DNA, doesn’t count. Nor do immune system boosters or antiviral vaccines.
Which is good, because even with their use there have been more than a few condomnauts who’ve died in strict quarantine after coming down with strange sexually transmitted diseases, if that’s the right term for them. This was especially true during the early years of enthusiastic Contacts with the Galactic Community, before our immunologists were forced to become as expert as those of most other Alien species.
The leaders of the dozens of clashing factions into which the decimated human population of the twenty-second century was divided after the Five Minute War soon realized that the Protocol for Contacts, whether Taraplin in origin or not, made it so that the species with better command of biology would almost always gain the lion’s share in any trade. Oxygen-based life forms who could “naturally” modify not only their anatomy but their body chemistry would have an indisputable advantage over others with less advanced biotech when it came to making Contact with, for example, a new race of methane breathers.
And forget about the even more exotic yet perfectly real cases, such as the arachnoids of Vulpecula IV, whose chemistry is based not on carbon but on the exotic element germanium.
Well! After the initial wave of enthusiasm about Molá’s lucky trade, things were starting to look rather gloomy for us. If we wanted to sail through the cosmos, we’d have to make Contact. But who could get excited about seeing a Vulpian arachnoid with its rare toxic metabolism? Or for that matter, even an amphibious newt from Wurplheos VII, with its profusion of spiny fins and pink and green polka-dotted skin?
What astronaut could be asked to make such a sacrifice, after years of painstaking study of technical science?
But everybody knows we’re a lucky species. It turned out we already had people who were not only capable of facing such bizarre Contacts, but even of enjoying them. Us.
People who had for countless centuries been shamefully rejected as perverts or sexual deviants. Gays, bisexuals, masochists, sadists and fetishists, the odd and the aberrational, the more or less satisfied victims of unspeakable paraphilias, we who had once been confined to madhouses or jails, or even executed to keep the moral cancer that infected us from contaminating the horrified “sexually healthy” members of society.
But as you know, everything is relative in the Lord’s vineyard. Morality depends on convenience; after news of the more salacious details about Quim Molá’s First Contact with the Qhigarians had gotten around (though various governments tried to keep them a secret), there was a strange, radical, and absolutely unexpected inversion in sexual values. Practically overnight, we, the same black sheep that the community had refused for millennia to consider members with full rights, had become important, essential, indispensable. The prosperity of the entire human race depend
ed in large measure not only on our negotiating skill but, even more important, on what society used to consider sexual deviancy and sin.
What irony: from pariahs to heroes, just like that.
Well, not just like that. Things didn’t shift right away right then, either, to tell the truth.
But it sure did help.
Indeed, a wave of sexual liberation began that continues to this day. Any upright citizen of the twentieth or twenty-first century would probably be horrified by our contemporary society, in which heterosexuality is only one possibility among many, not at all the majority or “correct” orientation that it was assumed to be for so many years.
Conscious of our historic mission, reveling in all sorts of dirty space fantasies in our twisted minds, we who once were shunned and stigmatized for our divergent sexuality now march with chests puffed in pride, aiming for the stars. The same mass of humanity who for so long spit on us, rejected us, denounced, repudiated, and killed us, now see us off with cheers and fanfare as their new (sexual) ambassadors. And they imitate us—to the degree that they can.
I guess they think that if “sleeping” with strange creatures is the way to conquer the stars, then why not sleep around! Starting with our own kind, just for practice.
The new foreign policy, and the morality derived from it, had many detractors at first, of course. Just about every religion in sight screamed to high heaven against “space immorality” and declared it would be a thousand times more preferable to languish and die “pure” on Earth without access to sophisticated Alien technology than to survive and conquer the stars at such a repugnant price.
The imams called for a space jihad. From the Vatican, neo-Pope Innocence XXIV issued an irate encyclical accusing Contact Specialists of being heirs to Sodom and Gomorrah, mocking God, and worshiping lewd demons from the depths of space. He excommunicated them all, scornfully terming them “condomnauts,” never suspecting that this would become the popular nickname for the new and prestigious profession.
Yes, that’s theory number 23,457. Didn’t I warn you there’d be more?
Save me the details about all the others, please.
But it backfired on His Holiness. And they talk about papal infallibility.
In any case, it is worth noting that the next occupant of the throne of Saint Peter, John XXVIII, not only withdrew the irate excommunication that his predecessor had hastily launched against us, but even transferred the Holy See of the Roman Catholic Church to outer space. Precisely, to the orbital enclave known as Novo Vaticano, built with Alien technology (of course) in orbit around Beta Crucis in the Southern Cross.
That’s what’s I call poetic justice. Or opportunistic repentance. Or, don’t spit into the wind.
It quickly became clear that the human race had truly lucked out with Quim Molá, because not all sexual perverts work out as condomnauts. Not at all.
Unfortunately, attitude alone isn’t enough. It also takes some aptitude.
Some species in the Galactic Community are more Alien to us than others. For example, “sleeping” with an Algolese woman, despite her height (two meters tall), her green hair, her violet skin, her mouth full of yellowish canines, and her language replete with ultrasonic frequencies that make your hair stand on end, is almost like a walk in the park for most human condomnauts.
Indeed, considering that both our species evolved from primates (or the equivalent), it almost seems like making love with a distant cousin. Plus, the voluntary control that the females of Algol have over the musculature of their vaginas is quite the extra added attraction for making Contact with them.
Little wonder that the second Alien technology that humanity acquired was none other than the gravitic control developed by these distant cousins.
On the other hand, making Contact with a rorqual from Kigrai (that is, Ophiuchus), with a body hundreds of meters long and three vaginas, each of them several meters wide and smelling of salted fish gone bad—that’s quite a feat!
I honestly wish sometimes there were more rational hermaphrodite species in the galaxy. Or at least with less recognizable sexual organs.
But sadly, even in the vast reaches of space, things are never so weird that they don’t remind you of something from back home. And sometimes it’s something you wish you’d never seen back home.
Do I ever know it. It’s been years, and I still have the occasional nightmare. Though I got Diosdado out of the deal.
And since quality generally comes at a high price, it turns out that whereas Algolese are, as a species, almost as young and devoid of sophisticated technologies as we are (and I emphasize that “almost,” in a place like this, which exists only due to Algolese gravity controls), the gigantic Kigrans are among the most powerful species in the Galactic Community. They’re hoarding more valuable biotech inventions than ten or twelve other races put together.
Secrets that lots of us would love to get our hands on, such as their bioships, their genetically individualized drugs, their biobatteries, their controlled cellular regeneration…
So there’s always a call for more and better condomnauts.
It was soon determined that, apart from exceptional cases such as Contact with the Furasgans, who are intelligent only when young and lose the ability to reason as they grow, or Termizarian reptiloids, who only practice heterosexual sex for reproduction and the rest of the time are happily homoerotic, pedophiles and pederasts are rarely suited to the task. Their spectrum of preferences tends to be simply too narrow.
Fetishists, however, such as furries, who are obsessed with dressing up as animals in plush costumes, and especially zoophiles, who love sex with animals, have found making Contact with Aliens to be the profession of our dreams.
Dreams some of us have, anyway. Or nightmares. Depends on how you look at it.
It also became obvious pretty quickly that, despite the publicity being given to this amazing new job, there weren’t enough pioneers with sufficient talent to get it done. Because being a pervert and ready for anything isn’t enough, not by a long shot. You also have to grasp the basics of the art of negotiation and diplomacy, and have some notion of linguistics and cultural relativism, technology and science, social intuition, courtesy, tact—lots of skills, in other words.
And none of the governments ruling the motley mosaic of cultures among which the human survivors of the Five Minute War were still divided wanted to fall behind, especially once it became clear that after an Alien species trades technology with a species making Contact, the recipients are not deemed morally obliged to share the information they acquire with the rest of their kind. First the Russians, then the Canadians, then the Japanese, and so on, until all the most powerful nations, one after another, embarked on a race to create costly and well-equipped special schools that detected and groomed their self-sacrificing students for all sorts of inclinations—furry, zoophile, and everything else considered useful for Contact. And of course they trained their most talented students in the difficult ancient art of negotiation.
That led to such academies as Feather, Hide, and Scale in Nueva Madrid, and Pan-Galac Zoo in Karlovy-MheschePlakneta, and many more. Mothers from the lower classes (and some from not so low) brought and continue to bring their children to them, dreaming they may pass the nearly impossible admission exams and, after difficult and exhausting training sessions that too often even damage the students’ mental health, acquire the professional education needed for travel into space as glorious Contact Specialists, ready to do anything as representatives of humanity to other races and cultures, navigating among the stars.
And most important of all, hoping they’ll come back wealthy from the bonuses paid for making a successful Contact.
Of course, there weren’t any expensive specialized schools operating in Rubble City, or in CH generally, or anywhere else in Cuba or the entire Caribbean, for that matter. So I broke into the trade in the hardest way possible: by improvising.
When Abel’s hacking skills and
his kindly nature provided me the money for a shuttle ticket to the Clifford Simak Geosynchronic Transit Station (named in honor of a famous science fiction writer from the twentieth century, incidentally), the biggest duty-free habitat in orbit around Earth, it only took me a couple of hours to get a contract as a condomnaut with Agustí Palol, the captain of a small independent trading vessel flying under the Catalan flag. That was the hyperjump corvette Juan de la Cierva, which was preparing to take off with a crew of four, not on a heroic voyage of exploration to the depths of space or anything of the kind, but on its umpteenth routine trading journey around the so-called Zodiac Circuit.
Now, I didn’t pick this corvette completely by chance; the history of technology and inventors has fascinated me since I was little, and I thought flying in a ship named after the brilliant Spanish inventor of the autogyro would bring me good luck. And so it did.
In theory, every human ship should carry a Contact Specialist on board, just in case it happens to be lucky enough to get involved in a First Contact with some new Alien race (as the odds say it will, sooner or later). Besides, according to the famous Protocol that the Qhigarians, as faithful disciples of the Taraplins, are determined to spread everywhere, it’s supposed to be basically impossible to conduct any sort of trade unless a condomnaut is present to represent every species involved.
But in practice, many ships (and not only the human ones) risk navigating through the Milky Way without a Contact Specialist. This limits them to trading with already familiar merchants. Because, obviously, you don’t need a condomnaut to trade hardware for fissionable material with humans from another enclave. Though some wish that was how it worked, if only it were limited to trade among ourselves.
But keeping up galactic standards for interspecies relations doesn’t mean we have to do the same with our own. Besides, it would be too much work. Contact Specialists, human or otherwise, don’t grow on trees. And normal individuals of most species aren’t exactly willing to take part in effusive sexual intercourse with the representatives of other species, no matter how similar they look.