by Yoss
Sexual xenophobia isn’t exclusive to Homo sapiens by any means. This is the particular irony of the Protocol that the Taraplins created: if everybody enjoyed making Contact, what sense would it make to become a condomnaut?
Of course there’s always room for improvisation and even for professional impersonation; among us humans, and I suppose among some other Alien races as well, every once in a while an unscrupulous (and/or desperate) crew member will attempt to assume the prestigious role of Contact Specialist.
Impersonating a condomnaut is sort of like the last card in the deck for an astronaut who, for whatever reason, has lost or been abandoned by his ship, and who can’t get any other space vehicle to hire them in any capacity. A desperate last resort, if you haven’t got the training, or the stomach, for it. Some call it playing sexual roulette: if you’re very lucky, you won’t have to make Contact with anyone during the voyage; with a little less luck, it’ll be something not totally disgusting, such as “sleeping” with an Algolese female; but if things go bad, you might always end up with a Kigran rorqual.
But even in that case, it’ll go much better for the impostor who at least bites the bullet and gives it a try. According to the sacrosanct Contact Protocol of the Taraplins, if a hired condomnaut does not adequately perform his role as sexual ambassador in the way expected of him, the ship’s captain has a perfect right not only to refuse to pay him what was promised, but even to launch him into deep space on the spot, as a fraud.
That’s why more than a few impromptu Contact Specialists have gone insane (or at least have pretended to go insane) after stubbornly and desperately attempting to overcome their natural repugnance and make Contact with some particularly repulsive Alien. Just so they won’t be abandoned in the middle of outer space by their disappointed and infuriated captains.
Well, nobody said our profession was always pleasant or free from danger.
Under these risky conditions I signed up with Captain Palol. I imagine that in spite of my swearing up and down that I had plenty of experience, he never believed me to be anything other than one more runaway teen, or at most a crew member who’d been left behind, perhaps an unlucky cabin boy. And he decided to give me a chance.
May the orishas bless his good heart.
And his gratitude for the good time I gave him in his office when he hired me…
After all, on its last twenty voyages, the corvette Juan de la Cierva had only come across the usual old friends: the Aliens from the so-called Ekhumen Merchanttil of Aries; the sidhar Iar Fjhoi and its people, bipeds with two arms and two eyes who could pass pretty easily for human on a dark night—if it weren’t for their slight scent of hydrogen sulfide, their navy blue skin, the small horns over their eyes, and their short, scaly tails, that is.
But luck was on my side: on the return trip, after an utterly routine commercial exchange with Arietian merchants (three tons of quartz geodes from Earth, swapped for a ton and a half of Furasgan-manufactured ceramic hyperconductors; I suspect it was contraband of some sort, to come so cheap), our small Catalan-flagged merchant ship detected the exhaust of a sub–light speed space vehicle in the direction of the constellation Pisces.
Captain Agustí gave me a dubious look and asked, “Do you dare, Josué?” I nodded, though I was trembling like a leaf. I had them shoot me up with all the vaccines and immune boosters I could take without bursting, put on the Countdown collar, and, well, that’s how humanity in general and the Catalans in particular made First Contact with the Continentines: gigantic masses of intelligent protoplasm from a double star system near the Hercules Globular Cluster. Confident of their physical endurance and biological immortality, after listening for thousands of years to radio transmissions from the Galactic Community, they had finally decided to set out for space—in ships propelled by nuclear fusion engines, no less!
That’s what I call being in no hurry to get anywhere in particular. Good thing they get around now with Taraplin hyperengines. Thanks to Captain Palol and me.
My Contact with the gigantic hermaphrodite amoebas was one for the textbooks; in fact, it’s already studied in a couple of academies. And I gained a lot of prestige. I admit that, speaking only for myself, entering a sea of cytoplasm protected only by a thin biosuit and swimming wherever the sol-gel changes led me isn’t all that arousing. But apparently I really did have some natural talent for the job: the way I stimulated the immense cell’s micronucleus proved so pleasurable for their Contact Specialist, they didn’t hesitate before giving us—no charge!—nothing less than the secret to their cold fusion method. With that, I secured a practically limitless source of clean, cheap energy for Nu Barsa and became a real hero among the Catalans, who offered me a long-term contract at the princely salary I’ve been living on ever since in Ensanche Nuovo.
Over the past eight years, through ups and downs, I’ve covered half the galaxy aboard all sorts of hyperjump ships, from small corvettes to enormous cruisers, “sleeping” with dozens of Alien life forms on my Catalan employers’ dime. Including eleven First Contacts.
And all that with no repercussions more troublesome than a fungoid rash I got from an infected Guzoid polyp. Nothing human pharmacology couldn’t deal with, luckily. A bit of interferon and the Alien spores surrendered en masse to my strengthened immune system.
Not bad for a starving runaway brat from Rubble City, eh?
The maglev car starts picking up speed again. Apparently it didn’t slow down a minute ago because we were arriving at our destination but just to let higher priority train pass.
At this point, accelerating is hardly worthwhile, though. We’re practically in the shadow of the outer ring of thin towers that make up the Central del Govern.
Up at the top of the holoscreen I can see the unmistakable profile of the Department of Contacts building. I wish I had met the architect who designed it. Xavier Pugat must have had a sarcastic sense of humor. Back in the day people often said that skyscrapers, so tall and narrow, were simply crude phallic symbols. He did them one better, deciding that the edifice housing the Department of Contacts and all its Specialists should be precisely an enormous hyperrealistic phallus.
Makes sense, doesn’t it?
He didn’t even leave out the veins, and there’s no mistaking the coloration. You almost expect to see a colossal, opalescent drop of semen emerging from the tip, which actually is the access to the central elevator and ventilation shafts.
“And here we are,” Mateo puffs, stretching his monumental bulk so brusquely that the seat creaks as if in pain. “Back to the madhouse,” he says with a beatific, or perhaps mischievous, smile. “Why the long face, Josué? Were you smoking wildwall, or is it that you don’t want to go see Nerys and tell her all the details about your Contact with the Evita Entity?”
I let out my breath, imagining the mermaid’s jealous reaction. “What’s done is done. I’ll take my lumps. The life of a Contact Specialist is a life of many sacrifices. Same goes for his girlfriend. In fact, I was thinking of visiting her today and telling her the whole story, with all the gory details. What’s really eating me is the idea of seeing the chassis of that nanoborg, Herr Schmodt. Think he’ll be there?”
“Hate to say it, but I know he’s there.” My Catalan friend shrugs. “His ship got back yesterday, like yours, so he can’t have taken off again yet. You know how exasperating Miquel the Stickler is about making his crews get a proper rest between trips.”
The maglev car decelerates one last time, almost imperceptibly (inertial absorption blocks, ultrafine tuning of the Algolese gravitic controls), stops in front of the wide platform at the foot of the phallic tower of our Department of Contacts, and opens its sliding doors.
“Up we go,” I say to Narcís as we walk in, and to calm our nerves I repeat the rusty old joke, “It takes the express elevator at least two minutes to reach the top—we’ll get to experience all over again how a sperm feels when it’s ejaculated.”
Narcís answers the joke in the usual w
ay: “So long as we don’t shoot out through the central shaft, Cubanito. I didn’t bring my parachute today.”
“Hush. Come on, kid, take your mitts off me! I haven’t forgiven you for that Evita business. Chill! I hear the boss. Knock it off, Josué!” Nerys is whispering all this into my ears in her sultry voice as she slips wetly from my grip and floats back to her spot on her antigrav platform, despite my efforts to hold her tight.
I’ll never learn. For the millionth time my attempts to hold on to her succeed only in getting her clear mucus smeared all over my expensive suit. Good thing the gunk is odorless and dries quickly.
The things we do for mermaid love.
Sometimes I think I get pleasure from making her jealous. Even though she’s got a tail and fins instead of legs (or rather, precisely because of this), the girl drives me crazy. I return to my own place, reluctantly.
As usual, the muttering and whispers suddenly die away in the hall filled with condomnauts (all of us annoyed by being urgently summoned here) the moment Miquel Llul, the feared and respected head of the Department of Contacts, walks in.
We really do respect him, though he was never one of us. Sex isn’t his thing. As they joke behind his back, Miquel is so dry, he’d only be able to make Contact with a race of robots.
Still, I often wonder if he’s descended from the great medieval Catalan sage Ramon Llull. The way this skinny fifty-something stoic has transformed the Department is nothing less than alchemy. In fact, turning lead into gold with the philosopher’s stone is child’s play next to converting a handful of the most undisciplined Contact Specialists in the Human Sphere into a highly disciplined team with genuine esprit de corps.
Well, for most of us, anyway.
I give a little side-eye to Jürgen Schmodt, who in accordance with our mutual unwritten pact has bitterly pretended I don’t exist ever since I came here.
Esprit de corps, him? Not toward me, for sure.
Whether or not he’s the great-times-nine-grandson of Ramon Llull, Miquel the Magnificent made himself crystal clear to us the last time the German and I tangled (so far) and almost came to blows, six months ago. Next time there was trouble, he warned us, we’d both be gone from the Department and out of Nu Barsa like a shot. No right of appeal, no chance for being let back in.
And we didn’t think for one second that Miquel the Implacable would waste time keeping his word.
He doesn’t give a damn if Herr Schmodt, born (make that cyborg-assembled) on the German planet of Neue Heimat, is one of only three fourth-gen condomnauts in the Department. Much less that I’ve made more First Contacts than almost any other Specialist under his command.
Jürgen wheels around as if he noticed me looking. Maybe he did—who knows what bizarre sensors his Neue Heimat designer-parents built into him. He fixes me with his icy stare (his eyes are gray today, not the blue he usually goes for), and displays all his teeth to me.
Is my worst rival smiling at me? I must be seeing things.
Or maybe he recently made Contact with one of the carnivorous, territorial Alien species that bare their teeth at each other as a threat, and he picked up the gesture from them.
But no: he really is smiling, with his arm almost lovingly draped over the shoulders of the well-tanned condomnaut dressed all in white who’s standing next to him. I’ve never seen the kid before. Must be new. There’s something oddly familiar about him, though. With his oversized Afro and his coppery complexion. Something vaguely Caribbean about him. Could be Dominican, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, or…
Miquel’s authoritarian voice, amplified by the speaker system, cuts short my thoughts.
“Good morning, condomnauts. You know I don’t like beating around the bush, so I’ll be brief. This is no mere administrative meeting. You’ve all been called together to hear three pieces of intelligence.” He pauses, and looming over the rest of the crowd, my friend Narcís gives me a conspiratorial wink. “One good, one bad—and a third that’s just meh. The good news is something we’ve been waiting years to hear: an extragalactic Alien race has finally reached our Milky Way.”
Wow, looks like Narcís was slightly off: this time he’s not talking about possible evidence or dubious sightings; they really exist, and at last someone has…
“The bad news is, we weren’t the ones who made First Contact with them. And when I say ‘we,’ I don’t mean Nu Barsa alone. The whole human race,” Miquel continues, honoring as always his reputation for implacability.
Shit, now we’re screwed. If the Kigrans of Ophiuchus were first to make Contact with them, or those tightfisted Arctians, or even the paranoid Furasgans, it’ll cost us all we have and all we’ll ever have and more to get access, someday, to the damn intergalactic-range hyperengine. Well, there’s always the consolation of knowing that those smug, arrogant Germans and Russians will also have to pay their weight in gold for it. Of course, they have whole planets at their disposal, so they’ve got a lot more resources to draw on than we poor Catalans do.
We poor Catalans. Hey, I like the sound of that. Almost believe it and everything.
“And the meh news is that the lucky ones were: the Qhigarians,” Miquel concludes, unflappable.
A sigh of both relief and disappointment, if that’s possible, goes up all over the hall.
It’s not like anyone’s surprised. Statistically speaking, there’s no race more likely to make Contact with extragalactics than the tireless wanderers of the Milky Way.
Just as no one knows who the Taraplin Wise Creators were, likewise no one knows the home planet of their Unworthy Pupils. Also known as the Alien Drifters. You can thank our human knack with nicknaming for coming up with that one.
You run into their immense, rambling, peaceful, yet incomparably fast worldships—built of good, solid metal without a drop of force-field technology—in every corner of the Galaxy. There’s loads of them, too. More than twenty thousand worldships have been counted so far. And there’s millions upon millions of Qhigarians squeezed aboard each one of them. So many that few humans can stand to stay on a worldship for even a few minutes—that’s how strong the stench of the crowd is.
No other Alien race has such an impressive fleet. The Qhigarians offer the size of their fleet (which incidentally demonstrates that they don’t believe in birth control and aren’t worried about overpopulation) as irrefutable proof that they never had a planet of origin and have always lived on their ships, from the day the mythical Taraplins took them under their wings, or created them—they never clarify this point.
Could be. They have no written records, but not even the annals of the oldest species in the Galactic Community, such as the Kigrans, contradict them.
Most exobiologists, for their part, are of the opinion that no sentient species could have come into existence already wandering through space, like Pallas Athena emerging fully grown and armed from the head of Zeus. This would support the general feeling that if the Qhigarians ever had a planet of origin, they left it so many millennia ago that they’ve forgotten where it was—or else they’re keeping the secret to sell it to anyone interested enough in that piece of information to pay them what it’s worth.
The episode in which Joaquim Molá managed to wrangle no fewer than twenty-five working hyperengines from them for just a trilingual dictionary and his cat could be considered an almost shameful exception in the trade history of the Unworthy Pupils. Even the wiliest traders in the Galactic Community consider the Qhigarians particularly sharp negotiators, never giving anything away or even offering a good deal.
Except, of course, for the hyperengines made by their beloved Taraplins, so useful and at the same time so resistant to reverse engineering. The Qhigarians paradoxically seem to treat those engines with the same generous attitude some ancient Christian sects from Earth show for their sacred book, the Bible. They gladly contribute them, delighted to let everyone know about them and use them.
It’s also very strange that the Qhigarians, despite their interest in
trading all sorts of technologies, have never wanted to buy or sell, much less use, any sort of weaponry.
They are committed pacifists. Or cowards to the core, depending on how you look at it. They don’t even have a hierarchical control structure so far as anyone knows. Considering how they’re piled up inside their worldships, their democratic nonviolence probably helps keep them from getting caught up in horrific fights all the time over every little thing, the way members of almost any other species would do under similar circumstances.
Pacifist ethics aren’t completely unique to them; at least a couple dozen other known races around the galaxy stubbornly advocate peaceful coexistence, even when threatened with annihilation. None have spread as far or become as important as the Alien Drifters, though. In an environment as competitive as interstellar trade, a species that refuses to resort to violence even under duress tends to be quickly relegated to the back row—that is, if they aren’t rapidly, definitively, and irreversibly eradicated.
Did something of the sort happen to the legendary Taraplins?
Paradoxically, it is known that in the not too distant past (which on a Galactic Community scale usually means a couple million years ago or more), the Qhigarians held Alien slaves. Not just one enslaved Alien species, either, but several dozen races. They protest that it wasn’t exactly like that; the slaves were merely clones, inspired by Alien DNA (or the equivalent, depending on the species), and they gave up this awkward practice as soon as they learned to control their own genome by following the teachings of (who else?) the Taraplin Wise Creators.
It could be pointed out, though, that they took their own sweet time—a few thousand years, that’s all—in interpreting those teachings. So I don’t put much faith in their story. Or is it that I find it hard to imagine how a nonviolent race could practice slavery?