by Yoss
Nothing for it but to try. Let’s see if things really have changed for the better in my REM department, or merely…
Here goes the first log… Good; it isn’t trying to bite me or dissolving into foam. How strange! It calmly lets itself get tossed onto the fire, and when it lands in the flames…
Yeah, I was starting to wonder. Instead of burning like it should, it shudders, acquiring the features of my friend Abel. His black skin writhes, scorched by the tongues of flame, and he asks me, “Why’d you do it, Josué? Why’d you abandon me?”
Shit, now I know where this new nightmare is heading. Pure remorse. Everyone on the bonfire, sacrificed for one thing only: me and my well-being. Step on up, ladies and gentlemen, watch everyone else burn so that Josué Valdés, the Rubble City Egomaniac, can live and prosper.
But I still can’t stop. No point getting scruples now. Especially since it keeps getting colder and colder. All I can do is throw another log on the fire. And another, and another.
Every time the bark of a log touches the fire it convulses and turns into the face of somebody I know. They cry out in pain as they burn, scolding me for being a cynical, ungrateful egotist. My childhood friends and enemies from the poorest neighborhood on the outskirts of CH: Yamil, Evita, Diosdado, Damián, Karlita…
And Agustí Palol, the likeable captain of the hyperjump corvette Juan de la Cierva; and the young physicist Jaume Verdaguer; and Nerys, the mermaid condomnaut; and Narcís Puigcorbé and his wife Sonya; and Captain Ramón Berenguer; even Third Officer Jordi Barceló. All are consumed by the greedy flames until I have no one left to throw on the fire, nobody else to sacrifice to the gods so my heart can keep on beating and not freeze solid.
But I still feel cold, and strangely the firewood hasn’t run low. So I throw on another log, and another… And once more I hear screams, accusations; but now the voices are all mine, the faces dissolving in the voracious blaze all have my features, because I’ve sacrificed so much of the best part of me to get this far, so I’m the one burning, with a smell of scorched flesh that turns my stomach. It’s burning, burning—I can’t go on.
A reflux of bile burns my esophagus, but when I try to spit it out I can’t stand up, I’m held too tight by the security net on my seat in the greenhouse-gym.
One second of suffering, just one, and the bile dissolves at some point between the pain and my mouth, but it doesn’t turn into vomit; it makes my eyes water, but my insides settle into their regular resting places.
I still hurt, though. Top to bottom. The price of Contact with that horrid, slimy Qhigarian star-octopus. Good thing the automedic already fixed up the worst of it, but… Jordi wasn’t the only one who made a sacrifice for Nu Barsa, Catalonia, and humanity.
Of course, I do hope that after the Unworthy Pupils take his DNA, they’ll free him before leaving the Milky Way, hurting only his ego. And I hope he’ll forgive us someday for leaving him behind. Me, Amaya, all of us.
And if not, screw him! He deserved it, the bastard.
So we’re finally making the leap—and once more I realize how right people are to say you should always stay awake during a hyperjump. It seems that the hyperengine, or rather the Qhigarian hive mind, can do serious side damage to the sleeping psyche among sentient species.
Though it’s not like I could help falling asleep after all that commotion, what with Gisela taking more than an hour to find a workable series of hyperjumps to get us where we wanted to go.
It really isn’t her fault; with nearly 90 percent of these troublemaking Unworthy Pupils gathered at a single spot in the galaxy, it’s incredibly difficult to make hyperspace leaps (or rather, teleportations). And they’re harder to bear, too. Well, pretty soon we’ll miss them, I bet. At least the Qhigarians were polite enough to transport us here, as a kind of farewell gift. Wherever here is…
Is this the last hyperjump? Could we already be at Lambda Trianguli?
I glance at the clock in the greenhouse. An hour and twenty-two minutes… It’s been nearly two hours since we left the conglomeration of Qhigarian worldships, and we’ve only managed to complete three jumps. There were 20,181 ships when we left; I don’t think we have much time to continue our search. Unless the Alien Drifters were just lying to us again about how hyperjumping really works.
Qhigarian assholes. Smart of them to take off. I almost feel like hunting them down all over the Metagalaxy, once we get the extragalactic hyperengine. And if we ever get our hands on them…
Even after hearing their confession myself, it’s hard to believe they had everybody fooled for so many thousands of years. Why would they lie like that? Were they afraid of being enslaved if they admitted that their telepathic colonial supermind was the real hyperengine, and that the Taraplin Wise Creators never existed? Were they really all one species? Did they come from a planet like everyone else, and were they jealously guarding the secret? Or did they evolve on their ships, or perhaps come from another galaxy? If they’re telepathic, why are they so obsessed with languages?
So many questions, and maybe we’ll never learn any of the answers. Though I have a feeling that the paths of those Unworthy Pupils and humanity will cross again someday. The cosmos is big, but not infinite.
Or at least let me believe it isn’t. The human mind can’t handle infinity. At least, not mine, not now.
Right now, of course, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.
I run to the sensor room and arrive, panting, in time to hear Amaya say, “… Trianguli. Red dwarf, six planets, asteroid belt. The hypergraph shows only one ship entering—none leaving. No need to be exact; we’re lucky the hypergraph still works at all,” she reports, unfazed. “But there’s also a strange energy signal”—now her voice shakes, as if she’s afraid we’ve been fooled again. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I think…” We all tense up around her. “Let’s have a look through the gammatelescope. Ah. Good news: there’s an identity beacon from one of our own on the scanner. The entering ship is human.”
“Shit,” Captain Berenguer enunciates clearly. Always so polite.
So the other guys the Qhigarians sold the information to were human. And obviously they beat us here. Well, Aliens would have been worse. Is it the Germans? The Japanese?
“The ship is ours,” Amaya confirms, greatly relieved, after checking the signal. “From Nu Barsa, I mean. The Miquel Servet.”
Just my luck. Did it have to be the hyperjump cruiser that my Nerys serves on as condomnaut?
I look at Captain Berenguer, who furrows his brow in thought. This is getting tricky. The good thing is, our competition is a human ship, and Catalan, too. The bad thing, it’s a whole cruiser, not a mere corvette or even a frigate like the Gaudí.
If things escalate to an armed confrontation (hopefully not), we obviously won’t stand a chance against the Servet and its capacity of forty-eight thousand tons. Even though it’s one of the oldest ships in the Nu Barsa fleet, as a hyperjump cruiser it’ll have thirty to forty crew members and, worse, much more powerful, longer-range weapons than our light frigate does.
And if the extragalactics evolved in an aquatic environment, I can’t think of anyone better than Nerys to make Contact with them.
“Our guys are in orbit around the second planet in the system, which has roughly the same dimensions as Earth… and two satellites, smaller than the moon,” Amaya continues, interpreting the data from her instruments. “It has an oxygen atmosphere, water vapor clouds, and… ” She gulps. “There’s another object in the same orbit, a few dozen kilometers away. It isn’t sending out any identification beacons. I can’t tell if it’s a ship or a natural formation. I’m going to visual.”
The hologram that pops up in front of us clearly shows the profile—small, because of the distance—of the Servet, an ungainly T shape. A hyperjump cruiser doesn’t need to have an aerodynamic hull. It can carry enough auxiliary vehicles on board that it’ll never have to risk entry into any planet’s atmosphere.
But we aren’t looking at the la
rge Catalan ship; we’ve seen it before. We only have eyes for what’s in the foreground: a sort of whitish cloud, fluctuating and vague, that makes spots dance before your eyes whenever you try to focus on it.
It definitely can’t be a natural formation. A cloud moving through space? But it doesn’t look like any ship we’ve ever seen, either.
We stand there, stunned, jaws dropped, paralyzed, for a very long couple of seconds.
And then we start jumping around, shouting and whistling. We hug each other. Amaya kisses me on the mouth. Gisela kisses Captain Berenguer. Pau and Rómulo hug as if to break each other’s ribs. Nuria recites what I think is an Our Father in Catalan. Manu recites something that sounds like poetry, also in Catalan.
For sure. We found the extragalactics!
Who cares if we got here second, if we’re in the right place at the right time? The guys in front don’t have too big a lead if the guys in back run fast and catch up, as we used to say in Rubble City. Maybe the Servet got here first, but if the extragalactics don’t have an aquatic environment we might still have a shot. And if not, better a small share of glory than none at all, right?
“What are the dimensions of that… thing?” Captain Berenguer asks, trying to sound indifferent.
“Dimensions, right. Just a sec.” Equally excited, Amaya stops, checks her magic sensors, then clicks her tongue with incredulity. “They vary: from two to four kilometers long. Form isn’t stable, either; it shifts like an amoeba. Its energy emissions are beyond strange. And the weirdest thing is, according to the gravimeter, its mass and density vary, and some very odd perturbations are showing up on the hypergraph. Which, by the way, I notice is losing power so fast, I doubt it will keep working for more than another few minutes.”
“Pure energy? Bioship?” the captain asks, thinking that brevity will hide his excitement.
Amaya, always so certain, again hesitates. “I’m not sure. It’s pretty much transparent to my sensors. I’d bet it’s made of matter, but these cyclical energy variations… I’d say they’re metabolic, judging by the biometer readings. It might be… breathing.”
“Breathing, in space? A living being? That size?” I almost choke, thinking of the Continentines, whole cubic kilometers of cytoplasm. But even they needed a ship in order to venture into deep space. And they couldn’t breathe in the interplanetary vacuum.
“I don’t know. Maybe. But I’m guessing it has other life forms, more solid ones, inside,” Amaya ventures, frustrated by the evident uselessness of most of her instruments. “Exactly twenty-four of them, slowly changing positions. They’re four or five meters long. But the thing that’s holding or encasing them, the ship or whatever, distorts everything, so I can’t be any more precise about the details.”
“It might be a bioship fluctuating between hyperspace and normal space,” Nuria hypothesizes thoughtfully. “A supercell. And those could be its nuclei, you know?”
Amaya gives her a furious look and opens her mouth…
If I let them go on one second longer, we’ll have to sit through yet another sterile argument between the former lovers, so I intervene. “We can settle all that later, but for now, why don’t we communicate with the Servet and see if they already made Contact? Isn’t that what really matters?”
“I have a transmission coming in from them now,” Amaya notes, suddenly and thankfully busy at the controls again. “I accept and copy.”
The holographic image of Alberto Saudat, the old captain of the equally antiquated hyperjump cruiser from Nu Barsa, immediately appears over our heads.
“… to the hyperjump frigate Antoni Gaudí,” says his monotone voice, as if he’s repeated the same phrase a hundred times already. Then, realizing that he now has a connection, his tone changes to what can only be called one of terrified bewilderment. “Captain Berenguer, condomnaut Valdés! How lucky you’re the ones who got here! We need your help urgently. We’ve located the extragalactics, as you must have deduced from the proximity of their ship to ours. But there were… unexpected problems. We haven’t been able to make Contact with them, Nerys is in shock, and… ”
I’m sorry about what happened to you, my dear slippery mermaid. I think you bit off more than you could chew. Or they made you bite it off.
I don’t know whether to feel angry at you or pity you.
Did you think making Contact with creatures from the Magellanic Cloud would somehow be routine?
The hyperjump cruiser Miquel Servet was luckier than we were. They found a Qhigarian worldship just four days into the search in the sector assigned to them, Radiants 3567 and 3568. The Alien Drifters were harvesting water comets in the Oort cloud of Epsilon Piscium, and they were delighted to give them the orbital coordinates of the extragalactics they had made Contact with a few days earlier—in exchange for the secret of cold fusion, which I myself had obtained from the Continentines years ago.
Oh, well. Easy come, easy go. Good to know I wasn’t the only one who would have happily sold his own mother to drag the damn coordinates out of the Qhigarians. Seems that Nerys also took Miquel Llul’s phrase at any price completely seriously.
Good thing only two ships from Nu Barsa made Contact with the Unworthy Pupils, because the third might have had to give them the entire orbital habitat in exchange for the same data.
The Servet, already knowing what the extragalactics were after and what route they would take, only needed one more hyperspace jump to catch up to them in this system. I suppose the conglomeration of worldships was just beginning to form in the triple Gamma Hydri system at that moment, or else it would have been a lot harder for them to get here, as it was for us.
Reaching the eagerly sought visitors from beyond the Milky Way wasn’t the end of the odyssey, of course; it was just the beginning.
The crew of the Servet didn’t wait the usual three days for a First Contact, of course; the matter was too urgent. The extragalactics allowed them to approach the orbit of their ship with its wavering outline (it almost gives you a headache to look at it) until they were just a few dozen kilometers apart. The Aliens didn’t communicate, attack, flee, or show any sign of hostility, fear, or even recognition.
The Catalan crew then figured they might try to make Contact with them. But just when Nerys was nervously preparing to head out into space wearing her ultraprotect, the hypergraph detected a sudden, massive fluctuation, and the condomnaut mermaid disappeared from the airlock—leaving her suit behind.
At first Captain Alberto Saudat retreated to what he thought was a safe distance, but after three minutes went by and no sign of Nerys, he admits he got so nervous he moved the ship back until it almost touched the damned white cloud. He even fired his disintegrating weapons, to see if there would be any response. Not the most powerful ones on board, of course, and he didn’t aim them directly at the extragalactics. Just in case.
In any event, my mermaid rematerialized exactly where she had disappeared, six minutes after the event. And in a state of total shock.
“She hasn’t recovered,” the stunned captain tells us in barely a whisper. “She breathes, she moves, the automedic says she has no neural damage or other internal injuries, but she hasn’t regained consciousness. Looks like a regular psychic trauma. Fernando, my life support tech, studied psychology and he’s afraid she must have gotten such a huge shock from seeing the creatures, she simply refuses to return to a reality where abominations like them exist.”
Wow, great theory for making every other Contact Specialist avoid coming within a parsec of the migraine-inducing cloud ship.
“We tried returning to Nu Barsa to ask for help, but we believe that the hyperengine stops working in the vicinity of these creatures,” Saudat continues to whine.
Of course, assuming they did try, it could just be that all the Qhigarians anywhere near here were already gathering over at Lambda Trianguli and not helping out with the hyperjumps; their minds were literally elsewhere. But this isn’t the time to tell him that the Galactic Community
is about to be deprived of any means of faster-than-light travel—at least until something new turns up.
“And the worst part is, none of the holocameras and other systems on her suit recorded anything. Lucía, my sensor tech, says that was probably because of the same burst of energy that caused the sudden fluctuation we saw in the hypergraph. So we still don’t have the slightest idea what sort of creatures we’re dealing with,” the old astronaut concludes, staring at us.
Or rather, staring specifically at me.
Within seconds, the entire crew of the Gaudí is staring, too.
All of them except Jordi, the absent third official, that is.
Okay, I get it. I’m the only condomnaut in the neighborhood. Plus, Nerys is my girlfriend.
Succeeding where she failed is now almost a matter of honor for me. That’s what they think, anyway.
Captain Berenguer clears his throat and says, nice and slow, “Josué, do you think, maybe… ”
“Sure.” I sigh and shrug, as if to play it down. Though I’m already feeling the first pre-Contact jitters and cold sweats. I still think I make myself sound pretty convincing when I say, “Nerys can be too impressionable sometimes. I should know! I’m going to go put on my suit. In five minutes I can be making Contact with… ”
“Hyperjump, incoming!” Amaya exclaims at that very instant, ruining the dramatic climax of my speech. Then, voice trembling, she adds, “Human ship, approaching full throttle. I’m checking the radio beacon signal… ” She gulps and looks up at me, her face serious. “Josué, I don’t think you have five minutes to get your suit on. It’s ours, too. The Salvador Dalí, no less.”
Shit. One damn thing after another. I thought the racing-against-time stage of this ordeal was over, but now I’m up against the nanoborg and his vengeful sidekick.
My only consolation is that things couldn’t get any worse.
“Incoming transmission,” the sensor tech continues, and a hologram appears in our midst.
A day full of surprises for the Nu Barsa fleet, it seems. It isn’t Yotuel’s tan face, or Jürgen Schmodt’s clear blue eyes, or any of the unfamiliar officers and crew members of the Dalí. It’s an all-too-familiar face, with a jutting jaw and roundly muscular face, looking at us for a moment, grinding his teeth, and at last speaking with an ominous calm: “Last person you wanted to see, right? Perfect. Best if you and the Servet back away from the extragalactic ship right now, if you don’t want us to disintegrate you. Damned traitors!”