by Yoss
The rhythm of raspy whispers quickens, then suddenly switches to an inarticulate hooting that rises and falls in tone in a suspiciously familiar pattern. I check the translation software: yep, we’re in luck. It’s the dialect of one of the other six hundred plus Qhigarian worldships that humanity contacted before the Unworthy Pupils fled the galaxy. We’re lucky that the extragalactics made Contact with them before us. Also that these creatures learned their language so quickly.
Unfortunately, our invisible visitor’s message comes through the translation with typically screwed-up syntax.
“Hello, humans-you. Peroptids-we. Extragalactics-we. No-distant we. Magellan Cloud-Large name-you home-we. Come here-now, no-wish war-you we. Danger-war-other species-power-very, fear-flee we. Seek no-enemies we, distant-here-now, Milk Road name you. Contact Qhigarians-before. Species no-war they. No-weapons they. Flee-distant they. Contact no-useful-very they. No-enemies, yes-war, join you-we? Proceed sex-Contact, tradition-you pact-seal, you-we, now-here?”
Quite the speech. For a First Contact with extragalactics, it couldn’t be clearer:
They already know we’re humans. Must be the free advertising the Qhigarians gave us. They are the Peroptids (or something like that; maybe it’s a Qhigarian term with no precise translation in any human language—peripheral eyes, maybe?) who come from beyond the galaxy, but not from far away, just from the Milky Way’s dwarf satellite galaxy, which we call the Large Magellanic Cloud.
They come in peace, fleeing another race that is threatening them, I think, with war. They fear their enemies and are looking for allies (I’m guessing) in the Milky Way. But they need warlike allies; the Qhigarians, who don’t fight and have no weapons, can’t help them. Makes sense. And they propose making Contact with us, following our customs, if we want to seal the pact and become their allies.
And if Jürgen Schmodt pulls it off, I might as well go back to Rubble City in exile and hide in the deepest hole I can find, because this Nazi will practically be a god in Nu Barsa and throughout the Human Sphere.
Extragalactics with working hyperengines that don’t depend on Qhigarian teleportation, looking for warlike allies? My Peroptid brothers, who cares what you look like? If it’s war you want, you’ve come to the right species. Nobody better than humans in the whole Galactic Community. I smell alliance and trade.
The nanoborg can obviously see the Peroptid, and he’s doing his best to imitate it. Exactly what fourth-gen condomnauts are good at.
Forced to sit idly by, I watch his swift metamorphosis with envy. He molds his nanoassisted flesh to his will, like clay in the hands of a skilled potter. At least it’s giving me a secondhand idea of what a Peroptid looks like.
There are two extra pairs of legs rapidly growing from his sides, just below the ribcage. Still rudimentary, but in a couple more minutes at most I guess they’ll be functional. Just as I thought, but eight legs, not six: the longest pair in front, because from the way he’s doubling over, the back half of his torso is going to be sticking up almost perpendicular to the floor. You might call this creature a centaur but with six pairs of horse legs, in addition to the pair of super-long arms on its human torso that it also uses in walking. What a weird anatomy!
The long, thick legs have three joints; the front limbs may even have four—they aren’t well-defined yet, but I’d say the original model must have segmented insectoid limbs. Six legs or eight, who’s counting? It might be something like a mantis, with long raptor limbs in front that can also be folded up and used for walking. Must be that; Jürgen’s back is becoming covered in what might well be elytra, the hardened topwings that certain insects possess. If they have wings underneath, they can’t be functional; the creature is far too large for flight. But I’d guess they… ah. The head is more defined now. Couldn’t be any more insect-like than that. A pronotum to protect the back of the thorax; long antennae… These nanos are amazing. I’m dying of envy. The things you can do with a couple of hair follicles—it looks like magic. Can’t I get me a set?
The head is relatively small, but the eyes are large. The nanos aren’t really magical; the real Peroptid probably has faceted composite eyes—that would make sense—but for Jürgen to make himself a similar pair he’d have to change his visual neurology too radically, so he just makes them larger and shifts them to the sides of his head. That’s it: Peroptid, peripheral vision. His nose is reduced to the minimum, two orifices. His chin sharpens. There are pedipalps on either side of the face—definitely insectoid—with mandibles opening horizontally, not vertically. Well, at least the German bastard isn’t going to have it easy. This is so infuriating, seeing the big prize and watching it get away…
Then, all of a sudden, the unthinkable happens. The human mimesis of an arthropod from another galaxy is shaken by an inarticulate cry of horror and in the next moment melts, blurs, dissolves, until in a matter of ten seconds what was once a fairly attractive Nordic male and later a surprisingly faithful imitation of an Alien insectoid has been reduced to a pulsating mass of formless flesh.
The tension was too much. Jürgen couldn’t control his own nanos. Like too many Contact Specialists of his generation, the result is that he has turned into a quivering aggregate of cells, only barely differentiated into organs and tissues.
He’s fucked and well fucked. I suppose that in Nu Barsa, given enough time, appropriate therapy, hypnotic treatments, nano reprogramming, and other sorts of high-tech black magic, they may be able to return him to a halfway human form. But he won’t be able to trust another nanocontrolled metamorphosis ever again. His life as a condomnaut is over and done with.
Deserved it, the bastard. But now what?
The invisible insectoid monster from beyond our galaxy approaches the pile of flesh that so recently was Jürgen Schmodt, seems to analyze it briefly, then turns toward weepy Yotuel—who lets the creature nowhere near him, jumping up and running away screaming in sheer panic until he almost embeds himself in a wall more than a hundred meters away, white suit blending with white walls.
He’s also out of the picture for good. Just me left. I stand up decisively and approach.
Yes, it’s true. The guys in front don’t have too big a lead if the guys in back run fast and make Contact. Or at least try.
The footprints of the invisible Peroptid show that it’s turning to face me.
I’ve made Contact with insectoids before, a couple of times. There’s no shortage of such species in the Galactic Community. This won’t be as good as my tête-à-tête with the Evita Entity, needless to say, but it’s not like I’m weeping buckets over it, either. Though I’m still worried about the panic that put Jürgen and Yotuel out of action. What’s so horrifying about this creature that both professional condomnauts found its presence unbearable?
I hold my arms prudently in front of me as I walk, until I touch the barrier—which is still invisible, but no longer solid; it’s more like a liquid now. After hesitating briefly, knowing that as soon as I cross through I’ll see the Peroptid, I cross it in a single long stride.
Then I see it. And smell it. Shangó, Obbatalá, and La Virgen del Cobre.
All I can do is laugh.
With its small head, composite eyes, long antennae, its anterior thorax perpendicular to the floor, freely swinging its long front legs as it sways on its three posterior pairs of legs, which it keeps firmly planted on the whitish gelatinous floor, the feared Peroptid turns out to be sort of an octopod hybrid: half praying mantis, half cockroach.
Except it’s nearly five meters tall and ten meters long. And also—stupid me, I should have guessed it from the colorless interior!—it completely lacks pigmentation. Through its translucent exoskeleton I can see its moving muscles, its digestive system, its lungs.…
And its scent is sweet, penetrating, and musky. Quite the monster, isn’t it?
I continue laughing and leave the undifferentiated pile of flesh that once was Jürgen Schmodt behind me.
God does exist, or the gods
, or the orishas, and they love me.
What irony! For poor Yotuel, just seeing it was too much. (A childhood trauma? Did some client try to threaten to throw him to the cockroaches if he talked about what they did to him?) For me, this being from the Large Magellanic Cloud is completely, comfortingly familiar. It’s so conveniently reminiscent of Atevi, my albino Periplaneta americana mutantis, champion racer of my childhood in Rubble City, that the very next second, while I continue to move forward, I’m already pulling off my green suit and uncovering one of the hardest erections I’ve had for a Contact in some time.
Not counting the Evita Entity, of course.
I’m a little worried about certain features of insects’ sexual anatomy that I recall. Earth insects, of course; this creature from another galaxy might look very similar to an insect externally, but it’s not necessarily the same at all. After all, it has eight legs. Given its size, it also must breathe with lungs, not tracheal tubes, and it’s got to have an endoskeleton in addition to its exoskeleton to support its weight.
But the exobiologists will sort all that out later. For now, I’m more interested in knowing if it’s a male with some sort of corneous genitalia that I’ll have to allow inside my body—depending on the size and texture of the organ, that could be a bit painful—or a female that I’m supposed to get inside. In that case it could be a relatively easy job, if it’s got a cloaca like it should, or a very complicated one if, as in certain species of bedbugs, it has no sexual orifice at all and the male has to jab its copulatory organ until it manages to perforate the chitinous exoskeleton and spill its sperm.
But that’s all mere details. I haven’t come all this way at such a cost to let trifles such as those stop me. If I need a little lube or a chisel, I’ll use them. Amaya and the automedic can patch me up later on. It’ll have been worth it. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, eh?
Reacting to my advance, when I’m a few meters away the enormous, translucent Peroptid pivots gracefully and lifts its elytra, braces its front legs against the floor, then opens its back legs wide. An unmistakable invitation. A wet orifice opens before my eyes; I’m one lucky guy, that’s for sure. A female, with a well-lubricated cloaca.
“Humans yes-war, allies yes-Peroptids,” I begin to say, and the corresponding raspy whispers emerge from my translator. “Interested Peroptid engine long-range,” I continue, while thinking: no matter how much it lowers its rump, I’m going to have to stand on a helmet to reach it.
Good thing I still have Jürgen’s with me.
“Welcome to the Clifford Simak Geosynchronic Transit Station,” the flight attendant announces in the syncopated sing-song of a pro accustomed to dealing with travelers and tourists. “Anyone wishing to descend to the planet may do so from the shuttle port. Shuttles leave every quarter of an hour. Those wishing to take advantage of the offerings at our duty-free shops, please speak to our uniformed staff. And to all our passengers, we suggest that you take some time to enjoy the exceptional views of Earth on our panoramic holoscreens.”
Which of course turn on at this precise moment, to spectacular effect. Murmurs of admiration, applause. We humans are still not used to living in space. It always gives you that little flutter in your chest to see your home planet in all its glory from near-Earth orbit.
I even feel it. Really. And I tear up a little. Sheesh.
The unmistakable disk of cloud-veiled blue grabs all the passengers’ attention. Well, almost all. Some would rather stare at me, and I’m not surprised. After making Contact with the extragalactic Peroptid I became the hero of Nu Barsa, of the Catalans, and of all humanity. My face was on the holonews so often that, even after cropping off my hair and growing out the thin beard I wear now, I could still never hope to pass completely unnoticed in a crowd.
I miss my dreadlocks. But lots of things have changed over the past six months.
The hyperjump cruisers Miquel Servet and Salvador Dalí and the frigate Antoni Gaudí returned with all their crews to Nu Barsa two days after making Contact with the Peroptids. Our new pigment-free insectoid allies from the Greater Magellanic Cloud accommodated all three human ships inside their gelatinous hyperspace vehicle and made the jump to the Catalan enclave in a single bound. Like it was our mother ship—or our taxi, as my ironic friend Narcís put it.
Their hyperjump system turns out not to be all that different from the one those Qhigarian con artists used, after all. It’s also based on teleportation and uses living matter: their white jelly-like cloud ships are nothing but Peroptid larvae whose development is modified so that their bodies remain partially outside our three-dimensional space. Or something like that.
Simple and effective, right? For those who understand it, I mean. Count me out. Maybe my friend Jaume Verdaguer (for the record, I finally did get a statue of him put up while he’s alive, in honor of his sniffing out the true nature of Qhigarian hyperjumping; a hero’s perks) and his handful of crazy physicist buddies understand it, but as for me and most people…
Anyway, the point is, it works. That’s good enough for me. For me and for the rest of humanity.
Hyperspace travel was apparently used in the Greater Magellanic Cloud even before fully intelligent life forms evolved. This discovery has astounded and fascinated exobiologists, both human and Alien. It’s hard to understand how a species of creatures similar to our ants could spread across the cosmos without the benefit of intelligence. And to think that nobody believed that the Unworthy Pupils could have evolved out in space. Times sure do change.
Humans in general had to work pretty hard to get over their initial instinctive repugnance to working with gigantic albino octopod cockroaches, but now we get along great with our Peroptid friends. It does help that they can make themselves invisible at will. But we’re getting their technology now, and they are also more than satisfied. They wanted allies and they got them.
We Contact Specialists, human and otherwise, have been quite busy lately. Negotiations to turn the peaceful Galactic Community into the Pangalactic Defense Force weren’t exactly easy. It’s a laborious chore to get thousands of species on the same page about any issue. But the fact that humans and Peroptids worked together to restore communications—after the widespread panic that broke out when the Qhigarians left and their fake “Taraplin” hyperengines stopped working—helped convince thousands of Alien species about the good intentions of our alliance.
To be sure, there’s a lot of irony wrapped up in the whole affair.
It took me a couple of weeks to get it. The thing is, if the Taraplins never existed—if their hyperengines were a fraud, just a front that the Qhigarians used to conceal their interstellar teleportation abilities—then now that the whole setup has been uncovered, what sense does it make for us to keep performing the “ancient and sacred” Protocol for Contact?
Especially considering that the Unworthy Pupils probably established the custom millions of years ago as a surreptitious way to gather DNA from the sentient species they discovered. Maybe they wanted to use it to build races of clone slaves, or maybe to enrich their own DNA and create the huge variety they now have in outward form. Either way, DNA-gathering was the whole point. But when the brilliant, paranoid Algolese invented the Countdown device to guard against unauthorized use of DNA taken from Contact Specialists, the system stopped working for the Alien Drifters. It only kept going out of sheer inertia.
So now we just do it because it’s the custom? So I let that slimy octopus Valaurgh-Alesh-23 play at being my otorhinolaryngologist and proctologist just because “habits are hard to break”? And then I “slept with” the supersized Peroptid version of Atevi for the same reason? And that’s why all the condomnauts of the Galactic Community do it?
I doubt it. But nobody’s even dared to bring the subject up. I suppose it’s hard for any rational being, human or Alien, to admit that we’ve been acting like idiots for such a long time. We already had to accept that we were taken in by their so-called hyperengines; i
t might be too much to ask of us to admit that the Protocol was another con.
Or else, there’s lots of us who actually like having an excuse for a little sexual experimenting.
The fact of the matter is that, even without Taraplins and Qhigarians, it looks like our Protocol for Contacts and our condomnauts will be around for the foreseeable future.
I just hope nobody gets the bright idea of trying to make Contact with the Peroptids’ enemies.
We still haven’t learned much about those mysterious extragalactic invaders, so powerful and cruel that the Peroptids fled the Greater Magellanic Cloud in search of allies to fight them. The Peroptids don’t even have a name for them. In their culture, naming something means recognizing that it exists. They think that defeating an enemy starts with rejecting its reality.
At the moment, the best guess is that they come from beyond the Milky Way and its dwarf satellite galaxies, though their ultimate origin is far from clear. As for what they’re like, our allies—who aren’t very skilled yet at making themselves clear; or perhaps, as our strategists suggest, they’re elusive about revealing valuable military secrets—say that they are creatures from negative space.
What’s that supposed to mean? Antimatter? We’ll have to make them clear that up for us. Just in case.
The bottom line is, they utterly ruin everything they come across, more interested in destruction than in conquest.
I just hope they find our friends the Qhigarians on one of their conquests and wipe them out.
Actually, our new allies think the Unworthy Pupils took off in such a peculiar rush simply because they feared the ruthless creatures. They must have come to the terrifying conclusion that, after finishing with both Magellanic Clouds, the unnamed enemies would come after our galaxy next. Being pacifists, which in their case means cowards, they opted for putting some distance between themselves and the new threat. Just as I figured. After all, if another species was going to take away their monopoly on hyperspace travel, why stick around?