Condomnauts

But there was a growing need for new and better Contact Specialists. Humanity was constantly losing too many trading opportunities because our Specialists were unable to make Contact with more than a couple thousand races, of the tens of thousands that make up the Galactic Community. It was still beyond our reach to “sleep” with chloride breathers, inhabitants of high gravity worlds, beings composed of plasma, and other life forms that are relatively distant from human physiology. At least, without special technology.

But necessity is the mother of invention, so in 2187, Japanese and German biotech and nanotech teams, working independently of each other on the rich colonial worlds of Amaterasu and Neue Heimat, almost simultaneously created the first fourth-generation condomnauts.

These were cyborgs. Half human, half machine. But a conceptually new variety: it wasn’t a matter of adding cybernetic limbs or computational systems, but of total integration. Each and every cell of these amazing individuals had been modified when their developing embryos were at the morula stage, by inserting a set of nanomachines that could drastically alter them. On receiving the correct encoded command, that is.

As the cells divide and grow in number, so do the nanomachines inside them, always maintaining a one-to-one ratio so that at maturity they retain their ability to metamorphose.

Jürgen Schmodt, the other 999 little Germans in Neue Heimat, and the 1,500 little Japanese in Amaterasu all grew up like regular children, with mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters, feeling perfectly human. Well, perhaps with the addition of subtle but constant indoctrination to make them want to become condomnauts when they grew up, and with particular attention being paid to their grasp of human biology.

Then, at the age of fifteen, after they had taken batteries of tests that caused more than half the teenagers to drop out (their identity still remains a closely guarded secret), those who were judged sufficiently stable and ready to proceed were told about their dual nature as humans and nanocybernetic complexes.

They were also told about the urgent need for more and better Contact Specialists, about the noble goal of working as sexual ambassadors for their cultures. And then they were given the codes to control their own metamorphosis.

Again, more than half declined the honor—or found themselves unable to deal with their recently revealed, sensational powers. The former flatly refused to do it; the latter either died from some dreadful, uncontrolled metamorphosis or went crazy. Or in many cases, both.

But Jürgen Schmodt, another fifty-six Germans, and 113 Japanese made the conscious decision to become Contact Specialists, got over the trauma, learned to control their bodies at the organ, tissue, and cellular level, and are now the last word in the Contact business: “protean condomnauts,” the fourth generation.

There’s a good reason why they’ve been termed protean. So long as they have enough energy available (which is why they’ve each had biobatteries surgically implanted in them), Jürgen and company can drastically transform their morphologies and physiologies in a matter of minutes, from their resting, more-or-less ordinary human form, into a being with a fluorine-based metabolism, or into a form that has no problem moving under gravity two hundred times that on Earth.

Now, they still can’t turn into beings of pure energy or of antimatter; but, man, it’s still a remarkable step forward! The new Contact Specialists quickly proved their exceptional worth, catapulting Neue Heimat and Amaterasu into the indisputable scientific and technological leadership of humanity thanks to the patents they obtained through their sensational Contacts with both new and old Alien species.

Recalling the lessons of the Five Minute War, before the chasm between them and the other human factions grew so wide that their rivals might choose to unite and obliterate them in order to erase their advantage, the prudent and astute Germans and Japanese “generously” offered to rent out the services of their new Contact geniuses to other nationalities.

At a high price, of course. Jürgen Schmodt costs the Govern of Nu Barsa almost as much as all the other personnel in the Department of Contacts put together. And since the bastard knows it, and probably even picks up on our envy and how we glare at him with hatred when his back is turned, he never misses a chance to show us that he’s worth every last credit of the fortune he earns.

In the year and a half he’s been here, he’s already made nine successful First Contacts.

A real record, isn’t it?

But in my opinion, you need to have more than a body that you can reshape at will to be a good condomnaut. No, Contact is much more than that. It’s like hypernavigation: more an art than either a sport or an exact science. And this obnoxious nanoborg, who’s used to always winning, just doesn’t have the sensibility to understand what art is.

Still, it was him, not me, who discovered that extragalactics have arrived in the Milky Way….

“Josué, watch it with that neo-Nazi son of a transistor,” Narcís warns me, serious, watching him walk away with his protégé, my old enemy Yotuel. “And his little friend, too. You’ve met that kid before, haven’t you?”

Puigcorbé surprises me: under all that fat, he has an extremely refined sense of empathy.

“Yeah. It’s an old story, from back in CH. I thought he had died,” I answer reluctantly. Narcís is the closest friend I have, but there are things you don’t share even with your best friend.

Then, in a desperate attempt to raise our spirits, I make a proposal. “Hey, everybody! Since we’re going to have to sail tomorrow and comb the cosmos for who knows how long, what do you say we take our leave tonight the right way? How about a five-star dinner at one of those classy little restaurants on a lake somewhere? They say Maremagnum Nuovo has good fish now. Even octopus. And good Earth wine, too, so we can toast to our good luck on the hunt!”

“Bravo!” Narcís’s bottomless stomach is always ready for the next feast. Especially if there’s good Earth wine to wash it down. “Maybe you’re a self-taught plebe, but your list of successful First Contacts is still longer than Jürgen’s,” he reminds me, laying an arm as thick as my thigh across my shoulders.

This, of course, raises my spirits a little.

But not as much as Nerys does when, stepping into the elevators we take down to the habitat’s ground level, she whispers affectionately into my ear, “It doesn’t matter who makes Contact with those extragalactics, Josué! I love you, and not that robotic German. And tonight I’m going to show you again how much. At your place! We’ll use up your annual water allotment in the best way you can imagine!”

I’m smiling like the drog that subsumed the bisork, like the verastis that parasitized the kindo—or, sticking to clichés, like the cat that swallowed the canary (though I’ve never seen a canary… )—while I picture what awaits me.

I’ll report to the Gaudí tomorrow totally exhausted. But the pleasure will have been worth every last ATP molecule I expend. Oh, to have a biobattery implant, like the fourth-gen proteans.

Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. Wet, splashing pleasure. Nothing like sex with a mermaid. Especially if you do it in the bath, or best of all in the shower. Because in bed, with all the mucus they give off… Afterward, I’ve often had to throw out the sheets, and sometimes even the mattress.

“I smell another wild goose chase. The hypergraph doesn’t pick up any jumps in or out for the past thirty-six hours. But there might be a very small worldship, or maybe one that’s been here for longer than that,” Amaya tells us, her voice sounding tired. “Let’s check the gravimeter. No; just as I suspected, this is a clean, boring system, nearly deserted. Apart from the primary, it only contains a super-Jupiter with… ”

Amaya, a statuesque, dark-eyed brunette, is strangely attractive despite her insistence on wearing her dark hair so short. If only she were a man, if only she had any interest in men. I wouldn’t mind sharing a bed with a him like her some night.

“… with twenty-one satellites and—what’s this?” Our Amaya’s voice is suddenly tinged with interest, and half the crew, clustered behind her in the narrow instrument chamber, tremble with excitement. “Oh, right. Comets. Lots of them. How intriguing. Astrophysically speaking, I mean.”

Nuria, the ship’s astrophysicist, with blue eyes, chestnut hair, and skin so tan she might have been born in the Caribbean, squeezes her lips tight at this dig. (She was Amaya’s partner until last year, and there’s still some bitterness between them about the breakup, which wasn’t altogether friendly.) But she remains stoically silent, stroking Antares, who purrs in her arms, blissfully oblivious to the tensions among us.

Our umpteenth disappointment translates into a chorus of sighs. Amaya’s tone returns to its former monotone. “Nothing on the gammatelescope. Besides the emissions from the primary, I mean. Beta Hydri I think this would be, according to the old Earth star charts. Has anyone recorded its data on the ship’s log? I can’t do everything myself. Nothing in the x-ray range, either. Well, it’s a blue giant, so that would be strange, wouldn’t it? The spectrographs say that its one big planet has a totally boring hydrogen-helium atmosphere, with a liquid core of… ”

“Drop it, Amaya,” Captain Berenguer orders her with a yawn. “Who cares about the atmosphere of one more gas giant? Disconnect. We’re outta here.” He turns to the navigator. “Gisela.”

“All ready for the next leap, Captain!” The freckle-faced, slender redhead jumps up enthusiastically. All she needs to do to complete the picture is stand at attention and salute, like they do in the Navy she served in until less than a year ago. “I haven’t stowed the antennae yet, so we can execute a jump right now.”

Not pretty, for sure, but she’s got something. Oh, if only she were a man…

Well, if she were, I probably would have slept with her by now and wouldn’t be wasting so much time thinking about it. Weird, huh?

Not the best time to be thinking about it, either: as usual, I’m getting lost in digressions and more digressions, at the exact moment when I should be focusing my attention.

A bit past the exact moment, in fact.

“It was reckless of you to leave the antennae out. A single micrometeor impact could have… ” Amaya begins to scold. And we know she’s right, but we also know that if Gisela had given in to Amaya’s sexual advances a few months ago, instead of to our stuck-up sensor tech Jordi’s, there wouldn’t have been any complaints.

A delicate thing, group dynamics on a ship.

Captain Berenguer plays the conciliator, as always.

“Bah, it doesn’t hurt them to stay out for a couple minutes. Nothing will happen, Amaya. You yourself said this system is clean. And leaving them deployed saves us time. This’ll be our fourteenth lightning jump today; after the next one, we’ll recharge the batteries.” His tone shifts from friendly to authoritarian: “Stations, everyone! Hustle! Hyperjumping in one minute, starting….” He glances at the chronometer, almost lost in the bustling instrument panel that is Amaya’s undisputed domain, and at last he says, “Starting now! Destination, Gamma Hydri. We’ll keep combing this constellation. Five seconds before the jump, we disconnect the artificial gravity! On your toes! That means you, too, Josué!”

Lots of things have changed on merchant ships since the times when they were propelled by oars or sails, but some stuff endures even in this era of hyperengines. Pushing, jostling, a call to action stations, Antares meowing in protest at being tossed like a ball from Nuria’s hands to those of Jordi, his official owner.

We all rush to our places, the soles of our shoes slapping the corridor floors. There are ten of us on board the eighteen-thousand-ton Antoni Gaudí: hypernavigator, sensor tech, life support tech, conventional engine tech, captain, first mate, third officer, trade economist, astrophysicist, and me.

Most know at least two professions inside and out. For example, Amaya is not only the best sensor technician I’ve ever worked with, and a better than adequate planetologist, she’s also the onboard medic. Of course, that doesn’t mean what it did centuries ago; she just has a slightly better knack with automated medical care than the rest of us.

Jordi Barceló, our brawny third officer, Gisela’s current partner and my secret nemesis, was in the Navy, so he’s familiar enough with military tactics to serve as our gunner or infantry operative under the command of Rómulo, the first mate and weapons expert.

Manuel (Manu for short), our conventional engines specialist, is our golden-fingered handyman, able to fix almost anything, from a disintegrator to a toaster.

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.

Material no-proceed? Deal no-interest? What do these guys want, the philosopher’s stone? Those three hundred tons of heavy hydrogen isotopes are practically all of Nu Barsa’s reserves, enough fusion fuel to last any worldship a whole year. And this nasty… Valaurgh rejected it like I was offering a pile of sand.

Think quick. We can’t let them leave the Milky Way without telling us where the extragalactics are. We could allow Rómulo and Jordi to test the strength of our weaponry against this peaceful cluster of worldships until they reveal the secret to us. That would amount to a sleazy protection racket trick, especially since they don’t have any way to respond in kind, as everyone knows. But big problems call for big solutions.

And if they still refuse to negotiate and insist on leaving, then what? Wipe out twenty thousand worldships? With trillions of sentient beings on board? That would be genocide, and the entire Galactic Community would come after us.

No, violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. There’s got to be something else they really want. Some offer they can’t refuse, even if they’re leaving the galaxy.

That’s it. I know what can do it.

Should I consult Captain Berenguer? No time for that. Anyway, a Specialist is the only one capable of assessing a Contact. I’ll risk it, then. Miquel said at any price, after all.

I swallow hard and present a new proposal, excited.

“Current human translator, with data of 11,568 Alien languages.”

“Qué cojons, tío? What the fuck are you up to? You can’t give them our software!” Amaya cries out, stunned. But a second later she calms down and I can almost see her shrugging, though the holocamera only captures her face. “All right, okay. It’s an idiotic trade, but you’re the condomnaut, you’re the negotiator. If this helps us locate the extragalactics, it’ll have been worth the price. Those Unworthy Pupils had better take it, for their sake. Otherwise we’ll have to fire on them with everything we’ve got.”

Damn, so it’s not just me thinking that way! I feel slightly relieved to find I’m not the only potential genocidal maniac in the crew.

Now the asterocephelopoid freak is flailing about, almost hysterical with greed, telepathically hashing it out with its fellow creatures, I suppose (since Qhigarians, as colonial telepaths, don’t have anything like leaders or bosses). Finally, after another concert of chirps and clicks and squeaks, it extends a tentacle toward me with a shower of sparks coming out at the end.

I got you, you ambitious thing. When I have unlimited funds to negotiate with…

I recognize what it’s holding, of course. It’s a universal computer compatibility device, made by the Arctians, that can read or transfer data between any two systems without connecting them by cables. Used throughout the galaxy to avoid computer incompatibility problems.

Everybody has a price, and it seems that an offer of 11,568 computer-coded languages is too tempting for Valaurgh-Alesh-23 and its people to keep pretending they’re not interested.

It’s an impressive total, but I wonder if they realize it includes about six hundred of their own dialects.

I imagine they do. And if not, well, caveat emptor, as the Romans used to say. Not telling the whole truth might look like lying, but it isn’t quite the same thing. All’s fair in love and trade.

Concealing my self-satisfaction, I let the enchanting Valaurgh caress my neck and twine its tentacle around my earpieces. I try to stay still, though the sparks from the Arctian device are tickling me, or maybe it’s the sucker-eyes on the mucus-coated tentacle. I don’t know and don’t want to know.

“Translator assimilate here-now,” a squawking voice surprises me. It seems to emerge from within the thicket of waving tentacles. What kind of vocal organ does this star-octopus have, that it can enunciate so clearly in addition to making clicks, chirps, and squeaking noises? “Two informations interest humans, negotiate-trade proceed. One: Qhigarians-all leave galaxy now-future, destiny-future no-negotiate. Two: Qhigarians no-here-future, hyperjump no-work here-future. Taraplin hyperengine no-true before-here-future. Taraplins no-true. Qhigarian mind teleporter, hyperengine yes-true.”

Shit. I hope I got that wrong. It can’t be…

“Holy cojons,” Amaya mumbles, jaw on the floor, eyes popping out. It seems that, in spite of the messed-up semantics produced by the translation software, I understood correctly. “Josué, I need confirmation. First, they’re all leaving, and there’s no way they’re going to tell us where to.”

“Correct,” I say in a thin, strangled whisper. “Captain Berenguer figured it out. He’s good. They’re going, and they don’t want us to know where. They’re playing it safe. Maybe they’re scared of the extragalactics. Or of us.”

“Scared of us? Why? And what was the second point? I don’t think I quite got it.” The sensor tech’s normally self-assured contralto voice shakes, full of anxiety, and her left cheek has a slight tic. “The Taraplins never existed? Then how did they make those hyperengines?”

“They didn’t make them,” I snort. “The Taraplins didn’t exist, never existed, and they have nothing to do with the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The so-called hyperengines are just metal cans with self-destruct mechanisms, that’s all. The Qhigarians, the Unworthy Pupils themselves—and I still don’t see why they made up the whole story about the ‘Wise Creators’—are the ones who created the fake hyperengines. It was them all along, making all our jumps through hyperspace possible with their minds. They’re teleporters! The only ones in the Milky Way! Shit, Jaume Verdaguer and his crazy friends were right.”

Amaya looks at me for a long time in silence, then finally dares ask, gently and almost in a whisper, as if she really wants to know, “Josué, who is Jaume Verdaguer?”

“Oh, God, Amaya, that doesn’t matter now,” I spit out, staring at smug, pompous Valaurgh-Alesh-23 with a growing temptation to tie it up into a giant knot with its own tentacles. I finally explain, “Old friend of mine. A physicist who never believed in the story of the Taraplins and their hyperengines.”

“Oh,” is all she says. Then, as the gravity of the situation dawns on her, she adds, as if still in doubt, “So there are no Taraplins, no hyperengines, just Qhigarian teleportation.” Her voice is trembling more than before. “And as soon as the last one leaves, we’ll be stuck here, unable… unable….” She can’t say it out loud.

“Unable to get home. Unable to travel faster than light,” I tonelessly complete the thought she couldn’t get herself to say. “Which practically means the end of the Human Sphere as we know it, and of the entire Galactic Community for that matter. Imagine! Poof, no more hyperjumps. Complete isolation between colonies, enclaves, and Earth. Same for every Alien race. Unless we manage to contact the extragalactics first, that is, and they have hyperengines that really work—and not mentally, if I had my choice. Assuming they want to sell them to us, naturally. That’s a lot of ‘ifs’ to work with, don’t you think? I’d say we’re good and screwed.”

“Fucking Qhigarians. We should blast them all out of the cosmos for conning the whole galaxy for so many millennia. They can’t leave now, just like that!” Amaya growls in pure rage at finally confronting our brute reality. But she instantly calms down, moves off holocamera to consult something, then returns to inform me mechanically, “There are now 20,112 worldships in this system. They’re still arriving.” She tightens her lips with determination. Something about the Catalan ability to put a good face on a bad hand and rise to meet the toughest challenges fascinates me. No wonder they’ve come so far. “Josué, if the octopus is telling the truth, there’s just 300 more to come. At the current rate, that gives us about… two hours. Listen up: if that sleazeball gives you the trajectory coordinates for the extragalactics in the next five minutes, we can still pull this off.”

Now, that’s what I call quick tactical thinking.

“We’ve got to do it,” I agree. Then, turning to slimy, purple Valaurgh-Alesh (I hope the other twenty-two from its brood or whatever are all dead), who continues fluidly waving its weightless tentacles, I insist: “Essential to have trajectory coordinates for extragalactic ship, here-now.”

The damn Qhigarian is so… Qhigarian, it waits a good three seconds before answering. And, it seems to me, it’s managing better than before with its newly acquired translation software. “Information available. Translator, no-sufficient price. Offer, what more?”

Oh, fuck Shangó, Orula, and La Virgen del Pilar. Clever bug, it was just messing with me. It fed me the key piece of information, enjoyed watching our faces as we figured out how they’d been swindling the whole galaxy for millions of years; and now it refuses to tell me what I need to know. What do I do now?

It’s like knowing you’re about to die and knowing what medicine you need to save your life, but not where to buy it.

“Assholes! Tell them, if they don’t let us know where those guys are right now, we’re going to tell the whole Galactic Community about their con game, and we’ll all get together and reduce them and every last ship of theirs to scrap!” Amaya explodes, her lovely dark eyes shooting fire.

“Chill out,” I try to calm her. It’s my turn to pretend to be cooler than I feel, while my neurons work feverishly. “Threatening them won’t do any good. Don’t you realize they literally have us by the balls? I wonder if any Alien species already suspected. They’ll owe their own Jaume Verdaguers a huge apology. For me, I’m planning to get a statue of him built while he’s still alive, if we get out of this.”

“I’ll help you,” Amaya offers, obviously in need of something concrete she can do. “I’ve got a friend who’s a sculptor.”

“Look. There’s nothing we can do to pressure them, and no threats that could work. Nobody can make a hyperjump without their help. So if we try to attack them, I wouldn’t be surprised if they teleport us to the other side of the galaxy. Likewise, if we try to leave now and warn the others about their con game, they’ll have no trouble stopping us. Anyway, as soon as they’re gone, the whole Galactic Community will figure out for themselves what they were up to; we won’t have to tell them. Except it’ll be too late by then to do anything about it.”

“And then what?” Amaya says impatiently, almost in tears from anger and frustration. “We give up, call off the search, forget about the rest of humanity, since losing our hyperengines is just about as fucked-over as we could possibly be, and stay for the rest of eternity in this system without any oxygen planets to colonize? The closest star to us from here is four lightyears away.”

“No.” I smile, in the sudden certainty that I’ve found the solution to our problem. “I’ll pay them more for the information we want. ‘Unworthy Pupils’—a perfect name for them! Even if their ‘Wise Creators’ never existed. What else do we have that might interest them?”

“Pay them more?” The sensor tech’s eyebrows almost disappear into her short but luxuriant dark mane. “But they already rejected enough tritium and deuterium to fuel a ship for a whole year, and we just gave them our translation software. I don’t see what else we have of value.”

“DNA,” I interrupt her, smiling mischievously. “The only other human possession that the Qhigarians have always been interested in obtaining.” Turning to the Contact Specialist star-octopus, I carefully articulate, “Human DNA, trade for trajectory coordinate extragalactic ship.”

The frenzy of activity running through Valaurgh-Alesh-23’s thousands of slippery, bifurcated, eye-encrusted tentacles is more than enough proof that it is seriously analyzing the proposal—with the help of all the other minds on all the Qhigarian worldships. Determined to convince it, I point out, “New galaxy, conditions unknown. Qhigarians need new race slave-clones.”

“Price sufficient,” my tentacular interlocutor replies at last, sounding almost sad. “Extragalactics trajectory, coordinates, transmit here-now.” And with that, it transmits a long string of numbers, which the computer in my suit and its big brother on board the Gaudí record flawlessly.

Then the Qhigarian adds, almost sarcastically, “Second transmission-coordinates extragalactics-trajectory.”

Shangó and Oggún! So we’re the second ones they told? The second to get a crack at finding those guys?

Time to run, then. With any other species, I’d dare ask who they gave the information to, Aliens or humans, and if humans, what enclave they’re from and which ship. But the Unworthy Pupils would make us pay for each crumb of information. And unfortunately, we have no bargaining chips left.

It gave away the fact that we’re not the first they told out of pure sadism, obviously.

“We did it!” Amaya laughs, excited, missing that last bit of bad news. I’m not planning to dampen her joy. Everybody will hear it when they replay the recording. “The computer is interpreting the coordinates and putting together a linear trajectory. What I can tell you now is that our visitors come from the Large Magellanic Cloud, they’re seeking out yellow dwarf stars, and their hyperjump system is long-range and very precise. I’ll have more to tell you later. For now, when you make Contact with that disgusting octopus, better hurry up and give it your DNA. I imagine that the fewer worldships there are remaining to join this conglomeration, the harder it will be for poor Gisela to find a feasible jump trajectory.”

She’s right, of course. Though damned if I want to go through the ordeal of getting myself coiled up in and screwed over by this snot-covered Qhigarian octopus-starfish with too many arms.

I almost feel like running away, like I did when I left Rubble City. Now that I’ve got the extragalactics’ trajectory coordinates, I’ll just refuse to make Contact and we’ll hightail it out of here. It’s what they deserve; not a bad idea to play one last trick on these tricksters.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that if we don’t play fair, they’ll just send us wherever they feel like and not where we want to go, giving the other searchers an even bigger edge on us than they already have. So I choose the straight and narrow. Sucks to have principles.

“Shall we proceed?” I finally suggest, sighing with resignation while I start to undo my suit. The faster I get through with this the better. Good thing it’ll be quick and painless to collect epithelial cells with useful DNA by swabbing my oral mucous membrane. Making Contact with this Valaurgh is going to be unpleasant enough already.

“Extragalactic trajectory data, transmitted. Human DNA no-degraded, required,” the Qhigarian calmly announces, without making the slightest effort at approaching me.

What? For a second I’m stunned, then I understand and laugh out loud.

Of course, human DNA no-degraded: I forgot about my Countdown.

Even if I turn off the handy device right now, its vibrations have already synchronized with my biofield, so my DNA will continue to degrade when it’s away from my body, and therefore become useless to the Qhigarians, for the next hour at least. And it’s not like we have time to spare.

“Human DNA no-degraded, required, cloning,” the octopus repeats, relentless. “Do, give sample, here-now.”

“What the fuck does the freak want now?” Amaya splutters. “Your DNA isn’t good enough for it?”

Shit. I think I’m going to have to stay in this crappy little system a little longer.

“No, it’s the Countdown I’m using,” I sigh, and I turn off the ultrasound-emitting collar that hangs around my neck. “Oh, well. You guys go on. I’ll wait here until the effect wears off and they can take a usable sample of my genome. An hour isn’t so long. You can come back later.”

And if we don’t find them in time, nobody can say that Josué Valdés wasn’t a team player.

“No way,” Amaya says between gritted teeth. “You’re the Contact Specialist. We’re going to need you there when we find the extragalactics. Besides, not only do we not have an hour to waste, we might not even be able to make it back here and get you if these Unworthy Pupil con artists take off.” She swallows hard, tries to smile confidently. “So—I’ll stay. I hope they drug me up, because I don’t like pain, and I can’t stand the thought of being fingered by those thousands of arms covered in eyes.”

You’re a real hero, Amaya. What a sense of duty. Everything for Nu Barsa and Catalonia, no?

Touched, I’m about to thank her for the gesture, but then I get a better idea.

“That’s the spirit, Amaya. But I don’t think I can allow you to make such a sacrifice.” I wink mischievously. “On any exploratory mission, especially one to make Contact with extragalactics, a sensor tech is also more useful than… than an arrogant third officer who anyway doesn’t know how to do anything but fire his guns, don’t you think?”

Yes, revenge is a dish best served cold. Amaya’s eyes shine conspiratorially. She smiles and says, “I’ll consult with the captain, of course, but I think your proposal will strike him as perfectly acceptable. I almost feel sorry for the Qhigarians, though. Cloning Jordi Barceló for slaves won’t do them a lot of good, wherever it is they escape to.”

It’s cold.

Real cold.

I shiver, maybe because I’m naked as a worm, huddling by a pitiful little bonfire.

I once read that our senses of heat and cold, feel, and taste play only a small role in the architecture of dreams. But I also know this must be a dream. A frozen dream?

Still, I almost feel like rejoicing. Though my teeth are chattering and my scrotum feels like it’s trying to hide inside my body, at least this isn’t my classic, obligatory nightmare, with my colorless Atevi losing the mutant cockroach race to Yamil’s long-legged Centella yet again and me being forced once more to copulate with the fat girl-Doberman Karla-Rita.

Maybe I’m finally going to get over it.

But it’s so, so cold. Too cold.

The fire’s going out, I’ll have to feed it. Luckily, there’s a little pile of logs here that look like they ought to burn well. If there’s any logic to this dream at all.

If not, maybe they’ll turn into snakes when I touch them, or into sand, or…

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 large 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!”

Turns out, things could get worse. We’re being insulted from the bridge of the Dalí by none other than Jordi Barceló.

“Hold up a sec, Josué, you’re almost half a klick ahead of them. You’re all three supposed to touch the extragalactic ship at the same time,” Captain Berenguer reminds me, his face looking worried in the small holoimage projected inside my helmet. This time he didn’t want to delegate the responsibility of being my remote Contact operator to anyone else. “We don’t want the crew of the Dalí to freak out and start the First Catalan Interstellar War right here, do we?”

“But what if that’s what we want?” Yotuel smiles venomously from another holographic window.

“Krieg if you mogeln,” comes the hoarse voice of Jürgen Schmodt, once again looking the part of the model gray-eyed Aryan in a third small holoimage next to that of his protégé.

What’s the point of having translation software with thousands of Alien languages programmed into it if he’s going to refuse to use it even to express himself in halfway passable Spanish?

My own German translator tells me that Krieg means “war” and mogeln is “cheat.” Clear enough. They trust me as much as I trust them. I never expected any different. No reason to.

This simultaneous triple hololink only proves how complicated the situation has become.

Could have been worse, though. If ours had been the only other Catalan ship in the system, then Jürgen, Yotuel, and especially Jordi Barceló (did the Qhigarians take the DNA sample from his pristine heterosexual rectum instead of his mouth, just to piss off the resentful prick even more?) would definitely have talked Captain Rubén Molinet of the Dalí into opening fire on us. Faced with the superior weaponry of the largest and most modern hyperjump cruiser in the Nu Barsa fleet, we wouldn’t have had any choice but to flee. Using our inertial engines, to make matters worse, because the hypergraph went dead only minutes after they arrived—meaning that Qhigarian-style hyperjumping has now stopped working throughout the galaxy.

We’ll never get out of this system if we don’t obtain a new form of faster-than-light transportation from the still unseen extragalactics in the cloud ship.

Luckily for us, Captain Saudat and his Servet were already here. Any hyperjump cruiser, no matter how outdated, is a factor to be taken into account in an armed conflict. Maybe the Dalí could have dealt with them and us both at the same time—but it would have sustained significant damage in the space battle. So the situation was basically a stalemate.

The three-ship problem, instead of the three-body problem.

Everybody frozen, watching the others.

Nobody making Contact, nobody letting the other guy make Contact.

Too awkward to last, right?

The Dalí trio started hurling insults and then threats our way. Jordi expanded on all the things he’d do to Amaya and me when he got his mitts on us. Yotuel told anyone who would listen about my more embarrassing childhood adventures in Rubble City. And Jürgen? I never imagined the German would have such a fertile yet rotten sexual imagination. Some of the things he said he’d do to Nerys when he had her at his mercy would make even the most experienced Contact Specialists, like my friend Narcís, blush.

But the bullying phase didn’t last long. Once they saw that they couldn’t intimidate Berenguer or Saudat into giving ground, they bit their tongues and let the grown-ups negotiate.

Discussions dragged on for three hours, constantly interrupted by “sincere” protests of innocence and marked by open mutual mistrust, but at last we more or less came to an agreement on a joint plan.

That’s why the three condomnauts still capable of making Contact are approaching the extragalactic ship at the same time, like good buddies. This way we’ll supposedly each get a fair chance. And may the best at Contacting win, right?

Lovely. Such fair play. Brings a tear to my eye.

If this had happened in Rubble City, my sarcastic mentor Diosdado would have said something like, “I want a clean fight—but everything goes.”

Two against one. The odds obviously are with the Dalí and their two Contact Specialists, first and fourth generation. Hard to say which of the pair is sneakier or hates me more.

I suppose one will try to knock me out of circulation while the other takes his own sweet time making Contact.

A good thing condomnaut suits are designed so you can’t carry any sophisticated weapons. Even having a laser telemeter on you is a bad idea: a particularly paranoid Alien might mistake it for some kind of gun, you know. I’d better keep my guard up anyway. They can always try strangling me or breaking my back between the two of them. And it’d be easy enough to hide a shiv in one of the pockets.

I had to accept the risk, of course. Time stands still for no one, and if the extragalactics decide to take off from this system and leave us behind here—I don’t even want to think about how embarrassing that would be. Or what consequences might result.

If Nerys had at least come out of shock it would have evened things up a little. Then I’d feel sure that Captain Saudat would support the Gaudí with all his ship’s arms, to protect his own condomnaut. Oh, well. If dogs had wheels, they’d be carriages. My mermaid still hasn’t shown any signs of consciousness. Quite a trauma….

But you can’t lose a battle before you fight it, and having the odds on your side doesn’t mean you’ve already won. Point is: sure, it’s two against one, but I’m still in the game, still playing.

Sure, I sound as trite as a college football coach or a drill sergeant. It’s a pile of clichés, but they work. Even when I use them on myself. It’s the magic of motivational speaking.

Now we can see each other. There’s no confusing us: Jürgen is wearing a red suit, Yotuel is in white (what a surprise, right?), and they’re approaching in close formation from the same direction. My suit is green, as always. I wish it was blue; then we’d be wearing the three colors of my country’s flag. So symbolic.

Blood and purity against green, which is the color of hope. And the old flag of Libya, with no other details. How lovely. How allegorical. How full of shit my thoughts get at a time like this. Like I care at all about Gaddafi. Or flags.

“Just five more klicks to the extragalactic ship,” Captain Berenguer tells me after checking his telemeter, like mine’s not working. “Synchronize your trajectories, though I doubt they’ll let you approach much closer. Captain Saudat thinks that at any moment they might telepor—”

Said and done. His voice cuts off, and the next instant we aren’t surrounded by the black of space but a softly luminous white. We’ve been teleported.

It was so soft and painless that, if their hyperengine functions anywhere near as well, I can think of one good reason why the Qhigarians were in a hurry to leave: the Qhigarian mental con game is no match for this system.

We’re inside an empty terminal half a kilometer in diameter, according to my sensors. Our comms are cut, of course. The unsullied white of the whole place must make Yotuel feel right at home, as obsessed with cleanliness as he is. I can barely make out his suit: it’s the exact same shade.

The air around us is perfectly breathable, and the pressure is correct. Well, a little low, to tell the truth. And—huh. Helium instead of nitrogen. We’ll be squeaking like a bunch of Donald Ducks when we try to talk. That’ll make it hard to sound like serious ambassadors.

The weird thing is, we’re still floating. Don’t these visitors use gravity control?

We’re still arranged as before: a few dozen meters apart from each other, Yotuel in the middle, me on the right, Jürgen to the left. My two rivals look at each other, make an almost imperceptible signal, and promptly remove their helmets in perfect synchrony.

The empty helmets float like abandoned satellites, while their owners briefly activate the inertial micromotors on the suits and come at me, with the coordinated decisiveness of football linebackers in a slow-motion replay: colorful monochrome uniforms bearing down inexorably on the quarterback from the other team who’s got the ball…

I was expecting this. Lucky I didn’t end up between the two of them. Fighting isn’t my thing; I prefer “Here is where he turned and ran” to “Here is where he died.” But hey, if you’re not going to give me a choice, let’s play ball, guys.

I remove my helmet, too (if there are extragalactic bacteria or viruses that our reinforced immune systems can’t deal with, we’ll figure that out later), and hold it between my hands. Not tight against my chest, like a football player trying to break through the defense and score a touchdown, but slightly away from my body, at eye level, like a basketball player about to shoot a free throw.

I was never any good at football. Standing barely five foot seven and 145 pounds, I wasn’t beefy enough, though I’m a fast runner. But I’ve got a good jump, so I was a better than average basketball player; almost a champion. And now I’m planning to show off some of my skills to this pair.

The helmet is made of light but very hard material. And I was always pretty good at making baskets. A little luck and, first guy that gets near me, I might just break his nose. No, I’d better strategize this. It doesn’t matter who’s in the lead; I’ll go after Yotuel. Jürgen’s nanos are made for shifting his body shape, but they also help him to heal disconcertingly fast.

It really is too bad there’s no gravity. When I throw the helmet, I’ll logically go flying in the opposite direction. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction: it’s the law. Plus, it won’t hit him with the classic 9.8 meters per second squared of acceleration force it would have on Earth.

But speak of the devil… The gravimeter tells me we’ve got microgravity now. We’re all settling gently to the floor, which is as white as the walls. It has the soft, strange (and a slightly repulsive, I might add) consistency of jam or gelatin. Luckily it isn’t sticky, though.

I flex my legs and keep my grip on my helmet, waiting as the gravity slowly increases, bit by bit. The helmets that my two adversaries tossed aside hit the floor and bounce a little. Jürgen’s red helmet rolls almost to my feet. Perfect. If I grab it in time, a second projectile will give me even more opportunities. Why would they throw away such obvious weapons?

Maybe because they’re sure they’ll easily beat me without them.

My suspicions are confirmed as soon as their feet touch the gelatinous flooring and they continue advancing on me. Their long, weightless leaps remind me of the old recordings Abel showed me one time, about the first humans to land on the moon, in the middle of the twentieth century, on the Apollo 11.

And, yes, I’m a fan of old-time astronauts. I was bound to have some sort of shortcoming, right? Nostalgia for the olden days. I hope Nu Barsa will forgive me. There are worse flaws, after all, even for a condomnaut.

Jürgen pulls a long, thin chain from a compartment in his suit, unwinds it, and holds it up before him with both hands, a meter apart, in the classic pose of a strangler.

A mistake, I think. He could have hurt me more easily and from farther away if he’d used it as a lash.

Yotuel, for his part, is more traditional or orthodox about evildoing. He’s gone for a large screwdriver. Good for stabbing, good for slashing: pure Rubble City style. I’ve got to keep my eye on both of them. In my triple-armored suit, the only part of my head that’s really vulnerable to a stabbing by my old pal is my eyes, but if I let myself get distracted by protecting them, the nanoborg could easily take advantage, sneak up from behind, wrap the chain around my neck, and strangle me.

Maybe I shouldn’t have taken off the helmet. Too late now; no time to put it back on.

Speaking of which, I can feel its weight in my hands now. The gravity keeps getting stronger. I don’t need the gravimeter; my bones and muscles tell me it’s almost up to Earth level. Hopefully it won’t rise much beyond Earth gravity.

Here they come, running with all their might, white and red. A killer Polish flag against the flag of Libya. Nice image, or colorful at least.

Damn, like I care about flags. Is the air getting to me? Muddling my brain? I’ve seen stranger things happen.

Let’s test it, just to be sure.

Self-examination. What color was the flag of Kiribati?

No idea. That’s good: I’m still the same old Josué. And I’ve got more important things to worry about.

Yotuel will get to me first—and with that screwdriver in his hand, he’s also going to find it harder to block or dodge a helmet missile than Jürgen will with the chain.

“Fuckin’ bastard!” screams Yamil’s little brother, the aspiring murderer, as he pounces with his deadly weapon raised high. I can’t help noticing how ridiculous his high-pitched nasal war cry sounds in this helium atmosphere. Revenge of Duckman?

I keep my cool. I’ve been waiting years for this….

When he’s two meters away, I hurl the helmet straight at his face with all my might. It does no good: my hard, green helmet travels all of one meter and stops cold, suspended in midair, as if held by an invisible barrier.

Same thing with Yotuel’s huge screwdriver, when he tries to drive it into me with all the force of the years he’s spent dreaming of vengeance. A second later Jürgen is caught in the same barrier when he lunges for my throat with the chain.

They both struggle to free their improvised weapons, but they can’t get them loose. Seeing this, I don’t even try to recover my helmet, which remains stuck in midair. Instead, I calmly walk over to Jürgen’s and pick it up (no problem). Good thing the ultraprotects we condomnauts use are all a universal model. Maybe a red-green combo only looks good on parrots, but better safe than sorry. I won’t survive long in outer space in a suit without a helmet.

My would-be executioners in red and white are still struggling in vain. They’ve given up on their weapons; now they’re just trying to get at me with their bare hands. First they jump as high as they can, then one stands on the other’s shoulders; they’re trying to see how high the transparent but invulnerable barrier goes. Now they’re running away from me in both directions, trying to find a way around it. But no doing: not only is the wall invisible and solid, it seems to divide the entire terminal in two, from side to side.

I’m intrigued by its nature. My instruments detect no force field or electromagnetic waves. But here it is, impregnable, though my stubborn enemies refuse to admit it.

Having nothing else to do, I sit on the floor, holding the red helmet in my lap. It appears that I’m completely safe from my colleagues and their uncharitable intentions for the time being. All I have to do is wait for our extragalactic hosts to take the next step toward making Contact. They are obviously in complete control of the situation. They’ve been controlling it from the beginning.

I clear my mind. This is what the ancient Greeks called ataraxia, philosophical calm, a state of robust waiting, not mere laziness. Narcís Puigcorbé would be proud if he could see me.

I don’t have to wait long. A rasping, whispery sound comes from behind Jürgen and Yotuel. They stop their fruitless efforts to break through the barrier separating us and spin round to face whatever it was that made the curious noise.

An aperture has appeared in the white wall, some two hundred meters behind them according to the telemeter in my suit. Not a laser telemeter, of course. As condomnauts, we don’t carry anything that could be mistaken for a weapon.

It’s just like Amaya said. The invisible barrier threw me for a moment, but this is clearly another bioship. Maybe I should specialize in races that do biotech when I get out of this….

Lady luck is loca. You never know who she’s going to smile on. Apparently they’re going to start on Jürgen and Yotuel’s side. I guess I should appreciate the biblical justice—last shall be first and all that jazz—but damned if I find it funny.

The aperture must be about ten meters across. The weird thing is, I don’t see anything coming out of it, but my rival-colleagues obviously do. And they seem not to like what they see.

I pay close attention. Indentations appear at certain points in the strange white gelatinous floor. Footsteps. From them I deduce that the newly arrived invisible creature has four, or maybe six or even eight, feet. Considering that there’s about two meters between the right legs and the left, I figure it’s about that wide by about… five to ten meters long. Big, but I’ve seen bigger. Not so much to write home about after you’ve made Contact with Continentines and Kigran rorquals. That’s some comfort.

But Yotuel falls at once to his knees and begins vomiting, weeping, wailing, moaning for his dead brother, crying for help from his babalawo. Diosdado! Poor kid. He’d probably also be calling for his mother if he’d ever known her. No way he’s going to try and take off his suit or make any effort at Contact. He’s literally dying of revulsion and fear.

What is it he sees that has him so horror-stricken? Sure, he’s new at this, but he must have a lot of experience. Otherwise Jürgen would never have taken him on.

The German Contact Specialist, meanwhile, shows more presence of mind, though he’s also trembling like a leaf. The damn professional. Training shows. He manages to get his red suit off. Under it, his skin looks like it’s boiling.

His nano-impregnated body is modifying itself before my eyes, trying to adopt the morphology of… of what? Damned if I even want to know. It’s so weird, watching a First Contact between humanity and a creature I can’t even see but my colleagues obviously can. I suppose the barrier between us must also have some curious optical properties. The notion of privacy that this race from another galaxy has is a bit odd, to say the least.

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; it 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?

Maybe we’ll meet up with the Qhigarians again someday, now that the metagalaxy has been opened up by the living Peroptid ships, with their capacity for long-range hyperspace travel. If we do, we can hold them accountable for their cowardice and their centuries of scamming us all. And find out why they did it.

Meanwhile, several human exploratory ships with Peroptid hyperjump (bio)tech have visited far distant galaxies. And in the Whirlpool Galaxy, the third planet of one red giant has been named—guess what? Josué Valdés! And it’s being terraformed to become New Catalonia.

I have the honor of being the First Citizen of the brand-new colony, the first colony established by humanity beyond the Milky Way. And I expect it won’t be the last.

Someday I’ll visit it, I suppose. If the Peroptids don’t abandon us to our fate and deprive us of our hyperjumping capacity, that is.

But not right now. Because today I start my vacation, and have I ever earned it. The special circumstances that make for smooth Contact between human and Peroptid condomnauts have forced me to work hard, without a break, for weeks and weeks.

I feel aches in muscles I never knew I had. Female Peroptids can be very demanding. In their species, males are not sentient beings, so ever since the females discovered the allure of “sleeping with” their intellectual equals they won’t leave us alone, day or night. By “us” I mean the few Contact Specialists who aren’t overcome by disgust at the thought of giving them what they want.

My good friend Narcís tried to console me once by saying he figured the albino cockroaches must find our bodies every bit as repulsive as we find theirs. Well, guess what—he was the second human to make Contact with a Peroptid. He came out of retirement to do it. Didn’t want to miss the party, I guess. So I’ll let him believe whatever he wants, if it makes him and Sonya happy.

My relationship with Nerys ended abruptly when the mermaid finally came out of shock, after two weeks of therapy. She didn’t want to see me anymore, not even by holoscreen. She sent me word that a man like me, a man so dirty he’d agree to have Contact with creatures as repulsive as those bugs, had better not come anywhere near her, ever again.

Not very professional of her, was it? Well, I heard she’s going to leave the Department, to Miquel Llul’s dismay.

Jordi Barceló never revealed what it was the Qhigarians did to him, but he also left the fleet. I heard he’s trying to get back into the Navy. Better for him, and for Gisela and Amaya, who almost came with me on this trip. But he left Antares in the Gaudí. Lucky them!

Jürgen Schmodt still isn’t exactly himself. He’s back to looking almost 50 percent anthropomorphic, but he still gets the occasional spasm of chaotic dedifferentiation. I dropped in to visit him before I boarded the hypership to Earth and he didn’t recognize me, poor guy.

Yotuel did, though. He started howling incoherently, saying I was a cockroach disguised as a human and demanding insecticide so he could kill me and prove it. The psychiatrists aren’t very hopeful they can cure him, but I donated a few million credits for them to give it a try.

I don’t hold grudges, and Diosdado wouldn’t have liked to see me being hard on one of his other kids.

I’m closer to Earth now than I’ve been in eight years. And I really am feeling emotional.

Sonya, Narcís’s wife, asked me before I left if I felt like an exile coming home in triumph.

I’m not sure. I don’t feel like a winner, but the truth is, I haven’t done too bad.

I decided to go into exile, and I got real lucky. That’s all.

But I always felt something was missing, and after years of living in denial, I think I’ve finally screwed up my courage to admit to myself what it is—and to come back and find it.

“Josué Valdés,” a voice comes over the speakers. “Please come to the main lounge.”

It’s time. I swallow hard and start walking, leaving the hypnotic panorama of Earth behind.

I once left this planet promising I’d never return. I willingly gave up my childhood, my origins, everything that made me myself—for what?

Well, you can’t keep all your promises, can you? Especially not the promises you make to yourself.

It took years, I had to cross half the galaxy and make Contact with dozens of creatures born under other suns, but I finally figured out for myself something that Diosdado always told us, the moral at the end of one of his patakíes, his orisha fables: it isn’t truly a journey unless it ends right back where it started.

Though a place can never be the same as the one we left behind. Just as we can’t be our same selves, either. You can’t really go back: that’s the true secret behind nostalgia.

But sometimes we find more than acceptable substitutes. And every return is a new departure.

Lucky for me, Abel agreed to meet me here in the Station this first time back. Neutral ground. Meeting him down there, on Earth, in CH, in Rubble City, would have been too rough for me.

I just hope he doesn’t laugh when I give him back the thousand CUCs he loaned me eight years ago. When friendship has been interrupted, it takes a bit of ritual to mend it. Repaying a debt is as good a ritual as anything.