Хосе Гомес - Condomnauts

The hyperengine we all use—Qhigarians, humans, Algolese, Furasgans, Arctians, basically all the thousands of races that now make up the Galactic Community—is an ancient Taraplin design. That mythical species, whose name in their own (lamentably forgotten) tongue meant “Wise Creators,” disappeared from the galaxy so many eons ago that not even their faithful heirs, the Qhigarians (which means “Unworthy Pupils,” of course) remember what they looked like.

Nor is there any clear explanation for why or how the alleged Taraplins disappeared—though many Qhigarians believe (or pretend they believe; never can tell with those crooks) that over the course of the millennia their beloved teachers accumulated so much power and wisdom that they simply transcended their mere physical state and became gods.

Luckily, before they Transcended, or died out, or disappeared, the Taraplins were generous and far-sighted enough to bequeath to their protégés, the Qhigarians, a stock of a few quadrillion engines, in three sizes or classes.

The hyperjump procedure is as simple as can be. All you have to do is set the coordinates for your destination and make sure that the entire hull of your ship is inside an imaginary polyhedron (specifically, an octahedron with eight identical triangular sides) drawn from the endpoints of the six long, thin antennas, which you must fully deploy in order to generate the field. When the antennas are energized, a microsingularity is generated in the space between them on which surrounding space tends to converge; but hyperspace cannot be squeezed flat, so the ship has no choice but to pop out of our three-dimensional space into an equidistant hyperspace—from which, when the energy impulse is turned off, it emerges once more into the regular cosmos, like no big deal. But suddenly you’re many lightyears away.

Simple, right? In practice, at least. Yes, the Taraplins were geniuses.

In fact, to the mortification of millions of human and Alien brainiacs, nobody’s been able to figure out the specific physical principle behind the ancient and incredibly effective devices that allow us to maintain faster-than-light travel across the galaxy. Try to open one and it dissolves in seconds, as if eaten by some powerful acid.

So we’re forced to buy each and every one of our hyperengines from the Taraplins’ savvy heirs, the Qhigarians, who are the only ones who know how to activate them. Though to be fair, they sell them and turn them on for an astoundingly low price, considering how greedy the Unworthy Pupils are in all their other business dealings.

As magical as it is as a transport system, hyperjumping also has its limitations. The most aggravating is that you can hardly ever jump straight to where you want to go. The routes through hyperspace, for reasons that not even the Qhigarians are able (or willing) to explain, appear to shift around all the time. Sometimes the same journey that took you just five jumps of a hundred lightyears apiece in one direction will force you to take six, seven, eight, up to twenty jumps of barely thirty lightyears each on the way back.

The Qhigarians don’t try to explain hyperjumping; they just believe in it. And in selling tons of hyperengines. But scientists, whether human or Alien, aren’t generally very big in the faith department. That’s why there are as many theories about how hyperjumping works as there are races in the Galactic Community.

The Furasgans, for example, believe that the Wise Creators set down a limited number of roads through hyperspace, along which the ships run like trains on rails. Except that these rails are constantly moving and reorganizing. Hmm.

Kigran rorquals maintain that on every hyperjump, the ship and the crew are annihilated, and what returns to our universe is a quantum copy. Yeah, and so?

Some Algolese and human physicists think superstrings are tangled up in the whole affair. Excellent.

Arctians argue that a hyperjump simply leaves the ship in place while the universe moves around it.

Of course, there are those who claim it’s a little of both.

While others say they’ve got it all backward.

But the hypothesis that, for my money, wins the cake for audacity, originality, and paranoia, is the one I heard Jaume Verdaguer, a young Catalan physicist, expounding one afternoon. Supersmart and crazy as a loon, but the sweetest and friendliest guy you’ll ever meet. He and I lived together in a blissful romance years ago.

Jaume and a handful of equally young colleagues, unorthodox fans of conspiracy theories all, simply don’t believe that any “real” physics are involved in hyperjumping. Using Occam’s razor, they came up with the idea that the brilliant, extinct Taraplins never existed. Moreover, they posit that Taraplin hyperengines are a massive con job being pulled by their Unworthy Pupils. Hyperjumping, they think, isn’t an intrinsic physical property of space at all, but a mere mental function. Something the Qhigarians themselves are doing, no less! Like an extension of their strange colonial telepathy, which is undeterred by distance.

Therefore, they think, how hard or easy a hyperjump is at any particular moment depends only on how many worldships, full of Qhigarians concentrating their mental powers, there are in that sector of the galaxy at the time. That’s also why it’s impossible to leap beyond the Milky Way to regions where none of their thousands of worldships have yet gone.

Personally, I find the idea kind of charming. But as a scientific theory, I’m afraid it’ll never be very popular. Believing it would mean, to start with, granting the nomadic, pacifist Qhigarians nearly limitless intelligence and mental power—enough to teleport thousands of ships a second! It’s a scary thought.

Besides, if they’re such a powerful race, why would they need to keep such a complicated con job going among thousands of races in the Galactic Community?

As it is, hypernavigation is less a science (though that’s how the Space Academies teach it) than a sort of intuitive gift, which some people have and some will never learn no matter how hard they try. Like the skill for Contact that we condomnauts have, for example.

Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to Gisela, the hypernavigator on the Antoni Gaudí . Sheer affinity between two souls who both have valuable and relatively rare talents.

Though hypernavigators are a bit more common, to be honest.

It’s platonic between us, of course. With my old trauma, she and I could never…

So who cares if she’s a skinny freckleface with basically nothing attractive about her, other than an exuberant head of disheveled red hair that cascades almost to her waist. Who cares if she picked that muscle-bound putz Jordi Barceló, the ship’s third officer, to be her partner. Jordi, who has an even nastier temper than his cat, Antares. But, man—those muscles.

Better not to think about it right now.

The fact of the matter is, whether it was Gisela’s talents or the sheer randomness of galactic routemaking, three days ago we jumped to this unmapped system in Radian 1234, Quadrant 31, almost dead on the galaxy’s ecliptic plane, and we would have jumped away almost immediately. Except that Amaya, our methodical sensor technician, glanced at the hypergraph and noticed that something had recently entered the system and hadn’t left. Some enormous something . Because, as our disconcerted Amaya explained to us, it had to be incredibly huge for her to detect it at such a distance.

As soon as we discovered this monster our priorities naturally changed. Screw recharging the gravitic hyperjump batteries and all the other drudge-work!

This was a really big deal. Maybe even the biggest deal in the past fifty years of human history, the biggest thing since the day when, thanks to Quim Molá’s cleverness and lack of scruples, we got those first twenty-five hyperengines from the Qhigarians and reached the stars.