Хосе Гомес - Condomnauts

A chill runs down my back. Could be out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Last year I got to make Contact with the monstrous rorquals of Kigrai. That is, of Alpha Ophiuchi, according to the naming system of ancient Earth star charts. They also use biotech. But each individual grows up to half a kilometer long (females, slightly less). As if that’s not enough, their genitalia are to scale.

That was a tough job, making that Contact. Ever since that day, I’ve had a rough idea of how a sperm feels inside a vagina.

Well, a Contact Specialist’s job comes with thorns as well as roses.

That’s why the few of us crazy enough to do it get paid the big bucks.

I keep moving with the mechanical industriousness of a beetle, climbing up a small ramp that has emerged from the opening. A welcome sign of courtesy. Apparently they realized that if I’m walking, I must not be able to fly.

The interior of the colossal Alien ship begins to glow a dull red. Lovely. Add some teeth and it’ll remind me uncomfortably of a giant, hungry mouth. Or of another less often seen bodily opening with teeth, which I’ve always assumed was just a black legend in our profession.

Ah. Now it’s not just glowing, it’s pulsating. All it needs next is a voice howling, “Get inside already, idiot!”

Strangely, this starts to make me feel better about them. Big or small, at least they share one trait with us humans: impatience.

So, with my hands still in the air (hoping they don’t interpret this as a threatening gesture), I sign off with Jordi and enter the bowels of the Alien ship. I even take the trouble to smile at his little holoimage. “I suppose we’ll lose our connection when I go inside this Alien monster. Just in case: it was a pleasure working with you, Third Officer Barceló, sir . Say goodbye to Antares for me—and to Gisela.”

His tiny face hardly moves a muscle when he replies, “Condomnaut Josué Valdés, I’ll pass on your regards to my cat and my girlfriend. I hope to see you again, though. Really, I do. I’d hate it if anybody else took care of you. But just in case— adieu .”

Yeah, that’s real friendship for you.

Just as I guessed, it’s a bioship. As soon as I’m inside, the ramp tucks itself away behind me and the entrance closes with remarkable fluidity. It seems like the opening never existed. At the same instant, the holographic window with Jordi’s image goes haywire and flits off, and I’m left in a reddish, unmistakably organic penumbra.

My helmet sensors tell me the ammonia atmosphere of the planet outside is rapidly being replaced in here by oxygenated air. Could they have identified the kind of gas I breathe from the carbon dioxide I’m exhaling? These guys are good.

I start sweating and trembling again.

A test of professional self-discipline: don’t think about the vagina dentata, don’t think about…

Situation analysis: roughly spherical chamber, approximately two thousand meters in diameter; quite large, yet relatively insignificant in relation to the ship’s total volume. If it’s an airlock, or some sort of decontamination chamber, what does it lead to? I can’t see any other doors, though of course the interior layout of a bioship is incomparably elastic and flexible.

But you’d at least hope…

Dull red remains the predominant visible hue. Flesh, or what? Do they see better in infrared light? That would make sense: this nondescript little planet isn’t exactly well-lit by the weak red star it has for a sun. There must be a reason they chose to stop here.

Well, hopefully I’ll get a chance pretty soon to figure out why they did that, and many other things, too.

I recalibrate my helmet visors. Just in time.

A shadow is approaching. It’s on the other side of the translucent membrane surrounding the chamber I’m in. A good guess is that the guys from the Contact’s home team are stepping up to the plate.

Or the guy. Looks like there’s just one of them. Well, in any case, here he is, passing through the last barrier. As he approaches, I take mental notes of his appearance with the swift precision gained from long practice.

What I can see at first blush bodes well: not too big; in fact, just about my height, which is always agreeably convenient. Bipedal posture. Two arms, two legs: definitely anthropoid. ¡Viva Shangó! ¡Viva Obbatalá! One head, narrow waist, wide hips, large breasts—so this is a female. I generally prefer them when dealing with other species, maybe to make up for my forced abstention from human women for so many years. Though some Alien males or hermaphrodites aren’t bad at all. Thin arms, long legs, blond hair…

Hair? And blond, to boot? Wow. Fortune isn’t just smiling on me, it’s grinning wide and laughing out loud.

No doubt about it: this Alien isn’t just a female, she’s 100 percent humanoid. And what a humanoid!

A perfect beauty, and not an inch of fabric covering her gloriously naked flesh.

Not just any woman, she’s a Real Woman. Elegant, beautiful, voluptuous, refined, all in a single package. Extragalactic or not, this Contact Specialist could win any Miss Humanoid contest.

And to top it off, she reminds me of someone. How odd.

Yes. Someone I know very well. A model, an actress, a Nu Barsa holovision host? Now that I look at her, she reminds me a little of Nerys…

No. Definitely not. She doesn’t even have green skin or gills. This isn’t my mermaid, or any other Catalan public figure; she reminds me of someone from my more distant past, but also someone who was closer to me. Someone from my childhood, yes. From CH.

At last, I’ve got it. Of course: Evita!

Uh-oh. Turns out they’re telepaths. How embarrassing. I hope they can take a joke. Or at least not consider it a capital crime. Evita… the little beauty, the only blond and blue-eyed girl in Rubble City, the daughter of Pablo Vargas, the greatly envied, powerful, arrogant director of Transplutonic Travels. A designer conception, she had been incubated in a sophisticated genetic womb up in Northia for a price that could have kept a hundred CH families living in luxury for practically a year. The rebellious hothouse flower who escaped her golden prison whenever she got the chance and played with us, the humble and happy orphans in the outer district.

And we watched over her, not just like she was our adopted little sister, but like she was made of glass. And not merely because we sensed that her father (what we wouldn’t have given to have a father ourselves!), who prudently turned a blind eye to her adventures beyond the cage, would have boiled us alive if she came home with so much as a scratch on her perfect skin. Most of all, because it was such a pleasure to serve her, like knights serving their lady: helping her wade across the muddy stream, helping her hunt and maybe kill the enormous, omnipresent mutant scorpions, centipedes, and cockroaches that made her scream with fright and disgust, saving the best fruit that we stole from old blind Margot’s garden for her.

Because even though we were just kids, she was even more of a child: she still had an innocence about her, while most of us already knew all about sex. And we were secretly thinking that when she grew up, having her as a girlfriend would be like being friends with the princess of heaven. So we were already trying to buy shares in the banking system of her affections….

Or maybe it was just friendship. Clean, simple childhood friendship. Why not? If anything so pure and innocent could exist among the children of Rubble City, I mean.

Evita, my secret childhood crush. I suppose that, apart from my “little problem” with women, it was the memory of her and a slight resemblance between her face and Nerys’s that made me fall for my snooty mermaid.