Хосе Гомес - Condomnauts

Well, I care, of course. If she really were human, I wouldn’t be able to function, either as a Contact Specialist or as a man. That’s the cross I bear, and at the same time it’s the best thing I have going for me and the source of my greatest talent.

Naturally, nobody on the Gaudí knows this, and nobody in Nu Barsa either except for jolly old Narcís Puigcorbé. But I can count on his discretion, whether or not he finally retires this year.

I also toss the translation earplugs and am more than ready to kick off the rest of my suit as soon as I can. One good thing about even the most heavily armored condomnaut suits is how easy they are to remove. A necessity for doing the job right, of course.

However, when a beauty like this, no matter how Alien she might be (or rather, precisely because she’s so Alien), steps up to help me remove this little obstacle between her flesh and mine, everything becomes much simpler—and much more enjoyable.

“We hail from the third star in the constellation that you call Crater, the Cup. It is a quintuple blue sun with no planets. Radian 3278, Quadrant 6 in the current cartography. We are a unitary being, made not of energy but of an elastic bioplasm that evolved in the system’s thin asteroid ring,” the lovely pseudo-Evita tells me, while gently fingering the Countdown collar with her perfect hand as soon as I am as naked as she.

No wonder the biometer couldn’t distinguish one crew member from another inside the ship: the whole ship is a single entity. Not a bioship but a creature capable of traveling among the stars. Making Contact with Aliens is a source of constant surprises, and it forces you to rethink what had seemed to be the most solid paradigms.

Another reason I love this job.

The gorgeous unitary being continues her speech, warm but fearless. “We assimilate radiant energy directly, and given our form of metabolism, we are virtually immortal, so we reproduce only rarely, by budding or fission. Therefore, the diplomatic ritual of Contact through sexual intercourse, of Taraplin origin, which almost every life form in this galaxy observes, strikes us as fairly… meaningless.” If she’s extracting all these words from my mind, she’s doing a good enough job of arranging them to sound convincingly human. That body and that face help a bit, too, of course. “Nevertheless, we are prepared to respect the tradition, just as we respected it on our First Contact with the Qhigarians. This… humanoid body, which we have molded based upon your memories, is only a partial projection, intended to facilitate your physical interaction with us. Shall we proceed, Josué Valdés?” Her final words follow the proper Protocol for First Contact. Maybe she learned them from the Qhigarians, maybe she grabbed from my brain; who cares.

I’m all for keeping the old traditions, this once. In fact, right now I’m a stickler.

I approach the fascinating “partial projection” of the Alien single bioplasm unit and tell her, in my most loving voice, something that could not have been very clear in my thoughts: “She was Evita to me, but perhaps as a species you would prefer to be known by some more formal name.”

“Excellent.” Her words ring in my mind, not my ears. “We shall be the Evita Entity.”

Well, there’s more than one way to leave your mark on history. I won’t be the first or the last Contact Specialist to do so, whether by chance or by design. Since the Five Minute War, almost all of human history for the past half century bears the stamp of the condomnauts.

Josué Valdés, Contacter of the Evita Entity. I rather like the sound of it.

Reciprocating her earlier gesture, now I am the one placing my hand on her delicate neck. It’s pure heaven, her rosy skin trembling under my fingertips. It’s just as silky soft as I remember it. I spend nearly ten seconds simply enjoying the feeling, then at last I say the ritual words, my libido quaking with every syllable: “Welcome therefore to the realm of humanity and of the Nu Barsa enclave, Evita Entity. May this First Contact and its intercourse mark the beginning of a fruitful trading relationship between our species. Let us proceed.”

And, wow, do we ever proceed. My hand slips down to her erect breasts, I kiss her, embrace her, and slowly we let ourselves fall to the floor in a tight knot of arms and legs. I have a huge erection. Thinking of how human she looks without being human in reality is the best aphrodisiac I could imagine.

So everything goes wonderfully well. Even before her thighs hit the soft organic floor, I’m inside her, and for a long time, as we move in unison, rolling across the bioplasmic bed, I feel her, wet, soft, exquisitely welcoming…

I’m nine years old, skinny, grubby, barefoot, half naked, surrounded by other kids as filthy as me. We’re in a muddy, unpaved little street that’s baking in the sun, flanked by shanties cobbled together from plastic paneling and recycled sheets of galvanized iron.

The street is named Tu Madre También. “So’s Your Mother” Street. It’s the main thoroughfare of Rubble City, the most impoverished district on the outskirts of CH, the beggar-queen metropolis, capital of poverty-stricken post-Five-Minute-War Cuba. The place I swear I’ll never come back to so long as I live. And to which I return regardless, night after night, in my recurrent nightmares.

So I know this is a dream. For all the good it does me. All the good it ever does me. I can’t wake up. Much less control what’s happening to me. The worst thing is, since this isn’t the first time I’ve relived this scene, I already know everything that comes next.

It’s a tragicomedy, being stuck in your own body, in your own past, which keeps repeating over and over until… until when?

As always, unaware of any drama, I jump around, make a racket, scream and shout along with all the other kids, like any poor but happy kid anywhere in the world would do, with the excitement you only feel when the games are about to begin.

Because we’re going to play—and I know full well what it is we’ll be playing.

Several of us are holding small multicolored cages woven from braided polystyrene fibers. These aren’t industrial products but a sampling of homemade children’s handicrafts that we’ve skillfully fashioned out of rubbish patiently recovered from the huge trash mounds surrounding Rubble City. Some kids even manage to sell them to outsiders, six for a CUC—the devalued Cuban monetary unit dating back, I’m told, to the early twenty-first century.

And inside those handwoven cages, we’ve got our runners.

I haven’t looked at them yet. I’d rather concentrate on the characters from my early years, who in this dream look exactly like I remember them.

It’s like settling a debt I owe to my nostalgia for a childhood I’ll never get back. Fortunately.

Here’s Yamil Check-My-Biceps, the bronze-skinned, green-eyed kid with the kinky hair who, at the tender age of twelve, is bursting with pride in his steroidal muscles. Well-dressed, attractive in the dangerous way bad kids can be. Kids born wicked. Not that I ever found him attractive, sexually speaking.

He always beat up on the little kids and dreamed of the big ones letting him into their gang. He’ll die without ever getting there, at the age of fifteen, from an overdose of wildwall. For now, though, he’s alive and kicking right here in front of me, showing off his magnificent Afro.

Standing next to him is his shadow, his scale-model replica, down to the miniature Afro, looking up at him like a minion at his god: his little brother, Yotuel Fullmouth. He hardly ever speaks and always keeps himself meticulously clean and good-smelling. He likes to dress in pristine white clothes, though he’s not a yabó . People say he pays for his beloved older brother’s vices and pleasures with the CUCs he picks up at night, sucking off the lonely, rich old men who park in the highway rest stop near Rubble City. Apparently, if you want to attract those perverted fat cats, you’ve got to smell really good and look healthy.