“It definitely likes you, Narcís. One of these days I’m going to go crazy and, forget about selling it, I’ll give it to you. But back to what we were saying: man, I still don’t believe a bit of what you told me,” I reply from the bathroom, pulling off my gym shorts.
I show off my muscles in the mirror, then run my fingers over my face, content. In spite of all the recent (and costly!) plastic surgery I’ve had done to get rid of my childhood scars from Rubble City (acne, insect bites), I’m still no Adonis. Especially not in Nu Barsa, one of the epicenters of beauty in the Human Sphere, where few people die without ever retouching the body and face that Mother Nature gave them.
But with these biceps and deltoids, which Yamil would have died for, and the dreadlocks I’ve been patiently cultivating for the past few years, at least nobody will call me “Zero” now.
Also, the light skin that drove me to despair in my childhood is perfectly normal here.
Yes, I’ve left all my childhood traumas behind. Except one. From which I make my living.
I step into the shower, leaving the door ajar so I can keep talking to Narcís—and keep enjoying my pet’s amazing color show.
I turn on my sophisticated Tornado shower system, which immediately surrounds me with rotating jets, shooting ten times more water at my body in one minute than I could have consumed in a whole month in Rubble City.
Who cares if the water, like almost everything else in this enormous habitat, has been recycled a thousand times? Point is, I get to use as much as I want. And the massage feels so good….
“What is it you don’t believe?” Narcís asks from the living room.
I raise my voice in the midst of the aquatic storm to answer, “I don’t believe you’re going to retire, and I especially don’t believe Aliens have finally appeared from beyond the Milky—”
“Shush, Josué!” paranoid Narcís whisper-shouts, scaring Diosdadito who frenetically pulsates purple and Prussian blue, transforming from its usual round shape into a sort of electric serpent, its demented angles zigzagging throughout the apartment at top speed. “In Nu Barsa, and in the home of a foreign condomnaut freelancer, the walls may have ears. Prudent Miquel doesn’t even trust us Catalans; imagine someone like you! But, hey, would you really give it to me?” He watches Diosdadito thoughtfully, letting his breath out in a pachydermic sigh. “Forget it. If I brought it home, Sonya would scream to high heaven—and toss me into the street, no doubt about it. Apart from the expense of installing all this magnetic fencing, with our boys it would be like letting an atomic bomb wander around the ceiling.” He shook his head and went on talking in his regular fat and happy baritone. “Well, it’s true, friend. Believe it or not, I did resign. I hung up my saber. Quit the whole shebang. I’m not a Contact Specialist anymore. Shit, I’m forty-two years old and I have two boys, aged five and three, you know, whose mother still manages to tell them lies about what their father really does for a living, but the truth is, they barely recognize me when they see me.”
It’s true: some double standards refuse to die.
It’s a tricky problem. There are still adults who haven’t figured out how to tell their kids what exactly it is we condomnauts do that makes us so famous and important. It’s especially hard when they’re your own kids, and you’re the guy who’s famous for, you know, doing nobody-really-wants-to-say-what. For all our sex appeal to some, for all our fame and money, the fact is, there still aren’t as many mixed marriages (between condomnaut and non-) as some people suppose.
And as for the kids—let’s just say, I admire Narcís’s tenacity. But I feel more certain every day that I’ll never follow in his footsteps. I find it hard enough to justify what I do to myself.
Of course, I never say any of this out loud. Narcís is my friend. But I figure he knows it as well as I do.
“Yeah, Sonya’s a saint,” I agree, thinking about my friend’s wife, as tiny and quiet as he is fat and outgoing, but equally headstrong. I switch the Tornado from thick streams of water to comforting jets of heated air, which have me warm and dry in an instant.
“She likes you, too, Josué—but she’ll still never agree to keep your energy pet in our home.” He brightens up and continues, radiating a sincere contentment that Diosdadito must be able to perceive clearly, because it glows a cheerful pink and green and returns to its spherical shape. “So I thought to myself, this business of waltzing all over the cosmos, willing and able to go to bed at any time with any Alien life form that might sell us some new appliance, was starting to feel like it wasn’t what had fascinated me at first. Maybe the time had come for me to devote myself to being a normal father and raising my kids without shameful secrets coming between us. And since I’ve saved enough for my family to live on for a few years, until I can find another profession, I put in for retirement. And there I was, signing the papers—retinal patterns, fingerprint scans, DNA, all the forms of ID they require for you to get your pension—when suddenly there’s all this excitement, everybody running around. I’ve never seen the office in such a state, or Impassive Miquel so animated. So I put two and two together, and started feeling as happy as a clam that it wasn’t my problem anymore. Then I remembered my little Cuban friend and zipped straight over to give you the news. It was as clear as could be that this could only mean one thing. Oh, and congratulations, by the way! I heard how well you did on your last Contact. The Evita Entity, eh? It isn’t every day you make Contact with a new telepathic, biotech, polymorph species.”
“Thanks, not that I deserve it; it was sheer luck. And thanks for the tip, too, brother.” I emerge from the bath completely dry, perfumed, and talcum-powdered, but still naked (an old joke with my friend, who loftily ignores my attempts to seduce his massive self), and pat Narcís on his back, as broad as a buffalo’s.
At ceiling level, thrilled with our harmonious friendliness, Diosdadito has now become a rapidly spinning ring, pulsating between sky blue and baby-chick yellow. If it were a cat it would be purring, I suppose. “Do you think one of our ships found them?” I ask, suddenly worried, as I put on my lavender-blue underwear.
This color choice probably would have earned me a stoning in Rubble City. Funny how when I was a kid in the Caribbean, which became one of the pioneering regions on Earth for gay and bi as the dominant patterns of sexuality, machismo still clung stubbornly to an antiquated notion of strict heterosexualism. Just like Jordi—before he got mixed up with me, that is.
The biovort empathically picks up on the anxiety concealed behind my tone and turns olive green, taking on the vague shape of an anvil—not a bad imitation of a storm cloud.
“My guess is, it was much ado about nothing. Or maybe just a rowdy office party,” Narcís reflects, trying to calm my pet and me at the same time.
Pleased, I open my wardrobe and after a moment’s hesitation tug on a lavender-blue shirt and a spider-silk smartsuit, then put on a pair of autoadaptable shoes of Sirian dolphin leather (Sirius: Radian 167, Quadrant 14; best leather in the galaxy; too bad the Kigrans exploit it). My outfit is worth more than all of Rubble City put together.
In this getup, and with only my Countdown collar for jewelry, nobody will mistake me for anything but what I am. Why hide it? Lots of people imitate us; in Nu Barsa, and throughout the Human Sphere, we Contact Specialists are the trendsetters, like movie stars and musicians used to be.
“Just another wild goose chase, then. The gazillionth.” I breathe easier, closing my eyes, the better to luxuriate in the delicious sensation of sophisticated fabrics and expensive footwear adapting themselves millimeter by millimeter to my exact shape. Now I’m the one who’d be purring if he could. “Probably somebody saw, or thought they saw, yet again, the phantom extragalactic Aliens, or found traces of them, but they still haven’t made Contact. So I could still be a hero for Nu Barsa if I pull it off.”