“Bravo for your spirit, Cubanito. But that may not be so easy.” Narcís’s qualms bring me down again. “I thought I heard the word ‘Qhigarians.’ If those polymorphic hoodwinking hobos are in on this… ”
I tremble, just thinking of what that might possibly mean. Diosdadito blazes red and violet on the ceiling, reflecting my worries.
But no. Think positive. That’s another essential for being a good condomnaut. With an almost physical effort, I push all thoughts about the asshole Alien Drifters and their thousands of shapes and worldships out of my head. I manage to crack a reasonably nonchalant smile, and my sensitive biovort dials its color back to pure sky blue.
“You must have misheard,” I speculate, standing at my apartment’s door. “Anyway, however it turns out, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“We’ll cross it, Josué. We will cross it,” Narcís says emphatically, waddling over after saying goodbye to my pet, who glows a happy red. If it were a dog, I’m sure it would be wagging its tail now. Its lack of selectivity is so inappropriate for a companion animal. Especially such an expensive one.
Maybe I should find myself a cat, like Antares.
“I thought you said you just retired,” I tease. Locking the DNA-controlled door behind us, we step onto the slow, narrow moving pathway that takes us to the much faster moving hallway outside.
“Did you think Cheapskate Miquel would let me go, just like that?” My enormous friend shrugs comically, and, as we are in a bit of a rush, we walk at a brisk pace on the building’s internal transport system, which does barely two kilometers an hour through the wide vestibule. “I had to make a couple of concessions, buddy. But I came out ahead: I’ll still be working for the powerful Department of Contacts, except I’ll be a consultant. And for this mission, I’m afraid they’re going to need all my experience and advice.”
A teenager from the second floor steps out of the elevator, recognizes me, and (staring at my outfit, a cheap imitation of which he will wear tomorrow to impress his friends) calls me by first name.
I don’t respond, just as I didn’t respond to Narcís, but not because I’m playing the big star.
I’m simply concentrating on the semiacrobatic feat of stepping quickly from the building’s slow walkway to the outer belt of the public Rambla Móvil, which does five kilometers an hour, an average pedestrian’s speed.
A great invention, these moving sidewalks, though people always complain the maintenance costs a fortune. But at least in this exclusive residential neighborhood, Ensanche Nuovo, one of the most expensive in Nu Barsa, they run like clockwork.
Narcís and I advance almost mechanically, with scarcely a second between transitions, from the outer belt to the innermost ones on the Rambla Móvil. Each belt runs five kilometers an hour faster than the last. The last one, in the center, moves at a respectable fifty kilometers an hour, with double grab rails on posts every four meters. We find one to hold on to, just in case, and in less than two minutes we reach the maglev monorail terminal. Hardly moving a muscle. Viva New Barcelona. Viva la technology.
Narcís and I wait silently on the maglev platform for the next car to arrive. Just takes ninety seconds. It isn’t rush hour; it’s never rush hour in the enclave, especially not in Ensanche Nuovo. The artificial sun above the enclave goes through a twenty-four-hour brightness cycle, but it never turns off, and good planning has divided the habitat’s population into three shifts for work and time off.
We get on and, as we’re the only passengers on the sleek, swift car, we take advantage of one of our privileges as Contact Specialists to key in a top priority destination, turning the already fast public transportation system into our own private superexpress train.
Having no need now to turn aside or stop at any other platforms, the AI controlling the maglev readily accelerates and after a few hundred meters hits eight hundred kilometers an hour. Not its top velocity, just normal cruising speed. We’re in a rush, but it’s no emergency.
The car has no windows. Enormous panoramic holoscreens equipped with dizziness filters allow us to enjoy the outside view perfectly well, without running the risk of motion sickness from looking directly at the blurred landscape rushing past.
As in old Barcelona on Earth, here, too, the Catalans have built an enviable transportation network. This organizing business comes easily to them, almost like with the Germans, I’m told.
Hopefully I’ll get to visit Neue Heimat someday and find out for myself. See if that conceited ass Jürgen Schmodt wasn’t exaggerating when he bragged about his home planet.
Our destination, the Central del Govern, administrative heart of Nu Barsa, is a dense cluster of towers (red and gold, of course: Viva Catalonia!) visible in the distance. So tall that, if it were on Earth, Gaudí’s original Sagrada Familia would look like a chunky stump next to them.
In fact, the complex includes a replica of the great basilica that once symbolized historic Barcelona. Twice the original size, yet still dwarfed by its sleek descendants.
Catalans feel such reverence for their brilliant Catholic architect, there must be at least six replicas of Park Güell in Nu Barsa. And I’ve counted like fifteen Casas de la Pedrera. Not to mention the hyperjump frigate I serve on, named after him. I wouldn’t be surprised if any day now they present the New Vatican with a petition to beatify and canonize him. If they haven’t done so already. Saint Gaudí—got a ring to it, you know.
The lightweight, highly resistant carbon-tubule internal structures of these graceful gold and scarlet towers (heraldic colors of the historical Counts of Barcelona), plus the Algolese gravitic systems that control them, allow them to rise as high as ten kilometers in some areas. The skeletal buildings are interconnected by countless bridges and walkways, like an elegant oversized tribute to the Metropolis of twentieth-century director Fritz Lang’s visionary film.
It’s such an impressive sight, I sometimes forget that Nu Barsa, like most human colonies beyond the Solar System, isn’t an authentic planet but an artificial habitat.
In other words, a space station. But what a station!
Neither Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, nor Robert Goddard, nor Lynn Poole, nor Wernher Von Braun, nor Arthur C. Clarke, nor any of the other daring pioneers of astronautics or of science fiction who fantasized wildly in the twentieth century, imagining orbital rings, excavated asteroids, and a variety of other permanent human habitats in space, ever conceived of a structure this immense.
I savor once more the magnificence of the spectacle. There’s a reason it’s so expensive to live here.
The small asteroids containing the force field and the artificial sun, a triad of barely visible black spots at the zenith, surrounding the constant fusion blaze of our “pocket star,” are exactly fifty kilometers up in the sky.
Not technically sky, but whatever. What matters is that the volume under the “roof” is not only big enough to holoproject a full sky but for genuine water vapor clouds to form and float overhead, along with helicopters, turbocopters, gravimobiles, and all sorts of aerial vehicles, and plenty of room to spare.
The “ground” is a simple layer, two or three meters thick, of organic topsoil over an expansive force field that knits together the dozen or so small asteroids containing the generators. All Algolese technology. We use it even though we don’t understand the mathematics behind it, and our physicists swear up and down that no Unified Field Theory is possible.