Well, our physicists haven’t exactly been the most brilliant ones in the universe lately. We treat Algolese “gravitic witchcraft” pretty much like we do the Taraplin hyperengines that the Qhigarians sell us: nobody is dumb enough not to use it just because we can’t understand it.
From edge to edge, the huge Catalan orbital enclave measures almost five hundred kilometers across. So, using the simple formula for the area of a circle, pi times the radius squared, that makes…
How much? I’m not up to doing it in my head, and I don’t feel like distracting the monorail’s AI with trivia. Let’s say, about two hundred thousand square kilometers. That’s the figure the authorities on this gigantic archology always bandy about when they’re showing it off to their generally stunned visitors.
Perfect Caribbean dimensions. Somewhat larger than my own native island, or a little smaller than all the Antilles put together.
A real space island, floating in one of the Lagrange points around Pi y Margall, a yellow dwarf in Radian 457, Quadrant 12, invisible from Earth and with only three planets—all gas giants with no satellites, and therefore absolutely inappropriate for colonization. That’s the only reason the greedy Arctians allowed us to occupy this system for a modest sum, and even let us rename its primary after the Catalan statesman, even though it lies well within their sphere of influence.
Zipping over on the monorail, the only thing that reminds us we’re on a man-made orbital habitat and not a planet is the uncanny flatness of the horizon.
Nu Barsa isn’t the largest human orbital enclave; that would be Commonwealth, belonging to the Anglo-Indo-Australo-Jamaicans, which orbits Bannard, a star much closer to Earth. It measures 750 kilometers in diameter and has seventy kilometers of “sky with atmosphere” from ground to zenith.
Once again I reflect that, while we humans may have conquered space thanks to the Aliens, especially the extinct Taraplins, their generous Qhigarian heirs, and their marvelous hyperengines, it’s also true (and I can’t help but feel proud at the thought) that we couldn’t have done it without the selfless hard work of Contact Specialists such as Narcís and myself.
No technology available to humanity in the twenty-second century would have made it possible for us to construct a space archology as enormous and as distant from the Solar System as this one—or, for that matter, even to transport the eleven million Catalans and the four million representatives of other nationalities who live here today. Especially not in such short order.
Thank goodness for Algolese gravity tech. And Arctian high-efficiency biorecycling systems and many more Alien technologies, without which humanity might be nothing but a sad memory today, just another line on the long galactic list of extinct civilizations, starting with the Taraplins. A list dutifully maintained by their Qhigarian heirs.
Likewise, the Russians, Canadians, Brazilians, South Africans, Japanese, and Germans—the only nations that have managed to either buy (at very steep prices) or discover and then occupy planets that are more or less terraformable—could never have reached their new and very distant worlds of Rodina, New Thule, Nova Saudade, Krugerland, Amaterasu, and Neue Heimat, were it not for the Taraplin-designed hyperjump engines sold by those same Qhigarians.
Well. Narcís fell asleep. Par for the course when he rides the monorail. And now he’s snoring up a storm.
I, for my part, am staring absentmindedly at the panoramic holoscreen, watching woodlands, towns, lakes, and fields stream past. It almost seems natural to think about travel when you’re moving this fast through a habitat as impressive as Nu Barsa.
After an impasse that lasted nearly a century and a half (due to the Five Minute War, among other things), the second and most dazzling stage of the human adventure in space began. It got started by sheer chance, as is often the case. One fortunate day, May 19, 2154, the distinguished Catalan astronaut Joaquim Molá was on a one-man exploratory mission for the European Union, looking for water-ice comets in the Oort cloud, when he made First Contact with an Alien species.
Or it might be more accurate to say that it all started when the wily Quim got the first twenty-five hyperjump engines ever acquired by humanity from the Qhigarians in exchange for nothing more than his cat and a Catalan–Spanish–English dictionary. (The cat, by the way, was named Aldebaran, according to his log; apparently it was already a custom back them to give Arabic star names to the cats that ships kept as pets and mascots.) This was probably the most profitable and providential trade anyone’s heard of since the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Indians for twenty-two dollars.
Nobody denies that cats are the best mascots a ship could have, as Antares reminds me every time I travel. So maybe the Qhigarians didn’t make such a bad deal in the long run. Not to mention that the Catalan–Spanish–English dictionary must have been a real gem for them; they’re completely obsessed with learning new languages. They’re still trying to talk us into selling them our most current translation software. No deal, of course: that is our main trump card for making Contact.
Still, every time I think about that episode, I don’t know why, but it brings to mind that old joke about how copper wire was invented: two Catalans picked up a one-peseta coin at the same time, and they each tugged on it, both refusing to let go.
Molá was a sharp negotiator and a hero for all humanity, yet he is nonetheless despised as nearly a traitor and a flaming idiot, both in the reduced remnant of old Catalonia on Earth and in this flourishing Catalan enclave of Nu Barsa.
I can understand. Every self-respecting Catalan must get angry at the thought that their fellow countryman could have kept them all of those precious hyperengines for his own people instead of giving (not even selling!) twenty of them to the rest of humanity. Then they’d probably be living on an entire planet of their own, New Catalonia, and not this orbital habitat. Sure, it’s a big habitat, but pitifully limited.
The rest of the human race would have had to pay the Catalans for the rights to use the Taraplin-Qhigarian hyperengine, just as now they pay the Russians for the high-efficiency biorecyclers they got from the Arctians. Otherwise, fuck them.
Whether or not Quim Molá was a traitor, we humans were very lucky.
In what had looked like our darkest hour—not long after the terrible Five Minute War between China and North America in 2136, with the consequent radioactive contamination, entire cities completely wiped out or partially destroyed (including Madrid and Barcelona, by the way), and even worse, the catastrophic climate change that followed, with floods and droughts unleashing the worst famine in history and reducing the swarming population of seven billion in less than a decade to a scant, starving nine hundred million—just when it seemed like a Solar System with no colonizable planets would be our grave, the Aliens and their new technologies opened up the Galaxy to us.
And today, almost five decades later, on the brink of the twenty-third century, if we play our cards right, other Aliens—this time, extragalactic—may open up the entire Universe.
The maglev car begins to decelerate. Too soon, it seems. The heart of the city, the Central del Govern, which old Catalans prefer to call El Govern, the complex of tall buildings from which Nu Barsa is run, is just beginning to come into focus, still kilometers away.
“Impressive, isn’t it, Josué?” The change of velocity wakes Narcís, who guesses what I’m thinking. Not too hard to do, as I’m staring at the majestic spectacle of the distant stylized towers and suspension bridges we’re heading for.
The labyrinthine yet elegant Central buildings defy the artificial gravity generated underneath the enclave, spreading their almost calligraphic filigree across woodlands, fields, rivers, even lakes. Narcís gazes at them and sighs, contented. “Every time I ask myself why the devil I have so many more Alien than human females on my list of sexual partners, I look at all this and, knowing it’s our home because of people like me, I feel… let’s say, rewarded.” He yawns, settling comfortably on the wide double seat of the maglev car, which his monumental backside fills almost entirely.