But sadly, even in the vast reaches of space, things are never so weird that they don’t remind you of something from back home. And sometimes it’s something you wish you’d never seen back home.
Do I ever know it. It’s been years, and I still have the occasional nightmare. Though I got Diosdado out of the deal.
And since quality generally comes at a high price, it turns out that whereas Algolese are, as a species, almost as young and devoid of sophisticated technologies as we are (and I emphasize that “almost,” in a place like this, which exists only due to Algolese gravity controls), the gigantic Kigrans are among the most powerful species in the Galactic Community. They’re hoarding more valuable biotech inventions than ten or twelve other races put together.
Secrets that lots of us would love to get our hands on, such as their bioships, their genetically individualized drugs, their biobatteries, their controlled cellular regeneration…
So there’s always a call for more and better condomnauts.
It was soon determined that, apart from exceptional cases such as Contact with the Furasgans, who are intelligent only when young and lose the ability to reason as they grow, or Termizarian reptiloids, who only practice heterosexual sex for reproduction and the rest of the time are happily homoerotic, pedophiles and pederasts are rarely suited to the task. Their spectrum of preferences tends to be simply too narrow.
Fetishists, however, such as furries, who are obsessed with dressing up as animals in plush costumes, and especially zoophiles, who love sex with animals, have found making Contact with Aliens to be the profession of our dreams.
Dreams some of us have, anyway. Or nightmares. Depends on how you look at it.
It also became obvious pretty quickly that, despite the publicity being given to this amazing new job, there weren’t enough pioneers with sufficient talent to get it done. Because being a pervert and ready for anything isn’t enough, not by a long shot. You also have to grasp the basics of the art of negotiation and diplomacy, and have some notion of linguistics and cultural relativism, technology and science, social intuition, courtesy, tact—lots of skills, in other words.
And none of the governments ruling the motley mosaic of cultures among which the human survivors of the Five Minute War were still divided wanted to fall behind, especially once it became clear that after an Alien species trades technology with a species making Contact, the recipients are not deemed morally obliged to share the information they acquire with the rest of their kind. First the Russians, then the Canadians, then the Japanese, and so on, until all the most powerful nations, one after another, embarked on a race to create costly and well-equipped special schools that detected and groomed their self-sacrificing students for all sorts of inclinations—furry, zoophile, and everything else considered useful for Contact. And of course they trained their most talented students in the difficult ancient art of negotiation.
That led to such academies as Feather, Hide, and Scale in Nueva Madrid, and Pan-Galac Zoo in Karlovy-MheschePlakneta, and many more. Mothers from the lower classes (and some from not so low) brought and continue to bring their children to them, dreaming they may pass the nearly impossible admission exams and, after difficult and exhausting training sessions that too often even damage the students’ mental health, acquire the professional education needed for travel into space as glorious Contact Specialists, ready to do anything as representatives of humanity to other races and cultures, navigating among the stars.
And most important of all, hoping they’ll come back wealthy from the bonuses paid for making a successful Contact.
Of course, there weren’t any expensive specialized schools operating in Rubble City, or in CH generally, or anywhere else in Cuba or the entire Caribbean, for that matter. So I broke into the trade in the hardest way possible: by improvising.
When Abel’s hacking skills and his kindly nature provided me the money for a shuttle ticket to the Clifford Simak Geosynchronic Transit Station (named in honor of a famous science fiction writer from the twentieth century, incidentally), the biggest duty-free habitat in orbit around Earth, it only took me a couple of hours to get a contract as a condomnaut with Agustí Palol, the captain of a small independent trading vessel flying under the Catalan flag. That was the hyperjump corvette Juan de la Cierva, which was preparing to take off with a crew of four, not on a heroic voyage of exploration to the depths of space or anything of the kind, but on its umpteenth routine trading journey around the so-called Zodiac Circuit.
Now, I didn’t pick this corvette completely by chance; the history of technology and inventors has fascinated me since I was little, and I thought flying in a ship named after the brilliant Spanish inventor of the autogyro would bring me good luck. And so it did.
In theory, every human ship should carry a Contact Specialist on board, just in case it happens to be lucky enough to get involved in a First Contact with some new Alien race (as the odds say it will, sooner or later). Besides, according to the famous Protocol that the Qhigarians, as faithful disciples of the Taraplins, are determined to spread everywhere, it’s supposed to be basically impossible to conduct any sort of trade unless a condomnaut is present to represent every species involved.
But in practice, many ships (and not only the human ones) risk navigating through the Milky Way without a Contact Specialist. This limits them to trading with already familiar merchants. Because, obviously, you don’t need a condomnaut to trade hardware for fissionable material with humans from another enclave. Though some wish that was how it worked, if only it were limited to trade among ourselves.
But keeping up galactic standards for interspecies relations doesn’t mean we have to do the same with our own. Besides, it would be too much work. Contact Specialists, human or otherwise, don’t grow on trees. And normal individuals of most species aren’t exactly willing to take part in effusive sexual intercourse with the representatives of other species, no matter how similar they look.
Sexual xenophobia isn’t exclusive to Homo sapiens by any means. This is the particular irony of the Protocol that the Taraplins created: if everybody enjoyed making Contact, what sense would it make to become a condomnaut?
Of course there’s always room for improvisation and even for professional impersonation; among us humans, and I suppose among some other Alien races as well, every once in a while an unscrupulous (and/or desperate) crew member will attempt to assume the prestigious role of Contact Specialist.
Impersonating a condomnaut is sort of like the last card in the deck for an astronaut who, for whatever reason, has lost or been abandoned by his ship, and who can’t get any other space vehicle to hire them in any capacity. A desperate last resort, if you haven’t got the training, or the stomach, for it. Some call it playing sexual roulette: if you’re very lucky, you won’t have to make Contact with anyone during the voyage; with a little less luck, it’ll be something not totally disgusting, such as “sleeping” with an Algolese female; but if things go bad, you might always end up with a Kigran rorqual.
But even in that case, it’ll go much better for the impostor who at least bites the bullet and gives it a try. According to the sacrosanct Contact Protocol of the Taraplins, if a hired condomnaut does not adequately perform his role as sexual ambassador in the way expected of him, the ship’s captain has a perfect right not only to refuse to pay him what was promised, but even to launch him into deep space on the spot, as a fraud.
That’s why more than a few impromptu Contact Specialists have gone insane (or at least have pretended to go insane) after stubbornly and desperately attempting to overcome their natural repugnance and make Contact with some particularly repulsive Alien. Just so they won’t be abandoned in the middle of outer space by their disappointed and infuriated captains.