Well, nobody said our profession was always pleasant or free from danger.
Under these risky conditions I signed up with Captain Palol. I imagine that in spite of my swearing up and down that I had plenty of experience, he never believed me to be anything other than one more runaway teen, or at most a crew member who’d been left behind, perhaps an unlucky cabin boy. And he decided to give me a chance.
May the orishas bless his good heart.
And his gratitude for the good time I gave him in his office when he hired me…
After all, on its last twenty voyages, the corvette Juan de la Cierva had only come across the usual old friends: the Aliens from the so-called Ekhumen Merchanttil of Aries; the sidhar Iar Fjhoi and its people, bipeds with two arms and two eyes who could pass pretty easily for human on a dark night—if it weren’t for their slight scent of hydrogen sulfide, their navy blue skin, the small horns over their eyes, and their short, scaly tails, that is.
But luck was on my side: on the return trip, after an utterly routine commercial exchange with Arietian merchants (three tons of quartz geodes from Earth, swapped for a ton and a half of Furasgan-manufactured ceramic hyperconductors; I suspect it was contraband of some sort, to come so cheap), our small Catalan-flagged merchant ship detected the exhaust of a sub–light speed space vehicle in the direction of the constellation Pisces.
Captain Agustí gave me a dubious look and asked, “Do you dare, Josué?” I nodded, though I was trembling like a leaf. I had them shoot me up with all the vaccines and immune boosters I could take without bursting, put on the Countdown collar, and, well, that’s how humanity in general and the Catalans in particular made First Contact with the Continentines: gigantic masses of intelligent protoplasm from a double star system near the Hercules Globular Cluster. Confident of their physical endurance and biological immortality, after listening for thousands of years to radio transmissions from the Galactic Community, they had finally decided to set out for space—in ships propelled by nuclear fusion engines, no less!
That’s what I call being in no hurry to get anywhere in particular. Good thing they get around now with Taraplin hyperengines. Thanks to Captain Palol and me.
My Contact with the gigantic hermaphrodite amoebas was one for the textbooks; in fact, it’s already studied in a couple of academies. And I gained a lot of prestige. I admit that, speaking only for myself, entering a sea of cytoplasm protected only by a thin biosuit and swimming wherever the sol-gel changes led me isn’t all that arousing. But apparently I really did have some natural talent for the job: the way I stimulated the immense cell’s micronucleus proved so pleasurable for their Contact Specialist, they didn’t hesitate before giving us—no charge!—nothing less than the secret to their cold fusion method. With that, I secured a practically limitless source of clean, cheap energy for Nu Barsa and became a real hero among the Catalans, who offered me a long-term contract at the princely salary I’ve been living on ever since in Ensanche Nuovo.
Over the past eight years, through ups and downs, I’ve covered half the galaxy aboard all sorts of hyperjump ships, from small corvettes to enormous cruisers, “sleeping” with dozens of Alien life forms on my Catalan employers’ dime. Including eleven First Contacts.
And all that with no repercussions more troublesome than a fungoid rash I got from an infected Guzoid polyp. Nothing human pharmacology couldn’t deal with, luckily. A bit of interferon and the Alien spores surrendered en masse to my strengthened immune system.
Not bad for a starving runaway brat from Rubble City, eh?
The maglev car starts picking up speed again. Apparently it didn’t slow down a minute ago because we were arriving at our destination but just to let higher priority train pass.
At this point, accelerating is hardly worthwhile, though. We’re practically in the shadow of the outer ring of thin towers that make up the Central del Govern.
Up at the top of the holoscreen I can see the unmistakable profile of the Department of Contacts building. I wish I had met the architect who designed it. Xavier Pugat must have had a sarcastic sense of humor. Back in the day people often said that skyscrapers, so tall and narrow, were simply crude phallic symbols. He did them one better, deciding that the edifice housing the Department of Contacts and all its Specialists should be precisely an enormous hyperrealistic phallus.
Makes sense, doesn’t it?
He didn’t even leave out the veins, and there’s no mistaking the coloration. You almost expect to see a colossal, opalescent drop of semen emerging from the tip, which actually is the access to the central elevator and ventilation shafts.
“And here we are,” Mateo puffs, stretching his monumental bulk so brusquely that the seat creaks as if in pain. “Back to the madhouse,” he says with a beatific, or perhaps mischievous, smile. “Why the long face, Josué? Were you smoking wildwall, or is it that you don’t want to go see Nerys and tell her all the details about your Contact with the Evita Entity?”
I let out my breath, imagining the mermaid’s jealous reaction. “What’s done is done. I’ll take my lumps. The life of a Contact Specialist is a life of many sacrifices. Same goes for his girlfriend. In fact, I was thinking of visiting her today and telling her the whole story, with all the gory details. What’s really eating me is the idea of seeing the chassis of that nanoborg, Herr Schmodt. Think he’ll be there?”
“Hate to say it, but I know he’s there.” My Catalan friend shrugs. “His ship got back yesterday, like yours, so he can’t have taken off again yet. You know how exasperating Miquel the Stickler is about making his crews get a proper rest between trips.”
The maglev car decelerates one last time, almost imperceptibly (inertial absorption blocks, ultrafine tuning of the Algolese gravitic controls), stops in front of the wide platform at the foot of the phallic tower of our Department of Contacts, and opens its sliding doors.
“Up we go,” I say to Narcís as we walk in, and to calm our nerves I repeat the rusty old joke, “It takes the express elevator at least two minutes to reach the top—we’ll get to experience all over again how a sperm feels when it’s ejaculated.”
Narcís answers the joke in the usual way: “So long as we don’t shoot out through the central shaft, Cubanito. I didn’t bring my parachute today.”
“Hush. Come on, kid, take your mitts off me! I haven’t forgiven you for that Evita business. Chill! I hear the boss. Knock it off, Josué!” Nerys is whispering all this into my ears in her sultry voice as she slips wetly from my grip and floats back to her spot on her antigrav platform, despite my efforts to hold her tight.
I’ll never learn. For the millionth time my attempts to hold on to her succeed only in getting her clear mucus smeared all over my expensive suit. Good thing the gunk is odorless and dries quickly.
The things we do for mermaid love.
Sometimes I think I get pleasure from making her jealous. Even though she’s got a tail and fins instead of legs (or rather, precisely because of this), the girl drives me crazy. I return to my own place, reluctantly.
As usual, the muttering and whispers suddenly die away in the hall filled with condomnauts (all of us annoyed by being urgently summoned here) the moment Miquel Llul, the feared and respected head of the Department of Contacts, walks in.
We really do respect him, though he was never one of us. Sex isn’t his thing. As they joke behind his back, Miquel is so dry, he’d only be able to make Contact with a race of robots.