Still, I often wonder if he’s descended from the great medieval Catalan sage Ramon Llull. The way this skinny fifty-something stoic has transformed the Department is nothing less than alchemy. In fact, turning lead into gold with the philosopher’s stone is child’s play next to converting a handful of the most undisciplined Contact Specialists in the Human Sphere into a highly disciplined team with genuine esprit de corps.
Well, for most of us, anyway.
I give a little side-eye to Jürgen Schmodt, who in accordance with our mutual unwritten pact has bitterly pretended I don’t exist ever since I came here.
Esprit de corps, him? Not toward me, for sure.
Whether or not he’s the great-times-nine-grandson of Ramon Llull, Miquel the Magnificent made himself crystal clear to us the last time the German and I tangled (so far) and almost came to blows, six months ago. Next time there was trouble, he warned us, we’d both be gone from the Department and out of Nu Barsa like a shot. No right of appeal, no chance for being let back in.
And we didn’t think for one second that Miquel the Implacable would waste time keeping his word.
He doesn’t give a damn if Herr Schmodt, born (make that cyborg-assembled) on the German planet of Neue Heimat, is one of only three fourth-gen condomnauts in the Department. Much less that I’ve made more First Contacts than almost any other Specialist under his command.
Jürgen wheels around as if he noticed me looking. Maybe he did—who knows what bizarre sensors his Neue Heimat designer-parents built into him. He fixes me with his icy stare (his eyes are gray today, not the blue he usually goes for), and displays all his teeth to me.
Is my worst rival smiling at me? I must be seeing things.
Or maybe he recently made Contact with one of the carnivorous, territorial Alien species that bare their teeth at each other as a threat, and he picked up the gesture from them.
But no: he really is smiling, with his arm almost lovingly draped over the shoulders of the well-tanned condomnaut dressed all in white who’s standing next to him. I’ve never seen the kid before. Must be new. There’s something oddly familiar about him, though. With his oversized Afro and his coppery complexion. Something vaguely Caribbean about him. Could be Dominican, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, or…
Miquel’s authoritarian voice, amplified by the speaker system, cuts short my thoughts.
“Good morning, condomnauts. You know I don’t like beating around the bush, so I’ll be brief. This is no mere administrative meeting. You’ve all been called together to hear three pieces of intelligence.” He pauses, and looming over the rest of the crowd, my friend Narcís gives me a conspiratorial wink. “One good, one bad—and a third that’s just meh. The good news is something we’ve been waiting years to hear: an extragalactic Alien race has finally reached our Milky Way.”
Wow, looks like Narcís was slightly off: this time he’s not talking about possible evidence or dubious sightings; they really exist, and at last someone has…
“The bad news is, we weren’t the ones who made First Contact with them. And when I say ‘we,’ I don’t mean Nu Barsa alone. The whole human race,” Miquel continues, honoring as always his reputation for implacability.
Shit, now we’re screwed. If the Kigrans of Ophiuchus were first to make Contact with them, or those tightfisted Arctians, or even the paranoid Furasgans, it’ll cost us all we have and all we’ll ever have and more to get access, someday, to the damn intergalactic-range hyperengine. Well, there’s always the consolation of knowing that those smug, arrogant Germans and Russians will also have to pay their weight in gold for it. Of course, they have whole planets at their disposal, so they’ve got a lot more resources to draw on than we poor Catalans do.
We poor Catalans. Hey, I like the sound of that. Almost believe it and everything.
“And the meh news is that the lucky ones were: the Qhigarians,” Miquel concludes, unflappable.
A sigh of both relief and disappointment, if that’s possible, goes up all over the hall.
It’s not like anyone’s surprised. Statistically speaking, there’s no race more likely to make Contact with extragalactics than the tireless wanderers of the Milky Way.
Just as no one knows who the Taraplin Wise Creators were, likewise no one knows the home planet of their Unworthy Pupils. Also known as the Alien Drifters. You can thank our human knack with nicknaming for coming up with that one.
You run into their immense, rambling, peaceful, yet incomparably fast worldships—built of good, solid metal without a drop of force-field technology—in every corner of the Galaxy. There’s loads of them, too. More than twenty thousand worldships have been counted so far. And there’s millions upon millions of Qhigarians squeezed aboard each one of them. So many that few humans can stand to stay on a worldship for even a few minutes—that’s how strong the stench of the crowd is.
No other Alien race has such an impressive fleet. The Qhigarians offer the size of their fleet (which incidentally demonstrates that they don’t believe in birth control and aren’t worried about overpopulation) as irrefutable proof that they never had a planet of origin and have always lived on their ships, from the day the mythical Taraplins took them under their wings, or created them—they never clarify this point.
Could be. They have no written records, but not even the annals of the oldest species in the Galactic Community, such as the Kigrans, contradict them.
Most exobiologists, for their part, are of the opinion that no sentient species could have come into existence already wandering through space, like Pallas Athena emerging fully grown and armed from the head of Zeus. This would support the general feeling that if the Qhigarians ever had a planet of origin, they left it so many millennia ago that they’ve forgotten where it was—or else they’re keeping the secret to sell it to anyone interested enough in that piece of information to pay them what it’s worth.
The episode in which Joaquim Molá managed to wrangle no fewer than twenty-five working hyperengines from them for just a trilingual dictionary and his cat could be considered an almost shameful exception in the trade history of the Unworthy Pupils. Even the wiliest traders in the Galactic Community consider the Qhigarians particularly sharp negotiators, never giving anything away or even offering a good deal.
Except, of course, for the hyperengines made by their beloved Taraplins, so useful and at the same time so resistant to reverse engineering. The Qhigarians paradoxically seem to treat those engines with the same generous attitude some ancient Christian sects from Earth show for their sacred book, the Bible. They gladly contribute them, delighted to let everyone know about them and use them.
It’s also very strange that the Qhigarians, despite their interest in trading all sorts of technologies, have never wanted to buy or sell, much less use, any sort of weaponry.
They are committed pacifists. Or cowards to the core, depending on how you look at it. They don’t even have a hierarchical control structure so far as anyone knows. Considering how they’re piled up inside their worldships, their democratic nonviolence probably helps keep them from getting caught up in horrific fights all the time over every little thing, the way members of almost any other species would do under similar circumstances.
Pacifist ethics aren’t completely unique to them; at least a couple dozen other known races around the galaxy stubbornly advocate peaceful coexistence, even when threatened with annihilation. None have spread as far or become as important as the Alien Drifters, though. In an environment as competitive as interstellar trade, a species that refuses to resort to violence even under duress tends to be quickly relegated to the back row—that is, if they aren’t rapidly, definitively, and irreversibly eradicated.