I really have to work on my bisexuality. Or homosexuality. Lately I’ve really been noticing women. More than men, in fact. Sweet Jordi, forgive me. I promise to be better. If you give me lots of kisses.
Come to think of it, could it be that I’m getting over my Karla-Rita complex? Or maybe I’m just turning into a hopeless gossip.
“Josué, por Deu! I don’t know… how you can… stay so calm,” she gasps, still panting from the run, while fastening her seat’s safety mesh. “Did you catch the poison dig Amaya made at Gisela? And at Nuria, before? What an unbearable butch.”
“We’re all on edge, what with one random jump after another coming up dry,” I try to excuse her. Keeping the peace. As an enemy, Amaya Serrat would be worse than Jordi Barceló.
“If we don’t find something soon, the gravitic batteries won’t be the only things that need recharging.” Rosalía loves playing the alarmist, though when push comes to shove you can count on her calmness and professionalism. Besides, she’s got a nose for good trade deals.
An unmistakable laxness in my body tells me the artificial gravity’s turned off, and mentally I count down: nine, eight…
“Locating the Qhigarians or the extragalactics isn’t my problem,” I reply, trying to sound even-keeled, though jumps through hyperspace always get on my nerves a little. “When we find them, though, you’ll all get to rest easy while I’m out there sweating buckets.”
… four, three…
“Or out there pleasuring yourself.” The understudy exobiologist winks at me, perhaps remembering my recent encounter with the Evita Entity. And to think that for months I thought she was playing on Amaya’s team. I like her, but one time on night duty I had to reject her with all the diplomacy I could muster. I didn’t want to offend her, but two platonic relationships on one ship were more than I could handle. This bisexualism business has really complicated things for crews. Especially for me. Nobody has more complex complexes than I do. At least, that’s what it feels like, which amounts to the same thing. “Besides, what makes you think we can just sit around calmly waiting while you make Contact? Too much depends on your sexual and diplomatic abilities, condomnaut Josué Valdés.”
… one, zero!
Sometime back, in Rubble City, I read a description of hyperjumping in an old science fiction novel I’d gotten hold of. The guy who wrote it, Asinov or something, said that it felt funny, like suddenly being turned inside out.
Not bad, coming from someone born in an era when they’d only gone as far as the moon, using antediluvian chemical combustion engines.
Years ago, when my physicist “friend with benefits” Jaume Verdaguer tried to explain the hyperjump process, about which we actually know so little, he used a slightly different metaphor; he told me that the jump through hyperspace was like falling into yourself while doing a somersault. Clear as mud, right?
The point is, every time I’ve had to go through it—and in my eight years as a Contact Specialist, I’ve done it thousands of times—that’s exactly how it’s felt: like my skin was trying to trade place with my guts, then suddenly jumping back into place, leaving everything still throbbing.
It isn’t much fun, for all that hardened old space dogs brag about finding it invigorating, and especially stubborn ones even speculate that it rejuvenates their cells. But in the end, it’s a small price to pay for a form of travel that can almost instantaneously transport ships with tonnages in the tens of thousands for distances of hundreds of lightyears, you know.
Over the past three weeks, though, I’ve started to think that I’ve simply gone through too much “falling into myself.”
“Pau, Manu, and Rosalía—you’re on bridge duty until our next jump. General maintenance and recharging the gravitic batteries. The rest of the crew can visit the sensor chamber if you don’t have anything more urgent to do.” It’s Captain Berenguer’s voice, sounding tired.
“This better not be the time we get lucky or I’ll miss it,” the trade economist complains, mischievously slapping me on the butt as we split up and head down different corridors.
Some women just don’t understand that a man can tell them no.
It’s our twenty-sixth day on an exhaustive search of the sector assigned to us by the great Miquel Llul, Radiants 2034 and 2035, and still coming up empty. More than four hundred jumps through hyperspace, hundreds of lightyears traveled, and zilch. Nada. The Qhigarian worldships that usually swarm almost every quadrant you go in the galaxy are conspicuously absent. Weird.
And judging by the three radio beacons we’ve picked up when we’ve approached the neighboring sectors, the other vehicles in the Nu Barsa exploratory fleet are having as much luck as we are in the rest of the galaxy.
There are currently 1,053 ships with hyperengines registered in the Catalan orbital habitat’s astroport, between corvettes, frigates, and cruisers. More than a thousand of them are engaged in this veritable Qhigarian hunt, with the aim of catching an extragalactic next. This is what I call an all-out effort.
It’s a little scary to calculate the volume of trade this flurry of exploration has cost us. If we don’t find those extragalactics soon, the other human enclaves are going to start suspecting what we’re up to. Then Aliens, and if everybody gets in on it…
We’re running a big risk. If anybody but us finds those extragalactics, the Nu Barsa economy could go into a tailspin before the end of the year.
But if, on the other hand, one of our ships gets to them first, we could be the first living beings in the galaxy to travel beyond the Milky Way.
One of our ships? What am I saying. It’s got to be the Gaudí that finds them, and me who makes First Contact. That way I’ll earn Catalan citizenship once and for all, get married to Nerys, and crush the hopes of that bastard Jürgen Nanobot and his little pet, Bitter Yotuel.
“There’s 18,250 hyperjumps into the system, and not a single one out!” Amaya’s astonished voice greets me when I walk into the sensor chamber, where I also find Captain Berenguer, Nuria, Gisela, Rómulo, and Jordi petting Antares—as ginger, lazy, pampered, and busy purring as ever, in spite of the excitement in the air.
“Who’s throwing the party?” the Captain thinks out loud, then asks, “How many planets?”
“None, according to the catalog,” Nuria is quick to answer.
“I’m going to look that up for confirmation,” Amaya adds distrustfully as she diligently consults first her computer, then her pandemonium of instruments. “But, Captain, I find it suspicious to see so many hyperjumps in. Our last leap may have thrown the sensors off. I’d better check the hypergraph. It’s more sensitive.”
“Save it,” Nuria insists, checking a couple of data points over her former lover’s shoulder and pointing them out with retaliatory smugness. “The catalog isn’t wrong. Gamma Hydri is a triple star; the gravitational tides must be complex and constant; there was never any chance for a protoplanetary nebula to form in this system. Your instruments are working properly.”
“But not a single ship shows up in the telescopes or on the gravimeter,” Amaya protests weakly. “Could it be… ?” And after a couple of quick manipulations, she triumphantly announces, “It turns out the catalog sometimes does make mistakes after all. There is a planet. And it’s a big one. It’s a solitary, at one of the system’s Lagrange points. I’m running a spectrograph analysis on it now… Wow, this is strange. It’s nearly the diameter of our Jupiter, but it’s more than 90 percent metal! A real treasure. Too bad we won’t have time to stake a claim on it.”