Having nothing else to do, I sit on the floor, holding the red helmet in my lap. It appears that I’m completely safe from my colleagues and their uncharitable intentions for the time being. All I have to do is wait for our extragalactic hosts to take the next step toward making Contact. They are obviously in complete control of the situation. They’ve been controlling it from the beginning.
I clear my mind. This is what the ancient Greeks called ataraxia, philosophical calm, a state of robust waiting, not mere laziness. Narcís Puigcorbé would be proud if he could see me.
I don’t have to wait long. A rasping, whispery sound comes from behind Jürgen and Yotuel. They stop their fruitless efforts to break through the barrier separating us and spin round to face whatever it was that made the curious noise.
An aperture has appeared in the white wall, some two hundred meters behind them according to the telemeter in my suit. Not a laser telemeter, of course. As condomnauts, we don’t carry anything that could be mistaken for a weapon.
It’s just like Amaya said. The invisible barrier threw me for a moment, but this is clearly another bioship. Maybe I should specialize in races that do biotech when I get out of this….
Lady luck is loca. You never know who she’s going to smile on. Apparently they’re going to start on Jürgen and Yotuel’s side. I guess I should appreciate the biblical justice—last shall be first and all that jazz—but damned if I find it funny.
The aperture must be about ten meters across. The weird thing is, I don’t see anything coming out of it, but my rival-colleagues obviously do. And they seem not to like what they see.
I pay close attention. Indentations appear at certain points in the strange white gelatinous floor. Footsteps. From them I deduce that the newly arrived invisible creature has four, or maybe six or even eight, feet. Considering that there’s about two meters between the right legs and the left, I figure it’s about that wide by about… five to ten meters long. Big, but I’ve seen bigger. Not so much to write home about after you’ve made Contact with Continentines and Kigran rorquals. That’s some comfort.
But Yotuel falls at once to his knees and begins vomiting, weeping, wailing, moaning for his dead brother, crying for help from his babalawo. Diosdado! Poor kid. He’d probably also be calling for his mother if he’d ever known her. No way he’s going to try and take off his suit or make any effort at Contact. He’s literally dying of revulsion and fear.
What is it he sees that has him so horror-stricken? Sure, he’s new at this, but he must have a lot of experience. Otherwise Jürgen would never have taken him on.
The German Contact Specialist, meanwhile, shows more presence of mind, though he’s also trembling like a leaf. The damn professional. Training shows. He manages to get his red suit off. Under it, his skin looks like it’s boiling.
His nano-impregnated body is modifying itself before my eyes, trying to adopt the morphology of… of what? Damned if I even want to know. It’s so weird, watching a First Contact between humanity and a creature I can’t even see but my colleagues obviously can. I suppose the barrier between us must also have some curious optical properties. The notion of privacy that this race from another galaxy has is a bit odd, to say the least.
The rhythm of raspy whispers quickens, then suddenly switches to an inarticulate hooting that rises and falls in tone in a suspiciously familiar pattern. I check the translation software: yep, we’re in luck. It’s the dialect of one of the other six hundred plus Qhigarian worldships that humanity contacted before the Unworthy Pupils fled the galaxy. We’re lucky that the extragalactics made Contact with them before us. Also that these creatures learned their language so quickly.
Unfortunately, our invisible visitor’s message comes through the translation with typically screwed-up syntax.
“Hello, humans-you. Peroptids-we. Extragalactics-we. No-distant we. Magellan Cloud-Large name-you home-we. Come here-now, no-wish war-you we. Danger-war-other species-power-very, fear-flee we. Seek no-enemies we, distant-here-now, Milk Road name you. Contact Qhigarians-before. Species no-war they. No-weapons they. Flee-distant they. Contact no-useful-very they. No-enemies, yes-war, join you-we? Proceed sex-Contact, tradition-you pact-seal, you-we, now-here?”
Quite the speech. For a First Contact with extragalactics, it couldn’t be clearer:
They already know we’re humans. Must be the free advertising the Qhigarians gave us. They are the Peroptids (or something like that; maybe it’s a Qhigarian term with no precise translation in any human language—peripheral eyes, maybe?) who come from beyond the galaxy, but not from far away, just from the Milky Way’s dwarf satellite galaxy, which we call the Large Magellanic Cloud.
They come in peace, fleeing another race that is threatening them, I think, with war. They fear their enemies and are looking for allies (I’m guessing) in the Milky Way. But they need warlike allies; the Qhigarians, who don’t fight and have no weapons, can’t help them. Makes sense. And they propose making Contact with us, following our customs, if we want to seal the pact and become their allies.
And if Jürgen Schmodt pulls it off, I might as well go back to Rubble City in exile and hide in the deepest hole I can find, because this Nazi will practically be a god in Nu Barsa and throughout the Human Sphere.
Extragalactics with working hyperengines that don’t depend on Qhigarian teleportation, looking for warlike allies? My Peroptid brothers, who cares what you look like? If it’s war you want, you’ve come to the right species. Nobody better than humans in the whole Galactic Community. I smell alliance and trade.
The nanoborg can obviously see the Peroptid, and he’s doing his best to imitate it. Exactly what fourth-gen condomnauts are good at.
Forced to sit idly by, I watch his swift metamorphosis with envy. He molds his nanoassisted flesh to his will, like clay in the hands of a skilled potter. At least it’s giving me a secondhand idea of what a Peroptid looks like.
There are two extra pairs of legs rapidly growing from his sides, just below the ribcage. Still rudimentary, but in a couple more minutes at most I guess they’ll be functional. Just as I thought, but eight legs, not six: the longest pair in front, because from the way he’s doubling over, the back half of his torso is going to be sticking up almost perpendicular to the floor. You might call this creature a centaur but with six pairs of horse legs, in addition to the pair of super-long arms on its human torso that it also uses in walking. What a weird anatomy!
The long, thick legs have three joints; the front limbs may even have four—they aren’t well-defined yet, but I’d say the original model must have segmented insectoid limbs. Six legs or eight, who’s counting? It might be something like a mantis, with long raptor limbs in front that can also be folded up and used for walking. Must be that; Jürgen’s back is becoming covered in what might well be elytra, the hardened topwings that certain insects possess. If they have wings underneath, they can’t be functional; the creature is far too large for flight. But I’d guess they… ah. The head is more defined now. Couldn’t be any more insect-like than that. A pronotum to protect the back of the thorax; long antennae… These nanos are amazing. I’m dying of envy. The things you can do with a couple of hair follicles—it looks like magic. Can’t I get me a set?
The head is relatively small, but the eyes are large. The nanos aren’t really magical; the real Peroptid probably has faceted composite eyes—that would make sense—but for Jürgen to make himself a similar pair he’d have to change his visual neurology too radically, so he just makes them larger and shifts them to the sides of his head. That’s it: Peroptid, peripheral vision. His nose is reduced to the minimum, two orifices. His chin sharpens. There are pedipalps on either side of the face—definitely insectoid—with mandibles opening horizontally, not vertically. Well, at least the German bastard isn’t going to have it easy. This is so infuriating, seeing the big prize and watching it get away…