Their hyperjump system turns out not to be all that different from the one those Qhigarian con artists used, after all. It’s also based on teleportation and uses living matter: their white jelly-like cloud ships are nothing but Peroptid larvae whose development is modified so that their bodies remain partially outside our three-dimensional space. Or something like that.
Simple and effective, right? For those who understand it, I mean. Count me out. Maybe my friend Jaume Verdaguer (for the record, I finally did get a statue of him put up while he’s alive, in honor of his sniffing out the true nature of Qhigarian hyperjumping; a hero’s perks) and his handful of crazy physicist buddies understand it, but as for me and most people…
Anyway, the point is, it works. That’s good enough for me. For me and for the rest of humanity.
Hyperspace travel was apparently used in the Greater Magellanic Cloud even before fully intelligent life forms evolved. This discovery has astounded and fascinated exobiologists, both human and Alien. It’s hard to understand how a species of creatures similar to our ants could spread across the cosmos without the benefit of intelligence. And to think that nobody believed that the Unworthy Pupils could have evolved out in space. Times sure do change.
Humans in general had to work pretty hard to get over their initial instinctive repugnance to working with gigantic albino octopod cockroaches, but now we get along great with our Peroptid friends. It does help that they can make themselves invisible at will. But we’re getting their technology now, and they are also more than satisfied. They wanted allies and they got them.
We Contact Specialists, human and otherwise, have been quite busy lately. Negotiations to turn the peaceful Galactic Community into the Pangalactic Defense Force weren’t exactly easy. It’s a laborious chore to get thousands of species on the same page about any issue. But the fact that humans and Peroptids worked together to restore communications—after the widespread panic that broke out when the Qhigarians left and their fake “Taraplin” hyperengines stopped working—helped convince thousands of Alien species about the good intentions of our alliance.
To be sure, there’s a lot of irony wrapped up in the whole affair.
It took me a couple of weeks to get it. The thing is, if the Taraplins never existed—if their hyperengines were a fraud, just a front that the Qhigarians used to conceal their interstellar teleportation abilities—then now that the whole setup has been uncovered, what sense does it make for us to keep performing the “ancient and sacred” Protocol for Contact?
Especially considering that the Unworthy Pupils probably established the custom millions of years ago as a surreptitious way to gather DNA from the sentient species they discovered. Maybe they wanted to use it to build races of clone slaves, or maybe to enrich their own DNA and create the huge variety they now have in outward form. Either way, DNA-gathering was the whole point. But when the brilliant, paranoid Algolese invented the Countdown device to guard against unauthorized use of DNA taken from Contact Specialists, the system stopped working for the Alien Drifters. It only kept going out of sheer inertia.
So now we just do it because it’s the custom? So I let that slimy octopus Valaurgh-Alesh-23 play at being my otorhinolaryngologist and proctologist just because “habits are hard to break”? And then I “slept with” the supersized Peroptid version of Atevi for the same reason? And that’s why all the condomnauts of the Galactic Community do it?
I doubt it. But nobody’s even dared to bring the subject up. I suppose it’s hard for any rational being, human or Alien, to admit that we’ve been acting like idiots for such a long time. We already had to accept that we were taken in by their so-called hyperengines; it might be too much to ask of us to admit that the Protocol was another con.
Or else, there’s lots of us who actually like having an excuse for a little sexual experimenting.
The fact of the matter is that, even without Taraplins and Qhigarians, it looks like our Protocol for Contacts and our condomnauts will be around for the foreseeable future.
I just hope nobody gets the bright idea of trying to make Contact with the Peroptids’ enemies.
We still haven’t learned much about those mysterious extragalactic invaders, so powerful and cruel that the Peroptids fled the Greater Magellanic Cloud in search of allies to fight them. The Peroptids don’t even have a name for them. In their culture, naming something means recognizing that it exists. They think that defeating an enemy starts with rejecting its reality.
At the moment, the best guess is that they come from beyond the Milky Way and its dwarf satellite galaxies, though their ultimate origin is far from clear. As for what they’re like, our allies—who aren’t very skilled yet at making themselves clear; or perhaps, as our strategists suggest, they’re elusive about revealing valuable military secrets—say that they are creatures from negative space.
What’s that supposed to mean? Antimatter? We’ll have to make them clear that up for us. Just in case.
The bottom line is, they utterly ruin everything they come across, more interested in destruction than in conquest.
I just hope they find our friends the Qhigarians on one of their conquests and wipe them out.
Actually, our new allies think the Unworthy Pupils took off in such a peculiar rush simply because they feared the ruthless creatures. They must have come to the terrifying conclusion that, after finishing with both Magellanic Clouds, the unnamed enemies would come after our galaxy next. Being pacifists, which in their case means cowards, they opted for putting some distance between themselves and the new threat. Just as I figured. After all, if another species was going to take away their monopoly on hyperspace travel, why stick around?
Maybe we’ll meet up with the Qhigarians again someday, now that the metagalaxy has been opened up by the living Peroptid ships, with their capacity for long-range hyperspace travel. If we do, we can hold them accountable for their cowardice and their centuries of scamming us all. And find out why they did it.
Meanwhile, several human exploratory ships with Peroptid hyperjump (bio)tech have visited far distant galaxies. And in the Whirlpool Galaxy, the third planet of one red giant has been named—guess what? Josué Valdés! And it’s being terraformed to become New Catalonia.
I have the honor of being the First Citizen of the brand-new colony, the first colony established by humanity beyond the Milky Way. And I expect it won’t be the last.
Someday I’ll visit it, I suppose. If the Peroptids don’t abandon us to our fate and deprive us of our hyperjumping capacity, that is.
But not right now. Because today I start my vacation, and have I ever earned it. The special circumstances that make for smooth Contact between human and Peroptid condomnauts have forced me to work hard, without a break, for weeks and weeks.
I feel aches in muscles I never knew I had. Female Peroptids can be very demanding. In their species, males are not sentient beings, so ever since the females discovered the allure of “sleeping with” their intellectual equals they won’t leave us alone, day or night. By “us” I mean the few Contact Specialists who aren’t overcome by disgust at the thought of giving them what they want.
My good friend Narcís tried to console me once by saying he figured the albino cockroaches must find our bodies every bit as repulsive as we find theirs. Well, guess what—he was the second human to make Contact with a Peroptid. He came out of retirement to do it. Didn’t want to miss the party, I guess. So I’ll let him believe whatever he wants, if it makes him and Sonya happy.