Yoss
CONDOMNAUT
For Susana and Roland,
because this idea for a possible story
came up on their visit to Havana,
and now it is a novel.
For Elizabeth, my little muse.
THE SKYSCAPE SPLAYED ACROSS the holoscreens turns from pitch black to navy blue to baby blue to milky white. I glance at the instruments and punch in a landing course correction. The numbers on the altimeter fall precipitously, and at last the dense ammonia clouds open up to give me a view of the ground below.
Right on target. It would have been easier to let the satellite feedback positioning system take over, but I like to pilot old-schooclass="underline" one man with his skill and intuition, controlling a machine with its sensors and thrusters. And thanks, but no AIs.
Flying solo like this is one of the special perks I get now and then on my job as a Contact Specialist, or “condomnaut,” as we’re usually called. Social relations—playing well with others—was never my strong point, and on a small hyperjump frigate like the Antoni Gaudí you don’t exactly get a lot of me time.
My little two-seater traces an elegant curve, coming in low to cruise over the desolate gray basalt landscape of Discovery Valley. Slowly, steadily, I drop speed on the approach and at last bring the shuttle to a smooth stop with millimetric precision, level with the ground, a prudent five hundred meters from the Alien vessel. Even at this distance, though, I’m entirely in its shade.
“Good job, Dralgol.” I whisper my congratulations to the thrumming shuttle, enjoying my privacy and keeping the helmet mic flicked off as long as possible.
The antigrav launch is the smallest of four shuttles we keep on our Catalan frigate. Its official name is the Drag d’Algol, but I prefer my nickname for it, Dralgol. It’s a comfortable but sporty little speedster, perfect for planetary scouting, even a short orbital trip. I like to use it when I’m going to make Contact, while letting the frigate hang back prudently in orbit. The ship wouldn’t have any problem landing—its 1,200-meter hull is aerodynamically streamlined—but best not to risk our only ticket off this forsaken planet.
Like the rest of the crew, I’ve examined the Alien ship from every angle our teleguided holocameras could record over the three days of inactive waiting prescribed by the Protocol for First Contact. But even so, I have to say: it’s very impressive from up close.
Not because it has a strange profile or an unusual design. Just the opposite. Its design is perfectly ordinary for an interstellar vehicle, human or otherwise: perfectly spherical, matte surface. But what floors me is its size. The only word I can think of is: gigantic.
It doesn’t look like a vehicle created by sentient creatures so much as a part of the natural rock-strewn, canyon-laced landscape where it has come to rest. Like some enormous metallic carbuncle that has come to fill the floor of a valley as inhospitable as the rest of the planet’s red topography.
Space is full of the weirdest formations, after all. I’ve seen things that most geologists only dream of—or have nightmares about. Planetologists, I mean. It’s hard to avoid being anthropocentric, even now.
But the thing is, it isn’t really sitting on the valley floor.
It’s hovering just above it.
And if there’s one thing you’ll never see a natural magma extrusion do, it’s break the universal law of gravity. In Rubble City we had a saying: If it’s green like a guanabana, and sweet like a guanabana, and prickly like a guanabana, it’s a guanabana. Not that any of us had ever seen a real guanabana fruit, except on commercials, much less eaten one.
So, it’s artificial.
And as soon as I admit this to myself, some odd mental calculus automatically makes it look even bigger.
Not even the Qhigarians’ ramshackle worldships are anywhere near as big as this. Not to mention, spherical shapes aren’t exactly a Qhigarian thing. As far as I know, no explorers from the Nu Barsa habitat (or any other human, I’d bet my hide) has ever come across a race in all their travels that constructs spaceships as huge as this.
Also huge: our stroke of luck when we saw it in motion. If we’d only seen it sitting here, still as a rock, like it is now, we’d probably have taken it for a natural feature of the valley.
That’s how enormous it is.
The next big thing may be whatever comes now, on this remote planet in Radian 1234, Quadrant 31.
It’s funny how the ancients, as sharp as they were about some matters, believed blindly that their convoluted historical star charts, with their constellations and their ecliptics and their Arabic names for stars, would be around forever. It never occurred to them that the arrangement of the night sky that their astronomers were familiar with only made sense when you viewed space from the vantage point of Earth. Of course, those ancient astronomers never imagined the Galactic Community.
Paradoxically, a few Alien races prefer our allegory-rich human names for them. Such as the Algolese, the race from the fifth planet around the great star Algol in Perseus. Now, that may be because their real name is unpronounceable—unless you use ultrasounds in your everyday speech, that is. Likewise, the Arctians, the natives of the ninth world orbiting the red giant Arcturus in the constellation Boötes, gladly adopted the semi-affectionate shortened form of the name that our old poetic Earthly system assigned them, because it had never before occurred to them that their race needed any sort of distinguishing name at all. They had always been just plain “us”!
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…
For example: this planet, which we’ve even gone to the trouble of officially naming Hopeful Encounter, orbits a red star in the northern hemisphere that’s concealed from view on Earth, as it turns out, behind bright Vega.
Until yesterday it was just like a trillion other planets in the galaxy: completely unknown to Earth’s ancient astronomers. And moreover—according to the restless Qhigarians who were the first to map this sector of the galaxy (and so many others), many centuries ago—absolutely unfit for supporting oxygen-based life forms. One more ball of stone, one of a gazillion desolate naked rockscapes. No dangerous chemicals to worry about, for sure, but no water or interesting minerals, either. So not only had it never been explored by human ships, it wasn’t likely to get explored anytime soon.
Well, nobody said everything in space had to be interesting.
And it probably would have stayed on that list for thousands of years, if sheer luck hadn’t intervened.
Hell of a drug, luck.
Even after our umpteenth hyperspace jump on this trade exploration journey left us right on the edge of the system’s gravitational sphere of influence, given that it had no resources we’d be interested in—no radioactive elements, rare metals, water, or free oxygen showing up on the spectra of any of its eight planets—we most likely wouldn’t have even bothered to stow our six jump antennas.
We would’ve just used the gravity of the system’s primary to recharge our gravitic batteries for the next hyperjump. And then—see ya later, system.
I’ve often thought that having a simple way to travel faster than the speed of light has done more to hamper than to facilitate the detailed exploration of the trillions of worlds in the galaxy. It’s like trying to learn about every nook and cranny in a territory by flying over it in a supersonic plane.
The hyperengine we all use—Qhigarians, humans, Algolese, Furasgans, Arctians, basically all the thousands of races that now make up the Galactic Community—is an ancient Taraplin design. That mythical species, whose name in their own (lamentably forgotten) tongue meant “Wise Creators,” disappeared from the galaxy so many eons ago that not even their faithful heirs, the Qhigarians (which means “Unworthy Pupils,” of course) remember what they looked like.