There’s obviously no rule against using nonbiological protective barriers; sometimes you have no choice but to turn to them, such as when your oxygen-based body has to get together with a fluorine-based life form. But aside from such extreme cases, anything as crude as a physical barrier or filter such as a condom is generally considered an unpleasant discourtesy, as well as evidence of the underdeveloped medical sciences in the culture whose representatives resort to such crude measures.
The Countdown, which only protects the integrity of your DNA, doesn’t count. Nor do immune system boosters or antiviral vaccines.
Which is good, because even with their use there have been more than a few condomnauts who’ve died in strict quarantine after coming down with strange sexually transmitted diseases, if that’s the right term for them. This was especially true during the early years of enthusiastic Contacts with the Galactic Community, before our immunologists were forced to become as expert as those of most other Alien species.
The leaders of the dozens of clashing factions into which the decimated human population of the twenty-second century was divided after the Five Minute War soon realized that the Protocol for Contacts, whether Taraplin in origin or not, made it so that the species with better command of biology would almost always gain the lion’s share in any trade. Oxygen-based life forms who could “naturally” modify not only their anatomy but their body chemistry would have an indisputable advantage over others with less advanced biotech when it came to making Contact with, for example, a new race of methane breathers.
And forget about the even more exotic yet perfectly real cases, such as the arachnoids of Vulpecula IV, whose chemistry is based not on carbon but on the exotic element germanium.
Well! After the initial wave of enthusiasm about Molá’s lucky trade, things were starting to look rather gloomy for us. If we wanted to sail through the cosmos, we’d have to make Contact. But who could get excited about seeing a Vulpian arachnoid with its rare toxic metabolism? Or for that matter, even an amphibious newt from Wurplheos VII, with its profusion of spiny fins and pink and green polka-dotted skin?
What astronaut could be asked to make such a sacrifice, after years of painstaking study of technical science?
But everybody knows we’re a lucky species. It turned out we already had people who were not only capable of facing such bizarre Contacts, but even of enjoying them. Us.
People who had for countless centuries been shamefully rejected as perverts or sexual deviants. Gays, bisexuals, masochists, sadists and fetishists, the odd and the aberrational, the more or less satisfied victims of unspeakable paraphilias, we who had once been confined to madhouses or jails, or even executed to keep the moral cancer that infected us from contaminating the horrified “sexually healthy” members of society.
But as you know, everything is relative in the Lord’s vineyard. Morality depends on convenience; after news of the more salacious details about Quim Molá’s First Contact with the Qhigarians had gotten around (though various governments tried to keep them a secret), there was a strange, radical, and absolutely unexpected inversion in sexual values. Practically overnight, we, the same black sheep that the community had refused for millennia to consider members with full rights, had become important, essential, indispensable. The prosperity of the entire human race depended in large measure not only on our negotiating skill but, even more important, on what society used to consider sexual deviancy and sin.
What irony: from pariahs to heroes, just like that.
Well, not just like that. Things didn’t shift right away right then, either, to tell the truth.
But it sure did help.
Indeed, a wave of sexual liberation began that continues to this day. Any upright citizen of the twentieth or twenty-first century would probably be horrified by our contemporary society, in which heterosexuality is only one possibility among many, not at all the majority or “correct” orientation that it was assumed to be for so many years.
Conscious of our historic mission, reveling in all sorts of dirty space fantasies in our twisted minds, we who once were shunned and stigmatized for our divergent sexuality now march with chests puffed in pride, aiming for the stars. The same mass of humanity who for so long spit on us, rejected us, denounced, repudiated, and killed us, now see us off with cheers and fanfare as their new (sexual) ambassadors. And they imitate us—to the degree that they can.
I guess they think that if “sleeping” with strange creatures is the way to conquer the stars, then why not sleep around! Starting with our own kind, just for practice.
The new foreign policy, and the morality derived from it, had many detractors at first, of course. Just about every religion in sight screamed to high heaven against “space immorality” and declared it would be a thousand times more preferable to languish and die “pure” on Earth without access to sophisticated Alien technology than to survive and conquer the stars at such a repugnant price.
The imams called for a space jihad. From the Vatican, neo-Pope Innocence XXIV issued an irate encyclical accusing Contact Specialists of being heirs to Sodom and Gomorrah, mocking God, and worshiping lewd demons from the depths of space. He excommunicated them all, scornfully terming them “condomnauts,” never suspecting that this would become the popular nickname for the new and prestigious profession.
Yes, that’s theory number 23,457. Didn’t I warn you there’d be more?
Save me the details about all the others, please.
But it backfired on His Holiness. And they talk about papal infallibility.
In any case, it is worth noting that the next occupant of the throne of Saint Peter, John XXVIII, not only withdrew the irate excommunication that his predecessor had hastily launched against us, but even transferred the Holy See of the Roman Catholic Church to outer space. Precisely, to the orbital enclave known as Novo Vaticano, built with Alien technology (of course) in orbit around Beta Crucis in the Southern Cross.
That’s what’s I call poetic justice. Or opportunistic repentance. Or, don’t spit into the wind.
It quickly became clear that the human race had truly lucked out with Quim Molá, because not all sexual perverts work out as condomnauts. Not at all.
Unfortunately, attitude alone isn’t enough. It also takes some aptitude.
Some species in the Galactic Community are more Alien to us than others. For example, “sleeping” with an Algolese woman, despite her height (two meters tall), her green hair, her violet skin, her mouth full of yellowish canines, and her language replete with ultrasonic frequencies that make your hair stand on end, is almost like a walk in the park for most human condomnauts.
Indeed, considering that both our species evolved from primates (or the equivalent), it almost seems like making love with a distant cousin. Plus, the voluntary control that the females of Algol have over the musculature of their vaginas is quite the extra added attraction for making Contact with them.
Little wonder that the second Alien technology that humanity acquired was none other than the gravitic control developed by these distant cousins.
On the other hand, making Contact with a rorqual from Kigrai (that is, Ophiuchus), with a body hundreds of meters long and three vaginas, each of them several meters wide and smelling of salted fish gone bad—that’s quite a feat!
I honestly wish sometimes there were more rational hermaphrodite species in the galaxy. Or at least with less recognizable sexual organs.