Though only my remote mission officer can now see my face, hidden under the helmet, the Qhigarians, who know their way around the Alien races of the galaxy better than anyone, always say that we humans are the only known sentient creatures who display our teeth to each other in order to show we are friendly.
Well, I like to comfort myself with the thought that, if the Qhigarians know this about us, why should everyone else know, too? And be tolerant about it.
So, no smiles. The corners of my lips still try to turn up, of their own accord. I must look totally ridiculous. More and more ridiculous by the minute, the more dignified I try to appear.
I move forward in the deliberate, dignified, fearless manner stipulated by the ancient Protocol for First Contact—which was supposedly established by the mythical Taraplins millions of years ago—displaying the absolute calm of a model professional condomnaut. In reality, I feel exposed, vulnerable, even prematurely naked, in spite of my ultraprotect suit.
But at least its triple shielding means that my coworkers from the Gaudí, who must be following my every move from the safety of orbit, can’t see that I’m sweating buckets and trembling like a leaf in a windstorm. This always happens to me during the preliminary phase of Contact, when I reveal myself for the first time to the Aliens that I’m supposed to make friends with.
Contact Specialist or not, I’m shitting myself with fear. And I don’t care.
I was ashamed of these feelings until Narcís confessed to me even he, with hundreds of successful missions on his service record and all the honors a Catalan condomnaut could ever dream of winning, still feels the same pangs in his gut every time he approaches another Alien species.
Nerys also once hinted at something of the sort, in her typically feminine, elliptical way.
I imagine that even pedantic nanoborg, Jürgen, must get some discreet nervous twinges when he makes a new Contact, though I suppose he’d rather be boiled alive than admit it. Stuck-up Prussian.
Yep. Who said that professional daredevils have no fear?
There’s a few things I know perfectly welclass="underline"
That all this is a simple matter of psychology.
That up inside that enormous ship, the Aliens’ own condomnaut (or whatever the potential extragalactics call their Contact Specialists, assuming they have such a thing) is most likely feeling at least as scared as I am.
That if I come under attack by disintegrators or hyperobliteration armaments (if they’ve got such things and aren’t born pacifists like the Qhigarians, who don’t dare touch any weapon more sophisticated than a slingshot), the thin monomolecular ceramic shield of the Dralgol won’t provide anywhere near as good a defense as my ultraprotect suit.
That if some misunderstanding makes them fire their heavy artillery, the guys on my own ship up in orbit will train all its destructive firepower on the Aliens to avenge me (I want to believe this with all my heart), so there’ll be some real hell stirred up right here.
And since nobody who initiates a Contact and has two grams of brains would want to stir up such a disaster, seeing as it would send all their potentially advantageous trade relations down the tubes, the chances of such a catastrophe taking place are slim to none.
But what can I do? I’m sweating and trembling anyway.
Because this could be the one time that the most unlikely possibility comes true, right?
Long ago and far away, when I used to play streetball in Rubble City, CH, with the rest of Diosdado’s orphans in El Viejo López’s back lot, fearlessly defying the residual radioactivity of the soil, I remember that whenever somebody hit a home run over the fence, one of the older kids would always jokingly say (imitating some old-time announcer, I guess), “And it’s going… going… gone! Adios, my sweet Lolita!”
In this case, it’d be more like, “Adios, Josué!” In other words, much worse. Because, what the hell do I care about Lolita? This is my own life I’m talking about. Okay, true, I risk my life week after week in this funny little business of being a Contact Specialist, which seems the only job I have any talent for. Thing about my life is, I’ve only got one. And I’m kind of fond of it.
Don’t try telling me about the “challenge of the unknown,” or my “sense of duty,” or how I should feel proud to be in “the human vanguard in the conquest of the Cosmos.” Let’s be clear: like all my select, envied, and reviled brothers in the trade, I’m in it for the money. Ideals and intellectual gymnastics are fine, but you can’t live in the twenty-second century without making a few credits, you know.
Especially not in Nu Barsa, rightly considered the most expensive habitat in the Human Sphere.
So I’m none too fucking relieved to know that, if some paranoid Aliens happened to disintegrate me, the pompous hypocrites would try to wash their hands of it the way they usually do when colleagues die on Contact missions. By slapping my name on some street (not that I’d ever see it) or even on a whole sector of the latest archology.
I’d rather not have any official ceremonies, which my pragmatic Nerys would just exploit to assert her rights as my quasi-widow consort and (most important) as my quasi-heir to grab any bonus pay I might have coming.
So: they can stick all the honor and glory up their…
Me being me, I’ll take the money and the plaque right now.
But here I am. I’ve finally come to a complete stop a good hundred meters from the Alien ship.
So I take a deep breath, whisper, “¡Arriba, compatriotas!” like Elpidio Valdés, the hero of comics and cartoons from my Cuban childhood, who rode his inseparable horse Palmiche into battle, wielding his machete to make our island independent from Spain, and—
“Quit dragging your feet, coward.”
Damn. I forgot that the mic inside my helmet would automatically reconnect when I left the Dralgol. And I especially forgot who’d be listening to me. Wouldn’t it have to be Jordi Barceló. And they say there’s no such thing as bad luck.
“It’s okay if you take your time to make sure they know we have no hostile intentions. But keep walking, fuck it! You’ve been standing there with your hands in the air for like a whole minute. They’re going to think we’re vegetables and you’ve stopped to do some photosynthesizing or put down roots. Come on, Cubanito, shithead, move it or you’ll lose your First Contact bonus. And if you make me lose mine, I swear to God I’ll cut your servos and make you crawl back to the ship in that lightweight suit of yours.”
So charming, so laconic, so homophobic. So tolerant of lower life forms like me, who didn’t learn Catalan before we could crawl.
Sometimes I think that if he wasn’t the owner of Antares—the lazy, selfish charmer of a ginger cat who’s now the whole ship’s beloved mascot—I would have tried strangling him long ago.
If none of the other crew members beat me to it, that is.
For instance: Amaya, our sensor tech, who was as taken by Gisela’s fire-red mane as I was. She still hasn’t forgiven Jordi for being the one who finally got Gisela’s juices flowing.
A pointless grudge, in my humble opinion. After all, the one who chose between the two lovers (not counting me, of course; everyone on the Gaudí knows I don’t go for females—not human females, anyway) was Gisela herself, right?
The worst of it is, apart from Amaya and Gisela and his own bad temper, Third Officer Barceló has his own reasons for feeling angry with me.
It’s taken for granted that, given the peculiar nature of our trade, we condomnauts have certain… intimacy skills that can make a favorable impression on regular humans, to the point that some grow slightly addicted to our humble selves.