by Yoss
“Don’t worry, he won’t be bothering you for now. Neither will his hound,” Narcís interrupts, resting his immense hand on my shoulder. “At least for now. That Nazi might not give a damn what happens to you, but he knows better than to ignore a command from Miquel the Implacable. And if you’re the first to make Contact with the extragalactics, you’ll be practically a god here in Nu Barsa. If that happens, who cares if he’s one of the few fourth-generation condomnauts we’ve got? They won’t let him so much as touch you with a rose petal.”
“Then I’ll just have to make Contact with them first, come what may,” I muse out loud, absentmindedly caressing Nerys’s dorsal fins, which are standing deliciously on end after the adrenaline rush from our confrontation. It has also left an odd, bitter, metallic taste in my mouth. “Even if I’m just a plain old first-gen plebe of a condomnaut. And an immigrant, to top it all off.”
We all laugh together, blowing off the stress with guffaws.
This first-, second-, third-, fourth-generation stuff isn’t just an obsession with numbering everything, and it’s also not about who your parents and grandparents were.
Quim Molá, Narcís, and I are all first-gen Specialists, setting aside how much more famous our precursor is. Our bodies weren’t modified to facilitate making Contact with other species.
Not even the layer of adipose tissue that Narcís has cultivated through his sedentary lifestyle can be considered an irreversible phenotypic alteration. Through diet, exercise, and a gastric bypass, it’s possible…
Well, only just possible is all. I’m not sure even God or Orula could slim my friend down.
In the beginning, of course, all of us Contact Specialists were first-gen. But the same thing happened as with bodybuilding before steroids: it was too clean to last.
My slippery Nerys is a perfect example of the second generation. She was born 100 percent human, in the polluted ruins of old Barcelona, on Earth. But from her earliest childhood she was such a freak for aquarium fish in particular and aquatic creatures in general, her parents thought they might have a future condomnaut on their hands. So, filled with hope, they spent what little savings they had to send her to the Feather, Hide, and Scale Academy on the New Madrid orbital habitat, where the Catalans have signed mutual agreements to more or less make up for the lack of any Contact Specialist schools on Nu Barsa.
I hope Nerys has been better about keeping in touch with the people who sacrificed for her than I’ve been, for their sakes.
The girl was a real eye-opener: she got highest marks on the empathy and trade diplomacy exams, and even her exobiology professors admitted that she understood the anatomies and physiologies of many Alien species better than they did. No surprise, then, that she was the first Catalan to undergo body modification surgery (she volunteered for it). She emerged from it transformed, of her own free will, into the mermaid she is today: webbed hands, fins down her spine, tail instead of legs. When she’s out of water she has to use an antigrav platform to get around. But her specialty was, of course, the many Alien species that evolved in aquatic habitats, which up to then had been a hard row to hoe for condomnauts. Her Alien partners generally hadn’t been completely satisfied with “sleeping with” creatures so biotechnologically underdeveloped that they had to use cumbersome scuba gear and crude propulsion systems to survive and get around in their liquid environments. Oh, and best of all, she has her choice of breathing through lungs or gills. The newly minted Catalan mermaid quickly racked up an impressive record number of Contacts.
Nerys’s surgery was so successful that over the next five years Nu Barsa and other enclaves saw a proliferation of all sorts of scaly lizard-men, furry bear-women, and other even stranger and more improbable hybrids who led the way in Contacts for years.
The only problem that kept cropping up was versatility. Nerys is unbeatable for making Contact in water, and even in zero gravity she doesn’t do bad; but with Aliens from dry worlds, she’s a total disaster, even with her antigrav platform. That just isn’t her thing.
And it goes without saying that making Contact with methane-breathing species or energy-based life forms remains out of reach for her generation of condomnauts. There’s a limit to how far surgery can take you.
As a result, since not even a large hyperjump cruiser can afford to carry a full staff of Contact Specialists ready for every possible combination of Alien life forms they might run into on their journeys, somebody thought of going still further.
The third generation was a daring leap: sidestepping the phenotype modifications and daring to go straight at the human genotype itself.
But transgenic chimeras were a huge disappointment. Bird-men, fluorine-men, and other such exotic creatures were so anatomically and physiologically distinct from your average Homo sapiens that they simply didn’t feel they were human. Nor did they see why they should sacrifice themselves for humans. Besides, they lacked the rough-and-tumble versatility of first-gen Contact Specialists, whether academy-trained specialists like Narcís or plebes like me.
A few stubborn governments nevertheless persisted in this direction. But when a group of almost fifty South African bat–human hybrids hijacked a hyperjump cruiser from the astroport on Krugerland and disappeared, direction unknown, after expressing their desire to freely settle their own world far from all humans, it became as clear as glass that the third generation was a dead-end.
I hope those bat-humans are all thriving, wherever they may be. They were very brave—and very sincere.
But there was a growing need for new and better Contact Specialists. Humanity was constantly losing too many trading opportunities because our Specialists were unable to make Contact with more than a couple thousand races, of the tens of thousands that make up the Galactic Community. It was still beyond our reach to “sleep” with chloride breathers, inhabitants of high gravity worlds, beings composed of plasma, and other life forms that are relatively distant from human physiology. At least, without special technology.
But necessity is the mother of invention, so in 2187, Japanese and German biotech and nanotech teams, working independently of each other on the rich colonial worlds of Amaterasu and Neue Heimat, almost simultaneously created the first fourth-generation condomnauts.
These were cyborgs. Half human, half machine. But a conceptually new variety: it wasn’t a matter of adding cybernetic limbs or computational systems, but of total integration. Each and every cell of these amazing individuals had been modified when their developing embryos were at the morula stage, by inserting a set of nanomachines that could drastically alter them. On receiving the correct encoded command, that is.
As the cells divide and grow in number, so do the nanomachines inside them, always maintaining a one-to-one ratio so that at maturity they retain their ability to metamorphose.
Jürgen Schmodt, the other 999 little Germans in Neue Heimat, and the 1,500 little Japanese in Amaterasu all grew up like regular children, with mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters, feeling perfectly human. Well, perhaps with the addition of subtle but constant indoctrination to make them want to become condomnauts when they grew up, and with particular attention being paid to their grasp of human biology.
Then, at the age of fifteen, after they had taken batteries of tests that caused more than half the teenagers to drop out (their identity still remains a closely guarded secret), those who were judged sufficiently stable and ready to proceed were told about their dual nature as humans and nanocybernetic complexes.
They were also told about the urgent need for more and better Contact Specialists, about the noble goal of working as sexual ambassadors for their cultures. And then they were given the codes to control their own metamorphosis.
Again, more than half declined the honor—or found themselves unable to deal with their recently revealed, sensational powers. The former flatly refused to do it; the latter either died from some dreadful, uncontrolled metamorphosis or went crazy. Or in many cases, both.
Bu
t Jürgen Schmodt, another fifty-six Germans, and 113 Japanese made the conscious decision to become Contact Specialists, got over the trauma, learned to control their bodies at the organ, tissue, and cellular level, and are now the last word in the Contact business: “protean condomnauts,” the fourth generation.
There’s a good reason why they’ve been termed protean. So long as they have enough energy available (which is why they’ve each had biobatteries surgically implanted in them), Jürgen and company can drastically transform their morphologies and physiologies in a matter of minutes, from their resting, more-or-less ordinary human form, into a being with a fluorine-based metabolism, or into a form that has no problem moving under gravity two hundred times that on Earth.
Now, they still can’t turn into beings of pure energy or of antimatter; but, man, it’s still a remarkable step forward! The new Contact Specialists quickly proved their exceptional worth, catapulting Neue Heimat and Amaterasu into the indisputable scientific and technological leadership of humanity thanks to the patents they obtained through their sensational Contacts with both new and old Alien species.
Recalling the lessons of the Five Minute War, before the chasm between them and the other human factions grew so wide that their rivals might choose to unite and obliterate them in order to erase their advantage, the prudent and astute Germans and Japanese “generously” offered to rent out the services of their new Contact geniuses to other nationalities.
At a high price, of course. Jürgen Schmodt costs the Govern of Nu Barsa almost as much as all the other personnel in the Department of Contacts put together. And since the bastard knows it, and probably even picks up on our envy and how we glare at him with hatred when his back is turned, he never misses a chance to show us that he’s worth every last credit of the fortune he earns.
In the year and a half he’s been here, he’s already made nine successful First Contacts.
A real record, isn’t it?
But in my opinion, you need to have more than a body that you can reshape at will to be a good condomnaut. No, Contact is much more than that. It’s like hypernavigation: more an art than either a sport or an exact science. And this obnoxious nanoborg, who’s used to always winning, just doesn’t have the sensibility to understand what art is.
Still, it was him, not me, who discovered that extragalactics have arrived in the Milky Way.…
“Josué, watch it with that neo-Nazi son of a transistor,” Narcís warns me, serious, watching him walk away with his protégé, my old enemy Yotuel. “And his little friend, too. You’ve met that kid before, haven’t you?”
Puigcorbé surprises me: under all that fat, he has an extremely refined sense of empathy.
“Yeah. It’s an old story, from back in CH. I thought he had died,” I answer reluctantly. Narcís is the closest friend I have, but there are things you don’t share even with your best friend.
Then, in a desperate attempt to raise our spirits, I make a proposal. “Hey, everybody! Since we’re going to have to sail tomorrow and comb the cosmos for who knows how long, what do you say we take our leave tonight the right way? How about a five-star dinner at one of those classy little restaurants on a lake somewhere? They say Maremagnum Nuovo has good fish now. Even octopus. And good Earth wine, too, so we can toast to our good luck on the hunt!”
“Bravo!” Narcís’s bottomless stomach is always ready for the next feast. Especially if there’s good Earth wine to wash it down. “Maybe you’re a self-taught plebe, but your list of successful First Contacts is still longer than Jürgen’s,” he reminds me, laying an arm as thick as my thigh across my shoulders.
This, of course, raises my spirits a little.
But not as much as Nerys does when, stepping into the elevators we take down to the habitat’s ground level, she whispers affectionately into my ear, “It doesn’t matter who makes Contact with those extragalactics, Josué! I love you, and not that robotic German. And tonight I’m going to show you again how much. At your place! We’ll use up your annual water allotment in the best way you can imagine!”
I’m smiling like the drog that subsumed the bisork, like the verastis that parasitized the kindo—or, sticking to clichés, like the cat that swallowed the canary (though I’ve never seen a canary… )—while I picture what awaits me.
I’ll report to the Gaudí tomorrow totally exhausted. But the pleasure will have been worth every last ATP molecule I expend. Oh, to have a biobattery implant, like the fourth-gen proteans.
Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. Wet, splashing pleasure. Nothing like sex with a mermaid. Especially if you do it in the bath, or best of all in the shower. Because in bed, with all the mucus they give off… Afterward, I’ve often had to throw out the sheets, and sometimes even the mattress.
“I smell another wild goose chase. The hypergraph doesn’t pick up any jumps in or out for the past thirty-six hours. But there might be a very small worldship, or maybe one that’s been here for longer than that,” Amaya tells us, her voice sounding tired. “Let’s check the gravimeter. No; just as I suspected, this is a clean, boring system, nearly deserted. Apart from the primary, it only contains a super-Jupiter with… ”
Amaya, a statuesque, dark-eyed brunette, is strangely attractive despite her insistence on wearing her dark hair so short. If only she were a man, if only she had any interest in men. I wouldn’t mind sharing a bed with a him like her some night.
“… with twenty-one satellites and—what’s this?” Our Amaya’s voice is suddenly tinged with interest, and half the crew, clustered behind her in the narrow instrument chamber, tremble with excitement. “Oh, right. Comets. Lots of them. How intriguing. Astrophysically speaking, I mean.”
Nuria, the ship’s astrophysicist, with blue eyes, chestnut hair, and skin so tan she might have been born in the Caribbean, squeezes her lips tight at this dig. (She was Amaya’s partner until last year, and there’s still some bitterness between them about the breakup, which wasn’t altogether friendly.) But she remains stoically silent, stroking Antares, who purrs in her arms, blissfully oblivious to the tensions among us.
Our umpteenth disappointment translates into a chorus of sighs. Amaya’s tone returns to its former monotone. “Nothing on the gammatelescope. Besides the emissions from the primary, I mean. Beta Hydri I think this would be, according to the old Earth star charts. Has anyone recorded its data on the ship’s log? I can’t do everything myself. Nothing in the x-ray range, either. Well, it’s a blue giant, so that would be strange, wouldn’t it? The spectrographs say that its one big planet has a totally boring hydrogen-helium atmosphere, with a liquid core of… ”
“Drop it, Amaya,” Captain Berenguer orders her with a yawn. “Who cares about the atmosphere of one more gas giant? Disconnect. We’re outta here.” He turns to the navigator. “Gisela.”
“All ready for the next leap, Captain!” The freckle-faced, slender redhead jumps up enthusiastically. All she needs to do to complete the picture is stand at attention and salute, like they do in the Navy she served in until less than a year ago. “I haven’t stowed the antennae yet, so we can execute a jump right now.”
Not pretty, for sure, but she’s got something. Oh, if only she were a man…
Well, if she were, I probably would have slept with her by now and wouldn’t be wasting so much time thinking about it. Weird, huh?
Not the best time to be thinking about it, either: as usual, I’m getting lost in digressions and more digressions, at the exact moment when I should be focusing my attention.
A bit past the exact moment, in fact.
“It was reckless of you to leave the antennae out. A single micrometeor impact could have… ” Amaya begins to scold. And we know she’s right, but we also know that if Gisela had given in to Amaya’s sexual advances a few months ago, instead of to our stuck-up sensor tech Jordi’s, there wouldn’t have been any complaints.
A delicate thing, group dynamics on a ship.
Captain Berenguer plays the conciliator, as a
lways.
“Bah, it doesn’t hurt them to stay out for a couple minutes. Nothing will happen, Amaya. You yourself said this system is clean. And leaving them deployed saves us time. This’ll be our fourteenth lightning jump today; after the next one, we’ll recharge the batteries.” His tone shifts from friendly to authoritarian: “Stations, everyone! Hustle! Hyperjumping in one minute, starting….” He glances at the chronometer, almost lost in the bustling instrument panel that is Amaya’s undisputed domain, and at last he says, “Starting now! Destination, Gamma Hydri. We’ll keep combing this constellation. Five seconds before the jump, we disconnect the artificial gravity! On your toes! That means you, too, Josué!”
Lots of things have changed on merchant ships since the times when they were propelled by oars or sails, but some stuff endures even in this era of hyperengines. Pushing, jostling, a call to action stations, Antares meowing in protest at being tossed like a ball from Nuria’s hands to those of Jordi, his official owner.
We all rush to our places, the soles of our shoes slapping the corridor floors. There are ten of us on board the eighteen-thousand-ton Antoni Gaudí: hypernavigator, sensor tech, life support tech, conventional engine tech, captain, first mate, third officer, trade economist, astrophysicist, and me.
Most know at least two professions inside and out. For example, Amaya is not only the best sensor technician I’ve ever worked with, and a better than adequate planetologist, she’s also the onboard medic. Of course, that doesn’t mean what it did centuries ago; she just has a slightly better knack with automated medical care than the rest of us.
Jordi Barceló, our brawny third officer, Gisela’s current partner and my secret nemesis, was in the Navy, so he’s familiar enough with military tactics to serve as our gunner or infantry operative under the command of Rómulo, the first mate and weapons expert.
Manuel (Manu for short), our conventional engines specialist, is our golden-fingered handyman, able to fix almost anything, from a disintegrator to a toaster.