And while I’m at it, I could also get myself a red-and-blue Barsa t-shirt and pretend I haven’t always hated soccer in every form. And learn to dance the pasodoble, or even better, the sardana! And let myself be seen in public eating fuet all year round, and coca catalana at Christmas, and generally make myself over as the perfect Catalanized immigrant brown-noser.
Oh, forget it. I made up my mind from the beginning that I’d either gain citizenship on the basis of professional merit or else take my talents to another enclave. This old Cuban don’t speak no Catalan, never have and never will, okay? I may be an opportunist, but everybody has their limits.
Right now, a very upset Jürgen is muttering something unintelligible, in the language of Goethe would be my guess, and turning about-face to confront the kibitzer. Apparently he didn’t recognize Narcís’s voice and doesn’t have the slightest idea who said it.
Because, as soon as he sees—his mouth slams shut.
Today Schmodt has gone for the typical Aryan look: blond, blue-eyed, and a muscular six foot three. Even so he has to look up to face the gigantic Puigcorbé, at nearly seven foot four and just under a third of a ton in body weight.
Suck on that, fucking nanoborg. How does it feel to be the short one?
I imagine that with enough metamorphosis and a significant expenditure of energy, the Teuton’s sophisticated nanocomponents would let him grow taller than my friend—but obviously he’d be even thinner then. The bodily transformations his nanotech produces in him look miraculous, but they can’t violate the law of the conservation of mass or create extra kilos out of thin air.
Narcís gazes down upon him with his characteristically beatific smile. Though the smile on his shaven round head, atop his colossal bulk, doesn’t look quite so beatific now.
Nerys gives my arm a hard squeeze with her damp webbed hand. The tension was so thick, I could have made bricks if I’d had a mold. The mysterious young mestizo in the Afro and the white outfit who’d been standing with Jürgen earlier has also come over, evidently to back up his German buddy if any blows happen to be thrown—and now he looks me in the eye with an expression that can only be hate. A two-on-two fight? I’m sure we’ll win it hands-down. Poor consolation if it means being forced out of Nu Barsa, even if the German gets kicked out, too. So I’m not going to start anything. I’ll wait for him to take the initiative. That way, at least I’ll be able to plead self-defense.
But the minute passes—and nothing happens.
“Haha, only because Miquel say expel,” Jürgen growls in his horrid Teutonic Spanish, and he grudgingly leaves Nerys and me, proving that even he is capable of thinking about the possible consequences of his actions.
As for his sidekick, it takes him a few more seconds to drop the belligerent attitude. Meanwhile, he hisses at me in a hoarse undertone, “Today you got off. But we’ll see you again soon, Zero.”
¡Ay, por Shangó y la Virgen de Montserrat!
Now I know where I remember him from. Cuba. CH. Rubble City.
How did I miss it—those eyes, that obsession with white clothes and cleanliness. I thought he’d be dead by now, but no. I can’t even imagine how, but he and his hatred have followed me to Nu Barsa and now, I guess, he wants to “avenge” his fallen idol.
It’s Yamil’s little brother. Yotuel Fullmouth Valdés.
Life sure is full of little surprises. So now he’s a Contact Specialist, too?
Not only that, but the asshole has sided with none other than my worst enemy, Jürgen Schmodt.
“Devils of a feather flock together,” Diosdado used to say back in Rubble City.
Does he show his appreciation for Jürgen’s mentoring with the oral skills that made him so popular among the old pederasts on the highway near Rubble City? Wouldn’t surprise me.
I think of Taraplins and Qhigarians. “Wise Creator” and “Unworthy Pupil.” What a coincidence.
“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.