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.
But 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!”