“Love! Ah! Alex, you can’t even fully grasp what it is, true love! Madness—joyful and voluntary. And an all-engulfing flame, whose heat is delight and torture at the same time. The love of a mother for her children, of a patriot for his motherland, or of a naturalist for truth, all of them pale in comparison with real, genuine, all-engulfing love! Poets have composed verses that live on for millennia. Conquerors have shed rivers of blood. Ordinary and unremarkable people have suddenly caught ablaze like supernovas, burning away a whole life in one blinding flash, raging, and inexorable. Love… love. Thousands of definitions, an endless search for the right words… as though mere sounds could ever encompass this ancient magic. Love is when your beloved is happy… love is when the whole world is concentrated in that one person… love is the feeling that makes us equal to God… There’s no approaching it! No expressing it in words. And it’s not even necessary to express—everyone understands, everyone has experienced this sweet intoxication. Even all the alien races are capable of love, Alex! Theirs may not be human love, but something very, very similar. The Tai’i don’t have any notion of what humor is. The Bronins are incapable of friendship. The Fenhuan can’t fathom vengefulness. A vast number of emotions are unique to humans, though we can’t ever grasp… um… well, for example, the Zzygou sense of sunrise. But every race has love!”
“Not anymore,” said Alex simply.
Edgar stopped short. Sighed.
“Yes, of course. We’ve moved farther than the other races, Alex. We’ve learned to alter our own bodies, and our own souls, as well. To cut something out, and stitch on something else.”
“Stitch on?”
“That’s an ancient term. Back then, thin threads were used to attach both cloth and living tissues…”
“I got it, thanks! But are we right, Edgar? You know that Janet played a joke on our Zzygou guests?”
“How would I know? You’ve switched me off from the ship’s internal cameras.”
“She slipped some anise cocktail to the Others. And the alkaloids of anise affect the Zzygou like a potent truth drug.”
Edgar let out a ringing laugh.
“You don’t say! What happened then?”
“One of the Zzygou declared that the human race was doomed. That we’ve gone too far down the road of genetic changes. That humankind is losing its unity and falling apart to become many disconnected, weak civilizations.”
“Bull!” said Edgar bluntly. “Dream on, stinkers… Humans always were different, you know? In prehistoric times, and in the Middle Ages, and in the blessed twentieth century… always! Some were rulers, some were peasants, some were poets, and some were sewer workers…”
“But back then we were genetically unified.”
Edgar shrugged.
“Do you know what kind of person would be born, for instance, from your sperm and Kim’s egg? If you don’t order any specialization, of course?”
“A baby-natural with sharp vision.”
The boy nodded, slightly surprised. “Yes… Exactly. It’s your only shared characteristic. Then you can easily get the rest! And the point, Alex, is that if necessary, humanity can easily and painlessly return to a unified genotype. Every spesh’s gametes contain a double set of genes. The altered one—the one your parents had the geneticists specify. And the regular set—the one you’d have had if you had been born the natural way. This regular set is compressed in the S-organelle and gets activated only during the fusion of sex cells. After that, the process can go all kinds of different ways!”
Edgar’s face was flushed. This was obviously a beloved topic that filled him with inspiration.
“And that was the hardest part, you see, Alex! Back in the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the active genotype alteration work began, we were facing an unsolvable problem. It was easy to alter the body completely. But how do you keep the human genotype intact in the process? How do you get a mermaid, who herds schools of fish, and a steeplejack, who has no fear of heights and can spend a whole work shift hanging by two fingers, to have a normal, healthy baby, and not some monstrous freak? It was then that this way was suggested, a complicated one, but safe—and fascinating! A spare copy of genes. Clean and untouched by alteration. Suppose our little mermaid swam out to the shore and met the young steeplejack. A moonlit night… the gentle lapping of waves. Two happy, self-satisfied young people meet. Our little mermaid is sitting on a tree branch, which gently slopes toward the water, and our steeplejack is walking along the shore and humming a tune, say, the one that goes: ‘We aren’t firemen or carpenters, our work takes us to the sky, we send you greetings from on high!’”
Edgar paused, looked at Alex with a smirk. “Have you heard this song?”
“No.”
“It’s a very, very old Russian song. From the epoch when all were naturals. But it perfectly expresses the very point of specialization. Well, back to our young couple… so, they meet…”
He slowly joined his hands.
“Surprise… confusion… laughter… it’s so romantic! Moonlit night on the seashore, as I said. Gentle caresses in the wet sand. We had to make sure these two citizens, so different, but equally useful to society, never suffered because of their differences. We had to make sure their baby could become a human-amphibian, or a female steeplejack, or simply an ordinary natural. Whatever they wanted. And so, when the great promise of love is fulfilled”— the boy locked his fingers—“enter the S-organelle. The nucleic chains spin open, ferments shuttle along the DNA strings, checking for specialization. Snap! A gene is altered! Then there is a check of whether both parents have the altered gene. Both do? We leave it. Only one does? Move over, please! A spare copy of the gene is extracted from the organelle—the necessary bit is cut out and pasted in. The DNA strings quickly repair themselves before the fusion. Well now, let’s see what we got? An ordinary baby-natural! And if the little mermaid fell in love with an amphibian-human—no intrusions would be necessary. Their baby would be born in the water, easily drawing its first breath with the little gills inherited from the mother… And if there were two steeplejacks, male and female…”
“I get the picture, thanks,” Alex interrupted him.
Edgar stopped short. He smiled apologetically.
“I’m just in awe of my… predecessors’ mastery. You see, they had to create structures that were self-sustaining—who knows what might happen to a group of speshes, if they found themselves cut off from genetic engineers. And at the same time, these structures had to be able to return to their initial state in the course of one generation. The engineers accomplished that goal beautifully!”
“And what if a spesh-couple wanted to give their child a different specialization?”
“Well, then the engineers have to work on that some more,” Edgar admitted. “But can you imagine this situation actually happening? You decide to have a traditional nuclear family, wife and kids, the way it ought to be… and not wish your kids to have the kind of life you’ve had?”
“No, I can’t imagine that.”
“And there you have it.” Edgar smiled triumphantly. “Alterations of the body are a mere trifle. A task for beginners. The main thing is to change the psyche. To manipulate emotions. That is the hardest problem of all.”
“Great. Then help me solve it. Kim must fall out of love with me.”
“Why?” Edgar looked closely at Alex. “After all, I understand everything, and I don’t mind. Why should her love bother you?”