The Marnott Liaison

"I'm sorry." I said.

"Do not be sorry, Paul," she said. "I knew I would most likely never see him again when I left. It is inherent to how much space travel we do that diplomats age much slower than our families that we leave behind and that we will start anew when we return. 150 of your years have passed on Marn while I have served, four of them just while coming here from my last assignment. Father would have died by now, in any event."

"Do the nanites indicate that you're bonded to me?" I asked.

"That is not quite how they work. Rather than tell me that you are bonded to me, they would recognize that I am bonded and warn me away from those who are not my bond-mate. But they do not react to humans, and only react to bonded Marnott or within bonded Marnott to virgins. While it would appear that I now have a 40th chromosome constructed from your genetic material, I am not getting any warning feelings related to the other Marnott males on my crew that I would expect if I had bonded to you, nor are any of them feeling that warning towards me. Even if my nanites have been changed to no longer produce the warning, theirs have not, so they must not be detecting me as bonded. Or it might be that the nanites are not detecting me as being Marnott any more, while my RNA secretions could still create a bond. We have transmitted a query to the scientists on Marn with all of the data we have, but it will be at least two more Earth weeks until we have any answer. Even sub-space messages take time to travel three hundred light years and back."

I asked, "So what does that mean? Can you mate with another Marnott now, without getting sick at all?"

Gellor sighed. "We do not know. It could simply be that the warning effect is broken while the threat remains. Having sex could still bind that Marnott male to me without binding me to him, which would not be fair to him, as he could have no other mate. While I might agree to be a test subject, since I am already affected, I am not prepared to ask any of my crew to be. We are simply not equipped with the testing equipment that would allow us to predict the effects. The medical scanners that told us this much are all we have. Hopefully, Marn or one of the other Alliance worlds can answer those questions for us."

"Have any of your males had relations with human females, yet?"

Gellor said, "No. We prohibited further sexual contact once you passed out and I began feeling ill, even before the external signs of the transformation appeared. Our doctor analyzed your original DNA from semen found in my bedding after we sent you to the hospital and concluded that if it had not been for our nanites altering how that 40th chromosome formed, I would likely be dead by now. We withheld that information from your doctors. A 40th chromosome with fatal flaws would have been formed from your sperm. That could explain my nanites taking drastic action to make alterations to my genome, but I do not understand why yours would do the same. You would have survived unharmed."

"Except my nanites are programmed to splice RNA into my DNA as treatment for cancer. They must have seen your RNA and decided it was more gene therapy, but then had to figure out a way to splice it into me without killing me, either. I happen to be glad not to be dead."

"So am I," Gellor said, reaching her hand to stroke my cheek.

"So, Marnott can only survive sex with humans who have nanites in them, and the result are both partners are changed to be compatible as mates? I am not devout, but that sounds like either a miracle, or a choice made by the nanites."

"The latter is a strong hypothesis, but unproven," she said. "We need more data on your revised DNA and your nanites to be sure."

"Do you have scanners to identify nanites?" I asked. "So Marnott can identify humans who have them?"

"Because nanites are ubiquitous among our people, we only have the medical lab scanners to confirm their operation is sound, and that detected some significant alterations to the programming of mine that seems to have improved their functioning. Analysis indicates that your nanites and mine exchanged data about our respective DNA, realized the risk and possibly arrived at a joint decision to alter us both. This might happen in any Marnott-human pairing if both types of nanites are present. But it might also depend on the individual genetics of the two individuals."

I said, "I will have to see if our scientists have developed portable scanners for our nanites, and investigate what programming changes might have happened in my nanites as well. My doctors assumed that it was the intrinsic coding to apply the cancer-fighting RNA patches to my DNA that enabled my DNA to be changed by your RNA. They did not imagine that the programming itself had been enhanced. In the meantime, should we see what your scanners will report about me that our doctors could not detect?"

"Let me call the doctor to the medical clinic." She raised her wrist-communicator to her mouth, and while the words she spoke were Marnott, I understood the thoughts behind them perfectly - 'Doctor Morto, please join me in the lab.'

~~~~~

Chapter 5: Doctor's Lab

~~~~~

The lab was just like I imagined a starship medical clinic would look like, after so many years of watching Star Trek. Their medical scanners were even built into a table surface like Trek. Doctor Morto was male and welcomed me in. I lay down on the scanner, and after a couple of minutes, Gellor said, "You can get up now, Paul."

"Conclusions, Doctor?" I asked Doctor Morto.

The doctor answered, "As your doctors reported, your entire body is converting to a 29-chromosome scheme, Mister Gould. Somehow, during mitosis, when your DNA strands reproduce, your chromosomes are rearranging, instead of just replicating. This appears to be a natural process now, as I did not detect nanite involvement. These 29 chromosomes appear to be fully compatible with the 29 chromosomes that Gellor is exhibiting, mainly in her newly formed eggs, although her cell mitosis is also converting newly split cells to 29 chromosomes as well, just at a slower rate than yours."

"Why would the nanites switch both of us to 29 chromosomes?" I asked.

The doctor said, "Our computer is now trying to decipher the programming of your nanites but, from what I know now from Gellor's nanites, they were in communication with each other and once they reached a decision that drastic changes needed to be made to save your lives, they decided to bridge the differences to make you fertile with each other. Having the same number of chromosomes is a requirement of that."

I asked, "Are the telepathic and telekinetic abilities I am discovering a function of the new 29-chromosome cells, or of the altered 23-chromosome ones? Are they going to get stronger as more 29-coded cells appear, or will they fade away as the 23-coded cells are replaced?"

He looked at a computer screen before saying, "From what I can see, in comparing your old DNA to the new, the DNA sequences that are most likely responsible for your new abilities are in both the 23 and 29 codings, so they will not get stronger or weaker, except through mastery of them. They are also present in the 29-chromosome cells that Gellor is developing, but are somehow not in her existing 40-chromosome cells. That may also explain her being less affected by the transformation, as fewer changes were made to the 40-chromosome cells. I expect she will gradually gain the same abilities and your children should inherit them. I conclude that you are both becoming a new species. No world in the Alliance has ever seen hybridization of sapient species, with or without technical help, from the records I can access. You are making history."

"Wow," I said, exhaling. "The press will just love that."

"That is sarcasm, correct?" Gellor asked.

"Yes, my dear, that was sarcasm. But it's also true. The story will sell papers and attract viewers, which is what the owners of the newspapers and television stations truly love. What will really matter is how people in general will react to the idea of a new species with special powers. The three men we encountered today may not be the last to try and harm either of us."

Gellor said, "If humans react negatively, that will just be evidence that they are not prepared for the Alliance. If they cannot cope with the idea of a new humanoid species that is a hybrid of both human and Marnott, how are they going to react to a species that reminds them of squid? Or dragonflies?"

"This new species cannot remain just the two of you," Dr. Morto said. "There would not be enough genetic diversity, and your children would have to mate with each other. You must add to your numbers. I now believe that it would be safe, if the human partner is equipped with the same nanites."

"How many would we need to be sustainable, Doctor?" Gellor asked.

"The whole crew at minimum, I would think."

I gasped. "Every Marnott female aboard would be willing to mate with a human male with the same nanites I have?"

"And every Marnott male paired with a human female, I expect," the Doctor responded. "But the nanites would be the key to the transformations."

"How would that work?" I asked. "Human females don't excrete RNA that would transform the male."

The doctor hummed for a couple of seconds before saying, "This is theoretical, but I expect that if nanites in the human females react to Marnott male RNA and nanites as you have, then their bodies will begin excreting RNA sequences after their transformation begins, which would then be able to transform the males they have chosen as mates soon after."

"It is a crew of 40, including Gellor?" I asked, to which Gellor nodded. "While I don't doubt we could find far more than 40 volunteers among billions of Earthlings, are all of the crew willing? It was my understanding that most Marnott join the diplomatic service to enjoy sexual experiences before bonding and here they would be asked to potentially bond for life with a human to be parents to a new species?"

"I would... I will do it," Doctor Morto replied. "I would be honored. Even if most of the crew declines, there will be other Marnotts who would volunteer to come to Earth and join us. We would need greater numbers for better genetic diversity, in any case. Forty couples is barely acceptable. As a positive, we would instantly gain status in the Alliance as a new species with the right to claim a new homeworld, just as if an existing species had gained sufficient sapience to qualify as intelligent and wanted to separate from a dominant species on their original world. Homo Sapiens would be considered that dominant species."

"Relocate to a new planet? Where?" I asked.

Marto responded, "Your system's fourth planet, that you call Mars, would be a marginal candidate for a new homeworld. We would need to manipulate the core to add mass and gravity and restore a spin so that a magnetic field is generated, sufficient to hold in water and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere once those are put back in place around it, or they will just disappear again. Accelerated terraforming for five of your years, less than three Martian years, and it would be habitable again, fully comfortable in ten. That was to be one of the first joint projects between Earth and the Alliance once Earth achieved membership."

"Isn't Mars still in Earth's domain?" I asked.

"Earth is not an Alliance member," Gellor answered. "Not yet. Maybe not ever, if today's attack is any indicator of your society's behavior. If we establish Homo Marnott as a distinctly new species and we request Mars as our new homeworld, the Alliance will grant the request, as Earth will have no standing to object. Homo Sapiens will then need to learn to live with us in the same solar system, or they will never become a member. We would share the resources of the asteroid belt, to avoid conflict over that. Terraforming Venus for Homo Sapiens to expand onto is definitely a possibility, although that project would take a century, maybe longer, as its rotation needs to be gradually changed to shorten its days and removing its greenhouse gases to allow it to cool is a lot harder than adding atmosphere will be for Mars."

I asked, "Do we want to call ourselves Homo Marnott? Why not just call ourselves Martians, if that's where we're ultimately going to live?"

Gellor answered, "There are those on Earth who already try to call us Martians, and they mean it in a most derogatory manner. Also, Mars was a god of war in mythology, which will not fit the image we want. Calling ourselves Homo Marnott would emphasize the kinship we have to both species. As for the planet, I think its name should change to reflect us, not the other way around. I rather like the sound of Homarnis. It does not actually have a meaning in Marnott, but would still be associated with Marn."

I added, "It is human nature to shorten almost any name, so I would propose "homarn" as a shortened form of Homo Marnite, just to keep the press from extending the Metaman name to all of us. That keeps us close enough to 'human' to benefit from that association, too."

"That is fine with me," Gellor said. "We will use both terms when we are ready to start recruiting among humans."

"Thank you for your time, doctor," I said. "I'm sorry, what is your first name?"

He laughed. "It is actually Doctor. It is by coincidence that your English word for my profession matches my name. We do not apply professional titles, or you would be calling me Doctor Doctor Marto. It sounds silly even to say it."

"Well, thank you again, Doctor. We'll let you get back to what you were doing before," I said.

As Gellor and I walked back to her quarters, she said, "Curious to try out the new equipment on each other?"

I snorted. "Now that's got to be the most unique way to ask 'Wanna fuck?' that I've ever heard. The answer is yes. Although, what about birth control?"

"Marnott never developed any, because our bodies stop releasing eggs after three pregnancies, and we developed space travel before our planet got overcrowded, then joined the Alliance, which gave us the technology to terraform several more planets in our solar system, and the opportunity to relocate to other worlds as well. Whether that three pregnancy limit still applies to homarn biology, I do not know. But if we are going to start a new species, why not start now?"

"You're right," I replied. "Survival of the species and all that."

"It will take time to get used to this sarcasm," Gellor said, chuckling anyway.

Back in her room, that I supposed was ours now, she called for the bed to appear, and immediately began to strip. I did the same. The first thing I noticed was the new nipples on her chest.

"Does it feel normal for your nipples to be gone now?" she asked, running her hands over the hair on my chest.

"No more than I'm sure it feels normal for you to have them," I said, rubbing my thumbs over the recently developed nubs on her still flat chest, each surrounded by a brown areola. She shivered at the sensation, then kissed me on the mouth, pressing her nipples into me.

"I have heard so much about how human women get pleasure from having them sucked. Would you show me?"

I answered by bending down and taking her left one between my lips. Being gentle at first, because I didn't know how sensitive they were, I caressed my tongue across the top and she purred. I alternated licking and sucking both nipples for a couple of minutes, hearing her begin to squeal.

When she reached down and stroked the finger tips of her right hand on both sides of my hard cock at once, I felt my balls jerk and a glob of precum gushed from my slit, which she spread around my shaft. She said, "I am gladdened you have not lost that ability, Paul. It will make it easier to do this." Her digits on the left and on the right curled around the top side of my cock, while the top of her palm pressed against the underside, and she began stroking and squeezing. Then she squeezed my balls with the fingers of the other hand, squeezing both balls and separating them simultaneously.

This was no tease. This was an all out assault on my new nerve endings, and I lasted less than a minute before I called out, "I'm gonna come, lover! Oh, fuck!"

She leaned over and engulfed my glans in her mouth as I thrust with my hips and came, filling her mouth. I could feel her swallowing rapidly, but still some slipped out, adding to the mess on my shaft. When she decided to lick that up, she excited those nerves so much that I did not lose the erection. If anything I was harder than ever.

"I need to check out this clitoris I've heard about," I said, guiding her to lay down.

"It has not breached the skin yet. I am transforming slower than you have. But you can feel its shaft growing between my labia. Doctor thinks the hood will form in another week."

"I'll wait patiently, then," I said, stroking her between the lips to feel it for myself. Whether or not it had surfaced, Gellor still reacted as if it had. My bet was that the clitoris itself had formed, and was just beneath the skin, just as sensitive as if I were massaging a human woman's clit through her hood. I'd managed to make a few women cum just from that, when their clits were too sensitive for direct contact.

I continued stroking there as I lowered my mouth and began licking one of those sensitive patches on her labia, and when I added two fingers into her vagina and split them apart to rub on the rough patches on both sides of her sheath, she came apart almost immediately, convulsing beneath me and screaming wordlessly.

She pushed me away, saying, "Stop, stop," in Marnott in her mind. As soon as I complied, she said, in English, "Now, that I hope I never get used to, never take for granted. Is your new cock going to feel as good?"

"Only one way to find out, honey," I said, climbing up her body, giving her nipples a couple of quick sucks, then reaching the point where my cock was splitting her labia, the head resting where her clitoris would be. A couple of quick flicks of the tip across her sensitive spots, and I thrust in as fast as I could. Damn, but those ridges scraping across the ridges inside her felt amazing. Drawing out slowly, they felt even better.

"Oh, oh, that feels delightful," Gellor said. "I thought the one ridge on your glans was good, but this is ten times better. Fuck me, Paul. Make me cum all night long."

I stroked back into her, and had to pause not to cum, it was that intense. I found that going faster kept the friction from building too much, but also reduced Gellor's reaction as well. Finally, I settled on a medium stroke that got Gellor to orgasm, and I soon followed her, filling her with sperm. I started to soften while I was in her, but just the sensation of trying to withdraw started me up again.

I had more stamina on the second fuck, lasting ten minutes of that medium stroke, bringing Gellor to three orgasms before I came once more. The erection didn't return right away, but ten minutes later we were at it again, and this one lasted for 30 minutes before I absolutely drained my balls into her, and could barely move afterwards, flopped onto the bed.

Thankfully, I stayed conscious. Cuddled against me, Gellor said, "I love you, Paul Thomas Gould. I know we are still so different, even transformed into homarn, but I want you to be in my life, bond or not."

"I love you, too, Gellor Tukta. I was going to ask you to marry me, as soon as I could get a ring," I said.

"Marnott are simply bonded or not, we do not have any marriage tradition. In fact, we had no word for it until we joined the Alliance and encountered similar traditions on other worlds. I do not need a ring or a license from any government to call you my life-mate."