Ambassador

by William Alexander

  Gabe sat on the floor. It seemed more companionable than sitting high up at the kitchen table. The Envoy went on fizzing.

  “How do ambassadors talk to each other?” Gabe asked. “Nobody’s ever answered our radio signals.”

  “Radio signals are slow,” the Envoy said. “No, that’s not true at all. Radio signals are very fast and travel just as quickly as light does. But the closest solar system is four light-years away, so light takes four local years to get there. If you wanted to have a talk with someone in that system, and both of you used radios, then that conversation would take too long. ‘Hello?’ you might start out saying. ‘Hello!’ they might answer, and already eight years are gone by the time you hear their answer. Ambassadors should be young—or at least neotenous—and at that rate you’d be very old before you finished with introductory small talk. Ambassadors must also have dealings with worlds very much farther away, hundreds and thousands of light-years distant. We don’t have time to wait hundreds and thousands of years between one ‘hello’ and another, so we never bother to use such things as radio.”

  “What does neotenous mean?” Gabe asked.

  “Species who keep childish traits in adulthood are neotenous,” the Envoy said. “Curiosity, the ability to learn new things and form new social connections—these are neotenous traits. Some humans are like this. Others become grumpy, solitary, and inflexible as they get older.”

  “Got it,” said Gabe. He mulled over the definition for a bit. “So how do we talk to each other if the speed of light is still too slow?”

  “Nothing travels faster than light,” the Envoy said. “Nothing but the Machinae, and I don’t know how they manage it.” It grinned its wide and unsettling grin. “But some dimensions curl in over each other, such that everything within them exists at a single point with no space in between. There are places where that first Big Bang never banged, where all things are still very close together, and that’s where communication bounces between worlds. That’s where it can be entangled such that there’s no actual distance for it to travel through.”

  Gabe stared at the Envoy and the fizzing baking soda inside it.

  “Did that make sense to you?” the Envoy asked.

  “It sounded like it made sense,” Gabe said carefully. “I’d like to just pretend that it did and move on. Maybe it’ll sink in later.”

  The Envoy changed color, rapidly alternating between shades of purple. This meant that it felt impatient—not with Gabe but with itself. “Let me show you the basement. I can explain this better if first I show you the basement.”

  “Why?” Gabe asked. “What’s in the basement?”

  “I spent hours down there waiting for the chance to talk to you,” the Envoy said. “While I waited, I dismantled and repurposed much of the machinery I found.”

  “You did what ?”

  “Come see.” The Envoy oozed out of the room.

  Gabe warily followed it down to the basement, where he stood and gaped at the state of things.

  The Envoy had taken apart the dryer and washing machine, rebuilt both at opposite ends of the room, and combined them with parts from a broken television. None of these things actually belonged to Gabe’s family. The landlord would be annoyed.

  “I’ve built a device of entanglement for you!” the Envoy announced in a triumphant way. “I’ve done this many times before for every ambassador, improvising with different materials each time. Usually it takes longer than just a few hours to build—especially underwater—but I’ve become very good at it.”

  Gabe took a step toward the mess of spinning and humming machinery. “You’ve had to build these underwater?”

  “Oh yes,” the Envoy said. “I selected many aquatic ambassadors before your species emerged and learned how to talk to each other. And the best physicists on this world are often squid. You notice things about light underwater that take longer to notice otherwise. Have you ever read squid poetry? It doesn’t last long. The ink quickly disperses into the surrounding water. But it’s beautiful poetry once you learn how to read it.”

  “What’s that glow?” Gabe asked, pointing. A speck of gold light flickered inside the washer. An identical speck flickered in the dryer several feet away.

  “That light is the same in these two separate places,” the Envoy told him, excited and proud. “They are entangled across the distance of your basement. What happens to one will also happen to the other at the very same moment with no lag of travel between them.”

  “So I can use it to send instant messages,” Gabe said. He sounded disappointed. “Ambassadors don’t ever meet in person? Visit each other’s planets, that sort of thing?”

  “Not so often,” the Envoy admitted. “Travel is much more difficult than communication. But you should know that there are strange ships in this solar system already.”

  “What?” Gabe asked, unsure if he’d heard that right. “Really? Who are they?”

  “I don’t know,” said the Envoy. “I wish I did. I spotted them from the moon, using abandoned equipment I’d been tinkering with there. The ships are hiding in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. It worried me. I found it inauspicious, inopportune, and distressing to see vehicles from elsewhere when we have no ambassador to talk to them. So I came looking for one and found you. This means that you’re likely to engage in some unusual, in-person diplomacy. I hope it goes well.”

  That sounded ominous. Gabe glanced at the Envoy, who quickly raised both its voice and its neck. “Besides all that, entanglement will allow you to send more than just messages! You can send yourself, which is almost like meeting in person. You can entangle your perceptions. In this way you will dream yourself into the Embassy where all other ambassadors gather.”

  “I’ll be able to dream about meeting aliens?” Gabe asked, skeptical.

  “You won’t just dream about meeting aliens,” the Envoy clarified. “You will experience the actual facts of such meetings in dreams. But first I have to do a little more tinkering and adjust the field of recoherence.” It moved across the concrete floor, picked up a few metal pieces of washing machine, and swallowed them.

  “Still hungry?” Gabe asked. “I can probably find you more baking soda.”

  The Envoy shook its mouth. “I’m sustained, thank you,” it said. “I’m partially digesting these metals in order to shift their molecules into more useful combinations, and not because I’m hungry.”

  “Oh,” said Gabe. He sat on the basement steps and watched, fascinated, while the metal pieces changed color inside the Envoy. It pushed them out, added them to the device of entanglement, and absorbed other pieces to work strange changes on. Then it took a breath and shifted to keep the pocket of air separate from the floating pieces of metal.

  “This is we how we will entangle you,” it said. “First we’ll embed tiny particles inside you—most especially in the skin of your eyelids, the surface of your eardrums, and all along your spine. Then we will entangle those particles and propel their identical twins through the tiny black hole I will make in your clothes dryer.”

  “You can make a black hole in the dryer?”

  “Yes,” said the Envoy. “Please do not stand too close to it.”

  “Can I throw something at it and watch what happens?” Gabe asked.

  “No,” said the Envoy. “It will be very precisely calibrated.”

  “Not even little scraps of paper or balls of dryer lint or something like that?”

  The Envoy cleared its long, purple throat. “Please do not throw anything at the black hole! Accounting for the air and dust motes is hard enough. It will remember everything it absorbs. We have to sneak the particles of your entanglement through that attention, avoiding its notice. Once the entangled particles pass through the black hole, they’ll travel between the ninth and tenth dimensions of our universe, skim across the surface of an adjacent universe, shift in and out of places where neither space nor distance currently exist, and finally arrive at the Embassy.
You might have some very strange dreams before they arrive. Try not to be alarmed by your dreams.”

  “Okay,” said Gabe. “I’ll try. I never really remember my dreams anyway.”

  “You’ll remember these,” the Envoy said. “Once the particles reach the Embassy, they’ll form a precisely entangled duplicate of your perception and awareness. You’ll see, hear, and move as though actually there, even though the Embassy is twenty-five thousand light-years away in the very center of the galaxy.”

  “I thought there was a really big black hole at the center of the galaxy,” said Gabe. He was the sort of kid who knew such things.

  “There is,” said the Envoy. “The Embassy is perched on the very edge.” It added molecularly modified pieces of dryer to the rest of the device. “We’re ready to begin. The device is ready, at least. Are you ready?”

  “Will it hurt?” Gabe asked, though he didn’t feel worried.

  “Not very much,” the Envoy said.

  Gabe felt a bit worried now. “Is it safe?” he pressed.

  “No,” said the Envoy. “Definitely not. Nothing is safe. Neither food nor playgrounds nor standing where meteors might land on you—which is anywhere and everywhere—is ever safe. There’s no such quality as safe. Instead there is trust. We’ve only just met, you and I, so I understand if we don’t yet have enough trust between us. We can delay your entanglement. But if you wish to accept this post to help protect your world and every form of life residing on it, then you must become entangled. And given that we have strange ships in the asteroid belt, I really do encourage you to hurry.”

  Gabe looked from one small golden glow to the other. “You can do this entanglement thing without making my head explode?”

  “Certainly,” the Envoy said. “I’ve never yet exploded the head of an ambassador.”

  “Okay,” said Gabe. “Okay,” he said again. “I’ll need you to rebuild the washer and dryer soon anyway. The twins go through lots of laundry. Our old washing machine broke right after they were born, and it took the landlord forever to replace it, so Lupe and I had to carry wagonloads of crap-stained onesies to the Laundromat almost every single day. So let’s do this quickly.”

  “Are you certain?” the Envoy asked.

  “No,” said Gabe. “Hurry up.”

  The Envoy paused. “We should conduct your entanglement with a little more ceremony and reverence for a very long tradition.”

  Gabe laughed. “I accept the role of ambassador with all due formality, because my little sister and brother are going to need clothes that aren’t covered in poop.”

  The Envoy sighed. “Please stand over here.”

  Gabe stood over there.

  The Envoy scootched behind the former washing machine and made adjustments. The flickering light inside the dryer vanished. Gabe squinted at where it used to be. He couldn’t see inside the dryer. No light escaped the dryer to see by.

  “Repeat after me,” the Envoy said. “I will speak for this world.”

  “I will speak for this world,” said Gabriel Sandro Fuentes.

  “Now close your eyes,” the Envoy told him. “You’ll feel a tingling sensation in your eyelids, eardrums, and all along your spine.”

  Gabe closed his eyes.

  He still saw a blinding flash of light.

  PART TWO

  ENTANGLED

  6

  Gabe never remembered his dreams. When other people talked about the bizarre, wonderful, or horrifying things they saw and did while sleeping, Gabe had always just listened and wondered what that would be like.

  His sister Lupe had a recurring dream about migrating birds who were also words. Sometimes they made messages on the undersides of storm clouds. Lupe never remembered the messages in the morning, but at least she remembered the rest of the dream.

  Frankie described his dreams at length and often, even the ones that made no sense. Especially the ones that made no sense. “And then I was an eggplant and somehow I’d climbed onto the roof even though I didn’t have arms, though I think maybe I still had legs at that point, and one of the trees in the backyard was also my mom and she forced me to play card games, but I’d forgotten how to play all of them, and I tried to explain to her how I’d forgotten, but she really wasn’t listening so . . .” Then Frankie and Gabe would play card games just to reassure Frankie that he really did remember how. Sometimes Gabe would win, and sometimes Gabe would let Frankie win if he figured that Frankie needed to win at something.

  Gabe was pretty sure that he had dreams just like everyone else, and sometimes he could just barely glimpse one as it vanished in the very first moments of the morning, but he couldn’t ever hold it. Before entanglement, Gabe’s dreams left no footprints or bread crumbs in his memory.

  After entanglement, Ambassador Gabriel Sandro Fuentes remembered all his dreams—almost. He remembered all of them but one.

  That first night he dreamed about motion and travel somewhere on the other side of the tiny black hole in his basement. He skipped and burrowed through the substance of nothing while stars stood fixed around him and watched him from very far away. Gabe tried to close his eyes in the dream, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t brought his eyelids with him.

  Suddenly and without warning he stood alone outside his house, in the center of the street. He was still in motion. He still saw stars in every direction. But he was also stuck in the road, unable to move out of the way if a car came hurtling over the asphalt.

  Zora and Garuda walked by, the iguana in a top hat and the bird in an evening gown. They greeted him in Spanish. Gabe realized that he had forgotten his Spanish, the language that was supposed to be his own. He felt a heavy shame that anchored him more firmly to the middle of the street.

  The light around him twisted, burned, and shriveled. His entangled senses passed through solar storms between twin suns. He woke up sweating.

  Lupe pounded on his bedroom door.

  “Wake up, wake up, wake up!” his sister said. “Dad wants you at breakfast.”

  “I’m up,” Gabe mumbled.

  He closed his eyes. He could still see solar storms behind his eyelids. The dream wasn’t evaporating the way his dreams usually did.

  Lupe pounded on the door again.

  “I’m up!” Gabe said, louder this time.

  He got up. He got dressed. He checked in with the Envoy, who occupied an otherwise empty aquarium in Gabe’s closet.

  “Morning, Envoy.”

  The Envoy’s mouth peered up from the aquarium like a purple periscope. It made a throat for itself and cleared it. “Good morning, Ambassador. How do you feel? How’s your head? Does it ache? Is it dizzy? I see that it hasn’t exploded.”

  “Nope,” said Gabe. “Still here. No headaches, no dizziness. No explosions.”

  “Good,” said the Envoy.

  “I think so too,” said Gabe. “I did have a weird dream, though.”

  “Did you arrive at the Embassy in this dream?” the Envoy asked, alert and more interested.

  “No,” said Gabe. “But how will I know?”

  “You’ll know,” said the Envoy. “Protocol will welcome you when you arrive. I should explain more before you actually get there. And once there, you should try to learn whose ships are nearby.”

  “Okay,” said Gabe. He yawned. “So what’s Protocol, exactly?”

  Someone knocked on his bedroom door. The Envoy ducked its mouth back into the aquarium, and Gabe shut the closet. “Hello?”

  His mother came in, looked around at the floor, and suggested that she might be going insane. “I’ve lost some laundry,” she said. “I was sure I put in a load this morning, very first thing, but now it’s gone. Poof. I’ve looked everywhere. You didn’t helpfully empty the dryer and then put all the clothes away, did you?”

  Gabe heard a burbling and unhappy noise come through his closet door.

  “No . . . ,” said Gabe.

  “Ai,” she said. “Well, hurry downstairs. Your father is waiting to fr
y up your breakfast.”

  “I’ll be right there.” Gabe promised.

  Mom went downstairs.

  Gabe opened the closet. “Did you hear that? A load of laundry disappeared.”

  “That shouldn’t have happened,” the Envoy said, sounding nervous. It climbed out of the aquarium. “The black hole should have dissipated completely by now. I’ll go back to the basement. Hopefully the basement still exists. Don’t let anyone else go down there.” It oozed out of the room through a heating grate.

  Now Gabe felt extremely awake. He dashed through the house, confirmed the non-basement location of every family member, and gathered up all three pets, locking them in his room. Then, and only then, Gabe got dressed, brushed his teeth, and joined his father in the kitchen.

  Dad gave him a nod, tossed bread dough in a pan of oil, and handed Gabe a cup of homemade horchata. Then he poured himself a cup of coffee. It was probably his third cup of the morning. He wore an old cooking apron composed of more grease than fabric and covered in whole constellations of splattered stains.

  Gabe sat and sipped his sweet-but-not-too-sweet horchata. He thought about his dream, rolled it over and over in his head the way he might roll an unfamiliar taste around in his mouth. He still remembered it, all of it, from solar wind to silly top hat.

  Dad called Lupe into the room. Then he set a plate of fried bread with two spoonfuls of greasy, salty garbanzo beans in front of Gabe. It smelled like greasy, salty poetry.

  Lupe joined them. She wore a black T-shirt with a sparkling pink Superman symbol on the front. She looked impatient. She usually did.

  Dad sat down across the table and folded both hands in front of him. “It is time once again to go over the family emergency plans.”

  Gabe and Lupe groaned.

  “Shush,” said Dad.

  He did this often. Dad had emergency plans for fire, flood, tornado, car accident, and the sudden disappearance of family members. He had several plans for sudden disappearances. He went through them all, point by point, and quizzed his eldest children on each. He inquired after the location and contents of their jump bags—backpacks stuffed with emergency changes of clothes, cash, snacks, and other supplies. They wouldn’t need to pack first if they ever had to leave the house in a hurry.