Ambassador

by William Alexander

  He held on to the sword hilt, though he probably shouldn’t have. The machine’s whiplash motion yanked Gabe off his feet and into the air. He let go of the hilt too late and went flying like a slingshot stone.

  Time almost stopped—or at least Gabe’s perception of time slowed down to a careful, deliberate crawl. He saw the moon above him. It looked close enough to touch in the clear night sky.

  Gabe had just enough time to think, This is going to hurt, before he landed in the pool at the base of the waterfall.

  It hurt.

  * * * *

  Gabriel Sandro Fuentes opened his eyes. It didn’t help. He couldn’t see anything. He didn’t know where he was. His back still stung from hitting the water.

  He moved his arms and legs. This took effort, more than it should have. They moved sluggishly, the air around them very cold and oddly thick.

  This isn’t air, he realized. This is water. I’m still underwater. That’s bad.

  He took in a sharp, surprised breath—and noticed that he could breathe. Air surrounded his head, but not the rest of him. He tried to touch his face and couldn’t. He touched the outside of a flexible bubble-helmet instead.

  “This is weird,” he said, and heard himself say. His voice sounded strange inside the bubble-helmet. Gabe had a high tolerance for weirdness, but his new circumstances still qualified as unexpectedly odd.

  Shapes glowed in front of him and moved across the surface of the helmet. Scripts and hieroglyphs wrote themselves into his field of vision, brightly purple like bioluminescent jellyfish. They shifted into something more like recognizable text, though Gabe still didn’t recognize it.

  ВЫ НЕ ЗНАЕТЕ ЭТОТ ЯЗЫК? Я ПОПРОБУЮ ИНАЧЕ.

  The purple color was familiar, even if the written language wasn’t.

  “Envoy?”

  The glow vanished. New words appeared.

  HELLO, GABE. SORRY ABOUT THAT. APOLOGIES. YOUR CONFUSION IS MY FAULT. I TRIED SEVERAL DIFFERENT ALPHABETS BEFORE REMEMBERING WHICH ONE YOU’D BE FAMILIAR WITH.

  Gabe poked the outside of the bubble-helmet with one finger. The glowing words rippled in front of him. “This is you? You made yourself into a helmet?”

  I DID, the Envoy wrote on its own surface. YOU WERE BRIEFLY UNCONSCIOUS AFTER IMPACT AND WOULD HAVE DROWNED. I’M SIFTING OXYGEN FROM THE WATER AROUND US AND FILTERING OUT THE CARBON DIOXIDE YOU EXHALE.

  “Thanks,” said Gabe. “I thought you were dead. I’m glad you’re not.” That sounded dumb to say out loud, but it was true, and he didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t feel capable of saying anything else. Moments ago he had been alone, completely alone, without home or family or Envoy. Now he wasn’t. Every emotion his brain had set aside came back to him now. He felt them all at once. That made it very difficult to speak.

  I’M NOT DEAD, the Envoy wrote. I’M ALSO GLAD ABOUT THAT. MY BODILY SYSTEMS ARE EVENLY DISTRIBUTED RATHER THAN CONCENTRATED INTO SEPARATE ORGANS, SO I CAN LOSE MUCH OF ME AND STILL REMAIN MYSELF. YOU’RE FAR MORE FRAGILE AND MIGHT BE INJURED. HOW DO YOU FEEL?

  “Ow,” Gabe answered. He crawled along the bottom of the pool and checked himself for impact injuries as he moved. He still couldn’t see anything beyond the bubble-helmet of Envoy, but he could feel the water flowing downstream and away from the thunderous, bubbling froth of the waterfall. “I don’t think I broke anything.”

  GOOD, the Envoy wrote. STILL, YOU SHOULD TRY NOT TO EXERT YOURSELF. MOVE SLOWLY. AND BE VERY CAREFUL AS YOU LEAVE THE WATER. THE ATTACKING CRAFT HAS NOT MOVED SINCE YOU STABBED IT WITH A SWORD—I WOULD HAVE FELT THE SHUDDERING VIBRATIONS OF ITS MOVEMENT OTHERWISE—BUT IT MIGHT NOT BE COMPLETELY INERT. IT’S UNCLEAR HOW MUCH DANGER YOU’RE IN AT THIS MOMENT.

  “Do you think I killed the pilot?” Gabe asked. He was not at all sure how he felt about the possibility.

  IT MIGHT NOT HAVE HAD A PILOT AT ALL, the Envoy wrote. IF IT DID, THEN YOU MAY HAVE KILLED IT. BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT MANY FORMS OF LIFE HAVE A CLEAR ETHIC OF SELF-DEFENSE. THOUGH MANY ALSO AGREE THAT VIOLENT CONFLICT HAS A TERRIBLE AND ENTROPIC COST. I’M SORRY THAT YOU HAVE SUFFERED THIS COST.

  Gabe said nothing. He had nothing to say. He crawled along with the current until the creek became more shallow. Then he climbed up and out, shivering. The moonlight looked purplish through his bubble-helmet.

  The Envoy dropped down from his shoulders and took up its usual shape.

  “Let me investigate first,” it whispered.

  “Okay,” Gabe whispered back. “Try not to get beheaded.”

  “I don’t have a head,” the Envoy pointed out. “But I’ll try to avoid getting bisected again.”

  Gabe rubbed his arms and jumped up and down, trying to warm himself. He listened for the clanking of the alien craft in motion, but it lay silently curled up on the trail.

  Gabe also listened for shouting or sirens from above the ravine, but he didn’t hear those, either. The park was closed. No one in the surrounding city had noticed the fight, apparently.

  He went searching for his backpack and found it. Then he found the scorched piece of Envoy. It was down among the rocks, oozing around as though looking for the rest. Gabe picked it up.

  “Hey!” he whispered as loudly as he dared. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure that no wounded alien pilots were sneaking up on him. “I found your missing piece!”

  The Envoy didn’t seem to hear him. It climbed a tree beside the trail and looked down, surveying the scene. Then it jumped away from the branch, stretched itself out, and glided in a slow spiral like a falling leaf. It landed on the inert craft. Gabe half-expected the thing to leap up and try to eat the Envoy, but it didn’t move at all.

  He crept closer to the trail. His sopping shoes squelched underfoot.

  The Envoy oozed along the edge of the cockpit, pushing and prodding until a hatch opened. Faint lights pulsed inside.

  Nothing came out. The Envoy went in.

  Gabe waited for a few heartbeats, or maybe for five thousand years. He wasn’t really sure which.

  “Envoy? Hello? Are you okay in there?”

  The Envoy’s puppetish mouth popped up from inside the cockpit.

  “Hello,” it said. “I think we can relax for the moment. We don’t seem to be in any immediate danger. The craft is automated or possibly controlled remotely. There is no pilot. Unless this smear of sooty ashes was once a pilot, but I doubt it. The ash seems to be pure carbon. That doesn’t help me identify its source. Almost everyone is carbon-based. Carbon is a very useful molecule for life to use while building itself up.”

  Gabe held out the scorched and severed piece of Envoy. “Here,” he said. “Build yourself up.”

  The Envoy hopped down from the craft and then tried to absorb the rest of itself. This looked difficult and possibly painful. The lost piece sat inside it, discolored and wriggling uncomfortably. Gabe looked away.

  “So there’s no pilot,” he said. “Is there anything about the ship that you recognize? Anything that might tell us who they are?”

  “I have figured out what the vehicle is for,” the Envoy said, its voice proud and self-satisfied.

  “Me too,” said Gabe. “The evidence is kinda subtle, but I’m pretty sure it’s an alien assassin’s attack ship.”

  “Wrong!” said the Envoy. “It might have been repurposed as a weapon, but that’s not its purpose by design. This is a mining craft made to harvest veins of ice. We are dealing with ice pirates, and definitely not an organized invasion force that the Outlast might employ. The cannon that you broke is an ice-cutting drill, not a gun. That’s why its aim is so bad. A military device would have been better at hitting a moving target, but ice does not run away.”

  “It still hit you,” Gabe pointed out.

  “I wasn’t moving,” said the Envoy. “I was encouraging you to move instead. And you’re welcome.”

  “Thank you,” said Gabe, remembering what it was like to be entirely alone. “So are they mining here, on the planet? Is that wh
y it was burrowing around?”

  “I very much doubt it,” the Envoy said. “I think it was just trying to sneak up on you. Too difficult to lift resources off world. There’s no need for them to expend all that effort. Plenty of ice in the asteroid belt, where I first noticed their ships. Much easier to find it out there. Much easier to avoid notice, too, which is clearly important to them.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Gabe argued. “Big metal dragon-bugs don’t seem sneaky to me.”

  “Each attack has been carefully and cautiously directed,” the Envoy pointed out. “They are shooting at you—but not the whole city and not the whole planet. They must fear the attention of an ambassador who might communicate their piracy to the rest of the Embassy. They fear exposure. So it follows that your best response to these attacks would be to expose them.”

  “How?” Gabe asked, frustrated. “We still don’t know who they are.”

  The Envoy grinned wide. “I think I can repair this craft,” it said, excited and proud. “We can go find out.”

  15

  Gabriel Sandro Fuentes sat in the cockpit of an alien craft, preparing to launch, when his phone beeped.

  It’s almost dawn! his sister wrote. WHERE ARE YOU?

  Busy, he wrote back. Light a candle to St. Joseph of Cupertino for me.

  Gabe’s grandparents had sent him a book about the lives of saints and the grotesque things that always happened to them. The book became favorite sleepover reading whenever Frankie failed to find them a horror movie.

  The crazy one? Lupe typed, far more speedily than Gabe could.

  Weren’t all saints crazy?

  Sure, she typed, but this one is specifically a patron saint of mental handicaps.

  And astronauts, Gabe pointed out.

  Same difference, said Lupe.

  LIGHT ME A CANDLE, he said, capitalizing each individual letter. If his phone had a caps lock, he had no idea how to turn it on.

  Fine, she said. But get back here SOON. When Mom wakes up, she’ll find out that you’re missing. Don’t do that to her. Not now. Not today.

  Can’t you just tell her that I have important business with aliens?

  Lupe described what she intended to do to him with the rubber mallet of wisdom and truth. She typed it all out with speed, and with many typos.

  Abrazos, Gabe answered, and put the phone away.

  “Are you ready, Ambassador?” the Envoy asked.

  Gabe didn’t answer.

  Dad gets deported today, he thought. We could rescue him before it happens. We could dig under the detention center and help him escape. We could burrow through the ground rather than launch ourselves away from it. We could do that.

  He thought about other huge metal dragon-bugs tracking him, following him, shooting at him while he tried to rescue his dad, shooting at Frankie’s house—again—when he tried to bring his family back together.

  Gabe closed the door on that thought, nailed it shut, and piled mental furniture in front of it. To protect his family he needed to be very far away.

  “Ready,” he said, though he wasn’t sure it was even possible to be ready for this.

  * * * *

  The craft coiled into a spring and leaped into the air. Segments of its tail separated, spread out like propeller blades, and spun. It hovered long enough to fire a blast of fuel behind it. Steam and smoke filled the ravine at the base of Minnehaha Falls.

  The craft reached escape velocity and escaped.

  Gabriel Sandro Fuentes, the ambassador of his world, left it.

  The back of the cockpit was curved and cushioned like a Papasan chair. Gabe lay smooshed in the center, his arms and legs splayed out around him as though modeling a da Vinci sketch of human proportions—though it was clear that the cockpit had been built with entirely different proportions in mind.

  The alien vehicle fought with gravity and created more of it, making Gabe’s body too heavy to move. A puddle of Envoy lay smooshed beside him. The transparent hatch glowed, bright with friction against the outside air. The glow faded when they left the atmosphere behind.

  Gabe saw stars through the hatch. They no longer flickered. They burned with constant, steady light in different colors.

  Overwhelming weight turned to weightlessness. Gabe’s backpack and his great-grandfather’s empty, hollow cane hovered beside him. The Envoy, Gabe’s fellow traveler, floated by as a perfect sphere.

  I’m in space, Gabe thought over and over, surrounding everything else he had to think about. I’m in space.

  Both the world and the ship turned toward the sun. Gabe watched the sunrise. All other stars vanished in the bright, reflected earthlight.

  Smaller flashes of light pulsed in displays around the otherwise dim cabin. Gabe couldn’t tell what any of the information meant, or what any of the controls were for. This didn’t matter too much, though. The craft operated by gesture more than touch.

  The Envoy made a mouth, inhaled, and then exhaled to fly around the cabin like a slow-leaking balloon. It took in another breath to speak with.

  “I wish I could act as pilot,” it said, “but the motion sensors don’t seem to recognize me as something substantial enough to pay attention to. I can push buttons on the dashboard, but I can’t steer the vehicle itself. You’ll have to be the pilot.”

  Gabe cracked his knuckles. “Good,” he said. “How?”

  “Point to where you want to go. The farther you extend your arm, the more force the craft will put into its propulsion. Aim for the moon.”

  Gabe tried to steer, but it wasn’t easy to control his gestures while weightless. He kept flailing, and he couldn’t steady himself in the empty air. The craft flailed along with him.

  “Point your arm at the moon,” the Envoy told him again.

  “Trying,” said Gabe. “Which way is the moon?”

  “Back that way,” said the Envoy. “No, that way. Look at where my mouth is pointing. We are currently falling back toward the planet, where we’ll probably crash in Antarctica.”

  Gabe struggled to keep the craft steady. “Maybe you should choose a penguin as the next ambassador.”

  The Envoy made a pbbbbbbbbt noise of annoyance, which propelled it bouncing around the cabin. “I might,” it said as it tried to keep still. “I have never yet selected a penguin for the role. They are good swimmers and know how to navigate between two different worlds, above the ice and below it. A penguin might be an excellent choice. The moon is still that way.”

  Gabe kept his mouth shut and concentrated. He finally got the craft pointed where they needed to go.

  The moon burned bright in the view ahead.

  “Shouldn’t we aim for where it will be by the time we get that far out?” he asked. “Not where it is right now?”

  “If this craft moved more slowly, then yes,” said the Envoy. “But it moves very fast. Extend your arm.”

  Gabe did. He pointed boldly. “To the moon!”

  He felt himself pressed against the Papasan-ish back of the cabin, though not with smooshing force this time. Then he became weightless again, moving at the same speed as the vehicle around him.

  The Envoy ballooned its way to the dashboard and pushed at the controls. “There. Now you can move around without changing our course.”

  “How long will it take us to get there?” Gabe asked.

  “A few hours,” said the Envoy. “Our destination will shift during that time, but we can chase it easily enough. Feels strange for me to be going back there so soon. I spent a long time trying to leave.”

  “What were you even doing there?” Gabe asked. “How did you get stranded?” He drifted off to the side of the cabin and bumped up against the wall with his shoulder. I’m in space! He found that he could move around just by gently poking the walls with his fingertips.

  “I helped your predecessor make travel plans, and then got stuck,” the Envoy said. “She negotiated passage out of our system. She was concerned about the Outlast—for all the same reasons that yo
u are concerned about the Outlast, though they had not spread so far then—and she thought she could best protect this world by leaving it.”

  Gabe thought he heard disapproval in the Envoy’s voice. “We just left it too,” he pointed out.

  “But we’re not going nearly as far away as she did,” the Envoy said.

  It spent most of their transit time telling Gabe about Nadia, the previous ambassador. She lived in Moscow. Her family was Jewish and tried to hide it most of the time. An ambassador always knows how to belong to more than one world at once.

  Nadia had an uncle working in the Soviet space program—or programs, really. There were more than one, and not all of them were on speaking terms with each other. Her uncle helped design the Zvezda moon base, and that turned out to be useful for Ambassador Nadia. She needed neutral territory, an off-world place to meet and negotiate in person.

  “The Russian program intended to create a permanent base,” the Envoy explained. “A shelter that would grow into an entire city. It looked as though they would manage it. They put the first probe in space, sent the first probe into orbit around the moon, took the first pictures of the far side, and remotely managed the first robotic landing there. They meant to send people there first, and then actually live on the surface—not just plant a flag and whack a couple of golf balls. But to the American program, the moon was a conquest to be wooed and abandoned after winning the race. Russian programs had more faithful plans.”

  “Hey,” Gabe interrupted, annoyed. “Don’t knock NASA.”

  “Hmph,” said the Envoy. “Your pardon. Apologies. Sorry.” It didn’t really sound sorry. “I remember that competition from the other side of it. In any case, dreams of lunar cities fizzled after the Americans landed. Most of the Russian programs shifted their ambitions and started to make orbiting space stations instead. But they still dropped separate modules of the Zvezda base on the moon’s far side. They put it together remotely with radio signals and rolling Lunokhod robots. Then Ambassador Nadia and I stowed away on the last of the N-1 rockets. That was in 1974. The launch was difficult and much less comfortable than our liftoff this morning. We had to toss out equipment of precisely the same weight in order to fit, and we almost exploded right after launch. Our return lander was damaged. I only figured that out later, and by then Ambassador Nadia had left the system. I stayed stranded on the moon. That wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know. While there, I modified and improved the Zvezda observatory equipment, which is how I first noticed the intruding ships in the asteroid belt. We can use the same equipment to track them more precisely.”