Ambassador

by William Alexander

  Gabe waved his arm to interrupt. Something else had become suddenly urgent.

  “Does this little ship have a bathroom?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said the Envoy. “The anatomy of those who built it might not require a bathroom. Or else they might wear suits with built-in waste collection. Nadia wore a large diaper on our lunar trip.” It paused. “She’d be unhappy to know that I shared this information.”

  Gabe took a deep breath and let it slowly out.

  “How badly do you need a bathroom?” the Envoy asked. “Can you wait? The base has crude facilities, and a little gravity will make the process easier.”

  “I don’t think I can wait,” said Gabe. “This is urgent. Suddenly. With no warning.”

  “Not surprising,” said the Envoy. “The weight of urine collecting in your bladder is what tells you it’s there. But neither your bladder nor anything inside it has noticeable weight right now.”

  “Makes sense,” said Gabe, pained and clenched. “So what can I do?”

  He ended up making a makeshift toilet out of a plastic bag and his camping towel. He needed the towel to soak up pee inside the bag—otherwise floating streams of the stuff would have bounced out again with equal and opposite force.

  Gabe felt a bit embarrassed to do this in front of the Envoy, who still sounded like his mother. “Turn away, please,” he asked midstream.

  “I can’t,” said the Envoy. “All of me is an eye. I could point my mouth away from you, but every part of my surface can still see.”

  “Fine,” said Gabe.

  One splash did escape. It formed a perfect pee sphere. Gabe reached out with the plastic bag, caught the globule inside, and then tied the bag tightly shut.

  “Nicely done,” said the Envoy. “That was a decent piece of astroengineering on the fly.”

  “Ha,” said Gabe. “So, you were saying we can track the ice pirates from the moon base.” That was kind of fun to say out loud, he thought.

  “Yes,” said the Envoy. “They clearly fear discovery. Let’s go discover them.”

  PART FOUR

  ENTRUSTED

  16

  The lunar surface loomed large in Gabe’s view.

  “Keep the nose up,” the Envoy told him. “We must reach the far side, just beyond the landing site for the Luna 24 probe—which you probably can’t see from here, so never mind. That side is dark at the moment. Hopefully our headlamps will give us enough light to land by.”

  Gabe moved his outstretched arm to shift the angle of their descending orbit. They crossed the lit horizon and flew behind the full moon. It was extremely dark. Gabe saw precisely nothing of the ground in front of them.

  “What headlamps?” he asked in a whisper. It seemed important to whisper while this close to the moon. “Could you turn them on?”

  “They’re on already,” the Envoy told him in a worried whisper of its own. “Can’t you see them? I can see them. Maybe the alien pilot used a different spectrum of light to see by—a wavelength invisible to you.”

  “I can’t see anything but the glowing parts of the dashboard,” said Gabe.

  The Envoy pushed a few dashboard buttons. “Can you see now?”

  “No.” Gabe glared at the absolute darkness of the ground below. He had no idea how close it was, no idea when they might slam into it. “Now I wish you could drive.”

  “Me too,” said the Envoy. “This landing is going to be difficult. Please pull up—not that much—and now steer a little to the left to avoid a series of sharp mountain peaks. Yes, good. Good.”

  “My nose itches,” said Gabe.

  “Do not scratch your nose!” said the Envoy. “Please don’t distract the motion guidance of this craft by scratching your nose.”

  Gabe scrunched up his face and tried to keep his outstretched hand steady.

  “Extend your other arm in the opposite direction,” the Envoy instructed. “Then bring it forward and open that hand.”

  He did. The craft cranked its tail around to fire its engines ahead of them, slowing their descent. The engine blast cast a dim, blue light. Gabe saw the ground leap at him. He flinched. He almost threw both hands in front of his face by reflex, but he didn’t.

  “Close your left hand. Open it one more time, briefly. Now point it behind you again.”

  He did. Darkness returned. Gabe tried to blink away the afterimage of the ground, tried to guess how close to it they were.

  “We are about to slide across the floor of a shallow crater,” the Envoy told him, whispering again. “Hopefully we will do so without bouncing much. The legs of the craft should grab the ground automatically.” It pushed two buttons. “Since there are no handholds or seat belts, I recommend curling up in a fetal position . . . now.”

  Gabe tried to make himself into a ball. Then he felt like someone was hitting him from all directions at once. He knew what was actually happening. He knew that he was tumbling around the inside of the cabin, bouncing off the walls. But it didn’t feel like he was moving at all. Everything else was moving and pummeling him.

  The craft tumbled and scraped to a long, slow stop.

  Gabe uncurled himself and pushed back into the Papasan-like chair. He settled downward. He had landed on the moon. He now had a “down” to settle toward.

  He listened for hissing sounds and held out his hand to feel for drafts, afraid they might have sprung a leak in the rough landing. The dim lights of the cabin display were still on, filled with information that Gabe couldn’t read. And he still couldn’t see anything outside. The cabin angled toward the ground. If the headlamps were on, Gabe still couldn’t see them. Instead of moon rock, Gabe saw the Envoy smooshed up against the windshield.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  The Envoy peeled itself away from the transparent surface, drifted down, and made a mouth.

  “Fascinating . . . ,” it said. It hopped in place and then stretched out its neck to peer outside. Its voice sounded higher with its throat stretched so thin. “You picked a very interesting place to land.”

  Gabe moved to stand beside the Envoy. He wasn’t weightless now, but he had only a fraction of his usual weight. “I think the place picked us rather than the other way around,” he said. “What’s so fascinating about it? I still can’t see anything out there.”

  “I might be able to fix that,” said the Envoy. It pushed more pieces of the dashboard display around. “Maybe. I should have tried this earlier. . . . Oh, dear. Oops.”

  “What’s wrong?” Gabe demanded.

  “That landing damaged the craft,” said the Envoy. “We should be able to move across the lunar surface, but I very much doubt we can launch again.”

  “So we’re stuck here,” said Gabe.

  “I’m sure we’ll think of something,” the Envoy said, trying to be cheerful. “And at least I can adjust the lights.”

  The view outside became visible to Gabe—dim at first and then brighter.

  A field of oddly shaped stones stretched out in front of them.

  He saw that the stones were brightly colored rather than lunar gray.

  He saw that they were not stones.

  “This can’t . . . ,” he started to say. “This isn’t . . .” He gave up. His mind hadn’t rebelled against the sight of the Envoy or the sight of the mining ship come to kill him or even the sight of the Embassy and his own alien colleagues when he squinted at their actual shapes. But his mind rebelled now.

  He saw dinosaurs, each one crested with three horns. Several triceratops lay dead on the surface of the moon.

  “Fascinating,” the Envoy said again, its neck craned thin to peer over the edge of the display. “The comet impact was very severe, I remember. It must have knocked this herd off-world entirely. Then they drifted until lunar gravity caught them up and brought them back down.”

  Gabe nodded slowly without really listening. Then he listened.

  “Wait,” he said. “Wait just a moment.”

  “I
’m waiting,” said the Envoy.

  “You remember? You remember the comet? The one that smacked into the Gulf of Mexico? You were there?”

  “I was,” said the Envoy. “I don’t remember very much from that era. Memory is always an uncertain thing, salvaged and bent into whatever we need it to be, and those old memories are worn especially thin. But I do remember the comet. It was memorable.”

  Gabe began to realize just how little he knew about the Envoy. “Where did you come from?” he asked.

  “Here,” it answered. “Not this moon, but this planet. Yours. Instructions for making Envoys out of local material are sent in seedpods to every system and habitable world. I was born here. I’ve never lived anywhere else. I have no species of my own, no genetic family heritage to share with the rest of Terran life, but otherwise I’m as native to this place as you are—and as native as they were.”

  Gabe returned his attention to the triceratops. They had always been his favorite dinosaur—less aggressive than faster and toothier beasts, but no less badass. They looked like knights with helmets, shields, and swords already a part of them. He imagined triceratops minding their own business, never looking for trouble, but always able to handle trouble whenever it came looking for them.

  His encyclopedic book of dinosaurs back home had pictures of lumpy, orange triceratops, but the ones in front of him had bright and feathery scales. Each helmet crest displayed blue-and-green patterns that reminded him of a peacock’s tail.

  The dinosaur book that I used to have at home, Gabe corrected himself. He had seen it on the floor, scattered with the others, when he’d pulled Garuda through his bedroom window and shouted for Sir Toby. He wanted that book back now, even though the pictures in it were wrong, even though triceratops skin was neither dull nor orange. They wore bright and brilliant colors. And they were here, right here, vacuum-preserved. But they were also dead, all of them, their feather-scales scorched by friction with the air when they’d left it, their eyes gone from the sudden pressure drop to nothing at all. They reminded Gabe of the bodies he imagined Sophia the non-exchange-student had seen in the desert, dead and a long way from home.

  He leaned closer to the windshield. Above the lunar horizon he could see the Earth hovering. They must have gotten turned around in the tumbled landing, and now faced home. It looked small. A planet might seem like solid ground while you happen to be standing on it, but still it moves.

  Gabe tried to make out the shape of continents. He tried to remember the relative positions of Minneapolis and Guadalajara. Instead he saw mostly clouds. The globe hovering in front of him was too small to show any such detail. Gabe couldn’t even tell which hemisphere he was looking at. The world wasn’t a map. It didn’t bother to indicate borders, boundaries, or place names. It didn’t show him the line that his father would be exiled across. Today. Now. Right at that moment.

  “We should be moving,” the Envoy finally said. “The Zvezda base is in that direction, around to the far side and away from the Earth.”

  Gabe nodded.

  He found it easier to direct the alien craft now that he had some gravity to work with. It helped him keep his arms steady while finding the right gestures.

  The craft extended legs and hoisted itself up to a skittering, silverfish-like position. Gabe steered carefully through the triceratops graveyard and across fields of gray dust and stone.

  17

  Zvezda Base was a series of cylindrical, beige pods. Each pod sat on eight wheels and looked like a large vitamin.

  Gabe thought about how much his father hated vitamins. The man despised the whole idea of vitamins. They were nutrients stripped all the way down to the bare-bones geometry of survival—tiny, sterile, swallowable food without any actual meal involved. No cooking. No mess. No friends and family laughing or arguing around the dinner table. Just a pill. Dad refused to take vitamins, ever, even when snotty colds took over the household and Mom tried to push vitamin C on everyone. “It’s just the inside rind of an orange peel,” he’d protest. “And I would rather eat orange peels.” Then he would eat orange peels while Mom grumbled and made everyone else take vitamins.

  Gabe tried not to think about his family.

  “This place doesn’t look like much,” he said out loud. This was bare-bones survival, the vitamin equivalent of house and home. He hadn’t really expected to find a gleaming silver city on the far side of the moon, but he still felt disappointed. Zvezda looked abandoned, left on cinder blocks in Earth’s backyard.

  “It’s a remarkable achievement, actually,” said the Envoy, sounding miffed. “You should be more impressed.”

  Gabe lifted one hand to steer the alien craft closer.

  “Why is it half buried?” he asked. Drifts of gray moon dust covered several pods on one side, like windblown snow—but there was no wind out here to move the dust around.

  “The soil is an extra layer of protection against small meteors,” the Envoy explained. “Most of the base was supposed to be buried. But the robotic shovel broke halfway through the burial process.”

  “I’m feeling more and more confident about this place,” said Gabe.

  “Ai, hush,” said the Envoy, sounding very much like Mom. “The front door is over there.”

  Gabe inched the craft forward. They passed the Envoy’s escape cannon and approached the entrance pod. This one was entirely unburied, with blue and gray stripes decorating the side and a big round hatch at the end.

  Gabe stared at the hatch.

  “How do I get in?” he asked. “I don’t have a suit. Should I just hold my breath and run?”

  “No,” said the Envoy. “You shouldn’t hold your breath and run. We will have to hurry, but this is going to be much more difficult for me than for you. I can protect you from the cold and the vacuum, but given the pressure difference, it will take a lot of effort to stay flexible. I’ll have to stretch myself extremely thin, and you won’t have much breath to spare.”

  * * * *

  Gabe climbed down from the open hatch. It slid shut behind him. The craft headlamps faded away when it closed. Gabe used a small flashlight from his emergency backpack to find the still-protruding hilt of the cane sword, and then used that as a handhold on his way down.

  Before the launch, he’d tried to remove the sword, but it hadn’t budged. He was afraid the metal blade had melted and fuzed to the inside of the broken cannon, that it would never come out, that he would never be able to return it to Lupe. But the sword slid out now, so he took it with him.

  After one last hop-jump Gabe stood on surface of the moon with a flashlight in one hand and a sword in the other.

  He looked up and kept on looking.

  The night sky had always seemed finite to him, like the inside of a ball with a few star-holes poked through it—especially the night sky as seen from the middle of a city, with the pale haze of urban light pollution hiding almost everything else. Even on car trips, even when Gabe had been far enough away from city lights to glimpse the sideways streak of our galaxy and see stars so distant that they looked like smoke or a smear of spilled milk, the sky had still looked finite, like a planetarium projector screen.

  This looked different.

  Gabe stared at the sky. He stared through the sky, through the absence of any sky. He looked into everything else. He felt as though he might fall through it, and never stop, and never want to stop.

  MOVE QUICKLY, the Envoy wrote across his field of vision. AND PLEASE, BE CAREFUL WITH THAT SWORD OF YOURS.

  The Envoy had stretched itself enough to cover Gabe, his backpack, and the little flashlight in his hand, its substance now so thin that it had become completely transparent. Gabe didn’t even notice a purple tint to his flashlight beam, though he saw it through the bubble-helmet of Envoy.

  He hop-stepped his way across the stones to the base entrance. It took him three tries to wrench open the door. Then he passed through the small airlock and sealed the second door behind him.

  THE
RE’S AIR IN HERE ALREADY, the Envoy wrote inside itself. I LEFT NOT VERY LONG AGO, BUT I DID TURN OFF THE ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS BEFORE I WENT. MUCH OF THE HEAT HAS DISSIPATED, AND THE OXYGEN MIX ISN’T IDEAL. WE NEED TO GET IT RUNNING AGAIN.

  The inside of the pod looked like a passenger plane with all the seats removed and replaced by jumbles of pipes, tubes, dials, and silver foil. Gabe’s little flashlight beam bounced back from the foil and scattered in all directions.

  What a mess, Gabe thought. He knew there had to be some sort of order to it all, but it wasn’t a kind of order that he could see and understand at a glance. It looked like clumsy chaos instead.

  THE LIGHT SWITCH IS OVER HERE, the Envoy wrote. It drew an arrow inside its helmet self.

  Gabe turned on the lights and looked around. The pod interior seemed even more randomly chaotic with the lights on. He looked down at his feet, encased in the Envoy suit. A fine layer of moon dust covered them both.

  Video screens embedded in the wall flickered on. They showed grainy footage of a mountain landscape in spring.

  “What’s that?” Gabe asked, confused.

  A CHANGE OF SCENERY, the Envoy wrote. IT’S SUPPOSED TO BOOST MORALE FOR HOMESICK COSMONAUTS. MOVE THROUGH THIS POD AND INTO THE NEXT ONE. WE STILL NEED TO HURRY.

  The Envoy guided Gabe to the environmental controls.

  HOPEFULLY THE BATTERIES ARE SUFFICIENTLY CHARGED TO START THE SYSTEM AGAIN, it wrote, and probably shouldn’t have.

  “What happens if they aren’t?” Gabe asked.

  NEVER MIND, the Envoy wrote. DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT. BOTH THE SOLAR PANELS AND THE ATOMIC BATTERIES WERE STILL WORKING WHEN I LEFT. TURN THIS DIAL HERE.