“I’m interested,” Rem said, and smiled wider.
The silly leather jacket and aviator scarf is a good translation, Nadia thought. He really is that sort of pilot. He’s delighted to try some new and dangerous thing.
“We are going to fly into the Machinae lanes,” she said.
Rem gave her a sideways look. “I think your translation node just broke. I definitely heard the wrong preposition.”
“We’re going inside the lanes,” Nadia said again.
He shook his head. “Are you joking? I can’t tell if you’re joking. No one goes into the lanes, silly human. We skip across the surface instead. We can sidestep light speed by riding in the Machinae’s wake, skimming right across those rippling waves of warped space-time. Barnacle and I are better at that kind of wake-hopping than anyone—”
Nadia tried not to laugh. The ship’s name probably sounded more dignified than Barnacle in Rem’s own language.
“—We can fly close to the lanes and their scrambled sense of gravity more skillfully than anyone else you could possibly find. But no one ever flies into the lanes.”
“Untrue,” Nadia said. “Witnesses tell me otherwise. The astronomers of the Seventh Fiefdom saw ships emerge from inside the lanes. So did the People of the Domes. Cartographers of the Volen Enclaves heard it happen while making their song-maps.”
Rem looked serious now. His posture lost its casual, adolescent unconcern. “I hear bad things about the Fiefdom, Domes, and Enclaves. What happened to them after they saw ships fly from the lanes?”
“They all died,” Nadia told him.
In her memory she heard heavy boots outside a cupboard door, though she tried very hard not to.
“You used to represent the Khelone,” she went on. “Honor the trade I negotiated with the ambassador who took your place.”
And you’re curious, she added, just to herself. Now that you’re starting to think this is possible, you really want to try it. I can tell. Even through the fuzzy translation, I can still tell.
Rem tossed the end of his aviator scarf over one shoulder in a cartoonishly rakish way.
“Fine,” he said. “Come aboard. Are you ready to leave?”
Nadia nodded. “I will be in just a moment.”
The Khelone stepped aside and turned away, waiting. The Envoy scootched closer to Nadia. “You did well,” it whispered.
“I suppose,” said Nadia—which was her way of saying “Yes, I know I did.”
“It’s good that you didn’t share much more about your intentions,” the Envoy added. “The pilot will be less likely to make this venture if the trip seems entirely futile.”
Nadia laughed. The Envoy sounded even more like her uncle whenever it said something so pessimistic. “Do you think this is futile? It’s a little late to say so, if you do.”
The Envoy held its puppetlike mouth at a low, despondent angle. “No,” it said. “I hope not. But your post is here. Your world needs its ambassador.”
Nadia reached over and gently poked the Envoy’s nose with a fingertip. It didn’t actually have a nose, but she poked its purple translucent skin just above the sock-puppet shape of its mouth. She wanted to offer a hug, but the smooshy Envoy didn’t hug very well.
“Go home,” she said. “Don’t wait around for me to come back. No telling how long that’ll take. Use the return capsule and go choose a new ambassador.”
The Envoy gave a slow and heavy nod. “The capsule was damaged when we first launched, but I should be able to repair it.”
“Be careful landing,” Nadia warned. “Those things don’t land very well. They just ram into the planet.”
“Then I’ll try to aim for an ocean,” the Envoy said. “I might even select a whale as your successor. Whales are less impulsive than humans, and aquatic mammals already know what it’s like to belong to more than one sort of world.”
“Sounds good,” Nadia said. “Choose a whale. Choose whoever and whatever you like—except Vanechka Vladimirovna. If you end up back in Moscow I absolutely forbid you to choose her.”
“Your classmate is both charming and harmless,” the Envoy said.
Nadia knew that the Envoy was just trying to annoy her. It worked. “She’s neither. She’s willfully ignorant. She thinks Father Frost is real and not just someone’s drunk grandfather mixing up all the New Year’s presents. She thinks you can get pregnant by holding hands.”
“Some species probably can,” the Envoy said thoughtfully. “Life enjoys infinite variety in infinite combinations.”
“Then you may browse the magnificent variety of life on Earth to pick whatever ambassador you see fit. Choose a whale. Choose a squid. Choose a beetle. But do not choose Vanechka Vladimirovna.”
“Very well, Ambassador. I can promise you that much.”
“Good-bye, Envoy.”
“Good-bye, Nadia.”
She hooked up a new breathing unit to her bulky orange suit. She wouldn’t need much oxygen to cross over to the Khelone ship, and the air inside Barnacle was supposed to be breathable, but she still intended to travel with a full tank and a spare tank.
Rem stepped back inside the translation matrix, clearly impatient. “Ready?”
“Just about,” Nadia told him. She grabbed a duffel bag already stocked full of food, water, spare clothes, a spare ventilation unit, and a notebook. Luckily, it didn’t weigh nearly as much as it would have on Earth.
“Good,” said Rem. He poked the module wall with one gloved finger. “This bare-bones tent of yours makes me nervous. I expect it to collapse at any moment.”
“This is my home,” Nadia said, with just a touch of warning in her voice. “I’m the first member of my species to live off-world. That’s no small accomplishment, however bare-bones the tent.”
“I meant no offense,” Rem said—though he clearly enjoyed causing offense. “But what you say isn’t actually true.”
“Excuse me?” Nadia asked, her tone extremely diplomatic. “Which part?”
“You aren’t the first member of your species to live off-world. Not even close.”
He walked away from the translation matrix and turned back into a turtle before Nadia could respond.
3
Zvezda Lunar Base: Present Day
Gabriel Sandro Fuentes, the ambassador of his world, was not on his world. He stood on the moon, inside the abandoned Zvezda base, face-to-face with an alien ambassador who looked far less alien than he had expected.
“You’re human,” he said. “How can you be human?”
Ambassador Kaen answered in a language that Gabe did not understand.
The two of them stared at each other, tense and wary, still unsure how much they could trust their new and fragile truce.
The Kaen fleet is an ancient, nomadic, and absolutely alien civilization of migratory starships, Gabe thought. How can they have a human ambassador? We haven’t ever traveled farther away than the moon, this moon, the one we’re both standing on.
He took in a deep breath of stale, Zvezda-processed air and let it out slowly. Ambassadors usually met in the Embassy, in the very center of the galaxy, where all of their languages and perceptions filtered through universal translation. They usually understood each other.
“Envoy?” Gabe called out. “Help?”
The Envoy scootched around the floor, reached out with a purple, puppetlike limb, and fiddled with old equipment.
“Just a moment.” It sounded almost exactly like Gabe’s mother when it spoke. Almost. “Let me dust off this old translator. Just a moment . . .”
Gabe made eye contact with Kaen, tapped his ear, and then pointed at the mess of machinery the Envoy was fiddling with. Kaen seemed to understand. She folded her hands, looked away, and waited.
He tried not to stare at her. Most human cultures considered staring rude, challenging, and aggressive. Most mammal species on Earth seemed to feel the same way about prolonged eye contact. And Gabe had worked hard to avoid aggression between them. The
y had a truce. They had a deal. Neither one of them was currently trying to get the other killed. So he tried not to stare. This wasn’t easy. He took in a sideways glance and then looked away.
The other ambassador wore a green space suit, jade-colored. The helmet of her suit looked very much like the headgear of Olmec statues, carved in ancient Mexico long before the Spanish came conquering across the ocean, before even the Aztecs came conquering southward from North America. Gabe’s family had kitschy salt and pepper shakers carved into the very same shape at home—or at least they used to, when they still had a home, before the house was swallowed by a small black hole in the Kaen’s first attempt to assassinate him.
Gabe tried not to dwell on that.
The Olmec heads look like astronauts, he had once said of the salt and pepper shakers.
His mom had absolutely hated that idea. They’re ball players, she’d insisted. Ancient ball players wearing football helmets. It would hurt to get hit in the head with a great big lump of solid rubber. They are definitely, definitely not astronauts.
Gabe wondered how to explain his current absence to his mother. I’m so sorry that I had to disappear on the very same day Dad got deported. The timing alone probably broke your heart and stomped on the pieces. But I had to go to the moon. . . .
Gabe tried not to think about either one of his parents.
He risked another sideways glance at the Kaen ambassador.
She looks a bit tense, he thought. Not tense as in anxious, but tense like a guitar string, or a bow string—or maybe a string stretched between two tin cans to make a telephone. I wonder if I look just as tense. Probably.
“There!” the Envoy said. “That should do it. Say something.”
Gabe didn’t notice any difference. He had expected to feel something when the translation matrix turned on, something like the mild headache he always got, right in the middle of his forehead, whenever someone spoke Spanish faster than he could follow.
He turned to Kaen. “Ambassador?”
“Ambassador,” she answered, voice equally formal and now understandable.
How are you human? Gabe wanted to demand, again. He wanted to shout that question. How can you possibly be human? But he swallowed his inner shouting. It wouldn’t be diplomatic to start their conversation with demands.
“Thanks for coming in person,” he said. “Thank you for showing so much trust.”
“I trust our truce more easily than I trust this place,” she said, looking around. “The walls don’t look very stable.”
“No, they really don’t,” Gabe agreed.
The Envoy quietly grumbled in the corner. Gabe caught the words “triumph of engineering,” but little else.
“We should leave,” Gabe went on. “I can point out where we’re headed when we get closer to the planet, once I can see the shapes of the different continents. Hopefully there won’t be too much cloud cover.”
“That won’t be a problem,” Kaen said. “We aren’t going down to the planet.”
“Excuse me?” Gabe asked.
“We will not be traveling to the homeworld at this time,” she said, slowly and carefully. She looked down at the makeshift translator with obvious skepticism.
“Excuse me?” Gabe asked again. Then he took a breath and adjusted his tone. “That was a condition of our truce. We negotiated this already. I need passage back to the planet. Earth. Terra. Home. The one right over there.”
“We did not speak of timing,” she said. “I intend to bring you back to the planet’s surface. But not immediately. I must return directly to the fleet, and I . . . invite you to come with me. The captains insist on a meeting.”
“The ones who ordered my assassination.” Gabe knew he probably shouldn’t bring up conflicts that the two of them had already resolved, but he did anyway.
“Yes,” she agreed, without embarrassment or apology.
Gabe felt something close to panic. “I have urgent business at home,” he tried to explain. Mostly because I don’t have a home. It imploded. Then it burned. And then Dad got kicked out of the country because of a stop sign. Now my sister Lupe is going to split her time between babysitting and summer school, and she hates both, and her hair is probably catching fire every single time she talks to Mom, and I’m not there. I need to be there. Dad needs to be there. I need to find him.
“You have more urgent business in the fleet,” Kaen said, unruffled. She lifted her helmet. “So do I. Please hurry. I assume you have some kind of suit.”
“I don’t actually know,” Gabe admitted. “Envoy? Are there any spare suits around here?”
“Yes,” the Envoy said. “Twenty years ago I did tear up one of the suits to patch wall leaks, but the other spare should still be serviceable. It might even fit you. Most cosmonauts were small of stature in order to squeeze into very small capsules.”
Gabe still felt close to panic. He couldn’t stop that feeling, but he could set it aside. “Just a moment, then. I’ll suit up.”
Ambassador Kaen waited by the front airlock while Gabe and the Envoy went looking for the spare suit.
“Envoy?” Gabe whispered.
“You don’t need to keep your voice down,” the Envoy told him. “We’re outside the translation matrix now. Your colleague can’t understand us.”
“My colleague is human,” said Gabe.
“I also noticed this, yes.”
“How? How is that possible? We haven’t traveled any farther than the moon. Right here.”
“You haven’t traveled farther in ships of your own making,” said the Envoy. “But some of your species may have hitched a ride on other ships, made by other civilizations. The Kaen fleet might well have passed through this system long ago. Many different species travel with them, and all consider themselves equally Kaen. Yours seem to be among them.”
“Don’t you remember a Kaen visit?” Gabe asked. “Aren’t you extremely old?”
“Memory is vague and uncertain over long stretches of time,” the Envoy admitted.
They found an orange, empty cosmonaut suit hanging on a wall. The letters CCCP had been stenciled across the white helmet.
“What does that stand for?” Gabe asked, pointing.
“,” said the Envoy. “It is the Cyrillic abbreviation for the USSR.”
“Oh.” The suit looked creepy, like a suit of armor in a haunted castle. Gabe wondered if any of his father’s emergency ghost plans would work on a moon base. Several of those stories involved wailing and unquiet spirits who wandered near bodies of water and tried to drown anybody who got too close. Maybe dying in a vacuum felt like drowning. Probably not. And Gabe didn’t know of any NASA astronauts who had died all the way out here—though the ones on Apollo 13 almost did. Maybe some secret Russian mission had gone badly and left ghost-cosmonauts behind. Maybe they wandered like La Llorona and tried to share the experience of vacuum death with everyone they met.
“What are thinking of, Ambassador?” the Envoy asked.
“I’m wondering if Zvezda is haunted,” said Gabe. “I don’t really believe in ghosts, but I’m wondering anyway.”
“Zvezda is haunted by frustrated possibilities,” the Envoy said. “It is haunted by a vision of the future that never happened, by planned lunar cities that were never built. And for forty years it was haunted by me.”
Gabe took the suit down off the wall and tried to figure out how to put it on. The Envoy tried to help. This took a while.
“Are you confident in your truce with the Kaen?” the Envoy asked while struggling with glove clasps. “And are you sure of this course of action?”
“I don’t see much choice,” Gabe said.
The Envoy shook its puppetlike head. “There are always choices. The options currently available to you aren’t ideal, but they do exist—and you do seem to be making the best choices under the circumstances. Traveling to the Kaen fleet, even as a kind of prisoner, is preferable to death by drill cannon. I also agree that it’s preferable to ineff
ectual abandonment here. I would rather not repeat that experience. But I don’t know what transpired between you and Ambassador Kaen at the Embassy, and I don’t understand why the Kaen would try to harm you in the first place.”
“They were scared,” Gabe explained. “They’re hiding, and they hate that. They hate to hold still. Kaen thought I would reveal their position—which was our plan, pretty much, when we thought they were just pirates.”
“Aren’t they?” the Envoy asked.
“No,” Gabe said. “They’re refugees. So I came up with a new plan.”
“It seems to have worked,” the Envoy said.
“So far.” Gabe fiddled with the mechanism of his helmet visor. Then he paused. “Is there anything to eat around here? I’m kind of hungry. It’s been a long time since those granola bars in the park.”
The Envoy scooted across the station module, checked a few storage containers, and came back with a metal toothpaste tube.
“What’s this?” Gabe asked. He couldn’t read the Russian label.
“Borscht,” the Envoy said. “Beet soup. That’s what the label says, though Ambassador Nadia refused to call it borscht.”
Gabe felt extremely skeptical about eating borscht from a toothpaste tube. “How does it taste?”
“Nadia described it as a mixture of apathy and pain.”
“Right, then.” He removed the cap, took a breath, and squeezed the dark substance into his mouth. “Yep,” he said, once he was sure he could keep the stuff down. “Accurate description.”
“I can only hope that our hosts will feed you better,” the Envoy said. “Given that humans travel with the Kaen, some of their food should be edible to you.”
“Here’s hoping.” Gabe tossed the empty tube back into the storage container. “Okay. Here we go.”
* * * *
Ambassador Kaen led the way to the shuttle, which crouched on lunar stone like a carved jaguar.
Three mining craft flanked the shuttle. They skittered like massive silverfish, and kept the single eye of their drill cannons pointed at Gabe. He tried not to pay them any attention, but it was difficult to pay attention to anything else. He stumbled and almost dropped the Envoy.
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