Nomad

by William Alexander

  “Why doesn’t it translate as ‘person,’ then?” Gabe asked.

  “Because adults don’t ever translate well. Their words and ideas become weirdly literal in translation.”

  Gabe nodded. That made perfect sense to him.

  The Speaker took a knife from her robe, thin-bladed and clear as though made out of glass.

  The Envoy made an unhappy noise.

  Gabe stared at the knife. He reached for his sword-cane, and then pulled his hand back. “Ambassador Kaen? Does your captain still want to assassinate me, or is this a challenge to some kind of duel?”

  Kaen shook her head, but she didn’t offer any further help or explanation.

  The Speaker looked amused. “This knife is not an invitation to contest or combat. But you may carry terrible invasions with you. Our welcome requires your blood.”

  That was not reassuring.

  Your space suits look like Olmec statue helmets, Gabe thought. Your shuttlecraft crouches like a jade jaguar. And now we’re talking about blood sacrifices?

  “I didn’t come here to invade,” he said, aloud and carefully. “I was invited. And I know that I must look very intimidating—an eleven-year-old kid stuffed into a forty-year-old cosmonaut suit—but I promise you that I have no plans to conquer the Kaen.”

  I really shouldn’t be joking, he thought with instant regret. Jokes don’t translate well, not at all. And I shouldn’t have pointed out the already obvious fact that I’m just a kid. She doesn’t respect us enough as it is.

  He was relieved when the Speaker laughed. She did seem to be laughing with him rather than laughing at him.

  “She needs a blood sample,” Kaen explained. “She’s worried about invasions of disease.”

  The Speaker nodded. “We must know if you carry strange plagues that could wreak gleeful havoc on our bodies here. I will not welcome you aboard my ship until I have your blood to analyze.”

  “Oh,” said Gabe. “I understand now. You’re worried about smallpox.”

  “What’s smallpox?” Kaen asked.

  “Something our mutual ancestors had no defense against. Okay, then.” Gabe unsealed his gloves and held out one bare hand.

  Speaker Tlatoani took the hand, not roughly but not gently either. She held the knife up to Gabe’s palm and pricked the skin with the very tip. It was sharp. Gabe couldn’t even feel the cut at first. Then he felt it, and winced.

  The Speaker pressed her knife against the cut. Blood seeped into the hollow core, turning the clear blade red. She took the knife away and slapped a small, sticky patch of cloth over the tiny wound. Gabe felt it burn. Then it itched. Then it tickled in a very slight and irritating way, and after that it didn’t feel like anything.

  Meanwhile the Speaker stood, pushed the blade into a wall panel, and twisted the hilt. “Now we wait to unfold your blood stories.” She waved one hand at the guards. Both stepped forward to set trays in front of Gabe and Kaen. “Eat while we wait.”

  Kaen took the cover off of hers. Gabe did the same. Each tray held four small cakes made out of cornmeal.

  “This is reciprocal protection for you,” the Speaker explained. “The tamales carry vaccines against germs that your body will meet here among us.”

  Kaen ate a cake. She didn’t seem to savor it much.

  “Thank you for the food and protection,” Gabe said. He sniffed one of the cakes. It was definitely cornmeal, but dry and hardened rather than properly steamed. It still smelled better than tube borsht. His stomach gave a long, slow growl. Gabe took a bite and spent a long time chewing.

  This is not a tamal, he thought. This is nothing like a tamal. Dad would weep, and rage, and tear at his hair to hear these little corn cookies referred to as tamales. He’d call them sordos, without any kind of meat or fruit filling in the middle, and he would refuse to eat them. He would probably rather catch space smallpox than eat these.

  Gabe offered one to the Envoy, who quietly swallowed it. The cake remained visible inside its transparent, purple skin, slowly breaking apart. Gabe ate the other three. Sorry, Dad. I’m hungry. And I don’t want to catch any alien diseases.

  Noises chimed from the wall panel. The Speaker stood to examine the blood sample knife.

  “Your blood tells no offensive stories,” she reported. “Be welcome, then. You may come aboard. We wash our painted faces and set aside the blood of snakes.” Her voice sounded less formal than the words she used. Gabe guessed that adult translation difficulties made her sound more ceremonial than she actually intended. “Now we will travel to the Library through Night and beneath Day. We must take counsel with other captains there.”

  6

  Kaen dusted corn-cookie crumbs from her hands and stood, obviously impatient to be done with the airlock ceremonies. Gabe stood up more slowly.

  “It’ll take us a night and a day to get there?” he asked. “It took less time to get here from the moon.”

  “Night and Day are both places,” Kaen explained. “Two cities in the middle of the ship. You’ll understand better when you see them. And you can store your outersuit here if you don’t want to carry it around. Looks heavy.”

  “It is,” said Gabe, relieved. He fumbled with the complicated clasps and climbed out of the bulky cosmonaut suit. Then he put on his backpack and took up the walking cane. “Okay. Ready.”

  Speaker Tlatoani went elegantly through the passageways and led them into a much larger chamber. Crowds of people moved through it and flickered in and out of translation. Gabe tried not to stare at them. He was somewhat used to alien company, but he was not at all accustomed to seeing so many untranslated appearances directly, without a squint or a sideways glance.

  The Speaker paused near a translation node. “This is the Avenue of the Dead, and we will ride through Night among them.”

  “Well, that sounds ominous,” Gabe said. “This place looks more like a subway train station than the land of death.”

  “That’s what she said,” Kaen told him. “It just didn’t translate well.”

  They moved on through the train station without calling any attention to themselves, but the crowd around them still parted for both their captain and their ambassador.

  The subway train floated in place rather than running on wheels or tracks. It looked carved out of turquoise and jade, though the surface felt like lightweight metal rather than stone. There were no chairs inside. Handholds rose up from the floor, shaped to suit each occupant. Gabe heard very little conversational buzz, and he couldn’t understand what he did hear.

  “Envoy?” he said quietly.

  “Yes?” the Envoy answered.

  “I’m still not sure if we’re honored guests or prisoners.”

  “These are not mutually exclusive categories, Ambassador.”

  “That’s very comforting,” Gabe said.

  “I’m glad you feel comforted.”

  The train moved. It carried them silently away from the station, away from the saucer rim, and sped through tunnels toward the hub. Gabe watched the tunnel walls blur outside, hypnotic in the way that train rides always were. Then the train left the tunnel for the wide-open space of the saucer’s interior.

  Gabe saw Night and Day.

  Each city stood above the other. Each one formed the other’s sky.

  He looked up. Tiny dots of people walked on the distant, day-lit ceiling. He looked down at the closer streets of Night. Lamps and windows burned with the same swirling phosphorescence as the smaller lanterns in the airlock welcoming room, and reflected light bounced down from the brighter city above to give its darker twin a dusky glow.

  A stepped pyramid stood in the center of Night. A massive, bowl-shaped platform stood suspended at the apex of the pyramid. Sunlight burned inside the bowl, and shone upward at upside-down cornfields and the city of Day.

  So they did build a space pyramid, Gabe thought, thrilled and almost laughing. The temple of the sun. A very small sun. They built a pyramid for holding up the sun.

&nbs
p; The train moved through Night with rocket-like speed. Then it slowed, and Gabe caught a less blurry look at the view just outside his window. At first glance Night seemed like an ordinary urban place, built by humans to human proportions and human ways of moving around. It had buildings, streets, and crowds of people flowing like water unsure about which way was down.

  I don’t know which way is down, either, Gabe thought. He looked up at Day, and thought about the people of Day looking up at him.

  At second glance the streets of Night looked utterly alien to Gabe. Most of the people were human, but not all. This was a Kaen city, and Kaen of other species moved through the streets. They flickered into human-seeming shapes when they passed translation nodes in public squares. Almost everyone wore thin clothing, brightly colored and easily seen in the dim light. Most walls were painted in equally bright colors.

  Gabe wondered whether people spent half of their time in Day and the other half in Night, or else stayed mostly in one place or the other. He wondered if the streetlamps of Night looked like stars to the people in Day, or if their miniature sun-in-a-bowl burned too brightly to see Night behind it. He wondered how their gravity worked.

  The train entered a tunnel inside the base of the pyramid, cutting off his view. Then it slowed to a stop. Speaker Tlatoani disembarked. She didn’t look back to make sure that the others followed her. The captain clearly expected to be followed.

  Walls and ceilings inside the pyramid were covered with bright metal foil, all of it stamped in complex patterns and designs. Crowds of people moved and milled around or stood waiting for another train, just as they would at any other central station.

  The Speaker led them to a very small room that was clearly an elevator. One wall displayed a cutaway map of the whole pyramid. Speaker Tlatoani touched the map and traced a route upward from where they were to where they were going. The doors closed. Gabe felt slightly heavier as the elevator moved.

  “How does your gravity work?” he asked.

  “It works very well,” Tlatoani told him. “How did you enjoy your first sight of our home?” The Speaker was clearly proud and inviting Gabe to offer compliments.

  “Amazing,” he said, honestly.

  “I am pleased that it amazed you,” Tlatoani said. “We built Night and Day according to the knowledge that time and space are not separate things. We built this ship and its cities to accommodate the needs of maize, and the needs of mouths, and the needs of the little sun we made. Even such a tiny sun must be the center of attention.”

  Kaen pointed at the etched pyramid map on the wall. “Our ambassador academy takes up this floor over here, and the command center of the ship is here, close to the sun.”

  “Is that where we’re going?” Gabe asked.

  “No,” said the Speaker. “We will hold council with the other captains in the Library. Here.” The elevator stopped. The doors opened. The Speaker held out one arm. “This is the home of our chronicles and codices, histories and discourses, high proverbs and tickling songs. This is the House of Painted Books.”

  * * * *

  The walls and floor of the library were made of dark and polished ceramic, which hid most of the space in warm shadows. Books sat on glowing podiums, waiting to be read, and the podiums themselves provided the primary source of light. The book pages were transparent with symbols printed in bright colors. Each page was bound at both ends, which made a single book into one long page folded up like an accordion. People stood reading in silence, their faces intent and lit from below. They looked like ghostly storytellers holding flashlights under their chins.

  Speaker Tlatoani led the way to a separate chamber, one without shelves or podiums. A single, unfolded book lined the walls like a horizontal tapestry, every page of it visible at once.

  Gabe read the translated writing: Here is told how the people of maize and bonemeal and the blood of Quetzalcoatl came to travel nomadic between suns.

  The floor was a mosaic of small tiles, and also a map of a single planet. Gabe instantly recognized the shape of its continents.

  A bright set of tiles marked central Mexico.

  “This is the Chamber of the Homeworld,” Speaker Tlatoani announced. “Here is told that history of several suns ago, and here we meet as a gesture of kinship. We who left to become Kaen were among the first city-makers. We were the best astronomers, and the very best mathematicians. The Kaen came visiting on their long migration and were impressed by our accomplishments, by our skills at math and stargazing, and by the play of our magnificent games. A sense of play is needful to establish communication.”

  “We know,” Kaen said quietly. “We’re ambassadors.”

  The Speaker went on as though Kaen hadn’t said anything. “First the fleet offered trade in objects and stories, in the sorts of communication and cooperation that complex life and civilizations all depend on. Then they offered us membership within the fleet, and we accepted. Our oldest cities emptied into orbit to become Kaen.”

  Mom might not be so pissed about this after all, Gabe thought. Aliens never built our pyramids. Aliens don’t take the credit for ancient human accomplishments. They were impressed by what we had already accomplished.

  “Thank you for sharing this history, Speaker Tlatoani,” Gabe said.

  “None of it should be news to you,” said the Speaker. “The homeworld should remember us. Your academy should hold and preserve the shape of such remembrance.”

  “They don’t have an academy on the homeworld,” said Kaen. She didn’t say it in an insulting way, but Gabe still felt the sting of embarrassment at his lack of galactic education.

  “This is astonishing,” said the Speaker. “It also explains much.”

  The Envoy turned mortified shades of purple.

  “Terrible things happened to each and every human academy I tried to build,” it explained. “They burned in Tenochtitlán, and in Baghdad, and in Alexandria, and in the fires of Qin. Human academies do not last. Inhuman academies sometimes last longer. The descendants of elephant ambassadors maintained their mobile school for many generations, and they might well be teaching history and diplomacy to each other at this very moment. I hope so. But I don’t know for sure. I have not selected an elephantine ambassador for some time.”

  “What’s an elephant?” Kaen asked.

  “A very big mammal,” Gabe told her, relieved to be the one answering a question rather than asking it. “Large ears, prehensile trunks for noses. Migratory, like the Kaen. They’re supposed to have very long memories, but I don’t know if that’s really true.”

  “It is,” the Envoy said. “And their epic marching poems are very impressive.”

  The light inside the chamber dimmed.

  “We will now take council with the other captains,” said the Speaker.

  “All of them?” Gabe asked. He had seen a great many Kaen ships outside, and he didn’t think representatives of every ship would fit inside this room.

  “No,” said the Speaker. “Four captains will meet here, two of them projected to join us remotely. We four take actions pertaining to snake blood and shields.”

  “Translation?” Gabe whispered to Kaen.

  “They make emergency decisions,” she told him, “especially those related to conflicts in general, and our evasion of the Outlast in particular.”

  Gabe understood what that meant. “These are the four captains who decided to kill me. Who turned my entanglement device into a house-swallowing black hole. Who sent ice-mining drones to shoot me down.”

  “Yes,” said Kaen.

  “Oh good.” Gabe cracked his knuckles. “Should be a fun conversation, then.”

  Two glowing projections flickered and took shape inside the chamber. One of them had a beak, a large head crest, and long hair—though the hair looked more like anemones than anything hairy or feathery. Visual translation flickered on and off again. It transformed the projection into a male and humanlike figure, blond and frowning.

  “Captain
Qonne,” the Speaker said as both a greeting and an introduction.

  The other captain was a tree. Once translated, the tree looked androgynously human, and also like some sort of guru: seated, serene, and hovering above the floor.

  “Captain Seiba,” said the Speaker.

  The fourth came physically into the chamber. He had to crouch down to pass through the doorway. This captain was tall, black-skinned, and potbellied. Untranslated he looked more like a massive metal suit. Mechanical arms and legs stuck out from the sides of a transparent sphere. An aquatic creature swam around in that sphere. The captain’s potbelly was really a fishbowl.

  “Captain Mumwat,” said the Speaker. “Thanks to you all for joining us here.”

  “This the hatchling?” Captain Qonne demanded. He looked down at Gabe in a bird-like and predatory way. “This the larval thing endangering us?”

  “This is Ambassador Gabriel Sandro Fuentes,” said Kaen. Her face looked chiseled out of seriousness.

  Gabe tried to stand with equal dignity. He was grateful that she came to his defense, though he also realized that she wasn’t just standing up for him. She was standing up for his office, his title, his job—the one that she shared. Not everyone respects ambassadors, apparently, he thought.

  “Greetings, Captains,” Gabe said. He tried to say it as though speaking to peers—adult, alien, powerful peers.

  The four captains watched Gabe without answering.

  “Could kill it,” said Qonne. “This thing could sleep and trance, could still betray us in the dreams shared by all hatchling diplomats.”

  Mumwat spoke, his voice a deep rumble. “We have new understanding. Only accidentally did he interact with the Outlast.”

  Qonne was not mollified. His frown became a scowl. “Ignorance and blundering endangers us yet. Sedate it, if not kill it. Damage it into coma. Keep it from the dreams.”

  This is not going well, Gabe thought. He held the cane close, and wished the sword inside it were a useful defense against a holographic projection of the bird-shaped captain. I thought that Kaen and I had finished this argument already.