Ambassador (3 page)

He set
Hiawatha
aside, picked up an old favorite instead, opened the book at random, and reread one of the chapters in the middle. He liked to do this with books he'd read already, liked to leap into the middle of things and let himself remember the rest of the story in both directions—all the stuff that had already happened
and everything still to come, everything he knew that the characters didn't yet.

Sir Toby climbed out from under the bed and sniffed the air a few times, suspicious. Then he jumped into bed and curled up at Gabe's feet.

Garuda climbed down from the bookshelf and clawed his way up the blankets to settle next to the fox and enjoy mammalian warmth.

Zora slept in her covered cage in the corner. The cage moved from room to room, and tonight Gabe had moved it in with him. He was still annoyed to be facing a Frankie-free summer, and felt better keeping all three pets close.

The Envoy oozed through a heating grate in the floor. It shaped part of itself into a mouth and throat, and then cleared its new throat with a thick, phlegmy sound.

Gabe and Sir Toby both sat up at the odd noise. The fox jumped to the floor. Gabe swung his flashlight beam around and found the Envoy.

The purple, transparent thing on the floor of his room flinched away from the flashlight beam and became slightly less transparent. Then it spoke.

“I am the Envoy.” It changed shape slightly to adjust the sound of its voice. “I'm the Envoy,” it said again. It sounded nervous. It also sounded just like Gabe's mother.
“Messenger. Traveler with important news. One who knows what others need to learn. I have no other name than Envoy. Hello. Hi, there.”

Gabe tried to say something but failed to say anything. His stare was a question mark a thousand miles high.

Sir Toby approached, his tail bristled and his ears pressed back like a cat's.

The Envoy lowered its mouth to be sniffed.

Sir Toby made a challenging and inquisitive yip-bark.

The Envoy changed the shape of its throat and gave a few yips of its own.

Sir Toby relaxed. His tail settled down and his ears perked up, as though recognizing those noises to mean,
Thanks for letting me trespass on your territory,
and also,
I'm not going to bite you. I don't even have any teeth to bite you with, and I recognize that your teeth are impressive. Your coat and your tail are also impressive.
Maybe they did. Those were the sorts of things Gabe would have wanted to say to Sir Toby, if only he spoke fox.

The Envoy changed shape again, took a breath, and made air into words.

“Hello,” it said again. “Greetings to you. Welcome. No, wait. I mean that I'm asking for your welcome and attention rather than offering you welcome. This is your home, so it's not my role to be welcoming.”

“You sound like my mom,” Gabe whispered. “You look like a purple sock puppet without any eyes glued on, though I can see right through you, and there's no hand inside to make the mouth move. And you sound like my mom.”

The Envoy nodded. “I have mimicked the shape of her vocal cords so that I can talk to you in a pleasingly familiar way. Is it working?”

“Not really,” said Gabe. “Nothing about this is pleasingly familiar.”

The Envoy took another breath to use as word-fuel. It still sounded nervous. It started to babble.

“My purpose is to assist ambassadors. But this world has been without an ambassador for many years, and it very much needs one, so now it's my purpose to select one. I have traveled very far, most recently from the moon—the only moon you have left—to select a new ambassador. The word
ambassador
means one who speaks on behalf of a place and people in dialogue and diplomacy with other peoples and places. Proxy. Diplomat. Representative and plenipotentiary.”

Gabe blinked a few times. “I know what
ambassador
means.”

“Excellent,” said the Envoy. “That's excellent.”

“I'm not sure about
plenipotentiary
, though.”

“It also means
ambassador
,” the Envoy explained.

“I figured that it probably did,” said Gabe.

“And I have selected you to take this post,” said the Envoy.

“Me,” said Gabe. “Ambassador. One who speaks on behalf of a place and people.”

“Yes,” said the Envoy. “Your world, in this case. Your planet.”

“Then who are you asking me to speak
to
?”

“Everyone else,” said the Envoy.

Gabe looked up. He couldn't help looking up, even though his view of the night sky was blocked by the ceiling of his room, the roof of his house, and urban light pollution that turned the sky into a dusky, starless place.

Gabe set his flashlight on the floor, pointing up, to serve as a dim bedside lamp. “Okay. I'm flattered. But I'm also
eleven
. Aliens I can accept—mostly because there's one in my room—but not an eleven-year-old ambassador.”

“I'm not actually alien to this world,” the Envoy said. It became more transparent now that the flashlight beam no longer shone on it directly. “Not quite. Not precisely. And I'd have guessed that you were younger than eleven. The previous ambassador was younger.”

“Younger?” Gabe laughed. “Somebody
younger
than me represented this whole planet?”

The Envoy grinned an odd-looking and puppet-like grin. “Good! You laughed. That's an excellent sign. You feel comfortable enough to laugh. And, yes, people younger than you have served as ambassadors. For very good reasons.” It pointed its mouth at the fox and iguana. “The mammal and the lizard there. Are they friendly to each other? Sociable?”

“Yes . . .” said Gabe, clearly unsure where this conversational turn might be going.

“Then they probably met while very young—at least while one of them was very young. Is that the case?”

Gabe nodded. “The fox was a little cub when we took him in. The family just across the street bought him, but their cats didn't like him, so they ditched him right away. He was tiny.”

“
That
is why the two are friendly, though they're such different species. Juveniles have not yet fixed the boundaries of their social world. They haven't drawn a circle around those worth talking to. Adults of most species find it more difficult to communicate with anyone outside their arbitrary circle—or even recognize that anybody exists outside it. So ambassadors are always young. Always.”

Sir Toby jumped back up on the bed and yawned, apparently satisfied that the Envoy was safe enough to
ignore. Garuda woke up. The two of them bumped noses and then both went back to sleep.

“Okay,” said Gabe. “Sure. But why choose me? I just destroyed a lot of lawn furniture with a toy rocket. It was Frankie's fault, really, but I couldn't stop him. I shouldn't represent anybody. I definitely shouldn't represent
everybody
.”

The Envoy smiled again with its puppet-like mouth. “I find your doubts encouraging. Anyone who agrees to take this on without first giving the task some serious thought would probably be a terrible ambassador. And I admit that I've selected you partly by accident. I fell into your neighborhood, though I wasn't really aiming for it. I was only aiming for the planet. But I've spent days observing children in the park. You are the only one I decided to follow. You can settle disputes. You treat other species respectfully, as members of your immediate family, despite differences in perception and cognition. And the two of us can have this conversation at all. Even though myself and my message are both unexpected and strange, you can set aside your shock and actually talk about this. Not everyone can do that. For all these reasons I've selected you as suitable for the post.”

Gabe sat up a little straighter. He clearly didn't mind the compliments.

“Would I have to leave home?” he asked. “Mom wouldn't be able to keep her tutoring jobs if she didn't have me around to babysit sometimes.”

“Good!” the Envoy said. “You immediately think about how your choices might affect those around you. This is how an ambassador should always think. And, no, you wouldn't have to leave home. Your ambassadorship will involve diplomatic communication with the delegates of other worlds, but you can accomplish this from here. And we'll work together in secret if we can. Human governments dislike knowing about things beyond their control. They find it frustrating and often exercise their frustrations on the ambassadors themselves. I've found that stealth works better, with your species at least.”

Gabe nodded, still thoughtful, still mulling over so much new information.

“Yes,” he said. “I
have
to say yes. I get to talk to aliens. I don't think I really could say anything other than yes.”

“Excellent,” said the Envoy. “Now, do you have any sodium bicarbonate in your kitchen?”

“What?” Gabe asked.

“Baking soda,” the Envoy clarified.

“Probably,” said Gabe. “Definitely. Sure.”

“I lost a substantial amount of mass when I fell,” the Envoy explained. “The experience was exciting, but it was
also scalding and dehydrating. I still need more nutrients to rebuild the lost substance of myself.”

“Sure,” said Gabe.

He climbed out of bed. The lizard and the silver fox looked up, and then both of them went back to sleep.

Gabe left his room and crept downstairs. The Envoy followed, oozing down the steps like a slow, purple waterfall.

Gabe took a box of baking soda from the back of the fridge and a glass of water from the sink. He set them both on the kitchen floor.

The Envoy scooted up to the glass, reached out with its puppetish appendage, and used it as a hand to pick up the drink. The rest of its body changed shape, becoming bowl-like. It poured the water into the bowl of itself and dumped the baking soda in after it. The mixture bubbled and fizzed while the Envoy's skin absorbed it all.

“Is that better?” Gabe asked.

The Envoy changed shape again to breathe and speak. The lump of baking soda still visibly fizzed in the middle of it. “Much better,” it said. “Thank you.”

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.”