Ambassador (6 page)

He saw caves set into the ground, a lake that looked more viscous than watery, and stranger features of the landscape that he wasn't even sure what to name. The Chancery looked alien to him. It also looked like a really big playground.

Kids were everywhere, climbing, running, swimming, building things together, or flying through layers of cloud. They all seemed human-shaped and Gabe-size, with hair and skin colors just a few shades different from what he was used to. This was disappointing. He had expected some green skin and tentacles.

Three of his fellow ambassadors seemed to be making sand castles out of the dark, blue-black sand of the lakeshore. Or maybe they were speaking to each other in some sort of sculpture-based language. Gabe watched from a distance, curious, but he couldn't really tell what they were doing.

He glanced away and accidentally caught sight of those same three ambassadors out of the corner of his eye.

They weren't human-shaped anymore.

One looked like a crab with the head of a camel.

Another looked like a lump of dandelion seeds.

The third was huge. That's all Gabe could tell at a glance. A face and one limb rested on the sand. The rest disappeared in the water.

Gabe stared at them directly. All three ambassadors looked human again: one crouching, one sitting, and one resting on his stomach with feet idly splashing the water behind him.

Gabe squinted. All three took on their very different shapes.

They only look like me when I look at them directly,
he realized.

He squinted up at the flying ambassadors and caught glimpses of wings or waving tendrils. With eyes open wide he just saw kids, flying kids. They shouted and swooped, playing an airborne ball game.

The three on the beach might have been playing some sort of board game—but shaping the towers and tunnels of the board itself seemed at least as important as moving little stone pieces across it. He watched carefully, but he couldn't tell how to play, and he didn't feel comfortable
intruding. He didn't feel comfortable at all. Instead he felt confused, disoriented, out of place—alien. Gabe didn't like this feeling, so he went walking and exploring to try to shake it off.

He couldn't shake it off, but the feeling shifted inside him. It traded awkwardness for awe.

We're not alone,
he thought. He had always figured that aliens must exist somewhere. Space was entirely too big, filled with too many other stars and way too many other planets for the rest of it to stand empty. And he had known about the living reality of intelligent-yet-nonhuman life since his first chat with the Envoy. But the Envoy was just one purple oddity that fit in an aquarium. Now aliens
surrounded
Gabe. He squinted to glimpse the wide variety of shapes and movement. He was one of many. His own world was just one place among infinite many.

Gabe felt very small. He savored that feeling and kind of enjoyed it while he explored. Then he came to the forest. It looked like a coral reef and a massive jungle gym as much as it resembled terrestrial trees. Forest games apparently involved lots of running, hiding, and chasing. Gabe climbed a tree to get out of the way. The surface of the branches felt smoother than tree bark but not slippery.

He perched on a limb and watched the kids below. He
could recognize bits of hide-and-seek, tag, and capture the flag, but he wasn't sure how they fit together. There seemed to be teams, but players often switched sides.

Two other ambassadors climbed an adjacent tree. They both looked like girls, and both wore clothes similar to Gabe's. He resisted the sudden urge to squint at them, to find out what other shapes they might have. He felt like that would have been rude.

One stood upright on a thick branch. She had high cheekbones, a wide nose, and very straight, dark hair. She looked severe. Gabe thought that she should have pointy ears, but she didn't.

“Kaen,” she said, and pointed to herself.

“Gabe,” said Gabe. Then he hesitated, unsure what information they were supposed to swap. “Is Kaen your name or your species or where you're from? My name is Gabe. I'm from Earth. Or Terra. We call the planet Terra in Latin. That sounds more official somehow. Hi. I'm babbling. Sorry.”

“Kaen,” she said again. “I am the ambassador of the Kaen, which isn't my species, and it isn't my world. We don't have worlds. We are different species, all traveling in a great, nomadic fleet, and all together call ourselves the Kaen. Call me that. It isn't my name. I won't share my name with you.”

“Fair enough,” said Gabe. “Gabe is my name, but you're still welcome to use it.”

“I will,” she said, and stared at him. Gabe wondered if she was squinting, if she saw him now as he saw himself. He felt exposed and uncomfortable.

The other girl held on with both hands and both feet, crouching on her branch and mostly paying attention to the games below. She shrieked with laughter every time someone got tagged, and her laugh was much larger than herself.

“I'm Sapi,” she said, without looking up. “My peer name is Sapi, anyway. Is hydrogen the most common element where you're from?”

“I'm Gabe,” said Gabe. “And yeah, I think so.”

“Good!” she said, delighted. “Everyone says so. If they know what I'm talking about. Hydrogen's everywhere.” Sapi pulled a handful of leaves off the branch, wadded each one into a tight little ball, and threw them at the players on the ground. She laughed when they missed and she laughed when they hit. Some players shouted protests, but most of them just dodged.

Kaen was still staring at him. Gabe stood on his own branch and looked out over the Chancery, trying get a sense of the place and its size.

“Who made all this?” he asked.

Sapi looked up, surprised. “You don't have an academy, do you?”

Gabe felt a flush of embarrassment, along with a hefty helping of annoyance at the Envoy and Protocol for tossing him into a great big roomful of aliens without so much as a hint about what this would be like. He tried to shrug off the annoyance and shame.

“Nope,” he said. “No academy. Just learning as I go.”

“We all made it,” said Kaen. “One piece at a time. We're still making it. Everybody's home environment helps to shape this one, so there should be one corner that feels like home to you. The rest is translated to look at least a little bit familiar.”

She stood on her branch with her arms crossed, not moving. It looked kind of badass to stand in a tree without using her hands to hold on. Gabe wondered if she actually had hands, but he didn't squint at her to find out.

Sapi, by contrast, kept in constant motion. She jumped between branches, threw more wadded-up leaves, and tried to disrupt the games below.

“I didn't expect all this to be a big playground,” Gabe said.

“Of course it is!” said Sapi. “
Everything
plays. And starting up a game is usually easier than talking.”

“But we're ambassadors,” Gabe protested. “Shouldn't
we be doing—I don't know—important diplomatic things?”

“You don't know very much about games, do you?” Kaen asked.

Gabe didn't know what to say to that.

“Be nice,” said Sapi. “He's new and confused.” She climbed from her branch to his and then leaned in close as though she had something extremely important and secret to say.

Gabe leaned in to listen. Sapi laughed when he did. “Have you noticed how different ambassadors have different comfort zones?”

That wasn't the sort of important secret Gabe had expected. “No,” he said. “I haven't been here long enough to notice.”

“It's hilarious,” she told him in a whisper-laugh. “Some prefer to stand farther back and shout at each other, and others don't really consider it a conversation if their faces aren't touching. So when two ambassadors try to talk but don't agree on proper conversational distance, one of them is always moving in while the other is always moving back. They don't even notice it most of the time. It's like dancing. You'll see it happen if you stay up here in the trees long enough. Just look down and watch people talk.” She reached over and tapped the tip of his nose.
“I'm glad you're not the sort who needs to be shouted at from a distance. Kaen over there doesn't mind close conversations, either—but only once she gets used to you, and that takes a while.”

Kaen said nothing and did not move.

Gabe had noticed the same sort of thing living in Minneapolis. Lots of people there were Scandinavian, or at least descended from Scandinavians—tall, blond, and more accustomed to large conversational distances—whereas Gabe's family preferred nose-to-nose chats. So he felt perfectly fine an inch away from Sapi's face.

A part of Gabe
was
jumping up and down and shouting
Girl! Girl! Almost rubbing faces with someone girlish!
But he didn't have too much trouble ignoring that part. Sapi seemed like a girl to him, but he had no idea what she was like to herself. The inner voice shouting
Girl!
sounded far enough away.

“My turn for questions,” he said. “I've got strange ships in my solar system. Not sure who they are. Not sure what they're doing, either. How do I find out?”

Kaen said nothing.

Sapi made a thoughtful, humming noise. “Who are your closest neighbors? Ask Protocol how to find them if you don't already know. Travel takes a while, so it's probably someone already nearby.”

She jumped away and threw more leaves at the kids below.

Gabe plucked a leaf from his own branch. It felt more malleable than terrestrial tree leaves, more like a kind of sticky paper. He folded it into a leaf-paper airplane and then tossed it out and away from the forest.

Several other ambassadors broke away from their chasing game to watch it fly. They pulled down more foldable leaves to try making their own.

Gabe's flew farther than he thought it would. The plane sailed over hills and then whacked an ambassador in the back of the head.

The ambassador turned around. This one was tall and very pale, his skin whitish-blue. He stood apart from every game, but he didn't look like a newcomer. He looked like a predator. Everyone else seemed to avoid his company and move wide around him.

The pale ambassador noticed Gabe in the tree, and they shared one moment of eye contact.

Gabe waved. “Oops,” he said. “Sorry!”

Another ball of leaves smacked the side of Gabe's face.

“Look away, look away, look away!” Sapi whispered. “Stupid! Don't talk to him. Don't even look at Omegan of the Outlast, not ever. Do you even have eyes? Most do, but not everybody. Light is a pretty efficient way to notice
things, so practically everyone grows eyes. But sometimes they don't. If your species grew up in very deep caves, or down at the bottom of very deep oceans, or in the middle of very dense clouds, then maybe you didn't have enough light to bother with eyes. So you might not know what I'm talking about when I say, ‘Don't look at him,' but try not to look at him anyway!”

“I've got eyes,” said Gabe. He shot a quick look back at the pale and solitary ambassador. But that one no longer seemed to notice or care about Gabe's existence.

Sapi climbed up beside him. “Then stop challenging the Outlast by catching his attention! If his people come to your system, then you should run. Flee. Off you go, all of you, your whole species and whoever else you can bring along. You need to keep moving if you want to outlast them.”

Gabe glared at her and wiped sticky leaf sap from his cheek. “Moving?”

“Yes, moooooooooving,” she said with exaggerated slowness as though speaking to an idiot. “Leaving the nest. Heading up and out to other worlds.”

“We can't do that yet,” Gabe admitted. “We
did
walk on the moon, though. I haven't been there, personally, but my people have.”

“Your own moon?” Sapi asked.

“Yes . . . ,” said Gabe.

“Well,” she said, and leaped back to her own branch. “Well, well, well. That's tremendously impressive. Your own moon. Right there, big in your own sky. What a great place to run and hide. They'll
never
find you there. Forget about running, then. Just keep your head down. If you have one. Maybe you'll get to keep it.”

Gabe plucked a leaf, wadded it up, and threw it at Sapi. It bounced off her forehead. She looked shocked for a moment and then laughed and laughed.

“You're worth talking to,” she said, still laughing. “You might even be worth playing games with. Kaen, what do you think? Oh, she's gone already.”

Gabe looked. Ambassador Kaen no longer stood on her branch, though Gabe hadn't noticed her leave.

“You seem to be leaving too,” Sapi said. “Bye.”

“What do you mean?” Gabe asked her. Then he felt a sudden, wrenching dizziness and woke up.

Gabe woke from his accidental nap at noon. The phone was ringing. He stumbled downstairs.

“Hello?” he said to the phone once he had found it. He wasn't fully awake yet. His only goal was to get the phone to stop ringing, and saying hello was how he got it to stop.

“Hello, my heart,” said his mother. For one strange moment Gabe thought it was the Envoy on the phone. But the two of them didn't
really
sound the same, even though both used the same voice with the same accent. The rhythm was different. The Envoy's words were clipped, separate, and specific. Everything Mom said moved like water, flowing downstream from wherever it started to wherever it needed to be.

“Hi, Mom,” said Gabe.

“I need you to do something for me,” she said with a
hitch and a stumble in her voice—or maybe that was just crackling on the phone connection. “I need you to get a few diapers and wipes together. And pajamas for the twins. Toss all that in a bag.”