Ambassador (15 page)

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.

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.

M
OVE QUICKLY,
the Envoy wrote across his field of vision. A
ND 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.

T
HERE'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.
M
UCH OF THE HEAT HAS DISSIPATED, AND THE OXYGEN MIX ISN'T IDEAL.
W
E 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.

T
HE 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. I
T'S SUPPOSED TO BOOST MORALE FOR HOMESICK COSMONAUTS.
M
OVE THROUGH THIS POD AND INTO THE NEXT ONE.
W
E STILL NEED TO HURRY.

The Envoy guided Gabe to the environmental controls.

H
OPEFULLY 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.

N
EVER MIND,
the Envoy wrote. D
ON'T WORRY ABOUT IT.
B
OTH THE SOLAR PANELS AND THE ATOMIC BATTERIES WERE STILL WORKING WHEN
I
LEFT.
T
URN THIS DIAL HERE.

It drew a little arrow inside its helmet self. Gabe reached for a dial.

NO, THIS ONE, the Envoy wrote. It drew a more forceful arrow, and then a circle around the right dial.

Between them they managed to get the environmental systems cranked up again. Gabe shed the Envoy suit and took his first breath of stale, metallic station air.

The Envoy kept a sticky hold on all the dust and dirt it had accumulated outside. It rolled itself and the dust
into one lump, and carefully spit the lump into a corner. Then it made a mouth and took a breath of its own.

“Dirt is dangerous here,” it explained, “both to your lungs and to the equipment. All the dirt has sharper edges than the stuff at home. No water or air has moved over the particles to smooth them out.”

Gabe shivered and rubbed both arms.

“It'll get warmer,” the Envoy said. “Follow me. The observatory is down this way.”

It led Gabe to a pod filled with ancient-looking computers, most of them open and spilling out their wires and circuit boards. Something like a submarine periscope dangled from the ceiling. Another window-like screen showed more grainy mountain footage. An actual window took up most of one wall. Gabe saw stars through it.

Small, abstract sculptures lined the windowsill. He leaned in for a closer look. He couldn't tell what any of them were—or if they were supposed to be anything other than themselves. “Did you make these?”

“Yes,” said the Envoy, sounding embarrassed. “I spent a very long time here. And I was able to extract more ice from the lunar soil than I needed for drinking water, so I used some of it to make mud and clay. Please don't touch. The little statues don't hold together well.”

The Envoy began to tinker with the spilled puddles of electronic equipment.

“We can actually scan the asteroids with this stuff ?” Gabe asked, skeptical.

The Envoy sighed. “I know it doesn't look tidy, but this was very advanced equipment in 1974. And I've been improving on it in all the years since. Watch.”

A floating map of the solar system burst into existence in the center of the room. It didn't look like a projection. It looked as though the Envoy had somehow shrunk the actual system and squeezed it inside itself. Gabe took one careful step closer. He didn't want to disturb anything. He felt as though touching a projected planet might knock the real thing out of orbit like a flicked marble.

“There,” the Envoy said, sounding pleased. “That's more interesting to look at. I've cobbled the model together out of data gathered over forty years, since of course we can't see the whole system at once from any single vantage point. This still gives us something to work with. I'll start making new scans and examine the data I had already collected.”

“Sounds good,” said Gabe, still watching the projected model. “What should I do?”

“You should sleep,” the Envoy told him. “Continue
to investigate your fellow ambassadors, especially the Centauri neighbors you've already met. You might even threaten to make public accusations.”

“But I don't know who to accuse,” Gabe protested.

The Envoy grinned. “They don't know that. They might panic and reveal themselves by panicking.”

“Aha,” said Gabe. “So you think I should bluff.”

“Just an idea,” the Envoy said. “You gather information there. I'll gather it here. We can compare notes after you wake up—unless, of course, you discover our enemies, expose them, and drive them out of our system before then. Good luck. There are bunk beds in the next pod on the left.”

The Envoy focused its attention on a bulky monitor, where a mess of numerical data glowed lurid green.

Gabe found a bed.

He was tired. He had been up for a while, and he had seen things entirely new to him. He felt both elated and frayed.

The bunk mattress was thin, like the kind of tiny foam camping mats that never actually stay underneath a sleeping bag. But Gabe didn't have as much weight as he usually did, so the thin mattress still felt comfortable.

Before he fell asleep, Gabe thought of a way to frighten his neighbors.

“Greetings, Ambassador,” said Protocol.

“Greetings, Protocol,” said Gabe. He felt less disoriented this time. The transition between waking life and entangled travel became shorter and smoother with each Embassy visit. “I have a request. Please call a local match for me. I challenge
every
adjacent civilization to a game of my choosing.”

Protocol paused. That pause had its own gravity. “Are you certain, Ambassador? The Outlast will be among the representative civilizations called to this match.”