Ambassador (18 page)

“If all this is true,” Kaen said carefully, “and if these are your very last moments, then you still have time to hurt us by revealing where we are. The Outlast would find us. And even if they didn't, it would still matter for other systems to know that the Kaen took guest gifts without local permission. Ports and docking rights would close to us. You can still hurt us before you die.”

“Tempting,” said Gabe. “Omegan wasn't far away, last I saw him. I could go right now and tell him where you are.”

Kaen shifted her weight, obviously prepared to tackle him if he tried.

“Or I could at least threaten to do that,” Gabe pointed out. “I could threaten you and make demands. But no. I won't.”

“Why not?” she asked him.

“If I did sic the Outlast on you—which might be harder than everybody thinks, since Omegan is trying really, really hard not to learn
anything
about
anyone
 —but if I did manage it, and they came to our system looking
for you, they would also find us. That's worth avoiding.”

Kaen nodded. “True. Is that why you're offering to help us instead?”

“No,” said Gabe. “It's not. I'm doing this because my best friend's house used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad. And because it still is a stop on the Underground Railroad. You're trying to make your way north. You're crossing the desert. You need water. I won't be the one who finds you and turns you in. I won't tell the people with guns where you're hiding. I will not do that.”

Gabe's anger stung him like a baseball caught without a glove. It felt painful and satisfying. He didn't try to hide it. He held it in his voice, and he let Kaen hear just exactly how angry he was—but he also held it close. He kept it his own. He threw absolutely none of it at her.

“I'm offering the Kaen emergency hospitality,” he said. “Hide in the asteroids. Take some ice. In exchange, I'll need a ride from the moon I'm on back down to the planet I'm from. I'll also need you to stop trying to kill me. Do you accept this offer?”

Gabe waited. He wondered if the mining ships had reached the moon yet, if they had landed on the surface. Maybe they were scuttling toward Zvezda on their many metal legs at that moment, drill cannon glowing, prepared to shoot holes in the walls that kept Gabe alive.

Kaen took two steps closer, closing the distance between them. “I accept your offer of refuge and resources. I'll tell the fleet captains to call off the attack and send you a transport.”

“Thank you,” said Gabe. “Please hurry.”

She nodded once and disappeared.

*  *  *  *

Gabe wished he knew how to wake up so easily. He wasn't sure which mental muscle to flex. He stood alone in the center of the clearing, in the forest that was not a forest, surrounded by trees that were not trees and that grew according to different rules. He tried to wake up.

When Gabe left the Embassy, finally, he didn't wake up. Instead he dreamed himself into an actual dream, the sort that people usually have: a scrambled mix of hope, fear, memory, and things translated into other things.

He dreamed about his family, all of them together. They didn't look like themselves. The twins kept turning into their pets and back again. Noemi also became a duck sometimes. She said “meow” no matter what she was.

They sat on a blanket, in the grass, in the park. Dad had prepared a picnic. He was still nimble at opening Tupperware, even when he was an eagle instead of himself.

Gabe closed his eyes, smelled the spices, and tried to guess what each dish might be from the smells that
followed every open lid. If Gabe had shifted between shapes like the rest of his family, he hadn't noticed. And he was not afraid. He didn't worry that they might be noticed, seen, shot, arrested, deported, assassinated, or invaded. He did not fear conquering Outlast or men with guns and
ICE
written in white letters over black vests.

Gabe ate his father's cooking, made his mother laugh, chased toddler siblings with Lupe, and none of them were afraid of anything at all. But Gabe didn't remember this dream when he woke up.

*  *  *  *

The station pod was so unfamiliar that Gabe had no idea where he was, or even who he was, or why he sailed through the air when he jumped out of bed and through lunar gravity. After that he was reasonably sure that he was Gabriel Sandro Fuentes, the ambassador of Terra and all Terran life.

He stumbled into the next pod and found the Envoy. It stood very still, neck craned to peer through a station window. The other window showed grainy video footage of a scenic Russian landscape.

“The ships have arrived,” the Envoy whispered. Mom's voice sounded stretched and thin coming through the Envoy's craned neck.

Four mining ships coiled outside and faced the station. Gabe could barely see them in the dark. Each was visible only in the dim glow from the station window and the red glare of their drill cannons.

“I'm sorry, Gabe,” the Envoy whispered, tense and quivering. “I shouldn't have brought you here to this defenseless place.”

Gabe stood at the window. He held up one open hand, unsure if the gesture would translate at all. Then he waved.

“What are you doing?” the Envoy asked.

“We might be okay,” said Gabe. “If she sent the message in time, then we might be okay.”

The red glow of the cannon drills did not fade—but the drills didn't fire, either.

Another craft landed behind the four mining ships. The wake of its engines blasted waves of gray dust across the surface of the moon and smacked small stones against the station window. Gabe and the Envoy both flinched. Gabe listened hard for the hiss of escaping air.

The new vehicle looked completely and in every way different from the mining ships. It was green, jade-colored, and it clung to the lunar rock with four sets of landing gear shaped like cat claws.

The Kaen are a mix of different species,
Gabe remembered.
Different civilizations, different kinds of ships. That one kind of looks like a flying Mayan artifact, like another Christmas present for Mom to make her homesick. She would hate it. She loathes the idea that aliens visited us thousands of years ago, that they get credit for building our pyramids.

The Envoy spoke with Mom's voice. Gabe was glad to hear the voice. It really was familiar and comforting, now.

“What's happening, Ambassador?”

“I negotiated a truce,” Gabe said. “I think it worked. I think that might be our ride home.” He took in a long, deep breath. Then he let the breath out and realized that he no longer knew what the word
home
meant, exactly. He didn't know what part of the world to return to.

Mom, Lupe, Noemi, Andrés, and all the pets would be waiting for him at Frankie's house, in Minneapolis, right smack in the middle of North America. He knew that he should join them there. He knew that he needed to help care for the twins and the pets. He knew that he needed to make plans with his fractured family, to figure out where they were going to live now that a black hole had eaten their duplex. He needed to learn how to cope with the constant anxiety that Mom might still disappear at any time. Gabe knew that he should get back to them as soon as he possibly could. But he also knew that his father was on his way south at that moment, in exile.
He had no way to return for at least a decade—unless someone happened to go looking for him, someone with a spaceship, someone who could ride down to any part of the planet that they chose.

The new ship opened its hatch. A small figure with only two legs emerged from the Kaen transport and bounce-walked across the lunar surface.

Gabe and the Envoy both hurried through the station to the entrance airlock.

Gabe spotted his great-grandfather's cane sword there, resting against a wall. He picked it up, felt reassured by holding it, and then set it back down. He didn't want to be holding a weapon in this next moment.

The inner door of the airlock opened. A figure much the same height and shape as Gabe came through it, encased in a dark-green suit. The suit helmet also looked like jade. It looked very much like the saltshaker that Gabe's family used to have in the kitchen, when they used to have a kitchen. It looked like the Olmec had carved this helmet in ancient Mexico.

“No,” Gabe said to himself. “No, no, no. That's ridiculous. Mom is going to be so pissed.”

He recognized his fellow ambassador as soon as she removed her helmet. She looked exactly like she did in the Embassy—broad nose, high cheekbones, skin a shade
or two darker than Gabe's own—but the two of them were not in the Embassy. They faced each other with no translation between them. Gabe squinted, just to be sure.

“You're human,” he said. “How can you be human?”

Ambassador Kaen responded in a language that Gabe did not understand.

This book has debts. Big ones.

Thanks to Guillermo Alexander, Kay Alexander, Bethany Aronoff, Leonora Dodge, Sara Logan, Sasha Sakurets, Kathryn Sharpe, Joy Nelson, and Tim Hart for their knowledge of immigration law, social services, secret railroads, Russian translations, Mexico, Guadalajara, quantum physics, and cane swords.

Thanks to Melon Wedick, Jon Stockdale, Ivan Bialostosky, Nathan Clough, Haddayr Copley-Woods, Barth Anderson, David Schwartz, Stacy Thieszen, and Karen Meisner for their insights, critiques, and support. Thanks to Mel Logan for the coffee.

Thanks to everyone at McElderry Books and BG Literary, most especially Karen Wojtyla, Annie Nybo, Michael McCartney, Siena Koncsol, Joe Monti, Tricia Ready, and
Barry Goldblatt. My name is the one sprawled across the front cover, but publishing is a collaborative art.

Thanks to Carlos Fuentes, Sandra Cisneros, Gene Roddenberry, and Ursula K. Le Guin for their stories of the borderlands.

Thanks to Alice for uncountable things.

MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Text copyright © 2014 by William Alexander
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Jacket illustration copyright © 2014 by Owen Richardson
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All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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ARGARET
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LDERRY
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OOKS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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Alexander, William (William Joseph), 1976–
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Ambassador / William Alexander.—First edition.
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p. cm.
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Summary: Appointed Earth's ambassador to the universe, eleven-year-old Gabe Fuentes faces two sets of “alien” problems when he discovers his parents are illegal aliens and face deportation, and the Earth is in the path of a destructive alien force causing multiple mass extinctions.
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ISBN 978-1-4424-9764-1 (hardcover)
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ISBN 978-1-4424-9766-5 (eBook)
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[1. Science fiction. 2. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 3. Illegal aliens—Fiction. 4. Mexican Americans—Fiction. 5. Ambassadors—Fiction.] I. Title.
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PZ7.A3787Am 2014
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[Fic]—dc23
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2013037333