Ambassador

by William Alexander

  “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.

  8

  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.”

  “Okay,” said Gabe. In his grogginess this sounded only slightly odd. “What’s going on?”

  “Frankie’s mother is coming by to pick you up and bring you here,” she told him, her voice careful and brittle.

  Gabe became fully and completely awake at this news. He hadn’t seen or spoken to Frankie’s mom since the destruction of her backyard and everything in it, and he had been hoping to avoid her for as long as possible.

  “What’s going on?” he asked again. “Where are you?”

  She told him.

  * * * *

  The doorbell rang.

  Frankie’s mom was tall and always prickly cold. The two of them did not say much on the drive to the ICE detention center. This wasn’t surprising. Frankie’s mom never said much. ICE stood for “Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” apparently. They drove to this icy place in a pocket of icy silence.

  Gabe stared out the window. He wasn’t sure he could speak if he tried. His brain and the rest of him seemed disentangled from each other.

  The waiting room inside the detention center was a small place with a gray carpet, ten dingy-looking chairs, and a guard behind a counter. The guard was a woman who looked and sounded like old leather, the way serious cigarette smokers usually looked and sounded. She was polite enough. She didn’t ask for Gabe’s birth certificate, though he had brought it with him just in case he needed to prove where he was from.

  Once the guard called his name, Gabe went through a large metal door that looked like it wasn’t supposed to open, not ever. The door shut behind him with a sound that suggested it never would open again. You are not welcome here, the door said in its heaviness. But now you can’t leave.

  Gabe met his father in a small room. They sat down, facing each other, a thick glass barrier between them. Dad wore an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs on a long chain that connected to cuffs at his feet. He took very small steps to get to his chair.

  “I brought the diapers,” Gabe said first, and quickly, without saying hello. For some reason it seemed important to say that first and to say it in English. “I gave them to the guard in the waiting room.”

  His mouth and his brain still didn’t feel connected. He tried to ask what happened, but he wasn’t sure how. Mom hadn’t explained it all. Gabe wanted to know where she and Andrés and Noemi were, and why they weren’t all right there, and he didn’t know how to ask any of that either. He wanted to know if the twins were wearing tiny orange jumpsuits.

  “I didn’t stop at a stop sign,” Dad said. He said it as though that were an adequate explanation. Gabe just blinked, because it wasn’t really. “Not completely. I was sure that I did, but the officer said I didn’t come to a complete stop.”

  “Okay,” said Gabe. “That’s something you can get arrested for?”

  “No,” said Dad. “But if you come to their attention, then they check your documents. And we don’t have any. Your mother used to. She had a visa at first. But I don’t. Never did.”

  He was trying to explain and trying to apologize and trying to understand himself how this had happened. Gabe knew that much, at least.

  “We never meant to stay,” Dad went on. “We figured we were nomads, your mother and I, and I always thought that by now we’d be in some other part of the world. But I had a friend who wanted to open up a restaurant here, so we came to help him out. We brought Lupe. And then we had you. Two kids kept us in one place for longer than we planned. Then we made the place home. I never thought we’d make a home somewhere with no defenses against howling arctic winds, you know? But we did. We stayed here.”

  He paused. Gabe nodded once to keep his father talking.

  “They’ll let your mother go soon,” Dad went on. “Her and the twins. Tonight or maybe tomorrow morning. I don’t know. But they’ll release her on recognizance.” He said the awkward, official words slowly. The syllables obviously tasted bitter to him. “They still want to deport her, but that’ll take months to happen. More than a year, maybe. And she doesn’t have to pay a bond now, luckily. They’ll let the three of them go.”

  He said this in a reassuring way, or at least he tried to, but Gabe noticed immediately that his father hadn’t said anything at all about himself.

  “What about you?” Gabe asked. “When do they let you out?”

  His father smiled with only half of his mouth, the way he did whenever the car broke, or when anything else broke, or when snowplows scraped the streets clean of a blizzard but blocked the driveway with a two-foot wall of solid ice and slush that the landlord was supposed to shovel but never actually did. It was Dad’s this sucks expression.

  “Me, they will throw out of the country. Immediately. Tomorrow morning.” He paused to let that sink in. It didn’t really sink in. Gabe just stared at him. He went on. “I don’t get months of hearings and paperwork like your mother does because I’ve hopped the border before. I was a kid, first learning how to ride a motorcycle around the world. I got caught right away and sent home. So this is my second time getting deported, and there’s no way to contest a second time. Not for ten years. In a decade I’ll be allowed to ask permission for reentry, but not until then. Not even with four children on this side of the fence. And we can’t all go south. They won’t let us all go south. All this is going to take a long while to untangle, and we’re going to rack up some mighty big phone bills between now and then. Maybe you can mow a few lawns this summer, earn extra cash to buy some long-distance phone time?”

  Dad tried to maintain his half-smile, but he looked stricken. Whatever he felt right then, he was clearly trying hard not to feel it. His voice was half kidding, half serious, and entirely ashamed to tell Gabe that he would have to pitch in to pay for international phone bills.

  Gabe needed to make that expression leave his father’s face immediately, so he did the only thing he could think of. He leaned forward and spoke with the sort of earnest mock formality that Dad had used when he gave him a hammer of wisdom and truth.

  “Every restaurant in this city will rise up in protest and demand your return,” Gabe said in solemn promise.

  Dad laughed, surprised. “Tell them not to give up hope,” he answered. “Tell them that my spoon and saucepan will return to the kitchens of this city. Tell them to tighten their belts and be brave.”

  “I’ll tell them,” Gabe promised. “Somehow they’ll endure other cooking while you’re gone.” Neither one of them joked about what Mom’s cooking was usually like.

  The leathery guard told them that time was up.

  Dad’s face got tense again. “Tell Lupe—something. Tell her I wish I could see her before I have to go. But I can’t.”

  “She could still come visit you today,” said Gabe, confused.

  Dad gave him a warning look and dropped his voice. “Better not.”

  Gabe understood the warning, if not the reasons for it. He nodded. His father seemed to relax.

  Gabe did not relax. His face hurt; all the muscles clenched with tension like they did whenever he and Frankie watched a horror movie.

  I’m the ambassador of this entire world, Gabe thought. All of it. But nobody here knows that. I can talk to aliens thousands of light-years away, but we’ll need to scr
amble for cash so I can keep talking to Dad by phone.

  He said good-bye to his father through the glass barrier.

  On the way home Gabe began to unfreeze and unclench. He tried not to. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he let himself feel the way he actually felt.

  9

  Frankie’s mother actually spoke on the drive back. “Your sister Guadalupe is at my house already. You should all stay there for dinner and then stay the night. There’s also a Pack ’n Play for the twins to sleep in. I’m sorry that Frankie isn’t home. He’ll be in California for the rest of the summer.”

  “I know,” said Gabe. “He told me.”

  Her voice was still sharp, like ice sculptures carved with chain saws, but it seemed to have emotion in it somewhere. She really did sound sorry.

  “Can you drop me off at home first?” he asked. “I need to feed the pets before coming over.”

  “Of course,” said Frankie’s mom. She pulled up in front of Gabe’s house. “I’ll see you at dinner. I have to go back to work for the rest of the afternoon, but hurry over as soon as you can. Hopefully your mother and the toddlers will be out before dinner, and your mother will need the help. I understand that the little ones listen to you more than they listen to Guadalupe.”

  She made a point of pronouncing Lupe’s full name with a Spanish accent, which made it leap out and away from everything else that she said.

  “The twins don’t listen to anyone,” said Gabe, “but I’ll hurry. Thank you for the ride. And for everything.”

  “This was the plan,” she told him. “Taking refuge at our house has always been part of your emergency plans. See you at dinner.”

  The car drove away. Gabe went inside.

  In the kitchen, on the card table that Gabe’s father used as extra counter space, Gabe found the cane sword, the varja hammer, and a Post-it note from Lupe.

  Emergency Plan #23, read the note.