Nomad

by William Alexander

  “The Terran ambassador now offers us guest gifts,” Tlatoani pointed out. “He offers hospitality, and rights to the ice we have taken unasked. And I offered guest gifts in return when I welcomed him aboard the Calendar.”

  Qonne threw his words at everyone. “Endanger the remaining fleet to a hatchling, blundering and ignorant?”

  Shame spread inside Gabe. Anger followed, and they fed on each other. He didn’t try to ignore or suppress either feeling, and he probably couldn’t have if he did try. Instead he held them close, held them still, and tried to stay calm.

  Say something, he demanded of himself. Talk your way out of this. Words are your weapons, the only ones you’ve got—except for the sword. Start talking.

  The Envoy spoke up before Gabe could.

  “You cannot kill me.” It kept its voice low, though furious shades of purple rioted across its skin. “I can scatter my own molecules at will. I can escape and subsequently regrow. I can steal one of your ships. I can build my own. I can launch myself through the vacuum of space without any ship at all, and still survive. You cannot kill me, or prevent me from returning to the planet that is my responsibility. If you harm this ambassador I will select another, and I will teach them that the Kaen are our enemies. I will teach them that the Kaen betray their own laws of hospitality and welcome, that the Kaen cannot now or ever be trusted. The new Terran ambassador will spread this knowledge throughout the Embassy, and throughout the galaxy. Kaen will become pariah, forever shunned, forever unwelcome in every sun, every system, every world. I will do this, and you will be powerless to prevent it, if you harm Ambassador Gabriel Fuentes.”

  Silence.

  The Great Speaker smiled a tight-lipped smile.

  Mumwat’s suit creaked as he crossed metal arms. “I move to honor the treaty negotiated by our own ambassador,” he said.

  “Agreement,” said Seiba the floating guru-tree.

  “Conditional agreement,” Tlatoani said. “If his ignorance endangers us, then we should address that ignorance. During his time with us he should take housing in our own academy, and accept tutelage there.”

  I need to get home, Gabe thought, but did not say. The thought was a lump in his throat. He swallowed it. But I also need to survive long enough to get home.

  Everyone in the room turned to look at Qonne’s glowing projection.

  “Three captains are agreed,” he said. “This makes the decision. My voice is not required.”

  “I remain curious to know if you agree,” Tlatoani said.

  Qonne’s projection disappeared.

  “That answers that,” Gabe said quietly.

  Kaen gave a hum of agreement. “His people don’t teach language at all until adulthood. It’s what marks adulthood for them. So they never send children to the academy, and never become ambassadors. They don’t respect ambassadors much.”

  Gabe knelt on the floor to be closer to his Envoy, whose skin still flowed in furious shades of purple. It clearly hadn’t calmed down yet.

  “Thanks,” said Gabe.

  “You are most welcome,” it told him in his mother’s voice.

  The remaining three captains spoke among themselves.

  “I go to stretch leaves in a window bubble and taste the outside light,” said Seiba.

  “We all hide inside an ice cave,” Tlatoani pointed out. “You will have very little light to taste.”

  “A little always trickles in,” Seiba said, and disappeared.

  Speaker Tlatoani turned to Mumwat. “Will you stay aboard?” she asked. “You are welcome to swim in the irrigation lakes of Day.”

  “For now,” he answered, and then addressed Gabe. “Welcome to the fleet. Pleased we are that we will not kill you, or damage your brain with deliberate intent.”

  “Thank you,” Gabe said. “Likewise.”

  Mumwat crouched through the doorway and left.

  Gabe stood to face the last remaining captain.

  “Thank you for your hospitality, Great Speaker.” He sharpened those words to very fine points.

  Tlatoani smiled again. “Thank you for your own, and for henceforth avoiding the dangers of Outlast attention. I trust that you will make productive use of our academy, lacking one as your world does. And while in the academy you should hold conference with that other stray ambassador we found, the very pale one. When first I saw her I feared that volcanoes had covered up the old world’s skies with ash, and that the only people to thrive below the ashes had become as pale as cave fish, desperate to absorb nutrients from whatever weak sunlight could still find them.”

  “The other ambassador?” Gabe asked. “What other ambassador?”

  “That little mouth who names herself Nadia.”

  PART TWO

  WITNESSES

  7

  Nadia Antonovna Kollontai went walking blindfolded through the streets of Night.

  Rem the pilot and Dromidan the doctor went with her, though only Rem actually walked. Dr. Dromidan sat perched on Nadia’s shoulder. The doctor tugged on her earlobe to warn her about bumping into things, and tried to convince her to take off the blindfold. Small, clawed hands reached out and tugged on the knot that kept the cloth in place.

  Nadia stopped moving and shoved Dr. Dromidan off her shoulder. She heard wings flap around her head. The doctor landed on Nadia’s other shoulder and punched her in the ear.

  “Ow,” Nadia said.

  “Are you in pain?” Rem asked.

  “Only from my doctor’s care.” Nadia rubbed her ear. Dr. Dromidan untied the blindfold knot. Nadia didn’t try to stop her this time. “Are there lots of people around?”

  “A few dozen at least,” said Rem.

  “And we’re near a translation node?” Nadia asked.

  Of course we are, she thought an instant later, but she was nervous.

  Rem added cheerful scorn to his voice. “No. We’re nowhere near a public translator. You can’t understand me at all. I’m free to point out just how silly you look with a piece of cloth wrapped around your face.” Sarcasm usually translated poorly, but Rem understood it well. He could employ near-Muscovite levels of derisive mockery when he wanted to.

  “Dr. Dromidan, would you go perch on his shoulder and punch the side of his head?”

  “No,” the doctor said, and continued to untie Nadia’s blindfold.

  She closed her eyes and tried to breathe in a calm and steady sort of way.

  The blindfold came off.

  “Look,” the doctor said.

  “Just a moment.” Nadia stood and breathed.

  “Look,” the doctor said again.

  Nadia opened her eyes.

  She saw movement. She saw pale lights that she knew were probably streetlamps. She saw the distant and reflected glow of Day above them. But nothing that she saw made any sense to her—especially not the other people out walking through the streets of Night. Translation tried to give everyone a familiar, humanlike appearance that Nadia could understand, but Nadia no longer understood any visual information. Her eyes worked fine, but they refused to communicate with her brain. She scrunched them shut. Then she took the blindfold back from the doctor and tied it in place.

  “No improvement,” she reported.

  She used to be an ambassador. She used to hold conversations across hundreds of thousands of light-years. She used to understand every gesture and expression that her colleagues made. But now visual translation gave her dizzying headaches.

  Dr. Dromidan made a clicking sound of consternation. She patted Nadia’s ear.

  “I’m hungry,” Nadia said. “Back to the big pyramid we go.”

  “I should return to Barnacle,” Rem told her. “She’s mostly recovered from the accident.”

  That’s not quite the right word, Nadia thought. Experiment would be closer than accident.

  “But she still gets fidgety if docked for too long,” Rem went on. “We need to fly a few laps around this little ice cave.”

  Nadia nodded and immed
iately wished that she hadn’t. She still felt dizzy. She also felt like Barnacle: docked and stationary for far too long. “Tell the ship I said hello.”

  “I will.”

  Nadia heard the Khelone’s heavy footfalls slowly recede into the crowd.

  Dr. Dromidan tugged on Nadia’s earlobe to let her know where the pyramid stood. Nadia walked in that direction. She trusted other people to keep out of her way, and they usually did.

  * * * *

  Sound bounced and echoed inside the pyramid. Nadia could recognize most of the chambers and passageways by the way noises behaved inside each. She made sharp clicks with her tongue to feel out the shape of the space around her. Dr. Dromidan had taught her that trick. The doctor herself had large, unfolding ears and a more precise sense of sonar than any human could ever learn, but even Nadia’s human ears found walls when she made clicking sounds.

  “Good,” the doctor said, noting her progress with echolocation. Then she tugged on Nadia’s earlobe when she made a wrong turn and directed her into the shared kitchens.

  Nadia was accustomed to the idea of shared kitchens. Her aunt and uncle’s apartment kitchen in Moscow had been similarly communal, used equally by several different households—though some of those households had been more equal than others. Mrs. Lebedevo had carefully policed all of their communal supplies.

  In her memory she heard heavy boots on a kitchen floor.

  Nadia paused to shut down all thoughts of Mrs. Lebedevo, their shared kitchen, and the cupboard that Nadia had hidden inside.

  “Hello?” she said to the kitchen. “Anyone here?”

  She got no answer, and she felt out the familiar shape of the room from the echoes her voice made inside it.

  “Good,” she said to herself. She tried to avoid the kitchens during busy mealtimes, and she couldn’t easily predict their timing. Different species lived according to very different rhythms. Some gobbled down constant calories like sugar-burning hummingbirds. Others ate rarely.

  She avoided shelves of foams, sprays, and dehydrated tablets, each one engineered down to individual molecules and carefully labeled according to the species that would find them most nutritious. Nadia couldn’t read the labels, and didn’t want to anyway. The tasteless stuff reminded her of nonfood she had eaten at Zvezda.

  Nadia preferred food, and she could smell some. An actual meal simmered on the stove, hot with energy siphoned from the apex of the pyramid. Nadia found a small bowl and followed the smell.

  “Hot,” Dr. Dromidan cautioned her.

  “I know it’s hot,” Nadia said. “It’s a stove. It’s supposed to be hot.”

  “Glove,” the doctor said.

  Nadia lowered her blindfold. She looked at the stove and the counter beside it, but she couldn’t actually see either one, or identify any specific object in front of her. She moved one hand over the counter surface, feeling for cloth, trying to find some sort of oven mitt.

  Dromidan punched her in the ear.

  “Ow!”

  “Knife,” the doctor said helpfully. “Sharp.”

  “They’re supposed to be sharp,” Nadia said. “But I wish people wouldn’t leave them lying around. Okay, can you help me find a glove?”

  Dromidan held her earlobe and used it to steer Nadia’s hand across the counter until she touched an oven mitt. She put it on, lifted the lid from a simmering pot of tasty-smelling stuff, and then ladled the goop into her bowl without spilling.

  The goop tasted splendid. Its rich intensity of flavors almost made her cry. Nadia had no clear idea what was in it, exactly—some combination of corn, beans, squash, and probably chocolate. She was still amazed that corn could taste so good. In Russia corn meant failure, choking and terrible failure. Foolish politicians had tried to import corn as the new staple grain of the USSR. It did not work out well. Corn refused to grow in Russia. But space is even colder, she thought, and the Kaen figured out how to grow it here.

  Dr. Dromidan flew from Nadia’s shoulder to find something of her own to eat. Then she landed back again and made disgusting chewing noises right next to Nadia’s ear.

  Someone came in—a few someones. Nadia raised her blindfold to keep visual translations from failing, flailing, and giving her another headache.

  “Hello,” she said. “The stuff on the stove is delicious if you happen to be human. It might be poisonous if you’re not.”

  “Hello, Nadia,” said a very familiar voice.

  She dropped her bowl and felt supper splash over her feet.

  Uncle? No. He’s dead. Uncle Konstantine and Aunt Marina are dead and a long way from here.

  “Envoy?” she asked.

  8

  Gabe watched the former ambassador of Terra and all Terran life as she knelt down, found the Envoy with one reaching hand, and poked it where its nose would have been if the Envoy had a nose.

  “It is you,” she said.

  “I’m so sorry I startled you,” said the Envoy. It used a different voice, a deep and raspy voice, one that sounded nothing at all like Gabe’s mom. “Now you’re kneeling in a puddle of food.”

  “Don’t care,” she said. “And they keep cleaning towels around here somewhere. Over there, I think.” The alien on her shoulder tugged her earlobe. Nadia adjusted her pointing arm. “Over there, I mean. I’m blind, by the way. Sort of. Mostly. It happened when we bounced off the lanes. Our experiment in sidestepping light speed didn’t work very well. The Kaen fleet found us damaged and took us in.”

  The Envoy scootched closer. “You don’t look any older than you did when you left.”

  “Rem said time might have gotten a little weird when we bounced,” Nadia said, unconcerned. “I don’t know what year this is, though. Even though we’re on board a ship named Calendar.”

  The Envoy hesitated.

  Nadia poked it again. “Well?”

  “You left the moon forty years ago, Nadia.”

  She sat back on her heels. Then she laughed a sharp and pointy laugh. “I’m more than fifty years old,” she said. “Strange. Do we have cities on the moon now? Has Zvezda grown up to become a thriving lunar metropolis?”

  “No,” the Envoy said. “Zvezda is as you left it, and empty.”

  “You’re full of good news. Tell me that the USSR still exists, at least.”

  “It doesn’t, I’m afraid,” the Envoy told her.

  “What?” Nadia demanded. “What happened? Nuclear war?”

  “No, no, no,” the Envoy said. “No. The planet is still very much inhabited and un-nuked. Russia is still there. But the USSR has collapsed.”

  Nadia took a deep breath. “It never held together very well anyway.”

  Gabe fidgeted, uncomfortable. They’re speaking Russian, he realized. I just hear the translation. Their accents sound Russian—maybe because I expect them to. When the Envoy shifted the shape of its vocal chords it seemed to become someone else, someone Gabe didn’t know at all. This was Nadia’s Envoy. Gabe had no part in their shared conversation.

  Nadia must have heard him fidget. She lifted her head. “Hello?”

  Kaen spoke first. “Greetings, Ambassador Emeritus Nadia.”

  Nadia stood up. She might not be much older than Gabe or Kaen, but she did stand much taller. Spilled food stained the knees of her Kaen-style clothing. “Greetings, Ambassador Kaen,” she said, mimicking the deep cadences of Protocol, the Embassy’s own voice. “Who else is here? Somebody is. Someone else is breathing in a human sort of way.”

  Gabe waved, and immediately realized that she couldn’t see his hand.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Gabe. I’m the one with your old job.”

  “Hello, Ambassador Gabe,” Nadia said. “I’m relieved that you aren’t Vanechka Vladimirovna. I suppose she must be too old by now. Would you mind finding a mop? Or just a cloth. They’re somewhere over there.”

  * * * *

  The three human ambassadors cleaned up the mess and then sat in conference over supper. The Envoy joined them, but
Dr. Dromidan whispered something in Nadia’s ear and then flew away.

  The food itself was goopy and acceptable, though Gabe couldn’t help imagining his father’s disgruntlement. Bland, he would say. Bland as shopping mall music. Bland as a blank Hallmark card. I traveled the world to learn how to cook. You’d think they would learn more exciting things about food while traveling the galaxy.

  Gabe held up his end of the imaginary conversation. This is a spaceship, he reminded his dad. This goop is better than the freeze-dried stuff they eat on the International Space Station. It’s much, much better than those leftover tubes on the moon base.

  The ambassadors told each other stories between mouthfuls. Gabe described his eventful and inauspicious beginning as the representative of their shared planet of origin. The story embarrassed him. His audience was intimidating. Kaen paid him chiseled, impassive attention. Nadia listened, blindfolded like some mythic spirit of justice and judgment, obviously amused. She had represented their world for years before leaving it. Gabe feared her opinion of his first few days on the job.

  “At least you’re still alive,” she pointed out when he was done. “The planet is still there. The Outlast have yet to come conquering. Good enough. Nicely done. And I’m glad that you two didn’t kill each other.”

  After supper she heated up some bitter and spicy drinking chocolate. The others all offered to help, but Nadia waved them away.

  Gabe glanced at the wall of shelves and metal canisters. The labels rearranged themselves into words he could read: apple, mamey, sapote, potato, manioc, jicama, avocado, acacia, tejocote, plum, guava, cactus fruit. He wondered if farmers actually grew all of those plants in the fields of Day, or if laboratories grew the stuff instead. Each canister looked much too small to hold apples or jicama.

  Nadia handed out drinking bowls of chocolate. The Envoy reshaped itself into a larger bowl, poured the molten stuff inside, and then closed up around the tasty pool and began to slowly digest. Gabe could still see the bubble of chocolate through clear purple skin.

  “So now the fleet captains have sent you to the academy for babysitting,” Nadia said to Gabe. “Could be worse.”