Nomad (10 page)

“Thanks,” he said aloud, and then he woke up.

Omegan tried to hide what he knew. This was difficult. His species had always shared thought and experience with each other, each mind linked and entangled. They did not understand that other kinds of thought and experience had worth. They did not recognize anyone else's right to exist.

Omegan knew better. He was an ambassador. But ambassadors are juveniles, and easily ignored.

He hoped that everyone else would ignore him now.

The bond between Outlast grew stronger with age and maturity. Omegan was still young. He could still set his mind apart from their shared awareness. He tried to hide what he knew.

He failed.

Omegan woke. The clamor of all other Outlast voices echoed inside his head. They untangled in every direction.
The loudest voices set the shape of all the words to follow.

That one knows how we travel.

That one speaks with the Kaen.

Kaen survivors know how we travel, know and share the information.

The lanes.

The Machinae lanes.

Closed to all others.

Open to ourselves.

Chosen.

We forfeit all military advantage if we lose the lanes.

We forfeit all advantage if any others gain the lanes.

We forfeit the manifest certainty of our exclusive survival without the lanes.

We need the lanes.

We must keep the lanes.

We must find the Kaen survivors.

We must find those among them who share what they know.

Omegan failed to hold himself apart. But he noticed something that he had not known before.

Outlast had hidden themselves among the Kaen. Remnants of the last attack kept low and tried to discover their current location, the hiding place of all the Kaen survivors. These few Outlast had not learned it yet,
but once they knew, all other Outlast would also know. The warships and raiders of the Outlast would come hunting for the Kaen.

Omegan became aware of these hidden Outlast, and in that moment they became aware of him and what he knew. They shifted their priorities and shaped their choices with new urgency.

The lanes.

Protect the lanes.

The Kaen must not learn how to travel the lanes.

Omegan could not hide what he knew.

I warned him
, he thought, down in that part of himself where thoughts remained his own.
I warned the Terran not to talk to me.

Gabe heard his mother's voice.

“Wake up.”

He knew it wasn't her, but he took one long, drowsy moment to remember
why
it wasn't her.

“I'm awake,” he told the Envoy.

“Excellent,” it said. “We have breakfast to eat and business to attend to.”

Gabe awkwardly crawled out of the sleeping nook set into the chamber wall.

He remembered the lake and the shifters, Sapi and Kaen, Ca'tth and Omegan. It still surprised him to remember his dreams. He never used to. Now he set these entangled memories gently aside.

Not yet
, he thought.
Not yet. I can't sort through all of that yet.

Someone had set out a change of clothes for him. He
put them on, relieved. His shorts and T-shirt had felt clammy ever since getting dunked in Minnehaha Falls. The Kaen tunic had far more dignity, and he was happy to borrow that dignity from them.

A platter of cakes that were
not
tamales sat on the floor beside a drinking bowl of water.
No one uses tables here
, Gabe grumbled to himself.
They have universal translators and artificial gravity, but no tables. Must be because the Kaen are all different species. Different heights. Waist high to me might be over someone else's head. If they have heads. Some of the people I saw in the city crowds yesterday didn't seem to have heads. Does the word yesterday still make sense when Night and Day are two constant, separate cities? Don't worry about it. Stop thinking in small circles and eat your breakfast.

He ate all the cakes, because he was hungry, but they still tasted dry and bland to him.

“Where is everybody?” Gabe asked around an unsatisfying mouthful.

“Nadia is taking her customary walk around the city with Dromidan the antisocial doctor.” When it spoke of Nadia, the Envoy slipped into a deeper, gruffer voice. “She has always enjoyed long walks. I hope she is well. I do hope so. Nadia is strong and stubborn enough to ignore her own injuries, which makes them unlikely to fully heal.”

“Do you think her eyes will get better?” Gabe asked.

“No,” the Envoy said. “And her eyes are not what I spoke of.” It shook itself and reclaimed Gabe's mother's voice. “I'm unsure where Ambassador Kaen is, but she told me that she would return soon. She means to bring us to her academy, which is housed somewhere inside this large, pyramidal structure. Underneath the Library, I think. Ambassador Kaen intends to introduce us to her own envoy.” It paused. Uncertain shades of purple flickered across its skin. “I have never met another envoy before. I'm not sure what this meeting will be like. Awkward, probably, given the fragile, tenuous levels of trust between ourselves and our hosts. I imagine Ambassador Kaen kept a very close watch on you in the Embassy.”

Gabe nodded. “She did. But then, after she left . . .” His voice failed him. He cleared his throat, tried again, and broke off when Ambassador Kaen pushed aside the sliding door and reentered the room.

“What's wrong?” she asked when she saw Gabe's face.

So much
, he thought.
And it's all mixing together. Ca'tth is dead. Dad's getting deported. My sister almost got kicked out of college before she could go. The twins are probably throwing mighty tantrums back and forth between them. Frankie's mom hates pets. She might have eaten mine by now.
Mom doesn't know where I am, and not knowing probably stabs her in the stomach every single time she notices that I'm not there. These cakes are not tamales, not at all, and digesting them also feels like small stabs to the stomach. Many things are wrong.

He chose the largest and most immediate wrong to actually say out loud.

“Outlast just attacked the Centauri systems.”

Kaen nodded. She held her head high and stuck out her chin, just like she always did whenever she decided to be brave about something. “That's close.”

“Yeah,” Gabe said.

“And heavily populated.”

“Yeah,” Gabe said. “Some ships evacuated during the attack. Others didn't. Ambassador Ca'tth of the Unbroken Line is dead. He sent out a local distress signal right after you woke up. I was the only one with him when he died.”

And then I spoke with Omegan again
, he thought.
I did exactly what I'm not supposed to do. But he told me something important. Something I don't understand yet. “The lanes recognize us. . . .”

Kaen moved closer to him. She leaned in and pressed her forehead against his. Then she moved away again. The gesture seemed formal rather than affectionate, but it was still close.

“I'll let the captains know,” said Kaen. “They should be preparing the fleet to run again, and soon, but we're still taking on supplies of ice. I'm not sure how quickly we can leave.”

“You'll need to bring me home before you do leave,” Gabe reminded her.

Kaen hesitated. “Even if the Outlast are coming? Even if they've already reached the Centauri systems?”

“Yes,” Gabe said.

“Then I will,” she said. “It was part of our treaty. Now come and meet the Envoy. I mean
my
envoy.”

*  *  *  *

Elevator doors closed behind them. Kaen traced their route on the pyramid illustration etched into the wall.

“We'll have to pass through the academy,” she said. “And we won't be able to talk along the way. The main floor lacks translation.”

That seemed backward to Gabe. “Isn't translation a big part of our job?”

“Exactly,” she said. “We don't want the little ambassadors-in-training to rely on it too much. Besides, everyone here is from the same fleet, whatever their ship and species of origin. We have a shared culture. They need to practice what it's like to talk to
alien
civilizations, so we make it harder to talk to each other. No translations, no
explanations, no adult supervision. Not in the central chamber, at least. The little tutoring rooms off to the side have translation nodes. Former ambassadors serve there sometimes, and offer help when asked—but they have to be asked. Our envoy lives and works in one of those smaller rooms. That's where we're going.”

“I have noticed that it doesn't remain by your side,” Gabe's envoy said. “I find that surprising. Selecting an ambassador is the beginning of my task, not the end.”

“No, it doesn't follow me around,” said Kaen, also clearly surprised. “And it didn't choose me.”

The Envoy turned shocked shades of purple. “But that selection is my primary responsibility.”

“It considers
the academy
its primary responsibility,” Kaen explained. “And the academy chose me. Our envoy met with every student and asked them to describe every other student, and whether or not they would make a good ambassador. It learned about us from what we said about each other. So
we
chose. It noticed that choice.”

The elevator stopped. The door opened. Kaen probably said something like, “Follow me,” but she said it in a language that Gabe couldn't understand.

The academy looked like a maze and an arena. Bright colors covered the floor and separated out different areas. Gabe saw holographic spaceflight simulators, hovering
four-dimensional puzzles, and kids of several different species gathered in a circle and singing—or at least he guessed that they were singing. None of the noise translated. None of the extraterrestrial Kaen looked human to him.

A long, narrow ball court took up the very center of the room. Players passed the ball back and forth by whacking it with sides, hips, and flanks rather than using more nimble, articulate limbs to catch or throw. They tried to knock the ball through mounted hoops, as in basketball, but the hoops were twisted sideways, more like tunnels than baskets.

Gabe recognized it.
This is the oldest sport we know about. Mom just called it “the ball game.” The Mesoamerican ball game. People used to play it with thick rubber balls in stone courtyards.

“Hurry, Gabe,” the Envoy said. “Our companion is striding on ahead, and she hasn't noticed how far we lag behind her.”

“You don't sound like you want to hurry,” Gabe pointed out.

“I am feeling increasingly uncertain about meeting a colleague,” the Envoy admitted.

“I'm sorry you don't have all of this,” Gabe said. “I'm sorry humans burned down your academies. But I'm also glad you stick around after you pick an ambassador.”

“That is how I interpret my role,” the Envoy said.

Kaen reached a door painted blue. She waited there for Gabe and his envoy before sliding it open. All three of them went in.

A dead alien lay sprawled across the center of the room.

The corpse was long, thin, and very pale. It had large, dark eyes and a small mouth, all open. Its two arms and hands looked similar to human limbs, though longer and with more joints. The rest looked far less human. Its torso ended in dozens of tentacles rather than legs.

“This was an Outlast,” said Kaen, her words hard and sharp. “They boarded us in the last attack. We fought them off. Eventually.”

Gabe stared. Then he almost laughed, and hiccupped instead.

Tentacles
, he thought.
The Outlast have tentacles. Of course they do. Tentacled invaders on a flying saucer. All of our dreams and nightmares about space are true.

“Why is there is a dead Outlast in your envoy's room?” Gabe asked.

“Because it's performing an autopsy,” Kaen told him.
“Look. Here it comes. Look away instead if you're feeling squeamish.”

An envoy oozed from a hole in the back of the Outlast skull. It was blue, bright blue, like turquoise or the Caribbean Sea, and its skin was covered in small, icky pieces of the corpse.

Blue Envoy oozed into a bowl of disinfectant sand and flopped around to scrub itself. Then it emerged and made a mouth. It didn't extend any sort of puppet-shaped limb, or take the time to mimic human vocal cords. Instead it just opened a mouth across its side. That made it look like a blue Pac-Man, or a beach ball slashed open. When it spoke it sounded like a toad.

“Welcome, Ambassador Gabriel Sandro Fuentes,” it croaked. “I do apologize for the assassination attempts. It was I who sabotaged your device of entanglement from afar. The council of captains requested this of me, but my actions are my own and I must beg your pardon for them. I'm so very pleased that these efforts failed—due in no small part to brilliant engineering by your own envoy. I really don't know how it managed to maintain a stasis field around that tiny black hole for so long. Well done. Very well done.”

“Thank you,” said Purple Envoy, half-outraged and half-flattered.

“Consider yourself forgiven,” Gabe said. “And you still have a smear of Outlast brains on your side. Over there.” He pointed.

Blue Envoy scrubbed in the sand again. “Much obliged,” it said. “Fascinating brain structure. The Outlast seem to have evolved a kind of cognitive entanglement, naturally occurring and shared throughout the species. Practically telepathic. Absolutely fascinating. But I would rather not carry accidental samples of brain tissue with me all over the place.”