Nomad (11 page)

Purple Envoy scooted cautiously closer. “May I?”

“Yes, yes, of course!” Blue Envoy said, and oozed aside.

Purple Envoy peered into the skull cavity. It remained on the outside, looking in.

Something tickled in Gabe's own brain.
Linked as we are, in the way that we are . . .

“What else did you learn about them?” Kaen asked, her voice still hard and sharp.

“A great deal,” Blue Envoy said, “though I don't know how much will prove useful to us. The Outlast were aquatic in their recent ancestry. Now amphibious, they can move through many environments with ease.”

It oozed around the edge of the room and adjusted a row of small and abstract figurines, each one carved of turquoise stone. Blue Envoy swallowed one of them,
changed its shape by digesting part of it, and then spit the thing back out and carefully returned it to its place.

Maybe all envoys are sculptors
, Gabe thought.
Mine made clay out of moon dust while stranded at Zvezda.

“I can't tell if they are, or were, primarily a predator or prey species,” Blue Envoy went on. “Likely both. And the workings and articulations of their limb joints are very interesting. I would like to describe those at length, but that would be indulgent and impose too much on your time. I didn't ask for your company in order to lecture you about Outlast wrist bones. I asked you here in order to introduce myself, and to apologize for my part in your attempted murder, which I've already done—and which I'll probably continue to do.”

It's babbling
, Gabe thought.
Maybe all envoys babble when they're nervous.

“And you are still pardoned,” he said aloud.

“Thank you,” Blue Envoy said. “So very gracious. But I must also make some small amends for my actions by offering you . . . by making available to you . . .” It trailed off, embarrassed.

Purple Envoy broke the awkward silence. “You are repeating the Great Speaker's offer to make this academy and its tutors available to him. Because he has had no prior training, and very little instruction before the
current crisis. None at all, really. But you fear that this invitation reflects poorly on me.”

“Yes,” Blue Envoy admitted. “And yes. But I don't want to cast any doubts or imply any criticisms of your work, I truly don't.”

Purple Envoy bowed its head. “No offense taken. Truly. I
have
failed to maintain a proper academy on Earth, but that failure is not wholly my own. Human society has not tolerated any such institution so far. I am pleased to see that human ambassadors fare better here.”

“Mostly,” said Kaen. “But you've already seen that our society doesn't always respect us, either.”

The two envoys huddled together and spoke of founding different academies. They paid less and less attention to anyone else.

Gabe and Kaen considered the dead Outlast and its broken skull. Kaen looked like she wanted to kill it again.

“Were you there?” Gabe asked. “When they attacked and boarded, were you there?” It felt dangerous to ask. Just asking might bring up wounds of blood and loss.

“No,” said Kaen. “I was here. We sealed up the whole pyramid. Then we waited for a very long time without knowing much of anything about the fight, or about the rest of the fleet. We lost contact with each other. Ships scattered. And we couldn't find all of them when we
gathered ourselves back together. We still don't know what happened to those missing ships. But we can guess.”

“The Outlast don't ever lose contact with each other,” Gabe mused. The tickle in his brain became an itch. “Not if they're all entangled. I wonder what that's like. Talking to everyone you know, all at once.”

Linked as we are, in the way that we are, in the way that we speak to each other, in the way that they recognized, the lanes let us pass.

“What is it?” Kaen asked. “You're staring at an Outlast corpse with a huge, gleeful grin on your face, and I find that unsettling.”

Gabe felt like shouting. He spoke softly as though sharing a secret instead.

“I know how they move through the lanes.”

“You spoke to Omegan.”

Kaen stood in a wide, solid stance, both arms to her sides, both eyes locked onto Gabe as though preparing to shoot powerful lasers at his face.

“Yes,” Gabe admitted. “And he said—”

“You
spoke
to
Omegan
,” Kaen repeated, as though no other information could possibly matter.

“Yes,” Gabe said. “He spoke to me first.”

“And you didn't leave? Run? Wake up immediately?”

“I didn't run,” Gabe said. He didn't back down
now
, either. “And I don't know how to wake up immediately. Or how to fall asleep immediately. But I
would
like to learn, so if any academy tutors are available to show me, I'd be thrilled. I hear there's a tree who teaches the trance.”

Kaen continued to glare at Gabe as though drilling ice out of his eyeballs. “So. You spoke to Omegan.”

“Yes,” Gabe said. “And he told me that the lanes recognize them. The lanes recognize the way Outlast communicate with each other. That's how they get through.”

“You believe him.” She said it like an accusation, like she also accused him of falling through infinite depths of stupidity.

Gabe nodded. “I believe him. He was horrified when Ca'tth died. He tried to comfort me afterward. He tried to convince me that it wasn't my fault.”

Which didn't work
, Gabe thought.

The two envoys abandoned their own conversation and moved to stand beside their respective ambassadors. Both kept silent.

Kaen shook her head. “The captains are going to kill us both. Or else force me to kill you while they watch.”

Gabe wondered whether or not she was joking, or if this was something the Kaen actually did. He decided that he'd rather not know.

“Just run with this idea for a bit,” Gabe said. “Please. Play along. You don't have to believe it, you just have to pretend. He said
recognize
. The lanes recognize them.”

Kaen shifted her stance. It was slight. She just moved her weight between one foot and the other. But now the way she stood made her look less like a death-minded duelist and more like a ball player ready for a match.
Okay, let's do this
, her stance said.
We aren't on the same team, but we're in the same game. I'll play along.

“
If
that's true,” she said, establishing rules and boundaries, “and
if
the word
recognize
translated well, then Outlast passage through the lanes isn't a trick of physics or engineering. They didn't build a new kind of ship, one that can travel through different kinds of space. They didn't
do
much of anything. The lanes decided to let them through because the Outlast are somehow familiar.”

She paused. Gabe picked up the ball and ran farther. “The way they speak to each other is familiar.”

Kaen caught his excitement. Her stance shifted again. Now maybe they could play on the same team.

“So the Machinae must communicate in similar ways. All together, all at once, all of them entangled.”

Gabe waved his arms around like a happy Muppet. “
Yes.
And if that's true, if the Machinae
do
communicate, if the Machinae
can
communicate, then maybe we can figure out how to finally talk to them. Just like Nadia tried to do.”

Kaen held up a cautioning hand. “That's still a huge leap to make. We can't even get into the lanes to have this impossible conversation. We can't pretend to be Outlast, or pretend to be Machinae. We won't be
recognized. Not if we need to have brains shaped like that.” She pointed at the broken Outlast cranium on the floor.

Purple Envoy tentatively raised its mouth. “And yet the both of you reshaped your neurology and perceptions in order to learn how to travel to the Embassy.”

Blue Envoy spoke up with skepticism in its croaking voice. “Nadia Kollontai is similarly entangled, just as all ambassadors are. But when she tried to accomplish this the lanes refused her. She suffered injury rather than admission. Mere entanglement does not lead to recognition by the lanes.”

“But she is not entangled like
this
.” Purple Envoy peered back into the Outlast skull. “Not in the way you described. Most forms of life communicate in a linear, sequential sort of way. Their words move in straight lines, marching after each other in single file. A written book puts down lines of ink across a page like a train rolling down one single track. A line of spoken conversation lets all other branching threads, all the things that we might have talked about, disappear unspoken. But it seems that the Outlast can communicate in many directions at once—though only with each other, entangled as they are.”

Blue Envoy started to bounce up and down. “We could
further adjust the speech centers of an ambassador's brain, one still young enough to have malleable neurology. If we used
every other
ambassador as fixed points of reference, and not merely the Embassy . . .”

“. . . then we might create a massive, galaxy-wide synaptic map for language and meaning to play in,” Purple Envoy added, finishing the thought. “The lanes might recognize such an expansively entangled ambassador. And the Machinae might speak with such an ambassador.”

“That's a lot of may and might be,” Kaen pointed out.

“Very true,” Purple Envoy admitted. “All of this is wild conjecture and haphazard guesses, a number of
mights
fancifully piled on top of each other and teetering. It
might
be true and possible—but infinite numbers of things might be true.”

“Agreed,” said Blue Envoy. “We need evidence that this hypothesis is a coherent, workable theory before we risk tampering with anyone's brain.”

“So how do we go looking for evidence?” Gabe asked. He felt his Muppet-flailing enthusiasm sink. “The only place we could go to find it is inside the lanes, and the whole problem is that we can't get there. I
could
ask Omegan for more details, but if I do that, Ambassador Kaen would have to kill me.”

“That's right,” said Kaen. “I would. So please don't.”
Then she gave an unsettling smile of her own. “But there is someone else we could ask about this. We both happen to know an ancient artificial intelligence who holds billions of conversations at the same time. He hates to be pestered for information, but I think we should go and pester him.”

*  *  *  *

Gabe was not at all sleepy. He felt the very opposite of sleepy. And he didn't want anyone to strangle him unconscious. So Gabe and Kaen went searching for the arboreal tutor who could teach him the trance.

The envoys stayed behind. They spoke very rapidly about new entanglements and bonded over other inscrutable, envoy-ish things.

“Why doesn't visual translation work on envoys?” Gabe asked Kaen as they set out across the main floor of the academy. “Neither one of them look human to me, even somewhere with translators turned on. They both still look like blobs.”

Kaen just stared at him. Then she tapped her ear.

“Oh,” said Gabe. “Right. Never mind.”

They passed loud games and quiet games, simple games and complex games, contests, combats, and challenges, all unfolding around them in untranslated chaos.

Kaen led the way to another adjacent room. A huge
tree planted in a large, ceramic pot took up most of the space. The pot had wheels. Roots emerged from the edges and spread across the floor. Several small kids knelt around it, each one holding a root.

Nadia sat in a far corner. She held a tree root with one hand and fiddled with some sort of carved, tactile puzzle with the other.

“Ambassador conference first,” said Kaen. “Then trance lesson.”

Several students shushed her.

“And keep your voice down,” Kaen whispered.

Once Gabe was inside the room the potted tree translated into something that looked more like a serene-faced dryad. It didn't seem to notice them. They tiptoed around tree roots and sat beside Nadia.

“Hello,” whispered Kaen. “It's Kaen and Gabe.”

“Greetings, Ambassadors,” Nadia whispered. She set aside the root she held but kept fiddling with the puzzle. It looked like a ship, and then like a crouching animal, and after that like nothing Gabe recognized.

“We have lane-related news,” Gabe said. “Maybe. Hopefully.”

They took turns describing their teetering tower of mights, maybes, and guesswork. This time Gabe and Kaen played on the same team, tossing the ball back and
forth between them as they raced ahead. Nadia listened, silent, and Gabe couldn't tell whether or not the older girl was willing to play. He tried to capture his earlier sense of excitement and expanded possibility. He tried not to feel foolish.

“I'll do it,” Nadia said before they had even finished summing up the idea. She said it loudly. Meditating students shushed her. She showed no sign of noticing them at all.

“We haven't even talked about who would go through with this yet,” Gabe said quietly.

“I'll do it,” Nadia said again, softer this time. “If either one of you tries to go in my place I will break both of your legs in your sleep. This is mine to finish. Feel free to try it after I fail, but not until then.” Her voice ended the argument. “So what happens next?”

Kaen took point. “Two things happen next: the envoys work together to design a new device of entanglement, and Gabe and I go to pester Protocol after Gabe learns the trance. Or we could make him run in circles until he exhausts himself and finally falls asleep, but this seems more efficient. And he should learn.”