Nomad (3 page)

Gabe made eye contact with Kaen, tapped his ear, and then pointed at the mess of machinery the Envoy was fiddling with. Kaen seemed to understand. She folded her hands, looked away, and waited.

He tried not to stare at her. Most human cultures considered staring rude, challenging, and aggressive. Most mammal species on Earth seemed to feel the same way about prolonged eye contact. And Gabe had worked hard to avoid aggression between them. They had a truce. They had a deal. Neither one of them was currently trying to get the other killed. So he tried not to stare.
This wasn't easy. He took in a sideways glance and then looked away.

The other ambassador wore a green space suit, jade-colored. The helmet of her suit looked very much like the headgear of Olmec statues, carved in ancient Mexico long before the Spanish came conquering across the ocean, before even the Aztecs came conquering southward from North America. Gabe's family had kitschy salt and pepper shakers carved into the very same shape at home—or at least they used to, when they still had a home, before the house was swallowed by a small black hole in the Kaen's first attempt to assassinate him.

Gabe tried not to dwell on that.

The Olmec heads look like astronauts
, he had once said of the salt and pepper shakers.

His mom had absolutely hated that idea.
They're ball players
, she'd insisted.
Ancient ball players wearing football helmets. It would hurt to get hit in the head with a great big lump of solid rubber. They are definitely, definitely not astronauts.

Gabe wondered how to explain his current absence to his mother.
I'm so sorry that I had to disappear on the very same day Dad got deported. The timing alone probably broke your heart and stomped on the pieces. But I had to go to the moon. . . .

Gabe tried not to think about either one of his parents.

He risked another sideways glance at the Kaen ambassador.

She looks a bit tense
, he thought.
Not tense as in anxious, but tense like a guitar string, or a bow string—or maybe a string stretched between two tin cans to make a telephone. I wonder if I look just as tense. Probably
.

“There!” the Envoy said. “That should do it. Say something.”

Gabe didn't notice any difference. He had expected to feel something when the translation matrix turned on, something like the mild headache he always got, right in the middle of his forehead, whenever someone spoke Spanish faster than he could follow.

He turned to Kaen. “Ambassador?”

“Ambassador,” she answered, voice equally formal and now understandable.

How are you human?
Gabe wanted to demand, again. He wanted to shout that question.
How can you possibly be human?
But he swallowed his inner shouting. It wouldn't be diplomatic to start their conversation with demands.

“Thanks for coming in person,” he said. “Thank you for showing so much trust.”

“I trust our truce more easily than I trust this place,” she said, looking around. “The walls don't look very stable.”

“No, they really don't,” Gabe agreed.

The Envoy quietly grumbled in the corner. Gabe caught the words “triumph of engineering,” but little else.

“We should leave,” Gabe went on. “I can point out where we're headed when we get closer to the planet, once I can see the shapes of the different continents. Hopefully there won't be too much cloud cover.”

“That won't be a problem,” Kaen said. “We aren't going down to the planet.”

“Excuse me?” Gabe asked.

“We will not be traveling to the homeworld at this time,” she said, slowly and carefully. She looked down at the makeshift translator with obvious skepticism.

“
Excuse
me?” Gabe asked again. Then he took a breath and adjusted his tone. “That was a condition of our truce. We negotiated this already. I need passage back to the planet. Earth. Terra. Home. The one right over there.”

“We did not speak of timing,” she said. “I intend to bring you back to the planet's surface. But not immediately. I must return directly to the fleet, and I . . . invite you to come with me. The captains insist on a meeting.”

“The ones who ordered my assassination.” Gabe knew he probably shouldn't bring up conflicts that the two of them had already resolved, but he did anyway.

“Yes,” she agreed, without embarrassment or apology.

Gabe felt something close to panic. “I have urgent business at home,” he tried to explain.
Mostly because I don't have a home. It imploded. Then it burned. And then Dad got kicked out of the country because of a stop sign. Now my sister Lupe is going to split her time between babysitting and summer school, and she hates both, and her hair is probably catching fire every single time she talks to Mom, and I'm not there. I need to be there. Dad needs to be there. I need to find him.

“You have more urgent business in the fleet,” Kaen said, unruffled. She lifted her helmet. “So do I. Please hurry. I assume you have some kind of suit.”

“I don't actually know,” Gabe admitted. “Envoy? Are there any spare suits around here?”

“Yes,” the Envoy said. “Twenty years ago I did tear up one of the suits to patch wall leaks, but the other spare should still be serviceable. It might even fit you. Most cosmonauts were small of stature in order to squeeze into very small capsules.”

Gabe still felt close to panic. He couldn't stop that feeling, but he could set it aside. “Just a moment, then. I'll suit up.”

Ambassador Kaen waited by the front airlock while Gabe and the Envoy went looking for the spare suit.

“Envoy?” Gabe whispered.

“You don't need to keep your voice down,” the Envoy told him. “We're outside the translation matrix now. Your colleague can't understand us.”

“My colleague is human,” said Gabe.

“I also noticed this, yes.”

“How? How is that possible? We haven't traveled any farther than the moon. Right here.”

“You haven't traveled farther in ships of your own making,” said the Envoy. “But some of your species may have hitched a ride on other ships, made by other civilizations. The Kaen fleet might well have passed through this system long ago. Many different species travel with them, and all consider themselves equally Kaen. Yours seem to be among them.”

“Don't you
remember
a Kaen visit?” Gabe asked. “Aren't you extremely old?”

“Memory is vague and uncertain over long stretches of time,” the Envoy admitted.

They found an orange, empty cosmonaut suit hanging on a wall. The letters
CCCP
had been stenciled across the white helmet.

“What does that stand for?” Gabe asked, pointing.

“
,” said the Envoy. “It is the Cyrillic abbreviation for the USSR.”

“Oh.” The suit looked creepy, like a suit of armor in
a haunted castle. Gabe wondered if any of his father's emergency ghost plans would work on a moon base. Several of those stories involved wailing and unquiet spirits who wandered near bodies of water and tried to drown anybody who got too close. Maybe dying in a vacuum felt like drowning. Probably not. And Gabe didn't know of any NASA astronauts who had died all the way out here—though the ones on Apollo 13 almost did. Maybe some secret Russian mission had gone badly and left ghost-cosmonauts behind. Maybe they wandered like La Llorona and tried to share the experience of vacuum death with everyone they met.

“What are thinking of, Ambassador?” the Envoy asked.

“I'm wondering if Zvezda is haunted,” said Gabe. “I don't really believe in ghosts, but I'm wondering anyway.”

“Zvezda is haunted by frustrated possibilities,” the Envoy said. “It is haunted by a vision of the future that never happened, by planned lunar cities that were never built. And for forty years it was haunted by me.”

Gabe took the suit down off the wall and tried to figure out how to put it on. The Envoy tried to help. This took a while.

“Are you confident in your truce with the Kaen?” the Envoy asked while struggling with glove clasps. “And are you sure of this course of action?”

“I don't see much choice,” Gabe said.

The Envoy shook its puppetlike head. “There are always choices. The options currently available to you aren't ideal, but they do exist—and you do seem to be making the best choices under the circumstances. Traveling to the Kaen fleet, even as a kind of prisoner, is preferable to death by drill cannon. I also agree that it's preferable to ineffectual abandonment here. I would rather not repeat
that
experience. But I don't know what transpired between you and Ambassador Kaen at the Embassy, and I don't understand why the Kaen would try to harm you in the first place.”

“They were scared,” Gabe explained. “They're hiding, and they hate that. They hate to hold still. Kaen thought I would reveal their position—which
was
our plan, pretty much, when we thought they were just pirates.”

“Aren't they?” the Envoy asked.

“No,” Gabe said. “They're refugees. So I came up with a new plan.”

“It seems to have worked,” the Envoy said.

“So far.” Gabe fiddled with the mechanism of his helmet visor. Then he paused. “Is there anything to eat around here? I'm kind of hungry. It's been a long time since those granola bars in the park.”

The Envoy scooted across the station module, checked
a few storage containers, and came back with a metal toothpaste tube.

“What's this?” Gabe asked. He couldn't read the Russian label.

“Borscht,” the Envoy said. “Beet soup. That's what the label says, though Ambassador Nadia refused to call it borscht.”

Gabe felt extremely skeptical about eating borscht from a toothpaste tube. “How does it taste?”

“Nadia described it as a mixture of apathy and pain.”

“Right, then.” He removed the cap, took a breath, and squeezed the dark substance into his mouth. “Yep,” he said, once he was sure he could keep the stuff down. “Accurate description.”

“I can only hope that our hosts will feed you better,” the Envoy said. “Given that humans travel with the Kaen, some of their food should be edible to you.”

“Here's hoping.” Gabe tossed the empty tube back into the storage container. “Okay. Here we go.”

*  *  *  *

Ambassador Kaen led the way to the shuttle, which crouched on lunar stone like a carved jaguar.

Three mining craft flanked the shuttle. They skittered like massive silverfish, and kept the single eye of their drill cannons pointed at Gabe. He tried not to pay them
any attention, but it was difficult to pay attention to anything else. He stumbled and almost dropped the Envoy.

Careful
, the Envoy wrote across its surface in glowing purple letters. It had condensed into a small and solid sphere. Gabe held it cradled in his right arm. He carried his backpack, his great-grandfather's cane sword, and the suit's oxygen tank with his left. This was difficult, not because the stuff was heavy—none of it weighed very much on the moon—but because it was awkwardly shaped, and because the sleeves of his space suit were awkwardly bulky.

“Sorry,” Gabe said, even though the word stayed inside his helmet. The Envoy couldn't possibly hear him.

He glanced up. Stars burned above in every color. Then he stumbled again and tried to watch where he was going in the dim light cast by the Kaen ships.

The jaguar-shaped shuttlecraft opened its mouth. The two ambassadors climbed inside to be swallowed by it.

The inside of the shuttlecraft looked spare and utilitarian. Most of the surfaces were metallic, either chrome or dark green. The back wall was made of something softer, with human-shaped indentations. It looked like someone had pressed action figures into a flattened lump of greenish Play-Doh.

Kaen crossed the floor to stand against one of the depressions in the wall. She waved at Gabe to do the same.

The shuttle closed its mouth and shifted positions to face upward, away from the moon. The back wall became the floor. The Envoy rolled away from Gabe. Then it poked his arm and pointed at his cane.

Oh, right
, Gabe thought.
This could be a dangerous, suit-puncturing thing during launch.
He pushed both cane sword and backpack off to the side. Then he looked at
Kaen. She held up one hand, extended all five fingers, and started a countdown.
Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Closed fist. Zero. Liftoff.

Acceleration pushed the passengers down as the shuttle climbed upward. Then both the shuttle and everything inside it moved at the same speed, and the words
down
and
up
ceased to mean anything. Gabe floated weightless.

Kaen opened the front of her helmet. Gabe tried to do the same, but it took him a while to work the clasp with his suit gloves on, and he wasn't really sure how to take the suit gloves off.