Nomad (7 page)

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 immediately 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.

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.”

“Could be much worse,” he agreed. “They obviously don't trust any of us.”

“They have little reason to trust you,” Kaen pointed out.

“I guess,” Gabe said. “But why don't they trust
you
? Their own ambassador?”

“Some are unhappy to be represented by a child,” Kaen said carefully. “You saw that for yourself.”

“Understatement,” Nadia agreed.

“My predecessor was better at pretending that the captains could boss him around,” Kaen went on. “He would listen, show them excessive respect, and then quietly do whatever needed doing—whether or not the captains would approve. But I don't know how to show respect that I don't actually have. If I think one of the captains doesn't understand the situation that they're trying to control, then my face says ‘You're an idiot,' regardless of what I say out loud. That expression gets translated into every single language of the Kaen. The captains have little reason to be fond of me.”

“Poor dears,” Nadia said without sympathy. Then she laughed and sipped her chocolate.

She seems oddly content for someone who just found out that she's lost forty years
, Gabe thought.
She isn't grieving for a lost home.
He wondered how he would feel in her place. He wondered how he was supposed to feel
now
, with house destroyed and family scattered. Right at that moment he felt nothing at all. Then he suddenly felt
everything, and had to look away. He read canister labels until the feeling passed him by. Sapote, potato, manioc, jicama, avocado.

Gabe spoke up when he felt nothing again. “Nadia?”

She looked his way. No, she didn't
actually
look his way, but she did turn in his direction to show that she heard him. “Yes?”

“Your turn in the spotlight. Why did you leave?”

That question clearly surprised her. “Envoy hasn't told you? It should have.”

Gabe glanced at the Envoy, who sat on the floor like a lump. Chocolate swished back and forth inside it with a soothing rhythm.

“I think it fell asleep,” Gabe said. “And it hasn't had time to tell me much. We've been busy.”

Nadia downed the thick, spicy sludge at the bottom of her bowl before answering. “Here's a quick summary, then. You've heard of the Machinae?”

Gabe nodded. Then he said, “Yes.” Then he apologized for nodding silently instead of saying yes the first time. “I've heard of them, sure, but I don't know much.”

“No one knows much,” Nadia said. “They don't communicate with any other species or civilization. They don't even share our dimension, exactly. But Machinae space overlaps with our own. We call those overlapping places
the lanes
, and sometimes we can see Machinae moving through them. Now Outlast ships are traveling through Machinae lanes,
inside
the lanes. That's how they spread so fast. Galactic conquest shouldn't even be possible. The worlds are all too far apart. You can't send armies across thousands of light-years of dark, cold space. You can't send supplies after them and expect to reach them in time to be useful. You can't conquer the galaxy. It's like trying to invade Russia in winter. That didn't go well for Napoleon, or for Hitler. And galactic history hasn't smiled on large military campaigns either—not just because they were violent, wasteful, vicious, and wrong, but because they just don't work. The distance is too great, and too cold. No one can muster up the resources. No one can travel fast enough. But no one told that to the Outlast, and now they're doing it anyway. They're conquering worlds and systems at a steady, constant,
impossible
rate, and this is how. Ambassadors from the Seventh Fiefdom, the Volen Enclaves, and the People of the Domes all witnessed the Outlast emerge from the Machinae lanes.”