Nomad (2 page)

Nadia resealed her helmet and climbed back inside the airlock, closing the inner door behind her.

She had met aliens before. She was an ambassador. Her whole job was to meet and communicate with the representatives of alien civilizations. But none of those meetings had ever happened in person. Nadia had never spoken with one of her colleagues while actually awake. Ambassadors used very strange physics to dream themselves elsewhere. They met in the Embassy, in the very center of the galaxy, without actually having to physically travel—which was good, because it would take many thousands of years to travel so far, even at the speed of light.

Unless you knew how to take shortcuts.

The knock came again. Nadia opened the outer door.

A turtle-shaped suit climbed inside on four legs. It
kicked the door shut with one hind leg, stood up, and considered Nadia through a dark helmet visor. She considered it back. Then she reopened the inner door and gestured inside.

In the Embassy, while dreaming Embassy dreams, Nadia's fellow ambassadors looked human to her. Communication always required more than words. Facial expressions, gestures, postures, behaviors, and games all needed translation, so her colleagues always looked human. Nadia would see them smile, frown, and wave hands in familiar sorts of ways. But she had also learned how to squint and sneak secret glances at the
actual
shapes of the other ambassadors. She could see them as they saw themselves, if she wanted to. And whenever she did that, she always compared their alien appearance to familiar sorts of animals:
That one looks like a flying bear. This one looks like a wolf-fish—or a wolf-mermaid. A fish bitten by a werewolf, maybe.
The other ambassadors never
really
looked like the animals she compared them to; they looked like themselves, and utterly alien to her. Nadia's brain would just try to fit new shapes into old words, because brains like to do that.

The Khelone really did look like turtles, though—or else like tortoises, the kind with long legs and very long necks.

Nadia lifted her helmet visor. The Khelone's helmet folded back inside its suit to reveal large eyes and a turtle-like beak.

“Translation ready?” Nadia whispered.

The Envoy pushed the lumpy translation node toward them. Pale lights flashed and flickered in the center of it.

Nadia's surroundings shifted. She no longer saw the inside of the Zvezda station pod. Instead she saw mountains. Footage from the fake window screen leaked out of its frame to surround her. The view looked grainy, awkward, and false. It gave her a headache.

“Can you turn down the scenery?” she whispered.

The Envoy made adjustments. The grainy mountain landscape flickered and faded away. Then the Khelone changed shape to become human-looking. He wore a brown leather jacket and an aviator's scarf, like a kid dressed up as a biplane pilot. He also looked like a young Yuri Gagarin—the very first cosmonaut.

Nadia did not approve. Everyone she knew in school had had a huge crush on Yuri Gagarin. The whole Soviet Union had had a huge crush on Yuri Gagarin. And Nadia had squeezed her aunt's hand while filing by Yuri Gagarin's coffin at the grand state funeral. It felt wrong in every way to see an illusory version of him now.

She concentrated hard and tried to change how the Khelone looked to her, but it didn't work. Nadia had never been good at manipulating her own translated perceptions. She wasn't any good at fooling herself.

The Envoy scootched off to the side and shifted between several uncomfortable shades of purple. It didn't like being there. Its purpose was to choose and guide ambassadors, not to participate in diplomatic conversations. Nadia was responsible for the actual talking.

“Hello,” she said to her invited guest, voice carefully formal and respectful. “I am Nadia Antonovna Kollontai, ambassador of Terra and all Terran life.” (The word
Earth
always sounded more official in Latin.)

“Hi,” he answered, his voice neither respectful nor formal. He grinned with Yuri's wide grin. “I'm Remscalan of the Khelone Clusters. Call me Rem.”

“Welcome,” Nadia said, a little wary now.

“Thanks.” Rem looked around. Nadia wondered what he saw, exactly. She wondered what the makeshift visual translation looked like to him. He used to be an ambassador himself, when he was still a Khelone kid and not yet an adolescent pilot, so the translator should work well for him—but it was a clumsy sort of translation compared to the Embassy. “I'm amazed you're alive out here,” he said. “This is a bare-bones tent you've pitched.”

Nadia bristled. She tried not to. Hadn't she just called Zvezda the rusting edge of Soviet technology in the privacy of her own head? But she lived here, and her own family had helped to design this place, throw it through the void, and build it on the moon. She had every right to mock her own home. The Khelone didn't.

“We're only just learning how to leave the planet,” she said, her voice barely diplomatic. “It wasn't easy to arrange the neutral meeting place that you needed.”

Rem gave her a long look, and then held up both hands. “Khelone ships can't land on planets as large as yours. Well, we
can
, but we'd never be able to take off again afterward. Escape velocity is difficult for those of us who've never had to bother with planets at all. And getting stuck planetside wouldn't be useful. You did call me here for transportation, right? You gave our new ambassador rare maps in exchange for a ride.”

Nadia had pieced together maps and information from the Seventh Fiefdom, the Volen Enclaves, and the People of the Domes. Those maps were all rare because the Outlast had since swallowed the Seventh Fiefdom, the Volen Enclaves, and the People of the Domes. Those three civilizations were now extinct.

“I've heard you can travel fast,” she said. “That you're good at taking
shortcuts
.”

Rem rested both hands behind his head. “True. I made it here almost instantly.”

I sent you a message more than a year ago
, Nadia thought, but didn't say. Time flows differently when you move fast.

“Excellent,” she said aloud. “Then I need you to accomplish a momentous and probably impossible feat of piloting skill.”

“I'm interested,” Rem said, and smiled wider.

The silly leather jacket and aviator scarf is a good translation
, Nadia thought.
He really is that sort of pilot. He's delighted to try some new and dangerous thing
.

“We are going to fly into the Machinae lanes,” she said.

Rem gave her a sideways look. “I think your translation node just broke. I definitely heard the wrong preposition.”

“We're going inside the lanes,” Nadia said again.

He shook his head. “Are you joking? I can't tell if you're joking. No one goes into the lanes, silly human. We skip across the surface instead. We can sidestep light speed by riding in the Machinae's wake, skimming right across those rippling waves of warped space-time.
Barnacle
and I are better at that kind of wake-hopping than anyone—”

Nadia tried not to laugh. The ship's name probably sounded more dignified than
Barnacle
in Rem's own language.

“—We can fly close to the lanes and their scrambled sense of gravity more skillfully than anyone else you could possibly find. But no one ever flies
into
the lanes.”

“Untrue,” Nadia said. “Witnesses tell me otherwise. The astronomers of the Seventh Fiefdom saw ships emerge from inside the lanes. So did the People of the Domes. Cartographers of the Volen Enclaves heard it happen while making their song-maps.”

Rem looked serious now. His posture lost its casual, adolescent unconcern. “I hear bad things about the Fiefdom, Domes, and Enclaves. What happened to them
after
they saw ships fly from the lanes?”

“They all died,” Nadia told him.

In her memory she heard heavy boots outside a cupboard door, though she tried very hard not to.

“You used to represent the Khelone,” she went on. “Honor the trade I negotiated with the ambassador who took your place.”

And you're curious
, she added, just to herself.
Now that you're starting to think this is possible, you really want to try it. I can tell. Even through the fuzzy translation, I can still tell
.

Rem tossed the end of his aviator scarf over one shoulder in a cartoonishly rakish way.

“Fine,” he said. “Come aboard. Are you ready to leave?”

Nadia nodded. “I will be in just a moment.”

The Khelone stepped aside and turned away, waiting.
The Envoy scootched closer to Nadia. “You did well,” it whispered.

“I suppose,” said Nadia—which was her way of saying “Yes, I know I did.”

“It's good that you didn't share much more about your intentions,” the Envoy added. “The pilot will be less likely to make this venture if the trip seems entirely futile.”

Nadia laughed. The Envoy sounded even more like her uncle whenever it said something so pessimistic. “Do
you
think this is futile? It's a little late to say so, if you do.”

The Envoy held its puppetlike mouth at a low, despondent angle. “No,” it said. “I hope not. But your post is here. Your world needs its ambassador.”

Nadia reached over and gently poked the Envoy's nose with a fingertip. It didn't actually have a nose, but she poked its purple translucent skin just above the sock-puppet shape of its mouth. She wanted to offer a hug, but the smooshy Envoy didn't hug very well.

“Go home,” she said. “Don't wait around for me to come back. No telling how long that'll take. Use the return capsule and go choose a new ambassador.”

The Envoy gave a slow and heavy nod. “The capsule
was damaged when we first launched, but I should be able to repair it.”

“Be careful landing,” Nadia warned. “Those things don't land very well. They just ram into the planet.”

“Then I'll try to aim for an ocean,” the Envoy said. “I might even select a whale as your successor. Whales are less impulsive than humans, and aquatic mammals already know what it's like to belong to more than one sort of world.”

“Sounds good,” Nadia said. “Choose a whale. Choose whoever and whatever you like—except Vanechka Vladimirovna. If you end up back in Moscow I absolutely forbid you to choose her.”

“Your classmate is both charming and harmless,” the Envoy said.

Nadia knew that the Envoy was just trying to annoy her. It worked. “She's neither. She's willfully ignorant. She thinks Father Frost is real and not just someone's drunk grandfather mixing up all the New Year's presents. She thinks you can get pregnant by holding hands.”

“Some species probably can,” the Envoy said thoughtfully. “Life enjoys infinite variety in infinite combinations.”

“Then you may browse the magnificent variety of
life on Earth to pick whatever ambassador you see fit. Choose a whale. Choose a squid. Choose a beetle. But do not choose Vanechka Vladimirovna.”

“Very well, Ambassador. I can promise you that much.”

“Good-bye, Envoy.”

“Good-bye, Nadia.”

She hooked up a new breathing unit to her bulky orange suit. She wouldn't need much oxygen to cross over to the Khelone ship, and the air inside
Barnacle
was supposed to be breathable, but she still intended to travel with a full tank and a spare tank.

Rem stepped back inside the translation matrix, clearly impatient. “Ready?”

“Just about,” Nadia told him. She grabbed a duffel bag already stocked full of food, water, spare clothes, a spare ventilation unit, and a notebook. Luckily, it didn't weigh nearly as much as it would have on Earth.

“Good,” said Rem. He poked the module wall with one gloved finger. “This bare-bones tent of yours makes me nervous. I expect it to collapse at any moment.”

“This is my home,” Nadia said, with just a touch of warning in her voice. “I'm the first member of my species to live off-world. That's no small accomplishment, however bare-bones the tent.”

“I meant no offense,” Rem said—though he clearly
enjoyed causing offense. “But what you say isn't actually true.”

“Excuse me?” Nadia asked, her tone extremely diplomatic. “Which part?”

“You aren't the first member of your species to live off-world. Not even close.”

He walked away from the translation matrix and turned back into a turtle before Nadia could respond.

Gabriel Sandro Fuentes, the ambassador of his world, was not on his world. He stood on the moon, inside the abandoned Zvezda base, face-to-face with an alien ambassador who looked far less alien than he had expected.

“You're human,” he said. “How can you be human?”

Ambassador Kaen answered in a language that Gabe did not understand.

The two of them stared at each other, tense and wary, still unsure how much they could trust their new and fragile truce.

The Kaen fleet is an ancient, nomadic, and absolutely alien civilization of migratory starships
, Gabe thought.
How can they have a human ambassador? We haven't ever traveled
farther away than the moon, this moon, the one we're both standing on
.

He took in a deep breath of stale, Zvezda-processed air and let it out slowly. Ambassadors usually met in the Embassy, in the very center of the galaxy, where all of their languages and perceptions filtered through universal translation. They usually understood each other.

“Envoy?” Gabe called out. “Help?”

The Envoy scootched around the floor, reached out with a purple, puppetlike limb, and fiddled with old equipment.

“Just a moment.” It sounded almost exactly like Gabe's mother when it spoke. Almost. “Let me dust off this old translator. Just a moment . . .”