Nomad (5 page)

No one moved. Everyone continued to wait. The door remained open. Gabe scratched his nose.

A thin and spidery woman joined them through the
open door. She had white hair cut very short, an ornate necklace of small blue stones, and dark skin creased by a thousand wrinkles.

“Hello, little mouths,” the woman said. Gabe heard the words in very heavily accented English.

Kaen sat up straighter. “Great Speaker,” she said, her voice
extra
formal, obviously annoyed, and trying hard not to be. “I present the ambassador of our host system, one who offers us guest gifts.”

Host system
, Gabe thought.
She called this their host system, a place they just happen to be passing through—a place they happen to be hiding in. This system is just another rest stop. They don't think of it as home.

The Great Speaker looked down at Gabe as though unsure of his species.

“Astonishing,” she said. “These offered guest gifts come soon after we wore snake blood.”

Gabe blinked. He understood the words, but not how they fit together.

“We found a more diplomatic solution,” Kaen said.

That made sense to him, at least.

The Great Speaker knelt on the other side of the woven mat, but she kept her voice aloof. “I am Nicanmorohua Cihuatlatoani. I say so. I, the Speaker. And here aboard this ship, among the Kaen, I serve as Great Speaker and
captain. Address me as Speaker Tlatoani when you yourself speak, little mouth.”

Gabe understood Kaen's annoyance now.
She's treating us like children. We are children, sure, but we're also ambassadors.

He tapped into his father's goofy love of high formality—though hopefully without the goofiness.

“Great Speaker,” Gabe said. “I am Ambassador Gabriel Sandro Fuentes of Terra. I am honored by your welcome. But you may not address me as ‘little mouth.' ”

The Speaker gave him a long and intense look. In that moment she reminded Gabe of the old woman in the city park near his house—the one who sat and watched children as though planning to eat them.

“She calls
everyone
‘little mouth,' ” Kaen whispered. “
Mouth
just means ‘person.' Though it
also
means ‘mouth.' ”

“Why doesn't it translate as ‘person,' then?” Gabe asked.

“Because adults don't ever translate well. Their words and ideas become weirdly literal in translation.”

Gabe nodded. That made perfect sense to him.

The Speaker took a knife from her robe, thin-bladed and clear as though made out of glass.

The Envoy made an unhappy noise.

Gabe stared at the knife. He reached for his sword-cane, and then pulled his hand back. “Ambassador Kaen?
Does your captain still want to assassinate me, or is this a challenge to some kind of duel?”

Kaen shook her head, but she didn't offer any further help or explanation.

The Speaker looked amused. “This knife is not an invitation to contest or combat. But you may carry terrible invasions with you. Our welcome requires your blood.”

That was not reassuring.

Your space suits look like Olmec statue helmets
, Gabe thought.
Your shuttlecraft crouches like a jade jaguar. And now we're talking about blood sacrifices?

“I didn't come here to invade,” he said, aloud and carefully. “I was invited. And I know that I must look very intimidating—an eleven-year-old kid stuffed into a forty-year-old cosmonaut suit—but I promise you that I have no plans to conquer the Kaen.”

I really shouldn't be joking
, he thought with instant regret.
Jokes don't translate well, not at all. And I shouldn't have pointed out the already obvious fact that I'm just a kid. She doesn't respect us enough as it is.

He was relieved when the Speaker laughed. She did seem to be laughing with him rather than laughing at him.

“She needs a blood
sample
,” Kaen explained. “She's worried about invasions of disease.”

The Speaker nodded. “We must know if you carry strange plagues that could wreak gleeful havoc on our bodies here. I will not welcome you aboard my ship until I have your blood to analyze.”

“Oh,” said Gabe. “I understand now. You're worried about smallpox.”

“What's smallpox?” Kaen asked.

“Something our mutual ancestors had no defense against. Okay, then.” Gabe unsealed his gloves and held out one bare hand.

Speaker Tlatoani took the hand, not roughly but not gently either. She held the knife up to Gabe's palm and pricked the skin with the very tip. It was sharp. Gabe couldn't even feel the cut at first. Then he felt it, and winced.

The Speaker pressed her knife against the cut. Blood seeped into the hollow core, turning the clear blade red. She took the knife away and slapped a small, sticky patch of cloth over the tiny wound. Gabe felt it burn. Then it itched. Then it tickled in a very slight and irritating way, and after that it didn't feel like anything.

Meanwhile the Speaker stood, pushed the blade into a wall panel, and twisted the hilt. “Now we wait to unfold your blood stories.” She waved one hand at the guards. Both stepped forward to set trays in front of Gabe and Kaen. “Eat while we wait.”

Kaen took the cover off of hers. Gabe did the same. Each tray held four small cakes made out of cornmeal.

“This is reciprocal protection for you,” the Speaker explained. “The tamales carry vaccines against germs that your body will meet here among us.”

Kaen ate a cake. She didn't seem to savor it much.

“Thank you for the food and protection,” Gabe said. He sniffed one of the cakes. It was definitely cornmeal, but dry and hardened rather than properly steamed. It still smelled better than tube borsht. His stomach gave a long, slow growl. Gabe took a bite and spent a long time chewing.

This is not a tamal
, he thought.
This is nothing like a tamal. Dad would weep, and rage, and tear at his hair to hear these little corn cookies referred to as tamales. He'd call them
sordos,
without any kind of meat or fruit filling in the middle, and he would refuse to eat them. He would probably rather catch space smallpox than eat these.

Gabe offered one to the Envoy, who quietly swallowed it. The cake remained visible inside its transparent, purple skin, slowly breaking apart. Gabe ate the other three.
Sorry, Dad. I'm hungry. And I don't want to catch any alien diseases.

Noises chimed from the wall panel. The Speaker stood to examine the blood sample knife.

“Your blood tells no offensive stories,” she reported. “Be welcome, then. You may come aboard. We wash our painted faces and set aside the blood of snakes.” Her voice sounded less formal than the words she used. Gabe guessed that adult translation difficulties made her sound more ceremonial than she actually intended. “Now we will travel to the Library through Night and beneath Day. We must take counsel with other captains there.”

Kaen dusted corn-cookie crumbs from her hands and stood, obviously impatient to be done with the airlock ceremonies. Gabe stood up more slowly.

“It'll take us a night and a day to get there?” he asked. “It took less time to get here from the moon.”

“Night and Day are both
places
,” Kaen explained. “Two cities in the middle of the ship. You'll understand better when you see them. And you can store your outersuit here if you don't want to carry it around. Looks heavy.”

“It is,” said Gabe, relieved. He fumbled with the complicated clasps and climbed out of the bulky cosmonaut suit. Then he put on his backpack and took up the walking cane. “Okay. Ready.”

Speaker Tlatoani went elegantly through the passageways and led them into a much larger chamber. Crowds of people moved through it and flickered in and out
of translation. Gabe tried not to stare at them. He was somewhat used to alien company, but he was not at all accustomed to seeing so many untranslated appearances directly, without a squint or a sideways glance.

The Speaker paused near a translation node. “This is the Avenue of the Dead, and we will ride through Night among them.”

“Well, that sounds ominous,” Gabe said. “This place looks more like a subway train station than the land of death.”

“That's what she said,” Kaen told him. “It just didn't translate well.”

They moved on through the train station without calling any attention to themselves, but the crowd around them still parted for both their captain and their ambassador.

The subway train floated in place rather than running on wheels or tracks. It looked carved out of turquoise and jade, though the surface felt like lightweight metal rather than stone. There were no chairs inside. Handholds rose up from the floor, shaped to suit each occupant. Gabe heard very little conversational buzz, and he couldn't understand what he did hear.

“Envoy?” he said quietly.

“Yes?” the Envoy answered.

“I'm still not sure if we're honored guests or prisoners.”

“These are not mutually exclusive categories, Ambassador.”

“That's very comforting,” Gabe said.

“I'm glad you feel comforted.”

The train moved. It carried them silently away from the station, away from the saucer rim, and sped through tunnels toward the hub. Gabe watched the tunnel walls blur outside, hypnotic in the way that train rides always were. Then the train left the tunnel for the wide-open space of the saucer's interior.

Gabe saw Night and Day.

Each city stood above the other. Each one formed the other's sky.

He looked up. Tiny dots of people walked on the distant, day-lit ceiling. He looked down at the closer streets of Night. Lamps and windows burned with the same swirling phosphorescence as the smaller lanterns in the airlock welcoming room, and reflected light bounced down from the brighter city above to give its darker twin a dusky glow.

A stepped pyramid stood in the center of Night. A massive, bowl-shaped platform stood suspended at the apex of the pyramid. Sunlight burned inside the bowl, and shone upward at upside-down cornfields and the city of Day.

So they did build a space pyramid
, Gabe thought, thrilled and almost laughing.
The temple of the sun. A very small sun. They built a pyramid for holding up the sun.

The train moved through Night with rocket-like speed. Then it slowed, and Gabe caught a less blurry look at the view just outside his window. At first glance Night seemed like an ordinary urban place, built by humans to human proportions and human ways of moving around. It had buildings, streets, and crowds of people flowing like water unsure about which way was down.

I don't know which way is down, either
, Gabe thought. He looked up at Day, and thought about the people of Day looking up at him.

At second glance the streets of Night looked utterly alien to Gabe. Most of the people were human, but not all. This was a Kaen city, and Kaen of other species moved through the streets. They flickered into human-seeming shapes when they passed translation nodes in public squares. Almost everyone wore thin clothing, brightly colored and easily seen in the dim light. Most walls were painted in equally bright colors.

Gabe wondered whether people spent half of their time in Day and the other half in Night, or else stayed mostly in one place or the other. He wondered if the streetlamps of Night looked like stars to the people in
Day, or if their miniature sun-in-a-bowl burned too brightly to see Night behind it. He wondered how their gravity worked.

The train entered a tunnel inside the base of the pyramid, cutting off his view. Then it slowed to a stop. Speaker Tlatoani disembarked. She didn't look back to make sure that the others followed her. The captain clearly expected to be followed.

Walls and ceilings inside the pyramid were covered with bright metal foil, all of it stamped in complex patterns and designs. Crowds of people moved and milled around or stood waiting for another train, just as they would at any other central station.

The Speaker led them to a very small room that was clearly an elevator. One wall displayed a cutaway map of the whole pyramid. Speaker Tlatoani touched the map and traced a route upward from where they were to where they were going. The doors closed. Gabe felt slightly heavier as the elevator moved.

“How does your gravity work?” he asked.

“It works very well,” Tlatoani told him. “How did you enjoy your first sight of our home?” The Speaker was clearly proud and inviting Gabe to offer compliments.

“Amazing,” he said, honestly.

“I am pleased that it amazed you,” Tlatoani said. “We
built Night and Day according to the knowledge that time and space are not separate things. We built this ship and its cities to accommodate the needs of maize, and the needs of mouths, and the needs of the little sun we made. Even such a tiny sun must be the center of attention.”

Kaen pointed at the etched pyramid map on the wall. “Our ambassador academy takes up this floor over here, and the command center of the ship is here, close to the sun.”

“Is that where we're going?” Gabe asked.

“No,” said the Speaker. “We will hold council with the other captains in the Library. Here.” The elevator stopped. The doors opened. The Speaker held out one arm. “This is the home of our chronicles and codices, histories and discourses, high proverbs and tickling songs. This is the House of Painted Books.”

*  *  *  *

The walls and floor of the library were made of dark and polished ceramic, which hid most of the space in warm shadows. Books sat on glowing podiums, waiting to be read, and the podiums themselves provided the primary source of light. The book pages were transparent with symbols printed in bright colors. Each page was bound at both ends, which made a single book into one long
page folded up like an accordion. People stood reading in silence, their faces intent and lit from below. They looked like ghostly storytellers holding flashlights under their chins.