Ambassador Read online

  Garuda the iguana sat on the bookshelf and looked Gabe over with one reptilian eyeball. He’d crushed half the city that Gabe had built on that shelf using little plastic bricks. The bricks were a chaotic mixture of several different toy sets, part moon base and part castle and part jungle, inhabited by little plastic characters who were never meant to mix together.

  Dad had wanted to name the bird Garuda instead, but Lupe had thought it suited the lizard better because it kind of sounded like Godzilla. Lupe won. Dad still grumbled about it.

  Sir Toby the silver fox curled up at the foot of Gabe’s bed, pretending to sleep. Gabe could tell by the fox’s ears and the squint of his eyes that this was just an act.

  The Envoy crept along a tree branch outside and watched through the window. No one noticed it except Garuda, who watched the Envoy sideways with his other stoic eye.

  Gabe closed his bedroom door. “Hello, everybody.”

  “Hello!” said Zora from the top of his head. “Meow!” Noemi had taught her to say “meow,” which only reinforced Noemi’s belief that “meow” was the proper thing to say to all animals—even though there were no cats among the family pets.

  Garuda twitched his tail and knocked over more of the plastic city.

  Sir Toby made a small yip-snore and kept both eyes closed.

  The Envoy said nothing. It curled around the tree branch and listened from outside.

  All three pets were refugees, abandoned and given shelter in Gabe’s house. They used to belong to various neighbors, but they had stayed when their former families moved away.

  “We’ll just watch them until we can find better homes for them,” Gabe’s father had said each time. No one believed him, and no one in the family had ever tried to find those alternate homes.

  Zora flew from Gabe’s head to Sir Toby’s haunch. The fox swiveled his huge ears and opened one eye, which looked like a little sphere of frozen ink. The bird walked up and down his spine. The fox closed his eyes and stretched, enjoying the bird-foot massage.

  Gabe sat on the floor. There wasn’t very much floor. His bed took up most of the space.

  Sir Toby made a yip-grumble at Zora, no longer enjoying his bird-foot massage. She didn’t seem to notice. Gabe reached over, dislodged the bird, and then pretended to sneeze. She sneezed back at him. Fake sneezes were her favorite noise to make.

  “Food!” Dad shouted from the bottom of the stairs.

  Gabe left his door open, just in case any of the pets wanted to leave, and went back downstairs.

  Mom came home just as Dad set the kitchen table. They all talked about nothing much in Spanish, English, and Spanglish.

  Lupe, the eldest, came in late with apologies. She wore all black, as befitting a waitress. Her place at the table was already set. She slid smoothly into her chair, and smoothly into the conversation. Her full name was Guadalupe, but she never used it. She never liked it much, even though it sort of meant “River of the Wolf,” which Gabe thought was unspeakably cool. She had been born on their grandmother Guadalupe’s birthday, so she couldn’t avoid inheriting that name.

  The Envoy watched them all from inside a cupboard. It had squeezed through mouse-chewed holes in the walls to get there. It watched, listened, and paid particular attention to Gabe—and it noticed how Gabe paid attention to everyone.

  Gabe’s mother shifted her posture, suddenly tense. She stared at the food as though trying to scry the future in it.

  Lupe looked for the salt. She loved salt. But it always annoyed Dad to add any salt to his already perfectly balanced collage of flavors, so she didn’t actually ask for the salt. Gabe noticed anyway and passed her the saltshaker. It was shaped like an Olmec statue head with a great big helmet. Both the salt-and pepper shakers were cheap gifts from Gabe’s grandparents—reminders to his mother that she could just come home to study ancient civilizations if she still wanted to be an archeologist.

  Gabe thought the helmeted heads looked like astronauts. Mom said they were probably ancient ballplayers, and she insisted, firmly and often, that they were not astronauts.

  Gabe made sure that Dad wasn’t looking when he passed the salt to Lupe. Dad and Lupe loved to argue about anything and everything, but Dad took actual offense where his cooking was concerned.

  Little Andrés dropped his spoon and started fussing, even though he never actually used the spoon to eat with. He still wanted it back. No one noticed but Gabe, so Gabe picked up the spoon, wiped it off, and gave it back to his little brother.

  “I need to run errands tomorrow,” Mom said, still watching her food more than eating it. “You don’t have a shift in the morning, do you?” she asked Dad.

  “Not until noon,” he said around a mouthful of curry.

  “Good,” said Mom. “I’ll need your help lifting things. I can drop you off afterward.”

  “I could help,” said Lupe.

  “No,” said Mom. The word was a high fence tossed up between them. “Summer classes start tomorrow. Remember?”

  Lupe started to say something angry and dismissive, stopped, started to say something else, and then stuffed her mouth to keep herself from saying anything.

  Gabe wasn’t sure why his mother and sister caught fire every single time they spoke. He just wished they would stop. The two of them did not love to argue, not with each other, but lately they couldn’t seem to help it.

  He asked for something that he knew he couldn’t have and didn’t actually want. “Can you drop me off at Minnehaha Park tomorrow morning? The one with the waterfall? I have to write about it for a summer reading project.”

  Lupe gave a snort of disgust. Now she would be annoyed with him for acting like such a perfect little student—which was strange, since she used to be a perfect student herself—but Gabe could live with that. She didn’t catch on fire when she was annoyed with Gabe.

  Mom shook her head. “No room for all of us in the car, not with both car seats.” She finally started to eat her curry, but she still made grunting, subvocalized noises.

  “I told you we should have traded the car in for that minivan,” Dad said.

  “That van was embarrassed and embarrassing,” Lupe protested. “It was so rusted out that it would’ve fallen to pieces in shame just as soon as anybody said something mean to it.”

  “I could have fixed it,” said Dad.

  “You can’t actually fix cars,” said Lupe. “I know you feel like you should be able to, but you can’t. It never works out.”

  “I fixed old Baghera so many times—”

  “A motorcycle is not a minivan!”

  Gabe sat back, relieved. This was something that Dad and Lupe enjoyed arguing about, and the topic wouldn’t wound either one of them. They fought without fire.

  “Just take the bus to the park,” Mom told Gabe, ignoring the minivan argument. “You can manage that by yourself. You’re the most sensible member of this whole family. You’re the only one who knows how to keep your head down.”

  “Even though he’s the only one who doesn’t need to,” Lupe muttered.

  Mom said nothing, loudly.

  Gabe wondered what Lupe meant. He decided not to care. Instead he tried to think of a way to distract them from another argument, but he didn’t have to, because the twins started blowing raspberries at each other and that was adorable. Everyone paid attention to the twins and seemed to forget about the ire that crackled between Lupe and Mom.

  The Fuentes family finished their meal.

  4

  Gabe turned out his light, climbed into bed, and found the flashlight he had stashed behind the mattress. He read a bit of Hiawatha for his summer reading project, read of “days that are forgotten, in the unremembered ages,” but the THUMP thump THUMP thump beat made him immediately sleepy. He read the lines “Break the red stone from this quarry, Mould and make it into Peace-Pipes,” at least three times, his eyes sliding over them and finding no traction. He wanted to enjoy it, but the book would have to wait for daylight.

&nb
sp; He set Hiawatha aside, picked up an old favorite instead, opened the book at random, and reread one of the chapters in the middle. He liked to do this with books he’d read already, liked to leap into the middle of things and let himself remember the rest of the story in both directions—all the stuff that had already happened and everything still to come, everything he knew that the characters didn’t yet.

  Sir Toby climbed out from under the bed and sniffed the air a few times, suspicious. Then he jumped into bed and curled up at Gabe’s feet.

  Garuda climbed down from the bookshelf and clawed his way up the blankets to settle next to the fox and enjoy mammalian warmth.

  Zora slept in her covered cage in the corner. The cage moved from room to room, and tonight Gabe had moved it in with him. He was still annoyed to be facing a Frankie-free summer, and felt better keeping all three pets close.

  The Envoy oozed through a heating grate in the floor. It shaped part of itself into a mouth and throat, and then cleared its new throat with a thick, phlegmy sound.

  Gabe and Sir Toby both sat up at the odd noise. The fox jumped to the floor. Gabe swung his flashlight beam around and found the Envoy.

  The purple, transparent thing on the floor of his room flinched away from the flashlight beam and became slightly less transparent. Then it spoke.

  “I am the Envoy.” It changed shape slightly to adjust the sound of its voice. “I’m the Envoy,” it said again. It sounded nervous. It also sounded just like Gabe’s mother. “Messenger. Traveler with important news. One who knows what others need to learn. I have no other name than Envoy. Hello. Hi, there.”

  Gabe tried to say something but failed to say anything. His stare was a question mark a thousand miles high.

  Sir Toby approached, his tail bristled and his ears pressed back like a cat’s.

  The Envoy lowered its mouth to be sniffed.

  Sir Toby made a challenging and inquisitive yip-bark.

  The Envoy changed the shape of its throat and gave a few yips of its own.

  Sir Toby relaxed. His tail settled down and his ears perked up, as though recognizing those noises to mean, Thanks for letting me trespass on your territory, and also, I’m not going to bite you. I don’t even have any teeth to bite you with, and I recognize that your teeth are impressive. Your coat and your tail are also impressive. Maybe they did. Those were the sorts of things Gabe would have wanted to say to Sir Toby, if only he spoke fox.

  The Envoy changed shape again, took a breath, and made air into words.

  “Hello,” it said again. “Greetings to you. Welcome. No, wait. I mean that I’m asking for your welcome and attention rather than offering you welcome. This is your home, so it’s not my role to be welcoming.”

  “You sound like my mom,” Gabe whispered. “You look like a purple sock puppet without any eyes glued on, though I can see right through you, and there’s no hand inside to make the mouth move. And you sound like my mom.”

  The Envoy nodded. “I have mimicked the shape of her vocal cords so that I can talk to you in a pleasingly familiar way. Is it working?”

  “Not really,” said Gabe. “Nothing about this is pleasingly familiar.”

  The Envoy took another breath to use as word-fuel. It still sounded nervous. It started to babble.

  “My purpose is to assist ambassadors. But this world has been without an ambassador for many years, and it very much needs one, so now it’s my purpose to select one. I have traveled very far, most recently from the moon—the only moon you have left—to select a new ambassador. The word ambassador means one who speaks on behalf of a place and people in dialogue and diplomacy with other peoples and places. Proxy. Diplomat. Representative and plenipotentiary.”

  Gabe blinked a few times. “I know what ambassador means.”

  “Excellent,” said the Envoy. “That’s excellent.”

  “I’m not sure about plenipotentiary, though.”

  “It also means ambassador,” the Envoy explained.

  “I figured that it probably did,” said Gabe.

  “And I have selected you to take this post,” said the Envoy.

  “Me,” said Gabe. “Ambassador. One who speaks on behalf of a place and people.”

  “Yes,” said the Envoy. “Your world, in this case. Your planet.”

  “Then who are you asking me to speak to?”

  “Everyone else,” said the Envoy.

  Gabe looked up. He couldn’t help looking up, even though his view of the night sky was blocked by the ceiling of his room, the roof of his house, and urban light pollution that turned the sky into a dusky, starless place.

  Gabe set his flashlight on the floor, pointing up, to serve as a dim bedside lamp. “Okay. I’m flattered. But I’m also eleven. Aliens I can accept—mostly because there’s one in my room—but not an eleven-year-old ambassador.”

  “I’m not actually alien to this world,” the Envoy said. It became more transparent now that the flashlight beam no longer shone on it directly. “Not quite. Not precisely. And I’d have guessed that you were younger than eleven. The previous ambassador was younger.”

  “Younger?” Gabe laughed. “Somebody younger than me represented this whole planet?”

  The Envoy grinned an odd-looking and puppet-like grin. “Good! You laughed. That’s an excellent sign. You feel comfortable enough to laugh. And, yes, people younger than you have served as ambassadors. For very good reasons.” It pointed its mouth at the fox and iguana. “The mammal and the lizard there. Are they friendly to each other? Sociable?”

  “Yes . . .” said Gabe, clearly unsure where this conversational turn might be going.

  “Then they probably met while very young—at least while one of them was very young. Is that the case?”

  Gabe nodded. “The fox was a little cub when we took him in. The family just across the street bought him, but their cats didn’t like him, so they ditched him right away. He was tiny.”

  “That is why the two are friendly, though they’re such different species. Juveniles have not yet fixed the boundaries of their social world. They haven’t drawn a circle around those worth talking to. Adults of most species find it more difficult to communicate with anyone outside their arbitrary circle—or even recognize that anybody exists outside it. So ambassadors are always young. Always.”

  Sir Toby jumped back up on the bed and yawned, apparently satisfied that the Envoy was safe enough to ignore. Garuda woke up. The two of them bumped noses and then both went back to sleep.

  “Okay,” said Gabe. “Sure. But why choose me? I just destroyed a lot of lawn furniture with a toy rocket. It was Frankie’s fault, really, but I couldn’t stop him. I shouldn’t represent anybody. I definitely shouldn’t represent everybody.”

  The Envoy smiled again with its puppet-like mouth. “I find your doubts encouraging. Anyone who agrees to take this on without first giving the task some serious thought would probably be a terrible ambassador. And I admit that I’ve selected you partly by accident. I fell into your neighborhood, though I wasn’t really aiming for it. I was only aiming for the planet. But I’ve spent days observing children in the park. You are the only one I decided to follow. You can settle disputes. You treat other species respectfully, as members of your immediate family, despite differences in perception and cognition. And the two of us can have this conversation at all. Even though myself and my message are both unexpected and strange, you can set aside your shock and actually talk about this. Not everyone can do that. For all these reasons I’ve selected you as suitable for the post.”

  Gabe sat up a little straighter. He clearly didn’t mind the compliments.

  “Would I have to leave home?” he asked. “Mom wouldn’t be able to keep her tutoring jobs if she didn’t have me around to babysit sometimes.”

  “Good!” the Envoy said. “You immediately think about how your choices might affect those around you. This is how an ambassador should always think. And, no, you wouldn’t have to leave home. Your ambassadorship
will involve diplomatic communication with the delegates of other worlds, but you can accomplish this from here. And we’ll work together in secret if we can. Human governments dislike knowing about things beyond their control. They find it frustrating and often exercise their frustrations on the ambassadors themselves. I’ve found that stealth works better, with your species at least.”

  Gabe nodded, still thoughtful, still mulling over so much new information.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have to say yes. I get to talk to aliens. I don’t think I really could say anything other than yes.”

  “Excellent,” said the Envoy. “Now, do you have any sodium bicarbonate in your kitchen?”

  “What?” Gabe asked.

  “Baking soda,” the Envoy clarified.

  “Probably,” said Gabe. “Definitely. Sure.”

  “I lost a substantial amount of mass when I fell,” the Envoy explained. “The experience was exciting, but it was also scalding and dehydrating. I still need more nutrients to rebuild the lost substance of myself.”

  “Sure,” said Gabe.

  He climbed out of bed. The lizard and the silver fox looked up, and then both of them went back to sleep.

  Gabe left his room and crept downstairs. The Envoy followed, oozing down the steps like a slow, purple waterfall.

  5

  Gabe took a box of baking soda from the back of the fridge and a glass of water from the sink. He set them both on the kitchen floor.

  The Envoy scooted up to the glass, reached out with its puppetish appendage, and used it as a hand to pick up the drink. The rest of its body changed shape, becoming bowl-like. It poured the water into the bowl of itself and dumped the baking soda in after it. The mixture bubbled and fizzed while the Envoy’s skin absorbed it all.

  “Is that better?” Gabe asked.

  The Envoy changed shape again to breathe and speak. The lump of baking soda still visibly fizzed in the middle of it. “Much better,” it said. “Thank you.”