Ambassador

fiction by michael werneburg

I stood up and went toward the booth. This brought me behind Jane's seat, and I placed a hand on her shoulder to encourage her along. She tensed slightly, but it surprised me when Cuong leaned toward Jane in a proprietary fashion as they stood. I watched Cuong step between Jane and me, and guide her to the booth with his hand on her lower back. I realized then that at some point, they'd become lovers. Was the reality of going home to his wife what explained the edge in Cuong's attitude? And was Jane acting the way she was because she sensed she was about to be set aside? I failed to suppress a sigh.

I apologetically told the waitress we were moving, and we crossed the floor to a secluded corner.

As the scientists sat, I plunked my payment card on the booth's meter and found the same broadcast that was playing above the bar.

It had been five weeks since the landing. The Americans had been keeping the Ambassador under wraps near the landing site. Publicly, the reason had been "ensure public safety" and "to establish a dialog in a controlled environment".

During that time, several teams had been assembled to try to study the visitor: to try to "establish that dialog"; to determine the visitor's health; understand its mission; and to identify its home world if we could. And of course, to try to learn something of the wondrous technology that had brought the creature across unimaginable distances.

I'd been asked to run one of those teams. In turn, I'd hired Jane and Cuong and a half dozen others. We'd gone in a team of pros at the top of our game, but had come away humbled. We did have scans of the alien's physiology and understood something of its remarkable organs and astonishing brain. Some of the other teams had made similar progress in their fields, but in the things that mattered most, we'd failed humanity.

We watched the segment continue. Hosting the entire broadcast was Harold Bollen, the journalist who'd been the first to broadcast from the Ambassador's landing site. Bollen spoke with the tone of perpetual arrogance he'd developed since coming to the world's attention.

"If you want an asshole," Cuong remarked, "take a Canadian and add fame."

On the screen, Bollen said, "Welcome to a special all-networks broadcast of the historic first meeting of the world's leaders with the extraterrestrial visitor who I simply call, 'the Ambassador'."

"Like he invented that name," Jane muttered, her glass at her lips again.

"He probably did," I observed, though I had no love for the broadcaster myself. He relentlessly put his own interests -- and his by-now towering ego -- ahead of everything else.

"As you know," Bollen continued, "the Ambassador has been tucked away in a secretive facility near Omemee, Ontario for more than a month, while the military-scientific community poked and prodded at him. Yes, Earth's welcome for this magnificent visitor -- who I was the first to greet -- was to cage him up and dismantle the space-ship that brought him to Earth."

Jane said, "No one's 'dismantling' anything! We can't put a scratch in it. Can we mute this?"

I gestured at the screen to kill the sound. It was still audible from other screens in the tavern, but this way we got less Bollen.

Cuong shook his head. "He was a weatherman before, wasn't he?"

Jane gave an expansive shrug. "That's probably why he feels qualified to speak in such technical terms about the work we've been doing. You know, poking and grabbing." She reached up a hand and played with Cuong's collar while he grinned into his beer.

I turned from the younger couple, embarrassed. Jane was in her early forties and Cuong well into his fifties but they were behaving like horny teens. Maybe this was just another sign of these chaotic times. But I knew Cuong through his wife and wanted no complicity in their philandering. When I'd assembled the team, Jane was the only one I hadn't known personally. She'd turned out to be competent enough but had also been unjustifiably arrogant and smug in the way that I'd observed among Toronto's self-styled elite: a little too confident in their standing and a little too disinterested in challenging themselves.

Now playing across the screen was the famous first footage of the alien, crouching in its four-legged suit with its helmet in its hands and blinking in the light of Bollen's camera. Bollen's hand extended into the frame and clasped the alien's in a way that caused the alien to drop the helmet, scuttle back, and cower beneath a wing of its ship.

Jane said, "That's Rover, through and through. Something new comes into his environment, he runs. Then he calms down and he plays around with it and tastes it if it can." With a sigh, she added, "and that's about it!"

"Always while saying nothing," Cuong added, somewhat peevishly.

"Well, not nothing," I countered. "Right? Our translations of its hand gesture for being hungry was correct."

"That's newborn stuff," Cuong said in an exasperated tone.

We'd had this conversation manytimes. Now irritated with Cuong at his disregard for his marriage, I couldn't help but to needle him. I shrugged, and said, "Maybe they just don't have much to say."

"I mean," continued Cuong oblivious, "you'd expect his journey would motivate him to say something!"

I'd hired Cuong for the creative thinking evident in his published work. But as far as I could tell, he'd spent his time on the project whining -- and in retrospect, fooling around. Well, if my invoices had all been rejected by the Canadian government due to our non-delivery, this man was certainly going to carry his share of the financial loss. "In the course of my 82 years," I scolded him, "I've learned that there's not much point in expectation."

Cuong frowned at me. The man had his share of grey hairs himself and seemed to take umbrage at my occasional "back in the day" and "at my age" statements, as if I thought of him as a child.

"And Jane," I added, "For the love of God, stopped calling it 'Rover'."

She nodded, but said, "The way he'd go around and around in his quarters." She smiled at me, "He really does get around like a dog!"

"A dog that can work out a childproof bottle with its hind feet," Cuong said, "while hanging onto the back of a chair and inspecting a piece of fruit from an alien planet."

I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. "At least we're out of that damn research site," I said with a sigh.