Ambassador

fiction by michael werneburg

To my surprise, the other two raised a glass and we toasted to what Jane called, "Freedom at last!"

Some footage, now, of the Ambassador on an outing from the facility. The creature surveyed the landing site, then made its way to the craft with that awkward gait. Of course, it scrambled into the cockpit with fluid grace once he'd climbed aboard.

The waitress had arrived with Jane's next drink. "Look at him go," she said, "like a little monkey, I've always said."

"He's not a monkey," Jane said but with less arrogance than previously, "he's wholly alien. Aside from the extra limbs and the aforementioned carnivory, there's the matter of the superb night vision."

I was glad that Jane had dropped the hostility to the waitress, but I still marvelled at her abruptly taking the opposite side of the argument she'd just been having with me. With a smile, I ordered another club soda and turned back to the show.

"A night monkey," Cuong joked. "A night monkey that likes the temperature up, the humidity up, and the air pressure way up."

There was just under half an hour to go before the actual ceremony. Bollen, mercifully, had now gone and I restored the volume. We were being treated to a series of prepared historical clips. A voice-over was guiding us through the clips, which pieced together the history of mankind's own timid space exploration. An exploration that had decidedly slowed over the past few decades as the economy worsened and the wars raged on. Which reminded me of our financial plight: I'd needed this pay-day as much as anyone on the team but had far fewer years left to make up the loss.

On the screen, a sequence of ancient black-and-white stills of early human rocketry played out. Men in bulky suits, rockets lifting off of launch-pads, and probes flying past Saturn. The waitress returned, and I thanked her for my drink.

"Your food is coming right out," she said.

I thanked her but she stayed to watch as some more stills played out on TV. One of them showed a chimpanzee in a space suit.

The waitress barked a short laugh and smirked at Jane without a word. She crossed her arms and watched the show with us.

"Oh God," Jane said, "that's too much."

I nodded, enjoying the irony.

"What was that?" Cuong asked, perplexed.

I asked him, "What's what, Cuong? The chimp?"

He pointed at the screen and said, "Yeah, was that for some sort of promotional thing? A stunt?"

I watched as the screen recounted a litany of explosions on launch pads in Europe, the US, and South America. "That was from the early days of the US space efforts, back in the Cold War. They used chimps in some of the early flights to test the safety on a humanoid shape. High gees, low gees; you know."

Cuong reacted as if I had slapped him in the face. He bounced back on the booth's bench, and then forward again. His mouth hung in a big "O" of shock. "But, what did they call that?"

"Call it? I don't know. 'Space monkey program'? I don't think it had a name." I stared back at Cuong. Now he was finally paying attention? "You didn't know about the space monkeys?" I asked him.

"And there was Laika," the waitress said. "The Russian dog. One of the regulars was talking about that on Sunday night."

The two scientists turned to her with shocked expressions.

I looked from one to the other, and back at the screen when the live footage resumed. There was the young Dalai Lama, shaking hands with the secretary-general of the UN. Then the presidents of France and Brazil were greeting our Prime Minister. Everyone was ignoring the wind and drizzle and looked downright pleased with themselves. In all of history, not many firsts would beat First Contact, and their names would be immortalized. Time was now short—the whole thing would be starting soon.

Looking back at the shocked scientists, I had the funny feeling that everything was about to go catastrophically sideways with this Ambassador event.

"She's right. Laika was a stray dog from Moscow who became the first animal to orbit Earth and return, in 1957."

"But why!"

"They didn't want to risk a human life, they didn't know it was going to work."

"This is stupid," Jane said.

I realized then that it simply hadn't occurred to any of them to consult with our own history of space exploration while conducting their research. And it hadn't occurred to me to ask if they'd brushed up on something I'd seen as a kid way back in the 1970's. These two would have been in grade school in the 2000's and 2010's. Had that been too late perhaps to learn about the likes of Laika and Ham?

I still had that dislocated feeling. I realized it was possible that it wasn't just my team that had ignored the history, but all of humanity. Not taking my eyes off the screen, I said, "As for that chimp we just saw? The first chimp to go into space was named Ham. That was in '61. Just four years after Laika. You two aren't thinking–"

"Oh yes, we are," Cuong said, cutting me off and pounding the table in excitement. He had my full attention. Breathlessly, he said, "It explains so much: its lack of response to speech or signing or music; its failure to complete the pattern matching or the mathematical puzzles. The underdeveloped communication center in its brain. It probably communicates, but in a limited way we haven't discovered not only because it's alien but because it's not sentient. We can't get an explanation of its mission or technology because they're not its mission or technology. A different species sent that poor creature across light-years as a test!"