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?"