Ambassador

fiction by michael werneburg

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 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 half a dozen others. We'd gone in a team of pros at the top of our game. But we'd been humbled by our inability to make the slightest progress. We hadn't learned the creature's origins or plans, or even figured out how it communicated. 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, we'd all failed. The technology was unfathomable, and without being able to converse, the rest was a complete mystery. After weeks cooped up in the compound, our exhaustion and frustration had been palpable.

The screen at the side of the booth lit up, and 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 said, "take a Canadian and add fame."

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.

"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 secret facility near Omemee, Ontario for more than a month, while the 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 at least it wasn't entirely intelligible.

Cuong shook his head. "He was a weatherman before, wasn't he?" He was a compact man with a formerly athletic build now starting to age. He was regarding Bollen with contempt.

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's wife well 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 arrogant and smug in a way that I'd always associated with Toronto's self-styled elite: a little too confident in their knowledge and a little too disinterested in challenging themselves. She'd had an exhausting habit of informing me of all the people she knew, never seeming to credit that it was my connections that had landed her this job.

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.