Ambassador

fiction by michael werneburg

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.