Elizabeth’s one-bedroom apartment echoed her fridge, which was another reason she and Mom fought. Unmade bed, dusty stacks of journals and newspapers, a vase of dead flowers probably sent by one of the boyfriends Elizabeth never fell in love with. Mom’s house north of the city, and Ryan and Connie’s near hers, were neat and bright. Housecleaners came weekly; food was bought from careful lists; possessions were replaced whenever they got shabby. Noah had no possessions, or at least as few as he could manage.
Elizabeth clutched the phone. She dressed like a female FBI agent—short hair, dark pantsuit, no make-up—and was beautiful without trying. “Come on, Mom, pick up,” she muttered, “it’s a cell, it’s supposed to be portable.”
“Maybe she’s in class,” Noah said. “Or a meeting.”
“It’s Friday night, Noah.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“I’ll try the landline. She still has one.”
Someone answered the landline on the first ring; Noah heard the chime stop from where he sat munching his sandwich. Then silence.
“Hello? Hello? Mom?” Elizabeth said.
The receiver on the other end clicked.
“That’s odd,” Elizabeth said.
“You probably got a wrong number.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full. I’m going to try again.”
This time no one answered. Elizabeth scowled. “I don’t like that. Someone is there. I’m going to call Ryan.”
Wasn’t Ryan somewhere in Canada doing field work? Or maybe Noah had the dates wrong. He’d only glanced at the email from Ryan, accessed on a terminal at the public library. That day he’d been on sugarcane, and the temporary identity had been impatient and brusque.
“Ryan? This is Elizabeth. Do you know where Mom is?… If I knew her schedule I wouldn’t be calling, would I?… Wait, wait, will you listen for a minute? I called her house and someone picked up and then clicked off, and when I called back a second later, it just rang. Will you go over there just to check it out?… Okay, yes, we’ll wait. Oh, Noah’s here… No, I’m not going to discuss with you right now the… Ryan. For chrissake, go check Mom’s house!” She clicked off.
Noah wished he were someplace else. He wished he were somebody else. He wished he had some sugarcane.
Elizabeth flounced into a chair and picked up a book. Tariffs, Borders, and the Survival of the United States, Noah read upside-down. Elizabeth was a passionate defender of isolationism. How many desperate people trying to crash the United States borders had she arrested today? Noah didn’t want to think about it.
Fifteen minutes later, Ryan called back. Elizabeth put the call on speaker phone. “Liz, there are cop cars around Mom’s house. They wouldn’t let me in. A guy came out and said Mom isn’t dead or hurt or in trouble, and he couldn’t tell me any more than that.”
“Okay.” Elizabeth wore her focused look, the one with which she directed border patrols. “I’ll try the college.”
“I did. I reached Evan. He said that three men claiming to be FBI came and escorted her to the UN Special Mission Headquarters in Manhattan.”
“That doesn’t make sense!”
“I know. Listen, I’m coming over to your place.”
“I’m calling the police.”
“No! Don’t! Not until I get there and we decide what to do.”
Noah listened to them argue, which went on until Ryan hung up. Of course Elizabeth, who worked for a quasi-military organization, wanted to call the cops. Of course Ryan, who worked for a wildlife organization that thought the government had completely messed up regulations on invasive botanical species, would shun the cops. Meanwhile Mom was probably just doing something connected with her college, a UN fundraiser or something, and that geek Evan had gotten it all wrong. Noah didn’t like Evan, who was only a few years older than he was. Evan was everything that Noah’s family thought Noah should be: smart, smooth, able to fit in anyplace, even into a country that wasn’t his own. And how come Elizabeth’s border patrols hadn’t kept out Evan Blanford?
Never mind; Noah knew the answer.
He said, “Can I do anything?”
Elizabeth didn’t even answer him.
She had seen many pictures of the Embassy. From the outside, the floating pavilion was beautiful in a stark sort of way. Hemispherical, multifaceted like a buckeyball (Had the Denebs learned that structure from humans or was it a mathematical universal?), the Embassy floated on a broad platform of some unknowable material. Facets and platform were blue but coated with the energy shield, which reflected sunlight so much that it glinted, a beacon of sorts. The aliens had certainly not tried to mask their presence. But there must be hidden machinery underneath, in the part known (maybe) only to Navy divers, since the entire huge structure had landed without a splash in the harbor. Plus, of course, the hidden passage through which the sub had come, presumably entailing a momentary interruption of the energy shield. Marianne knew she’d never find out the details.
The room into which she and the others stepped from the submarine was featureless except for the bed of water upon which their sub floated, droplets sliding off its sleek sides. No windows or furniture, one door. A strange smell permeated the air: Disinfectant? Perfume? Alien body odor? Marianne’s heart began to beat oddly, too hard and too loud, with abrupt painful skips. Her breathing quickened.
The door opened and a Deneb came out. At first, she couldn’t see it clearly; it was clouded by the same glittery energy shield that covered the Embassy. When her eyes adjusted, she gasped. The others also made sounds: a quick indrawn breath, a clicking of the tongue, what sounded like an actual whimper. The Russian translator whispered, “Bozhe moi!”
The alien looked almost human. Almost, not quite. Tall, maybe six-two, the man—it was clearly male—had long, thin arms and legs, a deep chest, a human face but much larger eyes. His skin was coppery and his hair, long and tied back, was dark brown. Most striking were his eyes: larger than humans’, with huge dark pupils in a large expanse of white. He wore dark-green clothing, a simple tunic top over loose, short trousers that exposed his spindly calves. His feet were bare, and perhaps the biggest shock of all was that his feet, five-toed and broad, the nails cut short and square. Those feet looked so much like hers that she thought wildly: He could wear my shoes.
“Hello,” the alien said, and it was not his voice but the mechanical one of the radio broadcasts, coming from the ceiling.
“Hello,” Desai said, and bowed from the waist. “We are glad to finally meet. I am Secretary General Desai of the United Nations.”
“Yes,” the alien “said,” and then added some trilling and clicking sounds in which his mouth did move. Immediately the ceiling said, “I welcome you in our own language.”
Secretary Desai made the rest of the introductions with admirable calm. Marianne tried to fight her growing sense of unreality by recalling what she had read about the Denebs’ planet. She wished she paid more attention to the astronomy. The popular press had said that the alien star was a K-something (K zero? K two? She couldn’t remember). The alien home world had both less gravity and less light than Earth, at different wavelengths… orange, yes. The sun was an orange dwarf. Was this Deneb so tall because the gravity was less? Or maybe he was just a basketball player—