Constellation Games

by Leonard Richardson

  "G-d, don't be such a civilian! Freefall showers are the worst. The water goes on like lotion."

  "Tammy, have you been to Human Ring?"

  "Why would I? There's nothing there."

  "Nothing but showers. Gravity showers, like on Earth."

  "... So first the booze and now hot water? You're just bringing all my recreational liquids back into my life? It is hot water, right?"

  "I guess? It's hot enough."

  "I'll need help, Ari. I've been free-falling for fifty days. Once I hit the ground, I'll need someone to hold me up. Do you really want to help a feeble old lady take a shower?"

  "Not really, but I want to help you take a shower."

  "That is a good answer."

  Real life, July 21

  I knocked a couple times on the wooden doorframe and let myself into Tetsuo and Ashley's house, two levels up the tree from the replica Ip Shkoy apartment and much better lit. Still got the storage trapdoors in the floor, though. A nice retro touch, like a Victorian fireplace in a Houston McMansion.

  In the front room, Ashley Somn was lying on her back in a yoga pose, hindhands stroking glowing symbols in the air like a sleepy cat with a dangled string.

  "Hey, Ash, whatcha playin'?"

  "This is not a game," said Ashley. "I'm parameterizing Earth organisms as part of the History of Life overlay." She twitched a finger on one hindarm, and one amoeba-looking hologram was replaced with another, nearly identical amoeba-looking hologram.

  "Okay, hey, can you put on some... clothes?" I turned my head away.

  "I'm wearing clothes," said Ashley.

  "Yeah, sort of, but your, uh, is showing."

  Ashley looked up at her belly. "My ovipositor?" she said, as though I were a foot fetishist. "Eggs come out of there. Nothing goes in. It's completely safe for work."

  "Just humor me, please?"

  Ashley peeled out of her asana and crawled into her spacesuit. Her transparent spacesuit.

  "I asked you here to find out if you can do something about Tetsuo's English," she said. "Apparently it's quite bad."

  "That's funny," I said, "because I was talking to Tetsuo earlier today, while we were playing Recapture That Remarkable Taste, and he asked me if I could teach you English."

  "I don't need to learn English," said Ashley through her chopped-up resampled vocalizer. "The translator is a benefit embraced by the median person and shunned only by snobs who want to show off their own erudition and enlightened attitudes."

  "Wow, I guess you feel pretty strongly about it?"

  "That translation went on a lot longer than it should have," said Ashley. "That was four words in Purchtrin. I don't know what happened."

  "Maybe you should learn English and figure it out? But you're safe from me; I can't teach you. You need an ESL course."

  "But you speak English," said Ashley.

  "I can't teach it to someone who speaks a language from another planet."

  "Thank you for taking my side, Ariel," said Ashley, who clearly didn't believe me. She circled the room on all fours, pulling scraps of wispy cloth out of trapdoors and draping them over her spacesuit. "Please tell me when I'm wearing enough clothes that you feel comfortable."

  "That's fine," I said.

  "What about Tetsuo?" Ashley turned dramatically and glared at me with combined eyes and eyespots. "Can you teach him?"

  "I can talk good English and hope he picks it up," I said. "If you want him to learn about grammar or something, he'll need to talk to my parents."

  "What in heck is occurring here?" said Tetsuo, who'd just crawled in. "Is today the day when we wear our clothes on the outside of our spacesuits?"

  "Ariel was distracted by my beautiful ovipositor," said Ashley, crawling back into her hindarms-up position.

  I flinched. "That's the worst possible translation of whatever you just said. Tets, you gotta get your woman some English lessons."

  "I am attempting," said Tetsuo. "Ariel, welcome to our home. My fruit is your picnic." He lay down on top of Ashley's tail.

  "I think I understood that," I said. "Thanks."

  "And I thank you for extending your stay in Alien Ring," said Tetsuo. "I know you would like to go back to the central cylinder."

  "You do, huh?"

  "You smell like a human who's going to fuck somebody," said Tetsuo.

  "It's quite strong," said Ashley.

  I took a sharp breath and said nothing. Tetsuo either didn't notice or immediately gave up. "I have made a discovery!" he said. "About the software games of the Ip Shkoy-era Aliens."

  "I hope it's a better discovery than A Tower of Sand," I said, "because that game didn't do shit for the Constellation's reputation. Agent Fowler's still on the warpath."

  "Do human software games have directors?" said Tetsuo. "Like movies?"

  "Yeah," I said, "if they're real pretentious, like Weapon Eternal."

  "Af be Hui was the director of A Tower of Sand," said Tetsuo. "She became well-known. High-status. She made seven other games and her games changed history a little bit. I think we should play more of her work."

  "To what purpose? Did she finally get the Ip Shkoy to calm down about the Constellation?"

  Ashley wriggled violently and Tetsuo crawled off of her tail. "Purpose?" said Tetsuo. "What is purpose? History is not a trash compactor where you lost something important. You have to spend some time there."

  "I don't have the time. I have to go back to Earth in a few days."

  "Your visit is an opportunity to understand the Ip Shkoy a little better than a tourist," said Tetsuo. "If you want, then you can apply the historical knowledge to your own situation."

  "If I want?"

  Blog post, July 22

  After a few days of randomly sampling the gaming history of the Ip Shkoy, Tetsuo and I have come up with a Plan. And a Schedule. We'll spend the rest of the week's game time playing Schvei and The Long Way Around, the two biggest games of Ip Shkoy game director Af be Hui. I'll write the reviews when I get back to Earth, because I've got other stuff going on. A lot of things I'd rather be doing than sitting on half a bunkbed, text-to-speeching stuff you're just gonna leave smartass comments about.

  One more quick note as Curic has a question for you Internet smartasses.

  A few days ago, my friend Ion Specialist took me to Ring City's utility ring and showed me a human-style shipping container with the Constellation Shipping logo painted on the side. Like, lawn furniture from China, goes on a ship, shipping container. She didn't know what to make of it; I explained that it was kind of a transportation-nerd joke. Like the fake wooden crates Curic brought down to Earth, with "Constellation Shipping" stenciled on their sides. Why cover something with boring reentry foam when you can give your drop that touch of human elegance?

  Well, this shipping container was a little unusual in that the door wouldn't open. Shipping containers are usually locked, as I discovered that time I tried to steal a entire shipment of DVD players. But this one wasn't locked, it just wouldn't open.

  The other strange thing is that when Curic went to the utility ring today to check it out, the container was gone. I know I'm stretching the definition of "strange" here. Constellation Shipping is more or less defunct, due to laws and shit, so at this point you might as well recycle the containers that never got shipped. But Curic suspects a container conspiracy. She wants to know if anyone on Earth ever took delivery of one of these containers.

  Don't ask me why she cares. If you were shipping contraband or something, would you paint a big Constellation Shipping starfield on the side of the container? Why not rip off the Loyalitet or NTF logo?

  * * *

  Chapter 15: 777

  Real life, July 22

  "What would you do," Curic asked me, "if you knew that something catastrophic was going to happen to your home planet?"

  "I don't... like where this is going." I lay on my back on the floor of Curic's house, immobile, slowly flattening in the Farang Ring gravity. A human lu
mp lying among the artworks Curic had acquired from her contacts on Earth: a polished wood bowl, some kind of picture of Jesus, and the big circuit-board sculpture she'd gotten from Jenny.

  Curic paced the room in a robe made of fishnet and pockets. "For instance, suppose that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane were destabilizing Earth's climate."

  "Oh, that," I said. "We already know about that."

  "What did you do when you found out?"

  "Well, there was this benefit concert Jenny and Bai and I went to, in college."

  Sunk into Curic's living room is a hot tub. It's a natural Jacuzzi, since water in Farang Ring boils at about seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Curic walked into this hot tub, submerged herself, and blew bubbles for a couple minutes. She walked back out and calmly said: "A benefit concert."

  "C'mon. What do you want from me?" I asked. I pushed the oxygen mask to my mouth with one hand and clutched my head with the other. Human-habitable, my ass.

  "You seem uncomfortable," said Curic with astounding perspicacity. "Zip up your suit. We'll go in the water."

  Outside Curic's house, Farang Ring looks like Hawaii would, if Hawaii had Seattle's climate. Swimming in the ocean is definitely easier than walking, though I do recommend a spacesuit so you don't freeze to death. In the water, Curic swelled up to twice her normal size. She looked like a tiny purple polar bear.

  "I belong to an overlay called 'Save the Humans'," said Curic, treading water.

  "Hey, that's patronizing."

  "Thanks for noticing," said Curic. "I am becoming worried because we cannot find a vector for action."

  "Is that some fancy jargon?" I slowly sank into the ocean, and Curic expelled little puffs of air to sink with me.

  "No," she said, "I'm trying to communicate in a straightforward way, except in English."

  "It's jargon. What is a vector in this context? Magnitude plus direction? A disease vector? Vector graphics?"

  "I will tell you a story instead. A few days ago, my friend Kinki Kwi, acting as part of the Hierarchy Interface overlay, walks through the metal detector into the Senate Office Building. She is here to talk to the famous Senator about sharing carbon capture technology. The Senator is happy to see her. She puts forward her hand and Kinki Kwi touches it with her own.

  "Kinki Kwi explains the carbon capture technology in layman's terms, because although the Senator is a ranking member of a committee that deals with such things, Kinki Kwi understands that her primary expertise is in touching her hand to other people's hands. The technology is based on kites."

  "Kites like the...?" It was getting dark here in the briny deep. I looked up at the rippling surface and kind of understood why Brain Embryo games always show a bottom-up perspective.

  "Kites are animals," said Curic, "that evolved along with the Auslanders. They can be bred to withstand the low pressure of your atmosphere, and to metabolize your atmospheric waste. They will increase the atmosphere's carrying capacity until humans can agree on a carbon reduction plan. They are a proven life-technology and their disruption of planetary weather will be minimal, compared to the alternative.

  "Meanwhile, on the other side of the desk, the Senator issues a series of utterances that do not respond to naive analysis. A submind of the Ring City computer is set to the task, and is able to produce similar English sentences using a Markov chain of order five. Hypothesis: The human is saying things that are bullshit. To the extent that her message has any meaning at all, it is: Not In My Backyard."

  "That's it? A politician spins you a line and ducks responsibility, and you're confused? Did humans invent bullshit? Is it a new phenomenon for you?"

  "Silence, puny human!" Curic squeaked, and splashed me.

  "Also, if your name is Kinki Kwi, you should not be a diplomat."

  "Why not?"

  "It just sounds dirty."

  Curic straightened her antennacles and vocalized over radio to conserve her air supply. "Fear my ultimate point," she said. "Your lifestyle-system contains an asymmetry. If we wanted to build a factory that turned trees into methane, nobody would stop us. But to fly a few million lousy kites, we have to get permission from people who talk bullshit. There is no way to act. No vector."

  "Aren't you being a little hard on this poor lady? Look at it from her perspective."

  "An order five Markov chain has a perspective?"

  "Sure. She's gotta run for re-election next year or whenever, and she's imagining trying to film a campaign commercial in a cornfield, but they can't get a good shot because the sky is full of these floating things—how big are the kites?"

  "On Earth? Wingspan would be up to a kilometer."

  "Yeah, the biggest thing in the sky, blocking out the sun, hovering over her shoulder in the background. And what do these things eat? What happens when they take a shit?"

  "I think we can assume the briefing deals with questions like these," said Curic. Above our heads, a thick and sudden mass of raindrops tenderized the water's surface.

  "But she's just the delegate," I said. "The people who voted for her aren't gonna sit still for any briefing. They're going to yell these questions at her and not listen to the answers, because they just don't want huge Auslander birds flying over their heads. And they won't want to touch her hand anymore, either. The bullshit is a defense mechanism."

  Curic waved a tiny, murky fist at me. "Save the Humans is not an after-school club like Constellation Shipping or History of Life," she said. "We have competition: an overlay called Plan C. If you keep employing defense mechanisms against people who want to help you, Plan C will win the argument. We will end the contact mission and go back home."

  "You'd just leave us here?"

  "You could come with us," said Curic. "Set up colonies on Earthlike planets. Remove some of the stress from your home planet. I don't recommend this. If I thought it was a good idea, I'd be aligned with Plan C."

  I swam upwards a little, just to make sure I could, that I wasn't going to sink forever. "What happened to Plan B?" I said. "Is that you guys?"

  "Plan B is what we're doing now," said Curic. "A normal contact mission. The name is a bit of a humanism—there's no actual plan."

  "Yeah, I can tell. Which leads me to the obvious follow-up question..."

  "Plan A is paleontology," said Curic. "Most of the time, when we get to a planet, all of the intelligent life is dead."

  "Oh, yeah. Glad we dodged that bullet."

  "You haven't dodged it yet."

  Real life, July 23

  I don't know if you've ever had sex with a pre-contact-era astronaut, but man, they've got a lot of stamina. I screwed Dr. Tammy Miram until my hamstrings gave out, and then she held me down on the flimsy bunkbed mattress and rode me for about twenty minutes more, and then she went for a DIY Lift-Off while I lay on my back exhausted and said cuss words for her. And then finally, finally, she spooned with me and got super emo.

  "I was in training," she said. "I was gonna go up maybe around STS-116. And then STS-107 was Columbia, and they shut it down."

  "I remember," I said. I didn't mention that I'd been in high school at the time.

  "Mmm. So I started working on the replacement program, the Constellation program." She laughed musically. "I can't believe we called it that. But by the time we started the launches, I'd be..."

  "Yeah?"

  Tammy sighed. "A certain age. Not old, but an age where they want someone younger stepping into that billion-dollar piece of equipment. So I got certified and I started working on simulations. Three solid days in the simulator, pretending to go to the moon. So they could decide how to arrange the buttons. Pretending, Ariel."

  "Pretending."

  "The personal allowance is five kilos," she said. "That's for the STS; it would have been a little more for Titan." It was like hearing someone recite the names of dinosaurs.

  "I had a bag, a backpack. I kept it packed at 4.99 kilos. As an act of hope. As if something might still happen after Columbia. S
ome call in the middle of the night, grab your socks, get your flight-status ass to Florida. There was a computer full of music, a big thick fantasy novel, college sweatshirt, chewing gum, crap like that. People used to pad it out with fresh food.

  "Okay, Ariel, this bag did not run my life or anything. It was in the back of my bedroom closet. Every few months, I'd remember it and swap out the novel. I went through Garth Adams's entire Sword of Chaos series. Did you know that every one of those books weighs 1.13 kilos? Plus or minus ten grams."

  "How does he do that?"

  "I don't know, but it sure made things easy for me. Last year, I finally pulled out the last one and finished it, so I switched to an e-reader. And then the call happened. They came and lifted me up, and I got to walk on the moon for real, and now I live in space, and... and you."

  I blushed. "So you got to use the bag."

  "It's still in my closet. I forgot it."

  "No!"

  "Yes. Contact event plus eight hours, I'm crammed into a Constellation shuttle with twenty whooping co-workers; and right as the Gulf of Mexico comes into view, I remember that I spent the past ten years keeping a bag packed for this specific contigency."

  "Ouch?"

  "I forgot the bag; I didn't clean out the fridge. My plants are all dead. I left my car in the parking lot at work. I keep being reminded of things I didn't do on Earth, and none of it matters, because I've left it behind. I live in space now. I'll never set foot on a planet's surface again."

  "What about, like, Mars?"

  "Is Mars a planet?"

  "Yeah," I said. "Unless they've been changing the definition again."

  "Then no."

  "Don't you have family?"

  "Sure. They can come up here."

  "They can't," I said. "You don't know what it's like. There's eight billion people the Constellation hasn't lifted up yet. I had to sell my soul to the State Department just to get on a shuttle."

  Tammy shrugged. "You don't have to go back," she said. "What are they gonna do, extradite you?"