"Wha?" you said, a little dazed. "You didn't—did you do that on purpose?"
"This isn't funny," I said.
"Kiss me again," you said, like an order.
I kissed you again and you laughed again, big broad Marx Brothers laughs, your lips writhing, impossible to catch. You pulled away. "Stop! I'll get hiccups!"
"Is this like a thing?" I said, as though that sentence meant something. Back then I was very sensitive about my kissing style. Actually I still am, my whole life.
"You don't feel that?" you said.
"I feel something," I said.
"Ariel, you have a superpower," said Jenny. "Did nobody tell you?"
"Is it the good kind of superpower?" I said.
You blew the bangs out of your eyes. "This morning," you said, "I put on my costume and I was Skewer Sue, for the con. And when we came back here, I took off the spikes and stuff, and I was Jenny again. And— and— then, you kissed me and I saw that Jenny is just another costume. We're all cosplaying, all the time, and when you kissed me, you took off the 'Jenny' costume and there was nothing underneath.
"I was just this bag of meat, this animal with arms and legs, with this stuff wrapped around me, laying on stuff, surrounded by stuff, fifty feet off the ground, held up by a huge complicated machine made of stuff. It was the funniest thing in the world to be this bag of meat surrounded by stuff and another one here watching me laugh."
"Is this your way of telling me you don't want to make out? Because—" She You pulled my head down and kissed me, with tongue. (I'm having real trouble keeping this in the second person.)
When I kissed you, I'd been too nervous for anything to really register. Now you kissed me and I finally felt your lips against mine. There was a split-second release of endorphins and then your tongue shorted some circuit inside my mouth and the universe went dead.
I let out a choked humming scream and rolled off the bed, inches from getting killed by Skewer Sue. "That's not supposed to happen," I said, my cheek pressed against the dorm room carpet. "I've never kissed a girl before, but I know what's supposed to happen."
"What? What is it?" you said. Trying to hold off laughing, waiting for the punchline.
I couldn't lift my head off the floor. "There's nothing there," I said. "The universe is just a bunch of atoms bumping into each other."
"Yeah!" you said, and started laughing again. "It is! It's just stuff!"
"It's not funny!"
"It's the only thing that's funny!"
"This is not supposed to happen," I said. Like I had some kind of Service Level Agreement.
"Let's skip the kissing," you said. Oh, beautiful practical Jenny. "Nobody says there has to be kissing." You started unbuttoning the sixty pearl buttons on the front of your Skewer Sue dress.
That got me off the floor. I knelt on the bed astride your legs. My briefs were strangling my cock. "Jenny," I said. "Jenny."
"There's no Jenny," you said. "She's not home." Your chest was heaving. It was the first time I ever decided not to look at breasts. You were still undoing the tiny buttons, one at a time. Oh, careful meticulous Jenny.
"I need Jenny," I said. "I don't want to do this with an animal or a bag of meat. I want Jenny who knows all about art and is so beautiful."
You smiled, biting your lip to hold back the laugh, the life rushing back into your eyes. You stopped undoing your buttons and pinned me with your gaze. You inhaled heavily and said: "Wastebasket."
"Wastebasket?" I said. And that was when you puked on me.
"Tell me, please," you said when I left for my own dorm an hour later, showered and with the ex-turkey scraped off my clothes. "Tell me if it happens with other girls. I want to know."
Well, Jenny, it doesn't. It's just us. I still can't explain it, but I've felt that feeling again. It's the feeling I get whenever I go into space. The Earth falls out from under me and I'm stranded in a universe of nothing, just like that night in your dorm room. Maybe this is just the feeling I have when I get something I've been wanting my whole life.
You asked me what I saw in Dr. Tammy Miram besides that she puts up with my immaturity and her boobs look nice in microgravity (they do look great, BTW). I couldn't formulate the truth because we'd agreed to settle for friendship and never to talk about this, about two bags of meat pressing against each other while 'Jenny' stands off to the side laughing and 'Ariel' whimpers abandoned in heat-death.
Here is the truth: Tammy is a cosplayer who never takes the costume off. Even when she un-Velcros her flight suit and stands before me naked, she's still the physicist, the Mission Specialist. She already knows that we're nothing but collections of atoms who momentarily got lucky. She doesn't find this funny or terrifying; it's just a fact she needs to do her job.
Tammy's been a romantic hard-luck case her whole life, just like me. She's got an emotional shell surrounding her like a clingy Constellation spacesuit. Most guys want a woman to be naked when she gets naked. But I need some assurance that I can kiss a woman without turning us both into bags of meat.
And that's the second reason I'm leaving Earth.
I'm going to put this letter under your door, I'll walk into a Constellation shuttle and I'll go up into space again. This time I'll keep my eyes open and pretend I'm kissing you.
I never believed that for any given person there was one other person who was "right" for them, love at first sight, and that happiness depended on finding your "other half." How would that even work? Especially now that we know there are trillions of people in our galaxy alone. How is it that the right person for you is always born on the same planet at around the same time? It's astronomical. You'd have to believe in G-d or something.
But maybe there is one absolutely perfect match for everyone, one true pairing, one person who fits with you to form something bigger, like the two hemispheres of a Farang brain. If that's true, maybe we should be glad that almost nobody ever finds that other person.
Your friend,
Ariel
- - -
Hey, welcome to page eight. One thing I've learned from crime shows is that the cops might go away if you put up a little fight and then let them see something that's embarassing but not incriminating. So read this eighth page, chuck it, and when Krakowski shows up to talk about me, show him the first seven pages about how we met. He'll say "Wow, you kids are fucked in the head" and leave you alone.
The thing I want to tell you is: don't get rid of those notebooks I left at your place. The paper they're made of is smart paper, and that box of notebooks is a major Outernet hub. That's what Tetsuo meant when he said the notebooks were soft-dolls. He wasn't (just) being a snob. They're fake replicas: super-advanced routers disguised as old embarrassing notebooks in a plastic tub.
Tetsuo tells me that the two big overlays, Plan C and Save the Humans, have cut a deal. StH dropped their objections to sending a port back to Constellation space, and Plan C agreed to work their haunches off to make sure that port never has to get there. The first step is to set up a communications channel that can't be shut down: the Outernet. As one of the few people to belong to both Save the Humans *and* Plan C, Curic is right in the middle of the combined overlay. The fake notebooks are her idea of a joke.
Don't keep the notebooks in your apartment—eventually the feds will be able to use frequency analysis to find the hubs. But please keep it all together for a while, someplace warm, until more Americans own their own smart paper and the Outernet can get along without hubs.
My original plan was to take the notebooks to the dump, a plan which I'm sure would be agreeable to you. But Tetsuo says the Constellation is about to scoop up a lot of dumps from Earth and salvage our garbage. This would bring the notebooks right back to the space station, where they can't do any good. Maybe you could rent a storage locker and forget to pay for it.
Goodbye for real this time.
I don't love her. I'm settling for her. I love you.
Real life, October 16
Fluid overlays ar
e how the Constellation gets everything done, and the great thing about them is that you can just walk up and join one. As long as you're not incompetent, they'll find something for you to do. This is doubly true if you're volunteering to carry heavy things.
Right in front of the port into Mars, a tiny Gaijin male was darting in and out of a second port, trundling large white tubes out of Utility Ring and stacking them just inside the airlock dome, just outside the port to Mars.
"Need help?" I said. The tubes looked like solid extruded PVC. They were longer than the Gaijin was tall, and the gravity differential between Utility and Gaijin Rings tossed him around every time he came out of the port with one.
"Hello, human!" said the Gaijin through his translator. "Naturally! Help!"
"Hand them out to me and I'll stack," I said. "I'm Ariel Blum, by the way."
"Because He Was Quick!," said the Gaijin. "I'm with Constellation Shipping. Hand delivery, as it were!"
"What are we delivering?" I asked him.
"FERNs," said Because He Was Quick!. "It's what you call an acronym. It stands for High-Dimension Fractal Carbon Accumulators!" He tossed me a tube.
"Oof!" The tube weighed thirty pounds in Gaijin Ring gravity, and I was already wearing a backpack that massed out at 4.99 kilograms. "That doesn't spell FERN," I said.
"The Martian atmosphere is carbon dioxide," said Because He Was Quick!. "FERNs pull out the carbon and leave the oxygen. They Earth-format the planet and yield carbon to use in manufacturing!"
We made a huge pile of FERNs in the airlock dome, and then we crowded into the dome ourselves and Because He Was Quick! opened the inner door. We carried the FERNs through another gravity differential and stacked them up again on Mars.
The sun, weak and distant, was setting on the base camp. Electric lamps strung between Quonset huts gave off pearl-strings of light; occasional shadows moved between the huts. The stars above barely twinkled. The camp was drowsy in the thin air, murmuring radio chatter into my suit. No one noticed us; no one cared. We were two halves of a fluid overlay, gettin' shit done.
We piled the FERNs next to the multinational flag, still standing where Colonel Mason planted it a week ago, tilted forward and waffling in the wind. They should cast that ugly thing in concrete. This isn't the moon; things don't stay put.
"Just like home!" said Because He Was Quick!, casting his sense-apparatus down at the rust-red ground, covered in footprints and Gaijin walker-tracks. "Exploring, building roads, catching things in the river!"
I nudged a FERN with my FOOT. "How do these things work?" I said. "I'm curious."
"Ah!" said Because He Was Quick!. "Help me move one off to the side, and we'll set it up!" We lifted one of the FERNs, carried it just outside of camp, and set it on edge so that the mouth of the tube faced upwards. Because He Was Quick! said a magic word and the FERN unfolded, anchoring itself in the soil on one end, growing and branching on the other into a huge, bushy, infinitely detailed solar-collection fractal. It looked like a smooth white tree, towering over me (not that difficult) and Because He Was Quick! (even easier).
"Is it alive?" I said.
"No, no!" said Because He Was Quick!. "They reproduce slowly, but they're not alive!"
"It breathes, it reproduces, I don't see any real difference between this and a tree."
"Ah, if you count a tree as alive, then maybe! Maybe you'd say the same."
Because He Was Quick! stepped back from the practically-a-tree. "Now I'll enjoy a luncheon under the stars!" he said. It was a statement, not an invitation. He slithered into the distance on eager walker tentacles.
"I'm looking for a friend," I called out after him, and walked back into camp.
For the first time in months, I could relax. I had come a long, long way, but everything was going to be okay. This was where I needed to be. I saw her from behind, working on a heating unit with a wrench.
"Hey, Tammy," I called out. Not over radio: my own voice through the thin air.
Dr. Tammy Miram started and dropped her wrench. It fell in slow motion through Martian gravity. The wrench landed on its head and fell over in a puff of rust-dust. It was not a wrench of human design.
"It's me," I said.
Tammy whirled around. "Ari! What are you—Jesus!"
"I came here to be with you," I said.
"Don't use the suit mic," she said. She beckoned me into the shadows, towards her. "Just talk normally and no one will overhear."
"What's wrong?" I said.
"You can't be up here." Tammy wiped the dust from her faceplate, exposing her naked panicked face. "What were you thinking?"
"I was thinking that I love you," I said, "and it would be nice if we got to see each other occasionally."
"You don't even have an exit visa," she said, "much less security clearance. How did you get up—no, I don't even want to know. You're a fugitive! I can't be seen with you! Oh my G-d."
"I abandoned my entire life to be with you," I said. "It's fucking romantic, okay?"
"Not telling you to go back," said Tammy. "Don't go back, Jesus what will they do. Just get out of camp. Go back to the station. You'll throw everything off. Shit, shit." She covered her faceplate with gloved hands, pressing the rust back on in whorls.
"I brought you something," I said. I twisted around and took off the backpack. "Your go bag. The one you packed and then forgot on Earth."
Tammy kind of stooped and rested one hand on the heating unit. "You broke into my house?" she said.
"No!" I said. "You told me what was in it! I made you another one!"
"Take it," she said. "I don't need it anymore. Don't scare me like that, Ari. Take it and go."
I backed off. "Is this it?" I said. "I come all this way, and it's over?"
The sun had set. I could no longer see Tammy through her spacesuit. She said nothing.
"It must be worth something, the sheer distance I traveled."
"This isn't a game," she said. "You don't get points."
"Is this it?" I repeated.
"Don't make me answer," she said. "You won't like the answer."
Tammy turned and stumbled around the Quonset hut, hugging herself like a wounded animal. The wrench lay dead on the ground.
"That's not—" No one heard me. Because He Was Quick! was gone. Tammy was gone. I was alone on Mars.
The green daylight of Gaijin Ring shone through the port like a flashlight, a cone-shaped swatch of light incongruous in the red Martian dusk. I walked back, past the active FERN to the border between two worlds: the planet and the space station. I gave the drooping flag a mock salute. I walked into the light.
* * *
Chapter 31: The Peaks of Eternal Light
Private email, sent October 16
From: Ariel Blum
To: Mission Specialist Tammy Miram
Subject: The Peaks of Eternal Light
I admit that surprising you at work was not the best idea. I want to give this another try. I'm not ready to give up on this.
I'm going down to the moon, to the Peaks of Eternal Light at the north pole. I'll wait for you in Perry crater, just outside the old Glavnaya moon base. You mentioned it once, back before they finished refurbishing it: how you wanted to hike up from Perry to the base, from darkness into light. I doubt you've made time to do that since then, but we can do it now.
I'll wait for you for a full Martian day. Whenever you can get away, come down and we'll be together. Assuming that's what you want. No one needs to know. Secrets have longer half-lives up here.
Just before I left Earth, I told a friend what you mean to me. I'd never made it explicit before: how you take the probability function of all the ways I could be stupid or crazy, and collapse me into sane, well-adjusted Ariel. Maybe I bring nothing comparable to you, but right now that's the thing I'll miss the most if we don't see each other again.
With great respect,
Ari
Real life, October 17
"Mason here."
"Well, it's not a hierarchical thing, but yes."
"Okay, yeah, my name's Mr. Blum."
"Mr. Blum, good to talk to you, but I really can't do any more classroom chats right now."
"That's understandable, I also hate schoolchildren, but it's not what I'm calling about."
"Well, whatever it is..."
"I need to talk to Dr. Miram."
"If you can call me, you can call Tammy. Ground Control won't put you through or what?"
"She won't talk to me. I'm... I was her boyfriend. It didn't end well."
"Oh, you're up here! I thought you were calling from Earth. You're the punk who was hassling Tammy the other night."
"Well, we each see events from our own unique perspective..."
"You want some advice, son?"
"Not really, dad."
"We've got a good thing going up here. You and I, a few hundred other humans, are privileged to enjoy a society that operates on common courtesy instead of on scarcity and coercion."
"I'm hearing this from a fucking Air Force colonel? You're worse than Charlene Siph."
"You're hearing it from the guy who's gonna wring your scrawny neck if you come to Mars again. Now, you prolly don't give a shit about fluid overlays. You think you came up here to be with Tammy. But if you can somehow make yourself useful to Constellation society, I think you'll find it a rewarding experience. But, do it on the space station. Don't let me see you here."
"Look, just give her a message. Tell her I know what happened to the shipping containers."
"Are you threatening one of my men?"
"Oh, Mister Wring-my-neck thinks knowledge of the disposition of some shipping containers might constitute a threat? Also, your gender-neutral use of 'men' isn't nearly as endearing as you think it is."
"I got work to do, Mr. Blum. A dozen overlays need my attention."
"The first time we met, we— she doesn't even have to respond. Just tell her I know what they did with the shipping containers."
Constellation Games Page 32