Constellation Games (16 page)

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?

"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 lump 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."

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
. Some 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?"

...

...

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Okay.

Let's start in the docking bay. My bag was slung over my shoulder and I was saying goodbye to Curic, Tetsuo, and Ashley. Ion was on duty, so I was the only human in the docking bay. Possibly the only human in Human Ring, and about to leave.

"This time," said Tetsuo, like he was delivering a commencement address, "its productivity has been tremendous. The two of us have greatly expanded humanity's knowledge of the post-contact Ip Shkoy civilization."

"Yeah," I said, "I'm not a hundred percent convinced that's a good thing."

"But what I said was technically true. And I think the Goyim philosopher Hushxnau said it best: 'Truth is good.'"

"There's got to be someone who said it better than that."

"I brought you a souvenir," said Curic.

"Thanks," I said, "but Tetsuo gave me so much Ip Shkoy crap, there's no room in my bag. I had to leave all my extra clothes here."

"Stick it in the overhead compartment," said Curic. "It's important." She lifted a large piece of burnished metal from her fanny pack and passed it to me two-handed.

"Oof," I said. It was a grid of tightly nestled metal gears suspended atop a mechanism of rods, cranks, and knobs. The gears had five or six faces, each with a symbol engraved on it. It looked like something Charles Babbage would invent to handicap the ponies.

"This is a mechanical game," said Curic, "from the planet Gliese 777Ad."

"Where's that?"

"It orbits Gliese 777A."

"That's where it is," said Ashley, like she had checked.

"It's a replica, of course," said Curic. "The original was eight times larger, but metal is a little scarce around here, and it probably wouldn't fit in the shuttle anyway."

"This looks like gold," I said. I set it down on the shuttle floor with a clunk.

"It is. An alloy of gold and copper."

I jump-fell away from the machine. "Are you nuts? I couldn't bring a
carrot
up here without having it cavity searched. How am I going to get a damn gold ingot through Customs?"

"It didn't occur to me," said Curic. "I'll make you a replacement of pure copper." Curic picked up the machine and held it to her belly.

"Who had that much gold?"
That's the single most valuable thing I've ever seen. I could get her to drop-ship that to me, I'd never need money again.
(Yes, go to the bank and deposit thirty pounds of gold. That's a great plan.)

"Gold is as common on Gliese 777Ad as lead is on Earth," said Curic. "Luck of the draw."

No one needs to see the whole thing. Pull out those little rods, sell them three at a time.
I looked at Tetsuo and Ashley so I wouldn't be looking at the machine. "Who's on 777Ad? Why don't they show up in the game database?"

"This is where I was born," said Curic. "On a contact mission in the 1960s, your reference frame. A lot of people reproduced near the end, when it looked like we'd be returning to Constellation space.

"The gears are
samsara
knots. What you would call cellular automata. You set their initial state—with tweezers, for the replica—and then turn the crank to run the algorithm." She turned it to demonstrate. The gears spun in little bursts, coming to rest on one face, then another.

"Ah," I said, "it's like Conway's Life."

"That's a cruel thing to say!"

"That's the name of a game," I said.

"Oh."

"It's beautiful," I said, "but why are you giving it to me?"

"We went there," said Curic, looking down at the machine she was cradling. "In your nineteenth century, my ancestors were part of a contact mission to the 777 system. We found a radioactive rock on one of 777Ad's moons, a rock that shouldn't have been there. On 777Ad itself, we found some technology like this. We found their cities. And we found them, the people who made these entertainments. But they were all dead."

"Fossilized?" I said.

"Not fossilized, no," said Ashley, as though her professional pride were at stake. "They were mummified."

"There was a virus," said Curic, "that tore apart their equivalent of DNA. It was probably engineered. Four thousand years ago, it killed everything on the planet, except for some isolated life near volcanic deep-sea vents. Anything that might have decomposed a body was also dead."

I didn't want the golden game anymore.

"You can imagine what it looked like when we landed," Curic continued. "As archaeology, it was perfect. Everything very well preserved. No living natives to complicate your reading of history. As a contact mission, it was an utter failure. Probably the worst in six hundred million years."

"It was not a failure," said Tetsuo, as though this were well-covered ground.

"Yeah, not your fault," I said. "They were dead when you got there. Sounds like a classic Plan A."

"It was an easy failure. No decisions to make, no culpability. Something like this happens... most of the time. Almost every time. But we had never come to a planet only a few years after the entire biosphere had died out."

"Four thousand years."

"That's not very long, Ariel!" said Curic. "This is context! Tens of thousands of people on
this
contact mission were born at 777Ad. We grew up outside the Constellation and we don't fit in with the rest of society, so we volunteered to come here. And here we found you, right on the other edge of the fossilization line.

"When we make our choices, we're thinking about the people who made this game. We're deciding to stand with you or to run away from you."

"Um," said Tetsuo, to break the silence. "Well, I just have a book about games that I translated for you." He handed it to me—more Ip Shkoy crap. "And a list of things I'd like you to bring up from Earth, the next time you come."

Tetsuo crouched, pressed his forehead against mine, and whispered. "Listen. Not everyone joins a contact mission because they feel guilty. I was born in Constellation space, and you're a lot more interesting than civilized people. So..." He made a complicated sweeping gesture with his forehands that did in fact convey: "Don't worry too much about Curic."

I looked at Tetsuo's list. "Why do you want me to bring olive oil?"

Tetsuo stood back up on his hindarms. "I saw advertisements for it," he said. "It looks delicious."

I stepped into the shuttle. "This was the trip of my life," I said. "I'll see you again soon." The lid of the shuttle closed and I shut my eyes and fell to Earth.

It wasn't nearly as bad going back down as it was going up. Mainly because I knew to close my eyes. I'm sure I was missing some magnificent view of Earth getting closer and closer, but if I want that kind of experience, I can just zoom in on a map.

Waiting for me at the spaceport like unwelcome relatives were BEA Agents Krakowski and Fowler. Since I saw them last, they'd gone native: They wore cowboy hats, like Texas Rangers. Black Stetsons with string ties.

"Hey, it's m'favorite asset!" said Krakowski.

"Um, hi..."

"Some desk pilot back in Washington told us it was a waste of time to give an exit visa to someone investigating million-year-old video games," said Krakowski. He chortled. "A waste of time!"

"Then you showed us
Ev luie Aka's Ultimate Yada Yada
," said Fowler. "Bam!" He clapped me on the back. Krakowski picked up my duffel and Fowler steered me towards one of the increasingly permanent-looking temporary buildings that had sprouted up around the landing site.

"Now they've got people scrambling to find out everything they can about every previous contact attempt," said Krakowski. "You and me, we're going places."

"You don't fuck with the field agents!" said Fowler, pumping his fist in the air.

"Guys, I'm feeling a sense of dread that only increases with every step I take in your presence."

"Occupational hazard, Blum," said Krakowski. "This will be one sweet debriefing. We'll get you through Customs real quick." We walked towards a brand-new metal trailer.

Krakowski tilted up the brim of his Stetson and whispered in my ear. "Am I resetting your jury duty clock, buddy?" he said.

"No," I whispered. "No one mentioned Slow People."

"Well, keep listening," said Krakowski, and backed out of my personal space. But then Fowler wanted in on the whispering action.

"Hey, Blum," he said. "The CBP lady, who does Customs."

"Yeah?"

"She's got great tits."

"Customs" meant "taking my stuff." Under the unblinking gaze of the CBP lady, Fowler and Krakowski stole my Constellation spacesuit.

"Hey, that's my spacesuit!" I said as they wrapped it in plastic and boxed it. "It was all bespoke and shit."

"So they can make you another one," said Krakowski.

"Yeah, you don't need it down here," said Fowler.

"I was going to go diving in it," I said.

"You can keep the next one," said Krakowski. "Where's your grav kicker? The zero-gee transit device?"

"Curic took it back," I said, "before I left. Said something about governments confiscating them for use as crowd control weapons."

"Oh, that Curic," said Krakowski playfully. "Anything else? More electronics, souvenirs?"

"Buncha Ip Shkoy crafts, and a book," I said. Fowler reached into my bag and picked out the book Tetsuo had translated for me. He showed it to Krakowski.

"
Exert Dominion Over Friends Using Gaming Tactics Unmatchable Unless Your Friends Also Own This Book
," Krakowski read. He flipped through it, peered at Tetsuo's shopping list. "Go ahead and keep this."

"Sign for the spacesuit," said Fowler. The CBP lady handed me her clipboard. The reimbursement rate for a Constellation spacesuit is three hundred dollars. It's taxable income.

Now debriefing time. Krakowski and Fowler's office was a trailer next door to the stealing-your-stuff trailer. Muted televisions perched on one wall, scrolling closed captions upwards like incense fumes.

The agents pulled off their hats. "All right, Blum." said Krakowski. He sat across a desk from me. "First off, you're not a fuckin spy."

"Pardon me?"

"Nobody's on your ass for actionable intelligence. You're part of a civilian cultural exchange and there are people who would kill for the experience you just had. So stop acting so damn persecuted."

"Curic called me a spy," I said.

"Well, you're not. Spies get paid." Fowler filled a conical cup with water from a water cooler and handed it to Krakowski, who handed it to me. "That in mind, let's start with general impressions. What's it like up there? Any problems?"

"You haven't been?"

"Who says
we
can go up?" said Krakowski with a tone that was close enough to irony for government work. "We're just the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs."

Fowler stood behind Krakowski and mouthed "Pa-per-work" while making a scribbling motion.

"Well, the beds are terrible," I said. "And the Repertoire food is also bad, no thanks to you guys and your wanton carrot destruction."

"That's the TSA!" said Krakowski, like, don't pin that on me!

"And every other species has a nice home-planet environment in their Ring, but we've got the fucking post office, because they listened to
you
while they were building our home in the stars!"

Agent Krakowski stuck his elbow on the desk and used two fingers to prop up his forehead. "Ariel," he said. "I used to be an analyst, at Homeland Security, yeah? And I took this job. This job driving around, collecting eyewitness reports, managing exit visas,
babysitting
. I took whatever job I could get at the BEA, because I knew that this career path was the closest I'd ever get to being in Starfleet.

"I want this contact mission to be the best thing that ever happened to the human race. I do not want this country or this species to stop existing because somebody made a mistake I could have prevented, or made an assumption I should have checked. So when you come down from the
space station
with your pissant complaints about the
interior decoration
... well, I get a little annoyed."

"He gets annoyed," said Fowler, who'd mistaken Krakowski's rant for the opening salvo of a good-cop bad-cop routine.

"I'm sorry," I said. "It just feels like we fundamentally don't understand each other. It really worries me."

"Are you talking about us and the Constellation?" said Krakowski. "Or you and me?"

Behind Krakowski was Fowler and behind Fowler something caught my eye on the television. "What's that on TV?" I asked.

Fowler shrugged. "TV stuff," he said, without turning around.

"Those are Constellation spacesuits, on Earth. The sky's blue. Did I miss something when I was in Ring City?"

That got them to look. All three televisions on the back wall showed handicam footage of ETs and large robots standing on an ice sheet in the dead light of an Antarctic noon. The camera swung back to show a group of humans in cold-weather gear, towering above a gesticulating Farang with frost collecting on his/her fur.

TWO CUBIC KILOMETERS AT A
TIME,

said the closed captions.

WE TAG ITS COORDINATES. WE
SLIDE THE PORT OVER IT.

"Turn it up," said Krakowski.

"How much are you going to remove?" A human voice spoke over heavy wind and was echoed in the closed captions.

"As much of it as we can," said George Clooney choppily. The Farang didn't speak English; he/she was using a vocalizer. "It's a delicate balance, you understand."

Cut back to the CNN newsroom. "...In what some people are calling an extraterrestrial plot to steal Earth's ice caps. New footage from the international Polar Climate Study expedition..."

"Sweet Jayzus!" said Fowler. "Just like
Ultimate Lift-Off
predicted. They'll dig us up, just like they dug up the moon."

"No!" I said. "Fuck on
toast
. Why would anyone steal
seawater
?"

"I heard there was an engine that runs on seawater," said Fowler, "but the government covered it up."

"You're the effing government!"