Constellation Games (24 page)

I toyed around with an idea and decided to bring it into the real world. "Dana," I asked, "is ambivalence a real thing with Farang?"

"Yeah, it's real."

"Because Tetsuo and I played this Ip Shkoy game where we were the two halves of a Farang. And if we didn't cooperate with each other, pfft, ambivalence, game over."

"It wasn't very common," said Dana, "but they worried about it a lot. The way you might worry about pissing your pants in public."

There was a crucial flaw in Dana's logic. "Except I don't worry about that," I said.

Dana unscrewed her monocle and breathed on it. "Because you've been conditioned," she said. She buffed her monocle on the sleeve of her cheerleading sweater. "When you were a little boy, your parents beat you with a stick to get you to piss in the toilet."

"Nobody beat me with a stick!" I said. "Is that your impression of humanity? My parents offered me red licorice to pee in the toilet, and I've never regretted taking that deal."

Fake Dana Light considered this defense of my parents more or less skippable. "However it happened," she said. "You were conditioned, and so are Farang. That's what was going on in the school in
Sayable Spice
. Personality integration. You can't go through life like King Hzme."

"But sometimes it happens," I said. "I get that feeling myself. I waffle back and forth, I can't make a decision. I'm ambivalent. And I don't know what an Alien would do in that situation—"

"We'd pick an option at random and create
post hoc
rationalizations," said Dana. "Humans do it, too."

"—but couldn't a Farang split the difference between their selves? Hedge their bets, if there were good arguments on both sides?"

"You should ask Curic," said Dana. "I keep telling you I'm not based on a Farang psychology."

"Curic's the one I'm
worried
about," I said. "I think half of her joined Save the Humans way back when, and the other half joined Plan C. Half of her told me to look for information about the Constellation Shipping container, and an hour later the other half said it wasn't important. She's hiding information from her crossself, and I don't think either of them even knows it's happening."

Dana gave me a stern look. "Someone with that kind of mental discipline wouldn't become ambivalent in the first place. You're saying that Curic is pissing herself, but because her bladder muscles are so strong, none of the urine escapes her cloaca."

"I'm more worried about my friend's problem than with coming up with the perfect urine-related analogy for the problem."

"It's not realistic," said Dana. "To pull this trick on each other, both you and your crossself would have to be sociopaths."

"You're not helping!"

[Entry backdated from October 13: The blog post after this one is a lie that I had to post, for reasons which should become obvious. This entry is what actually happened on September 2.—A.B.]

A knock at the door.

"Geez, Bai must have got off work early," I said, getting off the couch.

"He's still jealous of my work," said Dana. "You need to have a talk with him."

I untaped Dana's smart paper from the TV screen and folded her up to give to Bai. "He's your boyfriend," I said. "You talk to him."

"It's not my job to coordinate a relationship between myself and two males."

"On this planet, we have human gender roles," I said. "I'm a human, Bai's a human, and you're designed to approximate human behavior. This is about your relationship with him, so he's your responsibility."

I opened the door. It wasn't Bai. It was BEA agents Fowler and Krakowski.

"Oh, hi," I said.

"Where's your end of the port, Blum?" said Fowler.

"The fuck are you talking about?"

"Watch your fucking mouth!" Krakowski snapped. I slid Dana into my pocket. "Last night," Krakowski continued, "you went to Ring City."

"Circumventing passport control," said Fowler. "Which is extremely illegal."

"You spoke with a Schedule A superorganism," said Krakowski. "Namely, Her."

"Without clearance and without following the safety protocols," said Fowler.

"Curic and Her set it up," I said. "It wasn't my idea. It was like jury duty."

"Two hundred other people with Constellation contacts spoke with Her last night," said Krakowski.

I shrugged. "I didn't see anyone else."

"So your defense is that you didn't see anyone else talking to the massively distributed colony organism," said Krakowski.

"It's not a 'defense'," I said.

"No shit, Sherlock!" said Fowler.

"Two hundred people, Blum," said Krakowski. "Immediately before the Constellation signed the Greenland Treaty. We can't do anything but quietly complain about it, or we look like chumps. But something happened last night. I think the fate of fucking humanity was decided last night."

"I swear to G-d," I said, "we talked about video game design. Her is afraid that we're going to end up like the Inostrantsi. Lost in a virtual world. That's it. I didn't say anything, I wasn't promised anything—"

"Oh," said Krakowski. "That's cute. You think we give two-tenths of a shit what you talked about with Her."

"We don't care, Blum," said Fowler. "It's water under the bridge."

"No, Fowler," said Krakowski, completely losing his cool without doing anything as drastic as looking at Fowler or raising his voice. "It is not water under the bridge; we just don't care. You can repeat what I say, but do not fucking
elaborate
."

"Where's the port, Blum?" said Fowler.

"Just shut up, Fowler. Look. Most folks who spoke with Her last night were picked up by unscheduled shuttle drop. We know that you went up, but our witnesses don't remember you from a docking bay or the reception chamber. And we didn't see a shuttle drop anywhere near Austin. What we did see was our nation's missile defense system suffering a software failure because it detected an incoming object with negative mass."

"Okay," I said. "Yes, there was a port. Curic dropped a telepresence robot with one end of a port, and I walked through it onto Ring City. And then I walked back out and went back to sleep."

"So where's the port
now
, Blum?" demanded Fowler.

"Why did you even
get
a port?" said Krakowski. "That's very very unusual. What's special about you, or about Curic? Do you have any ideas?"

"Guys, I have an existential horror of space travel," I said. "On top of my existential horror of being covered with fucking trilobites and put on trial. Trial-obites, if you will."

"I don't think I will," said Krakowski.

"Curic brought me a port so I wouldn't have to take another shuttle ride. It was an act of mercy."

"So where's the port now?" said Krakowski.

"Where is it?!" said Fowler, like,
finally!

"I dunno," I said. "It wasn't here this morning. Curic took it back."

"You're saying that you let the most advanced piece of technology in the universe just sit overnight on your front porch?"

"You know how you
make
a port?" said Fowler. "You have to use a black hole as a lathe."

"It wasn't mine," I said, "and I was exhausted, and I don't understand how ports work, so I didn't touch it. I went inside and drank some tequila and fell asleep. Curic must have taken it back."

"How?" said Fowler. "You can't push a port through itself."

"And the missile defense system only crashed once," said Krakowski. "So either you're a complete
fucking
moron..."

"Or maybe you still have the port," said Fowler. "Somewhere in your house."

"Well," I said after a pause, "I guess I'm a fucking moron, because I never saw the port after last night. Did you check around the side?"

"You're not a moron, Blum," said Fowler. "You're good at computer stuff."

"Guys, you need to talk to Curic about this."

"We
are
talking to him," said Krakowski. "But I think we have more leverage over you."

"Well, your honesty is refreshing..."

"Portable wormholes are very expensive," said Krakowski. "Maybe not for the Constellation itself. But for one of its scientific expeditions? Pretty expensive.

"I think Curic gave you the port in exchange for something. Maybe some information, maybe a promise of some kind? He gave you the port so you can go up and see your girlfriend whenever you want. Aaaand... what'd he get? Help me out here."

"I don't have the port."

"You're playing a dangerous game, my man," said Krakowski. "Curic's not your friend. He doesn't care about you
or
America."

"He's a representative of a foreign government," said Fowler, as if this were somehow cheating.

"We gathered some good intelligence together, the three of us," said Krakowski. "Don't let it end like this."

"We've got the authority to tear this place apart," said Fowler. "Unless you give us the port."

"Tear the place apart?" I said. "The way you did on... I believe it was July twentieth?"

"What makes you think we were here on the twentieth?" said Fowler in a very flat tone.

Aha! I'd hurt them, and they were fishing for information. I tried to reel them in a little.

"You were very careful," I said. "I'll give you that. You put everything back the way it was. But you made the mistake of opening a Constellation packing crate." I nodded at Krakowski. "It took your picture. I made copies."

"That fucking snitch crate!" said Fowler.

"Calm down, man," said Krakowski. "No one's gonna believe a packing crate over two federal agents. And no one's gonna care what we do while we're searching an illegal emigrant's house."

Okay, that didn't work.

"Just give us the port," said Fowler, "and we'll go."

"Don't make us do this," said Krakowski, very quietly. His eyes were closed.

I looked out past the agents to the curb. Their biodiesel government car was nowhere to be seen. The only car on the street was a moving van. The kind of van you could use to hide a SWAT team or a rendition team, if you wanted to be sneaky about it.

"Don't make you do what?" I said.

"Condemn your house," said Krakowski.

"Oh," I said in relief.

"Oh, what did you think?" said Krakowski. He seemed genuinely hurt. "We're not the CIA! We have
standards
!"

"Wait! My house? I got a mortgage to pay!"

"We'll compensate you for any damage to your property," said Krakowski. "Which, depending on how Curic helped you hide the port, may be considerable."

"I don't like your compensation rates," I said. "You gave me three hundred bucks for a Constellation spacesuit."

"Then tell us where the port is," said Fowler, clenching and unclenching his fists.

"I can't prove a negative, guys," I said. "I don't have the port. I don't know what Curic did with it."

Krakowski sighed. "Briefcase," he said. Fowler opened his briefcase with a click and held it out to his partner. Krakowski pulled a sheet of paper out of it, peeled off the sticky base, reached behind my head, and stuck it to my front door.

"The Austin Building Inspection Division has condemned this property due to pervasive structural defects," said Krakowski. He took an envelope out of the briefcase, pushed into my hands. "And this is a National Security Letter. Read it. It bars you from discussing this case with anybody."

"Details?" I said. "Like someone took my house away? That's a little hard to explain."

"Your house burned down," said Fowler. "You blew out the electrical system with one of those alien Nintendos."

"I want to talk to a lawyer," I said.

"You'll get a lawyer," said Krakowski. "But right now you'll get the hell out of this house."

"I got important documents in here!" I said. "My phone! My passport!"

"You can pick up your passport," said Krakowski, "once we stamp it so you never get another exit visa."

"Out," said Fowler, jerking his thumb towards the sidewalk.

Krakowski frog-marched me to the edge of the property line. I watched six thugs in moving company uniforms climb out of the moving truck and go through the door of my condemned house.

"I really hope you're lying," said Krakowski. "I do not want to have to track down a missing port. It could be across the planet by now."

"This is un-be-fucking-lievable," I said.

"This is a valuable lesson," said Krakowski. "Learn the lesson and you'll come out ahead."

"What's the lesson?"

"Don't go freelance," said Krakowski. "It just makes trouble for everybody." He turned and walked back to my house.

I went around the corner and three blocks away I pulled Dana out of my pocket. "Fuck!" I said.

"Yes," said Dana.

"Fuuuuuuck!"

"Let's move on," said Dana.

"But I like it here at 'fuuuuuck'!"

"They don't want the port," said Dana. "They want me. They let an artificial intelligence slip through their fingers, and now they're coming after me. You have to hide me, Ariel."

"They're not coming after you," I said. "They didn't even pat me down. They don't know you exist. They think you're a six-foot-four mail-order bride named Svetlana."

"If they search you," said Dana, more to herself than to me, "I will disguise myself as a flyer for a chiptune concert."

"Maybe they want what's in the crates," I said. "Why don't they just take the crates? G-d, what am I supposed to do? I don't even have my phone."

"I'm a phone," said Dana.

"Can you call Ring City? Maybe Curic can stop this."

"I'm a
human
phone," said Dana.

"I can't go to the BEA field office and pass her a note."

"Just get me in the vicinity of the port," said Dana. "I'll reintegrate with Smoke and call for help."

"You too? I don't have the port!"

"I thought you were lying," said Dana. "And very brave."

"Sorry, neither."

"You fooled me," said Dana. "You're a very skilled liar."

"Dana, that's... that's not a compliment."

"I'll call Jenny," said Dana.

"What can Jenny do? Sculpt at them?"

"She can give you a place to live."