Constellation Games (39 page)

From:
Public Affairs Office, Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs
To:
Ariel Blum
Subject:
Reminder: CONTACT audit January 4

Mr. Ariel Blum,

This is an automated reminder that your initial CONTACT audit is scheduled for 1:30 PM on Monday, January 4, at the following location:

B.E.A. FIELD OFFICE AUSTIN
2112 NOPALES DR.
AUSTIN, TX 78757

As mandated by the CONTACT act, all American persons registered as hosts or sponsors for Constellation citizens must undergo an in-person audit within eight months of their first physical contact, and again every six months thereafter. The audit is an informal, one-on-one conversation held under penalty of perjury, focusing on the registered person's recent interactions with their contact(s), as well as topics of current general interest. All information divulged during a CONTACT audit is kept confidential.

Although it may seem inconvenient, your CONTACT audit is among the most important steps you as an individual citizen can take to maintain good relations between Earth and the Constellation. Failure to report for a scheduled CONTACT audit is a crime, punishable by six (6) months in jail and/or a $1000 fine.

In most cases, CONTACT audits will take only five to ten minutes. However, since your audit is among the first to be processed by this office, you should allow for extra time. Unless otherwise informed, you do not need to bring any documentation or supplemental material.

Please do not reply to this automated message. To reschedule your appointment, or to request the presence of a Constellation observer during your audit, please call the location listed above.

From:
Ariel Blum
To:
Jenny Gallegos
Subject:
Do not open until...

Jenny,

If you're reading this you found the encryption passphrase I hid in your Christmas stocking. Yay, you. I need to tell someone a secret and I know you probably won't listen, but you're the only person I can tell who
might
listen. And maybe it would be better for everyone if you didn't listen after all.

Anyway, I recently spent twenty-five hours sitting at the bottom of a crater on the moon, doing absolutely fucking nothing. The reasons for this don't reflect well on me, and I don't recommend that anyone else try it, but the experience pushed me into a silence and stillness, and even a kind of calm, that has been missing from my life. And in this calm I was able to puzzle out some things that have been bothering me.

If you're still following my blog, you saw me write about FERNs, the big unfolding treelike things that the Gaijin are using to terraform Mars. Well, I was writing that post from the moon and I thought "You know, these are effectively carbon sinks. We should use them on Earth, to counteract global warming." Well, it turns out we *do* have them on Earth, except they don't look like trees. They look like shipping containers.

I can see them on Constellation satellite imagery, little pinpoints on the chemical concentration maps. Slowly reproducing themselves, fanning out from the Gulf of Mexico. Within a couple years, they'll start showing up on human satellite imagery. They're being introduced through the port that Curic brought to my house and allowed the BEA to think I'd kept.

(I took the fall for that port, without knowing why, and in exchange, Curic offered me her protection. I don't really trust Curic, and I don't know how far her "protection" goes, but it's gone pretty far already, and I definitely trust her more than I do the federal fucking government.)

Shipping companies lose thousands of containers every year. The empty ones fill with seawater and sink. If you wanted to introduce a bunch of carbon sinks into an ecosystem, and the panicky natives had just shouted down your previous attempt at un-ruining their planet, you could do a lot worse than disguising the carbon sinks as containers. Especially if you had Curic's sense of humor. The containers are soft-dolls, fake replicas, just like the you-know-whats that are really a you-know-what, which I assume you put somewhere safe because you didn't mention it when I called you yesterday.

But we can't rely on this shit indefinitely. Carbon sinks and methanophiles and Auslander kites are stopgap measures. They might work for, let's say, seventy years. Keep humanity from killing itself until that probe gets back to Constellation space, and the Slow People can help us reduce our carbon footprints to almost nothing. Or, hopefully, until Save the Humans can finally get some traction and pull us back from the fossilization line.

If Tetsuo knew about this, he'd have told me by now. The man simply has no filter between his brain and his mouth. The Constellation must have some verification protocol for coordinating between overlays that don't trust each other. Some way that Curic can reliably tell Tetsuo "You've got seventy years, now do your stuff and let us launch this probe and don't ask for details." And some part of Tetsuo must not *want* those details, because he knows he'll blab if he finds them out.

If I'd discovered this in July, *I* would have blabbed. Six months from now, I'll probably trust Curic enough that if I'd found out then, I'd let it remain a secret. But it's right now, not the past or the future, and I'm still not sure about Curic, so I'm only telling you.

Let's not put a bunch of personal stuff in this email, in case you end up showing it to the media. But I meant what I said last time. I'm working on a few projects that you might be interested in, but as per your request, I won't bother you about them until I'm done.

Your friend, (I hope)
Ariel

Tetsuo, my love,

"A static document is a fossil of thought." You told me that, soon after we met on the dead moon of the humans. When we first met, I-in-myself laughed at you, with your archaic recreations, your silly nostalgia for the barbaric past. Then you said: "fossil of thought," and showed me that I'm also embedded in the past at the expense of the present.

I'm used to interrogating data and talking to people. Why am I now creating a record of a fictional conversation in which you do not respond? I'm doing this because when you moved to Earth, you began writing letters to the children; letters that you clearly intended for me to read, the children not yet having hatched. Although according to the text, I was not even a party to this conversation, I read the documents and I learned things about you that I would never have known otherwise.

Now I will write you a letter, and maybe you will learn something about me. Something I have been hiding, or unwilling to admit, or something I didn't know myself.

Today I took the children to Human Ring. They scampered up and down my spine as I walked the road to the port, falling, squeaking, and climbing back up my arms. I worried and prepared for problems at the membrane between the Rings, but they took to the new atmosphere and gravity, more easily than I did. It's official: our children are properly biatmospheric.

Their personalities are emerging as well. Cerise is the explorer, running out ahead to make sure the way is safe for her brother and sister. Ariel is like her namesake, gentle and stubborn. For any given thing, Drew either loves it or can't stand it—I don't remember having such strong opinions about
anything
when I was this young!

When we first walked up into the open space at the center of Human Ring I screamed-to-myself: Destroyed! The
cma
torn down, down to the bare dirt! Our homes! The children!

Of course there was no danger. This is not my home; it's Human Ring. Ariel only terraformed it a few days ago. Of course the open space is nothing but air, dirt, and the central-cylinder sun with its strange yellow light. The Earth
cma
are newly cloned; they'll take years to grow.

I stood telling myself this, and the children ran ahead of me, digging in another planet's soil, leaping and circling each other. Heading in a less-than-random walk towards Ariel's new house: the tallest, and nearly the only structure on the inside of the Ring.

This is not another replica of his house from Austin (a house which, I realize now, I have seen and you have not). Ariel's new house is a series of rectangles stacked elegantly atop one another. It seems to me like the primitive form from which today's ugly human housing is derived.

Ariel was a small figure on the roof of the house. He waved a forehand at us and disappeared into the building. When we met outside the front door, I showed him the children.

Ariel said: "You named one after me? Wait, you named a girl after me?"

I said: "Ariel seemed to be primarily a girl's name." The children introduced themselves by swarming up Ariel's body, clutching tiny handfuls of his clothing.

Ariel said: "No, that's because... Do you know something? It's fine. They're cute." He put a tiny pink finger in Drew's mouth. I flinched:
Unclean! Alien!
Fortunately Ariel did not see me.

I said: "I want to know: did you design this house?"

Ariel barked a human laugh. "No. I discovered: I could live in a hallway in a replica of my old house, or I could live up here in the open space, in a house designed by the best architect of the twenty-first century."

"And how has your decision treated you?"

"Not too well. Every time I move from one room to another, I hit my hindarms against a piece of furniture."

I said: "Why call this architect the best, if she assaults your hindarms at every turn?"

Ariel looked at his house; it must have been with pride. He said: "It's really beautiful, and I'll get things to work. That's part of the charm. If you can have any house you want, it's good to give yourself a little challenge."

"What will grow around it?" A sudden fear grew in me that
nothing
would be growing, that this dead dirty place
was
Earth, and that humans liked it this way.

Ariel said: "
Cma
. Not as big as [Alien Ring]
cma
, but some good-sized Earth forests. Different biomes, some
eshbre
, meadows and shit. People can run around. You can already see the streams and the lakes." He looked upwards, past the central cylinder, to the tiny blue traces and puddles on the other side of the Ring. He said: "And not farms, but small wild gardens here and there. People will be exploring when they find an orchard or some fruit bushes."

I tried to imagine the Ring as it will appear when the vegetation sprouts. A rich green sight, like the one you must see every day. My imagination grasped a tiny, stunted
cma
rooted in the shadow of Ariel's house: the one he had brought up from Earth.

Ariel must have seen my imagining. He said: "Yes, it's obviously not ready yet. I'll show you one of the docking bays instead. The kids can play on the Anish Kapoors."

He and I and the children left the empty space at the center of Human Ring to simmer like the inside of an egg. We walked together towards the nearest docking bay ports.

Ariel said: "They're so angry at me."

"Who is angry?"

"Artists. People who know shit about art. I made unauthorized reproductions. I stole everyone's cultural treasures [He scratched at the air.] and grouped them together out of context. As if I were filling a warehouse. Well, most of this shit was in warehouses already. Now it's on display."

I said: "It's true, but not many people will see the display."

"People will. Governments are sending up people to survey the damage. [He scratched at the air again.] Normal people. Well, sort of normal. Curators and artists. They'll change Human Ring to fix all the weird shit I did. By that time, they'll be invested in it. It'll be a real place for them. Not something they see on TV.

"And in a few months, the vegetation will start growing in the open spaces. You can stop people from going to a space station, but you can't stop them from going to the park or the art museum."

What? What are these arbitrary rules? How does Ariel navigate his civilization to make these distinctions? You do it by seeing the humans a little out of focus, as though they were slightly odd Ip Shkoy. The children will grow up with Ariel; and, once it's safe, on Earth; I hope they will understand human civilization almost like natives. Somehow Daisy manages to live with the dolphins, an even more primitive and cruel culture.

Tetsuo, how can I do this? I'm alone in my very aloneness. How can I understand the people I assumed wouldn't be here anymore?

The children unanimously love the docking bay. As soon as we went through the port, they ran into one of the shiny, complex metal sculptures and hid from each other, squeaking and screaming.

Ariel said: "I show this one to everybody." He took me to an enormous triangular display surface about half his height. Set on the surface at intervals were elaborately painted circular sculptures, each surrounded by a consistent set of less important objects. Beneath each sculpture, one or two words written on the side of the display surface in elaborate Latin script: names?

I said: "This one doesn't fit."

"Fit?"

I said: "The other artworks here are very large. But this is a display area for several small pieces." The "less important objects," it occured to me, might be tools.

Ariel said: "It's all one piece. It's called
The Dinner Party
."

"An anthology." I stood on hindarms and lifted one of the circular sculptures. It was beautiful, and extraordinarily detailed, by human standards. No two sculptures were alike.

I said: "The smaller sculptures are all the same, mass-produced. But these larger sculptures..."

Ariel said: "Dining plates. Plates, and the smaller sculptures are dining tools."

"The techniques of mass production were known at the time. This means it's important that each plate was designed individually. Who are the artists?"

Ariel said: "Judy Chicago is the artist."

"One person?"

"She had a lot of help."

"From the people named beneath the plates?"

"No. Those are the women invited to the hypothetical party."

I said: "The work is beautiful, but I don't know any of these names. I don't know enough to understand this."

"Jenny showed it to me the day we met. She showed me a bad picture of it from a web page. All I could think of was: 'This is just a bunch of plates.' Now I have been around Jenny for ten years. I can appreciate the beauty of the plates. But to me they're still just plates. I feel uncultured, like the people who can't understand that video games are works of art."

Ariel put his forehands not quite on one of the plates, as if obeying a taboo against touching works of art. He said: "But now I have my own copy of
The Dinner Party
. When I show it to people like you, they don't see the plates. They only see the beauty. In a sense I think you can appreciate pieces like this better than a human can."

No, Ariel is wrong. We are supposed to see the plates. The first thing you are supposed to see about this sculpture is that there are plates and dining tools. Bringing in an extraterrestrial is cheating.

An artwork is not just a way to deliver beauty, just as a game is not just a way to deliver feedback-fun. The artists of the plates are sending a message that I cannot receive.

I didn't say this to Ariel because I didn't want to argue with him through a translator. I felt entirely helpless. Tetsuo, I'm telling you this hoping that you can explain it to him in English.

In the far distance, beyond sculptures and sculptures, four humans—more humans than I've ever seen in one place—they came from behind a large glass sphere built by some long-ago human to send some message. The four humans held large bags. They weaved a slow silent path through the artworks, always looking upwards. They didn't notice us.

Ariel said quietly: "You see? Visitors."

I asked: "Who are they?"

"Probably big-shots of the art world. They're overwhelmed. Then they'll feel guilty that a slob like me overwhelmed them by putting a lot of big things in a big room. They'll want to remake this space into a proper museum. Which is fine. I'll just contact the welcome wagon overlay so they don't trip and kill themselves." Ariel took his computer out of a pocket and curled-low on the floor to type.

The children had rejoined us. They climbed onto the triangular display surface, pushing aside the dining tools. Cerise assembled her courage and, turning to make sure I was watching her, took a long leap off
The Dinner Party
. Her exploring fingers slipped on an empty polished floor and she rolled onto her back. Her brother and sister jumped on her belly and rolled into a play-fighting ball. Cerise, always moving forward.

I had spot-seen the empty space next to
The Dinner Party
, but assumed it was the airlock where a shuttle docks. Now that the children were playing in the space, I suspected danger. I focused and saw there was no airlock on the floor and so no danger. The children were playing in an empty space thirty meters across: the place where a work of art was not.

I asked: "What is this? An exploration of negative space?" Me-in-myself said: "If so, I can understand this. The one constant in the universe is emptiness."

Ariel looked up from his computer. He said: "Jenny wanted to make a sculpture of Mecha-godzilla out of stainless steel. Life size. Like Jeff Koons, except cool. She called it
Protector of Earth.
"

"It goes here?"

"Yeah." Ariel stood up and edged around the space where the sculpture of Mecha-godzilla was not.

I remembered Ariel telling me that Jenny never exhibits her work. I said: "Oh, she hasn't had it scanned."

"She never
made
it, Somn. The materials are too {{{requiring the exchange of more scarcity-surrogate than is available to her}}}. Even if you could get them, it's impossible to build an two-hundred-foot stainless steel robot within the Austin city limits. And who's going to {{{exchange scarcity-surrogate for}}} such a huge piece, from an artist who hasn't had a gallery show since college? If someone does {{{exchange scarcity-surrogate for it}}}, how do you move it? It was a totally impractical idea."

Ariel pushed his lips together as humans do when they're pleased with something. He held his forehands out towards the empty space, the same way he had almost touched
The Dinner Party
.

He said: "But she can build it here. One day she'll be able to come up to the space station, and if she wants to, she can build
Protector of Earth
. Right here, next to
The Dinner Party
. This spot is saved for her. I won't let anyone else put anything here."

Every object in the docking bays and down these halls holds a message some human was trying to send. I can't read the messages of
The Dinner Party
or the other objects. But I understand the message of the empty space. I can even read the part of the message that Ariel didn't say out loud, because the message he wants to send to Jenny is the one I want to send to you.

When I was younger—that makes it seem like I was a child. It was less than a local year ago! Before I joined the contact mission, when I experienced failures of communication, I found comfort in the knowledge that one day I and everyone else would live as Slow People. We'd be able to share our thoughts without the intermediaries of time or language. These artworks that fill Human Ring would no longer be necessary; these messages with their elaborate subtexts and statements by omission.

To come here, I gave that promise up. Here, I met you, the one person whose thoughts I most want to know. But we will always be alien to each other. The children, every atom of whom was once part of me, will be alien to their parents.

Unless—I hate me-in-myself for thinking this!—unless Plan C's port arrives at Constellation space before I die. Or—this is a little better—maybe we can reinvent uploading, on this side of the port. Then I can try to convince you that you are capable of more good work than will fit into one mortal lifetime. That you, my crusader, my Saver of Humans, deserve to live forever, more than do the cynical decadents and the apathetic clock-watchers we left behind in Constellation space. Is it too much to hope for? That one day we might all be together in the way I was taught a family should be?