Constellation Games (11 page)

(8:22 AM) The Transportation Security Administration: making space travel as fun as renewing your passport!

(8:24 AM) I brought stuff to add to the Repertoire's colln of human food. TSA dude pulled it all apart. Not looking forward to Ring City repro meals.

(8:29 AM) Waiting room is small. I am the only person here. Just me and the vending machine.

(8:29 AM) TSA dude probably moonlights as janitor, or they have the National Guard do it.

(10:30 AM) @OMJennyG No, even the carrot was snapped in half. At least he was wearing gloves.

(8:35 AM) Bought a bottle of water from the vending machine.

(8:41 AM) Best liveblogging ever.

(8:44 AM) I allowed extra time for nonexistent lines and got here two hours early. I guess I'll just take

(8:51 AM) the next shuttle. Sorry, the next shuttle arrived just as I typed that. Now standing inside it.

(8:53 AM) Shuttle is a big glass dome. Could hold 20 people (humans). I feel like a pie in a diner.

(8:53 AM) My pilot today is Smoke-Motor-Allotrope-Mimicry-Diurnal-Trainer.

(8:54 AM) Smoke-Motor-etc. says hello. It also says: "
Erb
to Ring City from Austin, USA. Next Earth connection Casablanca, Morocco."

(8:55 AM) oh shit

(8:59 AM) I'm dictating now because if I open my eyes to type I'll die. The Earth is gone. It just fell, down, and then the clouds, fell, down.

(8:59 AM) And now the stars are coming out and I'm standing on nothing, while everything else falls away from me.

(9:00 AM) There's no acceleration. I have the worst nausea of my life and I'm not even moving.

(9:00 AM) I'm going to open my eyes. One. Two. Three.

(9:00 AM) I am I am I am alone in space. There is nothing for a million miles but this little bubble of air.

(9:03 AM) Oh God. Oh God. Let this be over.

(9:04 AM) Someone's shining a light on me. I hope it's the space station.

(9:05 AM) Docking bay, human ring. Please step out.

(9:05 AM) Please come back for your 60 centimeter blue duffel bag. I don't want to leave with your stuff.

(9:05 AM) Thanks for coming back for your bag!

(9:44 AM) Hello,. I am Tetsuo. I anm using Ariekl's complutesr.

In the very first level of
Temple Sphere
you fall out of an exploding spaceship, go through reentry and land on your ass on an alien planet. All in glorious high definition and optional autostereoscopic 3D. I'm not an idiot who believes video game skills map perfectly to real life, but I thought I would be able to handle a trip from a
planet
to a
space station
in a
non-exploding
spaceship.

Turns out this is a totally different skill. Real space travel requires coming to terms with the vastness of the universe and your insignificance in the face it all. And I never learned how to do that. The less said about my first journey into lunar orbit, the better.

Ring City is made up of 26 ring-shaped habitats, each with a different atmosphere and each rotating at a different rate around a weightless central cylinder. So that you get a picture of the scale, Alien Ring holds about four million people; Farang Ring, only about a million, even though Farang are tiny.

The population of Human Ring is about five hundred, half of those being Eritrean refugees, the other half being diplomats, "diplomats", and media. (The astronauts live in the central cylinder, so that we won't have wasted all the money we spent training them for weightlessness.)

With only a couple hundred government-approved humans trickling in and out of Ring City, you could do all the arrivals and departures through the reception chamber. That'd be a kick, huh? Go through that same airlock, pretend you're part of the original gang who made first contact. A nice quiet friendly human-sized space to introduce you to the station.

And the Constellation shuttles
were
sending everyone through the reception chamber, but then the UN stepped in and said they wanted to preserve that whole area as a historical memorial. So now the shuttles dock in bays along the circumference of Human Ring, way out in the boonies, twenty-five miles from the central cylinder. And no one will be there to pick you up.

Where the Human Ring reception chamber is cozy, a Human Ring docking bay is a single empty room the size of an airport. Like some farcical reprise of the vast-emptiness-of-space theme I just got hit over the head with. This is a room built to shift
populations
. (Hey, kids, shall we go to the moon this weekend? It might be a
little crowded!
) Big docking airlocks pocking the floor every hundred feet. And two big statues in the middle of the room. Must be the middle, right? Where else would you put the only things in the airport taller than an inch?

The shuttle I'd came in on dropped down through the airlock. (Back down to Earth, hoping vainly that someone would be waiting to board—I must have made that shuttle's day.) I walked towards the statues. Because this huge room contains only two places: near the statues, or not near them. And over in "near the statues" I'd be easier to find.

I started a video chat with Curic. "Hi," said Curic. "I'm quite busy."

"I took an earlier shuttle," I said. The phone service was actually better up here than on Earth.

"I am aware," said Curic. "You announced this fact to the universe twenty-four minutes ago. My friend Tetsuo is on his way. He's eager to meet you."

"Tetsuo? Isn't that a human name?"

"Tetsuo is an Alien. A historian, and possibly a descendant, of the Ip Shkoy Aliens."

"Okay, tell Tetsuo I'm in the docking bay with the big nude statues."
Remember, kids, we're in the elephant lot!

"Every docking bay has those statues," said Curic.

"Why? To scare people away? 'Cause it's working. Do the Farang Ring bays have big nude statues of Farang?"

The statues were of a man and a woman. Like Ring City itself, they were made from matter-shifted moon rock. The poses looked familiar. The man had his right hand raised, bent stiffly at the elbow, like an Italian character actor playing an Indian in a dumb spaghetti western. The woman was kind of slouching. Now I was close enough to compare the statues to my own height. They were forty feet tall and they didn't reach halfway to the vaulted ceiling.

Curic in the chat window flibbed her antennacles at me. "
Your
species designed those statues," she said. "You sent out space probes with drawings of these people. You clearly considered this an acceptable interspecies greeting."

"Oh yeah," I said. "It's Adam and Eve from Carl Sagan's gold record. Wait, did the Constellation
find
those probes?"

"No, we looked up the designs on the Internet."

Up close the statues were cartoonish and lacked detail: a bell curve carved into Adam's chest suggesting a six-pack. I waited for Tetsuo beneath Eve's phantom vagina.

When Tetsuo came there were two of him: two Aliens on a silent Constellation motorcycle, like Komodo dragons, muscles taut under the skin.

The motorcycle stopped on a dime. The Alien who was steering was enormous, dinosaur-size, mottled green and brown. The one in the bitch seat was a little smaller, "only" eight feet long, bright orange. They both looked at me with big nictating anime eyes.

"Uh, hi," I said. "Are you guys Tetsuo?"

"I am Tetsuo Milk!" announced the Alien in the bitch seat, like he planned to follow up this revelation with some sleight-of-hand, maybe a little ventriloquism. "Curic is my friend." He hugged the driver. "This one here is Ashley Somn. He is, in English... my wife."

"Sorry,
he
is your
wife
?"

"No, the other one.
She
is my wife." Tetsuo and Ashley made a coughing noise like this was really funny.

The two Aliens clambered off the motorcycle and stretched on all fours like dogs. Tetsuo had been sitting on a folded pile of plastic: he grabbed it with a hindarm and tossed it to me. "Enshroud yourself in this," he said.

"What is it?" I held the plastic by one edge and let it unfold flip-flip-flip like the photos of the grandkids in an old man's wallet. It was a spacesuit.

"It's a spacesuit," I said. Tetsuo's body heat had not warmed it at all.

"Curic said you wanted to visit the moon," said Tetsuo.

"She didn't
ask
me if I wanted to visit the moon," I said. "That just happens to be incredibly true."

We all slipped into our spacesuits, which looked more like transparent clean-room suits than anything you'd trust to space. My suit was tailored to my measurements, or at least the measurements of all the clothes in my house that Curic scanned on the Fourth. Ashley and Tetsuo's suits had dark charcoal moon dust ground into the creases.

"Attach your computer to the spacesuit," said Tetsuo, "and you can use it instead of suit-to-suit radio. It's a convenience!"

"Computer? Oh, my phone." I reached into the unzipped suit and took the phone out of my jeans.

"Computer!" said Tetsuo, like I'd pulled out a puppy. His long skinny Alien fingers splayed out in joy. "It's cute! May I use it?"

"Go for it." Tetsuo poked at my touchscreen. After a minute he got bored and reached into my suit to connect my phone to its communication system. I flinched as he touched me, because I'm a big ol' racist. Curic never touched me, and I kind of liked it that way.

An endless sequence of zippers zipped shut and my suit pressurized. Shit, what am I doing? I froze up. Must be doing
something
wrong. You can't just put on a spacesuit and
go
to the moon, can you? Ten mortgages worth of signatures on BEA paperwork, two grand for the exit visa just to get up to the empty space station, and then some Aliens come along and propose a little Apollo mission, just to kill time, because I got here a little early? What about those UN treaties Agent Krakowski was so keen on upholding? What about... well, whatever keeps people off the moon?

Fortunately cooler heads prevailed. It's not often that the cooler heads are the ones screaming MOON. NOW. GO. And then there was a hissing sound behind me and I saw
how
we were going to get to the moon. Another glass-dome shuttle, popping up like whack-a-mole from the nearest airlock.

"Oh, shit," I said.

"Indeed this could be problematic," said Tetsuo. "Curic warned us that en route to the moon, you might weep like an infant and humiliate us all."

"It is not
problematic
," I said, "because I will face my fears, and also close my eyes the whole time."

We got in the shuttle and the dome closed over us. "
Mmurnmew
from Human Ring, Ring City, to Luna negative space," said the ship.

"What's negative space?" I said.

"Evacuating atmosphere." said the shuttle, and lurched horribly. "Oh, geez, this time there's weightlessness," I said, and shut my eyes.

"This is lunar gravity," said the strange Dutch-Russian accent—that's Tetsuo. "A form of gravity endemic to the moon. There is no way around it."

"Okay, if it's just
less
gravity," I said.

"Can you breathe?" said the twitchy recut sample-voice of B-list comedian/actress Padma Dhanjan—that's Ashley, using the Purchtrin-English translator.

"Guys, I don't know what Curic told you, but I don't need to be reminded to breathe. I just have a slight fear of being a tiny speck in the infinite cosmic void."

"I mean, can you breathe in the suit? Because there is no longer any air in the shuttle."

I let out a reflexive gasp for air and well, okay, there was air in the suit, plenty of it. "I'm fine!" I said indignantly.

"Negative space," said Ashley, popping a couple horrifying topics off the conversational stack, "is the hole in the moon where the space station used to be. I met Tetsuo there in June. I taught him how to operate a large-scale matter shifter."

"I courted Ashley as we cut rock from the ground," said Tetsuo, "and we eventually uphooked."

"Tetsuo was very persistent," said Ashley.

"Unheed her subtle deprecations," said Tetsuo. "I am an expert on the customs of the Ip Shkoy. My courtship style is raw and primitive. Females are helpless!"

"And I'm a paleontologist," said Ashley, "so I was willing to listen to Tetsuo's nonsense."

"Sorry?" I said. "I don't follow."

"Historians and paleontologists have a great rivalry," said Tetsuo. "Most contact missions arrive too late, after history has ended. The people we wanted to contact have wiped themselves out. The historians have to put on pith helmets and learn how to dig up fossils."

"But you're not fossils," said Ashley.

"And so, the historians win!" said Tetsuo. "This time, the paleontologists have to learn about inefficient hierarchical systems of social organization!"

"Gee, I guess I'm glad humanity didn't fossilize itself before you got here," I said.

"We're all glad," said Ashley. "When this contact mission returns there will be another star in the Constellation. It's the best possible outcome." Nice words, but maybe the English vocalizer was hiding some professional resentment?

"Anyway, I suppose I wouldn't be a very good paleontologist," said Tetsuo.

"You would be the worst," said Ashley. "You would mount skeletons on variable-tension wire so you could move them around and make them talk in funny voices."

"When do we get to the moon?" I said, eyes still closed. "This is taking longer than my trip up here."

"We landed one minute ago," said Tetsuo. "I thought you just wanted to chat.

I opened one eye in case this was a practical joke. We were on the moon. I opened the other eye. We were on the moon, in 3D.

The dome of the shuttle peeled away and I stood at the edge. The area around the landing site was a mass of footprints. Human footprints (civilian tennis-shoe and big NASA-issue boot), waddling Farang prints, articulated-toe Alien footprints paired front and back. Barbarian peg distributions expanding outwards in meandering spirals, the slap-marks of Gaijin walker tentacles and the surrounding smooth spots where the dust they'd raised had come back down. The tiny regular footprints of Them organisms, like the marks left by soccer cleats. All of them had been here, and now I would join them.

"Go ahead," said Tetsuo. I stepped off the shuttle floor with low-gravity Ministry of Silly Walk steps and became the 1,182nd human to walk on the moon. The sun was out, so there were no stars, and we were on the far side, so there was no Earth.

A hundred yards east from the landing site is the edge of Luna negative space, outlined in photosynthesis paint. Tetsuo and Ashley walked towards it on a concrete sidewalk. I walked on the moon.

"The old work site," said Ashley.

There was no safety railing, just the photosynthesis paint and a mine shaft. It was big, all right, but about the right size for a mine shaft: quite a novelty for me, after the Human Ring docking bay and the entirety of outer space. I was small enough around that I could see the entire glowing perimeter, and the mountains on the other side.

"How deep is it?" I said.

"It's infinitely deep," said Ashley. I backed away from the edge.

"No,
tyen
," said Tetsuo. "Ariel is asking for the fall-and-die distance, which is about six hundred kilometers." I backed away a little more.

"It branches out, Ariel," said Ashley. "We dig in a fractal pattern so that the space can be reused. It's not just a hole in the ground."

"Place a dome upon this and pressurize it," said Tetsuo, "and you'll have an excellent moon base." Ashley nudged him. "However, your already moon base is also nice," he added diplomatically.

"We wanted to show you this," said Ashley, "because we see humans on Earth television. They complain that we ruined the lunar environment to build Ring City. As if we destroyed the whole thing."

"It offpisses me," said Tetsuo. "You weren't using the moon for anything. Only some long-term robot storage."

"I'm going to pass on some advice from my good friend Jenny," I said. "Stop watching TV. Those people are faking it. They don't even care about the environment on Earth."

"But they
live
on Earth," said Ashley.

"Say, do you guys hear a weird sound? Like a ringtone?"

"Are you changing to hide the subject?" said Tetsuo.