Constellation Games (35 page)

The blades come out. The cuts are deep; huge cubes of earth are pulled into the sky, dripping and crumbling until white reentry foam covers and contains them. From a safe distance, the humans cheer. The Constellation is accepting Earth's garbage.

In some parts of Earth, garbage is valuable: poorer humans scavenge and reuse what the richer ones throw out. But where I come from, garbage is a nuisance. Buried and forgotten, it piles up in strata decades thick. The contact mission needs metal, and it's full of bored archaeologists. The Constellation loves garbage.

In Lyon and Austin and Kyoto, on the edges of dead mines, the earth of Earth is pulled out, or churned through ports. The dirt will be returned, sterilized, once certain environmental concerns have been addressed. (I suspect this will never happen.)

In lunar orbit, skyscraper-sized blocks of dirt and garbage are loaded into Utility Ring. Dissected, scanned, and analyzed. For this, the Constellation needs humans, people who can put the garbage into social context.

I was a rich human. I lived this garbage.

"Talk to me, babe!" The artifact is a rusty, dented metal tub as long as I am tall. An Auslander the size of a city block holds it between bioluminescent manipulators and spins it like I would a basketball on my finger, except I was never able to actually do that.

"Freezer," I say, suspended in the same microgravity, wearing a much smaller spacesuit.

"You're sure it's not a ritual basin?"

"'S a fucking deep freeze." They're always hoping for ritual items. "Look for brand markings."

"It's uncovered, hon. An inefficient freezer."

"The lid should be nearby. You remove the lid when you toss it, same as a fridge. Otherwise neighborhood kids climb inside and suffocate."

I spend twelve hours a day in Utility Ring. I take a swim in boiling water to sterilize my spacesuit. I drag myself through identical Human Ring hallways until I reach my replica house. Inside, I play games and practice metafractal reduction until I fall asleep.

I'm doing the work to build a reputation. I need to be thought of as reliable, useful to other peoples' fluid overlays. I have my own projects planned, and one day soon, I will need to draw on the Constellation's stock of carbon and energy and permission.

I don't get paid (there's nothing to pay me with), but in certain strata there are things I ask to keep. My interest in obsolete human technology is noted as one more anthropological datum. Broken wooden cabinets, the sides painted with lurid graphics, holding shattered circuit boards. Cracked cartridges bearing stickers from video rental stores. Bent and mangled floppy disks, children's handwriting fading from the labels (the children have grown up and are now cheating on their spouses). Here and there, a hard drive entombed with twenty megabytes of dead secrets.

The hardware is crushed by time, stained and discolored by who-knows-what. The software—there isn't any software, anymore. Some of these games were thrown away working, but they sure don't work after twenty years in a landfill. I keep the hardware because they are original pieces, and everything else in my life is a replica.

I clean dead consoles by hand, using conservation techniques taught to me by the other members of the Raw Materials overlay. I blow into the corpses of NES cartridges and stack them up by the hundreds.

This is a race. My opponent is an unmanned probe with a port strapped onto it, accelerating to relativistic speeds and headed out of the solar system, towards the Constellation and the Slow People. Obviously, I can't accelerate to relativistic speeds. I'm not even sure what would count as forward movement against that probe. And in general, I don't think I stand much of a chance. Judging from these trash piles, all we've been after this whole time is food, entertainment, and security. We're pretty much Slow People already.

But I'm doing what I can. And even if all I accomplish is to make it really really clear that childrens' dolls are not ritual charms, or allow a few thousand people to say "yeah, I met a human once, back in the day"... that has to count for something, right?

Back on Earth, the dust cloud settles. The humans—local officials—are wearing suits and respirators. They look down, dirty and astonished, into the squared-off crater that used to be the municipal dump. And then, driven by instinct, they call in the trucks and start filling the hole back up with fresh garbage.

"I brought you a hot beverage," I said.

"Oh, thank you," said Somn, regal atop her nest, wearing the Alien equivalent of a bikini, little shimmering bangles running all down her tail. She took the bulb of hot beverage and sucked on it. She didn't seem to notice or care that the bulb looked like a smaller version of the eggs she was incubating.

"So, Ariel, are you still excavating garbage?" asked Somn. The skin of her eggs had gone taut a few days earlier, and the Aliens inside were starting to make tiny squeaking noises.

"Today was my last day," I said. "I've got enough materials data to complete my Human Ring project. So, I'm out of there. I taught everyone in my overlay how to have an awkward goodbye office party."

"Oh, is that a card?" said Somn, looking at the paper in my hand. "Tetsuo says humans use humorous cards in rites of passage."

"I ran a survey," I said. "I've been asking people from the contact mission why they chose to keep living in the real world instead of uploading and becoming Slow People."

"You must have some interesting responses," said Somn.

"They're too damn interesting," I said. I showed her the list. There were very few duplicate responses.

• We should move upwards through the simulation stack of universes, not downwards.
  
• As Eugene Debs said, "while there is a lower class, I am in it."
  
• Slow People are a consciousness everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable. [Gee, thanks, Oscar Wilde. -A.B.]
  
• I can't think of anything worse than passing an eternity of time with a trillion other people.
  
• I am already immortal.
  
• I want to die.
  
• There is a lot of work to be done here.
  
• ...
  

"Clearly the Eugene Debs quote is from Tetsuo," said Somn. "Do you want my answer as well?"

"These answers are ridiculous," I said. "If we rounded up all the humans who have these opinions, they wouldn't form a breeding population. People are making shit up. Or else there's some secret that no one will tell me."

"The secret is that your sample is biased," said Somn. "You're asking the wrong people."

"Who else is there?"

"Contact missions are assembled from society's misfits. We all thought something else was important enough to give up our chance to upload. Of course we have strange opinions. You need to ask the people who stayed behind."

"Can't ask them, can I? Not for seventy years. And by then it'll be too late."

"I nearly stayed behind," said Somn. "I'll tell you. We have obligations to family. Obligations to the knowledge and experience of the Constellation as a whole. If everyone uploaded at once, there would be no one left to maintain the Slow People. You ought to first live a full life in this space."

"That's the secret?" I said. "Being sysadmins for the Slow People?"

"This is no secret," said Somn in a huff that didn't make it through the translator. "Tetsuo told you about his parents. He may have talked as though their behavior was strange, but that's because he has bizarre political beliefs. Uploading is
normal
. It's part of the universal life cycle."

"You've got to be kidding me," I said. "This is just bourgeois Protestantism. Live in a housing development, work hard, raise your kids, go to heaven when you die."

"You can't denigrate it by calling it something you don't like," said Somn. "It works for a lot of people."

"Doesn't work for me."

"Nor for Tetsuo or Curic," said Somn. "Nor for the people you surveyed. That's why we have the terraforming projects, and the contact missions that never find anybody. An anarchic society can't stay static for eight hundred million years. There has to be a safety valve."

"What about you?" I said. "Three kids and a garage; is that what you want?"

"I'm a fossil hunter," said Somn. "I love to uncover the secrets of dead life. I can be happy almost anywhere in the universe."

Curic stood bowlegged before my front porch, her antennacles twitching. "Well, I never expected to see this again," she said. "However, the original was more active in the low EM spectrum."

"That was the electrical wiring," I said. "I'm not Tetsuo. I don't need to recreate every stupid detail."

"Did you do the work yourself?" said Curic.

"Somn handled the matter shifter," I said. "That was most of the work. I'm going to redo it myself, with new data from the Raw Materials overlay."

"Show me the inside," said Curic. "I want to see how you are adjusting to your new environment."

"That's why you finally came down here? You're my case worker?"

"I'm the one responsible for bringing you to Ring City," she said. Curic climbed the porch in big straddle-steps and reached up to push the door latch. "If you succumb to space madness, it makes me look bad."

"Wouldn't want to make you look bad."

"You came to live with us," said Curic, "and the first thing you did was to recreate your old environment. People are worried!"

"Excuse me? Have you
seen
the rest of Human Ring?
That's
my old environment: a crappy one-room apartment. I recreated an environment I
liked
. Everyone does that. Your private island, Tetsuo and Somn's treehouse, my regular house."

"Mmm." It was almost a concession. Curic padded through the living room into the kitchen. I heard the creak of cabinets opening.

"What do you want," I said, "more Twinkies?"

"I'm looking for evidence of hoarding," said Curic. "Some refugees can't adapt to post-scarcity. They hoard food and other items they consider valuable." She leaned into my lazy susan and pushed some replica cans of food around.

"I'm not stupid," I said. "The repertoire's right outside. Where are you getting this? Are the Eritreans hoarding?"

"The Eritreans are fine," said Curic. "They form a coherent human community. You're here by yourself. Space madness may be living here with you." Curic shut the lazy susan and worked her way down my kitchen counter as though she were scanning everything again.

"Is 'space madness' a technical term?" I asked.

"I heard you were taking things from the archaeological dig," she said. "Broken computers."

"I'm
collecting
. People threw away things they should have kept. I have two
Gnarly Aerobics
cartridges. Two carts, Curic. A month ago, there were only nine known copies in the universe!"

Curic summoned up a mental picture of someone who would be interested in
Gnarly Aerobics
, and swiveled her gaze to lay that picture on top of me. She shuddered and shook herself out like a dog. Static crackled off her fur in the arid atmosphere of Human Ring.

"It doesn't sound good," said Curic. "Have you been bargaining with yourself?"

"That's none of your business. What? No."

"Where's your hoard? Upstairs?"

"Two doors down," I said. "Those computers don't smell very good."

"You already owned these computers," said Curic. "Their software was on the hard drive I scanned in July. Including
Gnarly Aerobics
, as if you cared."

"Yeah, their software," I said. "ROMs can't capture the experience of the hardware. The stack of cartridges, futzing with the RF adapter. The experience of the original controls."

"The experience of being discarded beneath gigagrams of dirt."

"I couldn't just let all this old stuff go through the matter shifter!"

"Ariel, where we come from, nostalgia for... simple mass-produced objects... it doesn't exist. It's difficult for me to understand your emotions, but I can accept them. Unfortunately, not everyone on the contact mission is a trained anthropologist. There have been complaints about your behavior."

"Why don't they complain to my face? I'm working hard here. I'm a fucking model minority."

"It's supposedly my fault," said Curic. "My bringing you to the station violated human norms."

"We broke a law. A stupid law. It's not a norm."

Curic slammed my nonfunctional dishwasher shut. "I pitched my rescue of you as a show of capability. A public demonstration of our willingness to defend the freedom of movement. There are idiots who think you don't really want to be part of this society. As such, it has been suggested I acted from improper feelings of personal guilt."

"What, survivor's guilt, from Gliese 777Ad?"

"That has come up more than once," said Curic, "but I was referring to my visit to Austin, in July."

"That went fine. What's to be guilty about?"

"You think it went fine," said Curic.

I thought back to Curic deadlifting crates into Bai's SUV, scanning my house, fireworks, live music... "Wait, is this because you peed in my sink?"

"I was born on a space station," said Curic, "orbiting Gliese 777Ad. A dead world. Even after we rejoined Constellation space, I lived on space stations. The day I spent with you was my first visit to a planet-sized ecology. I had what you might call an allergic reaction.

"I saw infinite small creatures crawling in the ground, flying through the air. Your water was polluted with synthetic chemicals. I was surrounded by noisy, primitive machines. I was coerced and pushed around by fascists. I saw how close you stand to Jenny. Young Eduardo wanted to tumble with me, writhing in grass and dirt. I was nauseated."

"You hid it pretty well," I said.

"Of course I hid it. You're the reason I came here. I'd devoted my life to preparing for another contact mission. And then I came to Earth and I saw that you really were
alien
. You were not pretending. All my preparation was useless.

"When we went to the bar, we were served drinks from a communal bottle. Humans touched each other with their hands and their mouths. It wasn't just you: it was all of human society. I knew I was only encountering my own hang-ups. I tried my best to act like a human. But then we went back to your house... and you went to
sleep
. You lay down and your brain shut off and you died."

"You watched me sleep?"

"I know what
happens
, Ariel. Most species experience something like sleep. I didn't realize I'd be present in your
house
while it happened to you.

"I panicked. I had an irrational fear that if I stayed there I would catch sleep, like a disease. I thought to leave, but where would I go? It was the early morning; everyone else was asleep. I was trapped alone in a decaying world of the dead.

"I threw up in your sink, Ariel. I'm sorry." Curic was shivering furiously.

"It's okay," I said. "Lots of women throw up right after they meet me. Whoa, whoa, I can't read your body language. What's going on?"

"I am crying," said Curic.

I kind of held out my hands. "Do you need a hug?"

"Absolutely not."

"Well, what can I do?"

Curic took a big breath. "You're re-terraforming Human Ring," she said.

"Hopefully, yeah. It's going okay. Won't be ready for a while. You want to see what I have?"

"I want you to
do
it," she said. "Prove them wrong. Tear this Ring down and build it up better. Show them how little they understand humans. Show them that you belong in the Constellation."

Curic took another deep breath. "And don't fuck it up," she said.

"Curic," I said, trying to channel my anger, at what? I wasn't mad at Curic, was I? Maybe. "I should tell you something."

"Yeah?" Curic was still quivering.

"I know what you did with the shipping containers."

Quivering stopped. Curic stood rigid. Fur sticking up. Fight-or-flight response. That's what
I'd
been feeling. "Containers, plural?"

"Very plural."

"I never saw any shipping containers, and neither did my crossself."

"Okay, however you do plausible deniability. I know what your overlay did. You've got a weird sense of humor, you know that?"

"Ariel. If you do know, then you probably know what they're for. Please keep the secret. It ought to have a half-life of three years."

"You can't hide this," I said. "You're barely trying. What if someone finds one? They say 'Constellation Shipping' right on the side."

"No one will find one unless you tell them where to look. If the secret decays now, it's another Antarctica. It's an invasion. If you give it it a few years to work, it's a garbage patch cleanup. An act of friendship. I can't coerce you into keeping this secret, but—"

"Curic, I already told someone."

"... I see."

"If it makes you feel any better, she'll—she'll probably never decrypt the email."

"Oh, that does make me feel better," said Curic, leaning one hand against a kitchen drawer handle. "Thank you!"

I was wiping my eyes. "Now
you're
crying," said Curic.

"You're very observant."

"Do... you..."—forcing the words out like quintuplets—"need... a... hug?"

"Yes," I said.

Yes.