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 fun
ny 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.
"No, it's been on and off for a couple minutes now. I figured it was the suit."
"I hear nothing that could be called a 'tone'," said Tetsuo.
"Oh, right," I said. "Phone-in-the-suit. It's my ringtone."
HOLD ON YOU GUYS, IT'S MY MOM
Hi. Yes, ma, I know.
Yes, I'm fine. I'm there. I took an earlier flight. I made it fine. In fact I'm standing on the moon right now. The moon itself. I am wearing a spacesuit. I'll send you a picture. No, I'm on the far side, so even if... you wouldn't be able...
No, it's fine. I just had to pay for the exit visa and the paperwork. I'm serious. They don't use money, it's like Star Trek. Not the reboot, I'm talking like Next Generation.
Yeah, ma, the thing is, I have savings. They're a Brazilian company. They never offered it, so there's no net loss. There's no COBRA. Will you stop worrying? I know what I'm doing.
So am I hearing the lightspeed lag, or are you pausing to let the guilt sink in? Ma, I'm not gonna take career advice from a professor of English literature. I made like multiple thousands of dollars last week, doing consulting. Probably not, but it was a victimless crime. And Jenny and I have our own game studio now. Jenny. You know Jenny. Yes. No. Because we're not. Great, now we're on that topic.
Can I call you back? Sometime when I'm not on the moon. Okay. Love you too. Bye.
"Well, that's that," I said, "the moon is ruined." Ashley was lying on her back, making a snow angel in the dust, wiping out other peoples' footprints.
"It is unruined," said Tetsuo. "That is what we wanted to show you. Allow me to demonstrate you some craters." Tetsuo galloped like a cheetah away from the mine shaft, across the lunar surface. I carefully hopped along after him.
"Craters?" I huffed. "You sent up an big-ass dust cloud when you were digging this shaft. It took over every cable news station for a week. You must have filled in every crater in a hundred mile radius."
"You should stop watching TV," said Tetsuo, climbing up a small ridge.
"Well, you got me there, but... oh."
Like I said, a hundred yards east of the landing site is the dig site, Luna negative space. A hundred yards west is a pristine lunar field. No footprints, no uniform blanket of dust, just a four-billion-year crop of craters. The moon I had always looked up at, the moon the first human had seen, the first mammal. The moon as it had been back in May, when I could have theoretically been the thirtieth or thirty-first person to walk on its surface.
"How did you—did you put down a sheet or something?"
"That would have been a very large sheet," said Tetsuo.
"Well, you built a space station, I figure you can build a big sheet."
"We can if we want," Tetsuo admitted, "but it was a lot simpler to scan the surface and restore it once the dust had settled. This is a replica."
"You resurfaced the whole thing?"
"Nobody wants to walk in an ocean of dust," said Tetsuo.
"Thank you." It was the only thing I could say.
"Go ahead," said Tetsuo. "The suppose is to guide tourists to this area, and restore the surface every four to six lunar years."
I walked down, trailing footprints behind me, leaving Tetsuo on the ridge. I was alone on the moon.
I stood next to a crater that came up to my shins. It was already a replica, so why not? I kicked the crater and it exploded in a cloud of dust. I laughed.
"I can still see you," said Tetsuo, a voice in my ear over radio.
Don't care.
* * *
Chapter 12: Monsters from Space
Real life, July 17, continued
This may sound ungrateful and stupid, but there's not very much to do on the moon. Even if you catalogued every crater and extracted the entire history of the moon from which crater overlapped which other crater, you'd just have a timeline of meteorite impacts. And there's no point in you doing this, because the Constellation has already catalogued the craters and is working on that timeline: Smoke has its lesser subminds crunch the numbers whenever they get bored.
Alternatives to crater classification: you could look at the Luna negative space some more, or you could go to the old moon base at the north pole and have the astronauts refuse to let you in, ya feckin' tourist. Or, you could leave the moon, walk through a port into Alien Ring and play some twenty-million-year-old video games. I chose the last option.
The ports back to Ring City are all behind super double airlocks in an underground bunker, so that someone doesn't fuck up and suck Gweilo Ring's atmosphere onto the moon. Going into this bunker was like taking an instant tour of the Rings. I gawked through airlocks at the huge crystal structures of Peregrini Ring, shimmering in the heat. The windswept ocean of Farang Ring, the flat grey desert of Gaijin Ring, the lightless liquid methane world of Inostrantsi Ring. (Who's writing the purple travelogue prose now, Blum?) It was like the world-selection screen from a Bit Boy game.
"What's up?" said Tetsuo, noticing me lagging behind staring through the airlocks. He and Ashley stood in front of a port that overlooked a forest of let's-call-them-t
rees with broad blue let's-call-them-leaves. "This one is our destination."
"These look like planets," I said. "I thought Ring City would look more like a space station."
"It is a space station," said Ashley, "but unlike you, we don't get to go back home."
"Beware of the gravity differential." The airlock didn't really open—Tetsuo and Ashley just crawled through it like it was made of jelly.
I pushed through the airlock behind them and stepped into the picture. Out of lunar gravity into something four times as strong. Off of the moon and onto a thick blue leaf the size of a city block, the consistency of anti-lawsuit playground foam. Into a forest that was also a city.
"Holy shit," I said.
"Welcome to Macintosh," said Tetsuo with pride.
Trees with trunks the size of office buildings. Above us, a few trees shooting up for miles; trees so tall they nearly reached the central cylinder that ran through Ring City like a skewer through a sliced pineapple. Below us, whole smaller forests of trees with darker leaves, growing between the larger trees. Whole smaller forests growing between each of those trees, ad infuckingitim. A fractal forest.
"You built this?" I said.
"We didn't build the trees," said Ashley.
"They're called cma," said Tetsuo. "A tree is an Earth creature. A paleontologist should disallow her translator such liberties." He and Ashley were stripping off their spacesuits and stretching—this place was home for them.
"It's odd that you never saw this before," said Ashley. "On the Earth Internet I watched a brief documentary film about Alien Ring."
"So did I," I said. "But the cameras were down there, in the forest. I thought it was a park."
This was around noon, Austin time, but in this wedge of Alien Ring it was early morning. On the far side, curving into the sky, city lights twinkled in the night like stars. Directly above my head, the central cylinder, glowing red like a sun where it faced us, showing darkness to the night side of the ring.
"You can keep wearing your suit," Ashley told me, "or we can make you a breathing mask."
Constellation Games Page 10
