Space Opera

  “DIED? Whenwhenwhy? How could this HAPPEN? Oh no! Oh NOOOO. What about KYOKO? Did she ever find her mommy’s hand inthesnowinthesnowinthesnowintherain . . . ?”

  “Three years ago, I think?” Oort Ultraviolet said helpfully. “She died of . . . well, of being an old lady, really.”

  Öö blinked his adorable brown eyes and rubbed his fuzzy apricot-colored cheeks with his paws. “I don’t get it.”

  “What’s there to get, love? She was ninety or something, wasn’t she?”

  The red panda wriggled his button nose. “No, butwhybutwhybuthow should that killkillhurtkill anybody?”

  Al let that question drift pointedly unacknowledged among them like a fart at a dinner party. “This is what’s left of the band. Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros, Öö. They’ll do fine. Probably.”

  The Keshet made a face like he’d just eaten kale for the first time and scrambled down a long corridor lit with a calming dappled undersea light that flowed out from holes in the thick black coral. He spun around in circles, found things to eat hidden in his striped tail, and bounced over himself several times.

  “ ’Kay, ’Kay, ’KayKayKay. Pay attention! I’m not going to go through it twice! Well, wellwellwell, I will go through it twice. More than twice. WAYWAYFARMORE. I will conduct your tour of the good shipship Cake in the Rain 1047 times before the waveform sets and this whole timeline gets served at the table.” Öö stopped, fell over backward, and looked up at them, clasping his little black paws. “You see, gentlemen, time is a cheesecake. It must be whipwhipstirred and mixed and creamed and frappéd by someone who knows whatwhathowwhat he’s doing, and then it must be LEFT to set in the refrigerator until all the chronologies gel into something the multiverse can sink its teethtoothsteeth into. Though to be honest, even after it’s set, the whole thing is quite jiggly and wobblyobbly and you can stick your fists right THROUGH it and cram HANDFULS and HANDFULS into your MOUTH because TIME is so YUMMY and FATTENING. But YOU won’t go through it twice, so heads up, sailors! Well, you will go through it twice, but you won’t know it.” Öö, the ship’s Mandatory Keshet, tumbled off down the hall. “Lookseelook if you see this fluffy orange ice creamsherbetcreamcreamy-looking coral, don’t eat it, that’s a doorknob. Lifts are clearly marked by the angry squids. Command’s that way, cafeteria’s on reef four, cocktails at seven p.m. on the observation deck, that’s the engine room, don’t look in there—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Decibel Jones cried out as they passed a round jelly-glass window into the engine room.

  Inside, they could clearly see a lovely Victorian-looking bedroom with green curtains and a splendid four-poster bed on which two undeniably naked and undeniably human people were rather vigorously going at it.

  “Not an engine,” Oort shouted, as if to summon someone who could fix it up. “Not an engine! Sorry. Sorry, Miss. Sir. Sorry.”

  But it was an engine. It was, in fact, the absolute pinnacle of propulsion technology.

  The Keshet Effulgence owes its exalted position in galactic society to its patent on the Paradox Box, simply the most efficient FTL drive ever imagined by any species. A ship that wishes to avoid the unpleasantness of the public wormhole system is required by corporate law and the desire for self-preservation to have a Keshet representative on board, as anyone else attempting to work the Box would find their molecules subjected to all manner of assault in defiance of time, logic, and propriety—for example, summarily rearranged to resemble a painting by Picasso after it has been shat out by a sexually frustrated emu and delivered to the doorstep of a wholly perplexed pre-asp Cleopatra.

  The Paradox Box is a simple enough concept that could only have been discovered by a species born with the chronochondria of their cells set to fun. The splitting of an atom is nothing compared to the energy released by even a small, unassuming, paint-by-numbers time-travel paradox. This is why the prudent time traveler avoids, at all costs, meeting their younger selves or killing the inventor of time travel (a very nice little girl named Malinda Moss, who was, not coincidentally but definitely improbably, also the progenitor of the Keshet, who will have once someday had a terrible accident with a wormhole, a zoo, and a lifetime of emotional neglect) or buying, selling, or gifting strange pocket watches without a properly established chain of provenance or stepping on any important butterflies or, really, any insects at all if it can be helped.

  However, for a starship, such horrifying temporal train wrecks are a quick fill-up at the petrol station. The Keshet, luckily for travel agents everywhere, are born flitting from timeline to timeline like hummingbirds from flower to flower to the invasion of the Mongols to flower. They don’t have to expend any more energy to do it than a human expends maintaining enough muscle tension to keep them from being a meat aspic. They cycle through every version of every timeline they come into contact with until all permutations are exhausted and the infinite forking decisions of everything ever have firmed up into a cool, refreshing reality. All of this takes no time whatsoever relative to the friends, loved ones, and office furniture of a Keshet, and the entirety of all time multiplied exponentially relative to the Keshet themselves. Öö’s attention-deficit-disordered dialect wasn’t actually a stutter, but the only visible effect of all this constant cosmic channel surfing—each time they get stuck repeating a word, it is a slightly different Keshet in a slightly different timeline trying out different linguistic paths through the mess of it all.

  All of which is to say, whenever they’re short of cash, an enterprising red panda will go scurrying about snuffling up a paradox, pack it carefully in quantum bubble-wrap, and deliver it to the nearest ship, installation included, where it can be safely held in a stasis field until someone presses the big red button. The cosmos-shredding energy released by the paradox then dutifully shreds the cosmos, just a little, in the back where no one will notice, allowing a vessel to cruise happily through the high-occupancy vehicle lane of space and time and come out the other end when the iterative cycles of the paradox exhaust themselves and become a cheesecake. Therefore, it’s very important to select the right-size paradox for the journey at hand.

  As the gardenworld of Litost was a hefty journey of some sixty-five hundred miles, Öö had had to find something juicy in the local pantry. Thus, in the engine room of the Cake in the Rain, a Mr. Walter John Pritchard of Virginia Beach, Virginia, was busy becoming his own grandfather.

  “And HERETHERERIGHTTHISWAY is your recordingstateroomstudio for the remainderdurationremainderelevendays of the flight. I know you’ll want to get started right away writing the bassline of the total salvation of your species, so we’ve just stuffed it full of anything we thought you might need. Please pull the eel in the lavatory if we missed anything.”

  Lilac-colored brain coral subwoofers studded the walls. Sea slug soundproofing rippled orangely across the ceiling. The floor was a lime-green anemone shag carpet. A vast glittering soundboard dominated one corner. Three jelly-glass doors led off into bedrooms that could plausibly be comfortable for a human being. A swim-in closet overflowed with fabric in every type but matte and every color but brown next to a bank of mirrors. Dess and Oort caught their reflections and did a proper slapstick double take.

  “Look at you!” crowed Decibel. “You’ve gone all first-year art project! And so have I!”

  All down the sides of their necks and across their collarbones, a spray of deep scarlet leopardy spots had sprung up, if leopards were too glam for the veldt and soaked their spots in glitter before padding off to the club.

  “That’s the encephalitis! Coming in nicely!” the roadrunner said approvingly.

  Oort St. Ultraviolet looked as though he was about to be sick. He rubbed at his spots, but they weren’t going anywhere. Decibel Jones preened. He pulled out his collar to see how far down they went, which was quite far.

  The whole place was lit with glowing purple-striped sea nettles that hung from the long encrusted ribs of the ship like party lanterns. Mira’s drums and old Casi
o sat proudly in a corner. Guitars lined one wall, normal noncoral guitars, famous guitars: Hendrix’s, Clapton’s, Page’s. Beneath them was Oort’s petting farm: double-necked cello, electro-glass hurdy-gurdy, über-theremin, Moog—and a perfect glass Oortophone.

  It was gorgeous. It was grotesque. It was an exact replica of their first recording studio in Hoxton, reclaimed by the sea. Mnemopathy really was was a hell of a thing, Decibel thought as he ran his fingers over the cymbal on Mira’s drums.

  “Mushy, mushy, Wonderful,” he whispered.

  “I don’t see any of my toys,” sniffed Capo the short-haired cat, padding superciliously into the room after having thoroughly inspected the hallway.

  “Hell-o,” said Jones.

  “What did you do to my cat?” Oort exploded, pointing at the unconcerned feline like a Salem girl at trial. “Not okay! That is not okay! I agreed to spaceships and aliens and the possible end of life on Earth. I did not agree to tolerate talking cats. This is too much. It’s too mad. It’s out of genre. Undo it immediately!”

  “I gave her the ability to talk,” said the tall, graceful Esca as she stepped gingerly into the room. “It’s very easy. Through the ear. Just a little strobe lighting in the hippocampus. A . . . gift. I thought you would both enjoy it.”

  “Eh,” said Capo, licking her paw and whacking it over one ear vigorously.

  “Also, it rather neatly proves a point,” the roadrunner went on. “You keep saying that we converse, and therefore sentience is not in question. Now your pet converses. So perhaps you can see that speech is not the determining factor. Any animal can talk. But Capo cannot assemble a band and sing a heartbreaking work of popular music. She hasn’t got the thumbs, the postproduction skills, or the vocal range. We did think about this sort of thing, you know. We did discuss it for more than a second or two.”

  “Could if I wanted,” Capo sniffed. “You don’t know. You’re just a bird.” A hungry look came into her green eyes. “A big bird.”

  “Look, birdie,” Oort said with a nervous laugh. He reached out to put his arm around the roadrunner, as he’d do with any hard-arse producer who just didn’t understand what he was all about. “This is all a laugh, right? What I mean is, you’re not really going to incinerate our planet if we don’t sing better than anyone has ever sung in the whole history of humanity, right? It’s just a bit of hazing. Messing about with the new kid in school, yeah? Well, you got us good! Honestly! Scared shitless, me. I might’ve peed a little. The Yoko stuff was a deep cut, really subtle comedy. But I get you, all the way. So let’s have a drink and skip to the part where everyone jumps out and yells, ‘Surprise, fooled you, you pronks, you should see the look on your face,’ all right?”

  The roadrunner blinked her gorgeous Disney eyes and looked away with something that could almost be mistaken for shame.

  “I’ve got kids, mate. You didn’t even let me call them. You turned my mobile into the left tit on your spaceship. What is wrong with you?”

  Decibel Jones sprung into action. Yeah, sure, he was a drunk and a fool wearing last night’s rhinestones and tomorrow’s hangover, long past his salad days or even his soup days. He was, in fact, approaching middle age at the speed of paradox. But if he could still do anything in this universe, he could get his band onstage when they got the Eeyores, which had been, if he really thought about it, mostly all the time.

  “Okay, okay, Oort. Omar. My darling. My Arkable love. It’s fine. It’s fine! You don’t need to call little Sarah and Samantha—”

  “Nico and Siouxsie.”

  “God, really? Bit on the nose, don’t you think? No, no, of course. Lovely names. Good old Sue,” Dess said soothingly. “Anyway, you don’t need to call them because we’ll be fine. Write the greatest song ever composed by man, beast, or polyp in eleven days? No problem! Don’t you remember when we were writing Spacecrumpet? Days laid out on the floor of some godforsaken flop, nights on the floor of some godforsaken nightclub, and all of it paradise. All of it us. The lyrics came like honey, my dearest darling space oddity. The melodies came like wine. So we just do it again. Wind back the clock. And you know what? We save the world like motherfucking caped crusaders and the history books get printed in glitter from now on, and on page one they all say: THANK YOU DECIBEL JONES AND THE ABSOLUTE ZEROS! They chose us, gorgeous. Don’t forget it. Out of everyone singing and playing and Auto-Tuning their hearts out all over the sodding stupid planet. They chose us.”

  “Only because everyone else was dead,” mused Oort, stroking his cat’s silky head and watching Dess do what he always did, which was to shove everyone else’s feelings into a sack and drown them in the ocean of his own enthusiasm.

  “So what? So destiny, that’s what. So immortality! So me and you and Mira.” Decibel’s face fell. “Well. Me and you. So your stupid cat. So flying a fuck-fueled aquarium to Planet Music and rocking so hard and so true, they’ll know just how alive glamkind is. I can already hear it, Oort. I can hear the song that’s gonna save us all, and you are gonna blast it from the quasars to the Queen’s ears, and you and me are gonna sing it till the stars rain down like applause, my glorious, gloomy boyfrack.”

  “Öö and I will leave you to it,” said the space flamingo, bowing with the space panda and beating a surprisingly sensitive retreat.

  Oort looked up at Dess with moist eyes. Almost like they used to look at him, when he’d believed they’d find a manager, a label, a venue, a place on the charts, a place in the world. When he’d believed and they couldn’t quite yet. When his belief and a kebab shared among them could keep them going through a thousand and one Brobdingnagian nights.

  “I’m not your boy-anything anymore,” Oort said stonily as soon as the cabin door shut. “So just don’t.”

  Decibel blinked in hurt confusion. Hadn’t Oort heard him? Hadn’t he just been giving him the old eyes?

  “Okay, Dess,” Oort said, playing the reconciling middle child between Decibel and the ghost of the Zero who’d missed the flight, as he’d done a hundred thousand times before. “Okay. Let’s hear it. Let’s hear the song that’s gonna get me back to my girls. Give us a few bars.”

  Decibel Jones clapped his hands together and broke into a smile that once graced the cover of every magazine worth its gloss.

  “Oh, sorry, that was a lie. I have no idea.”

  18.

  All the Things That Nobody Sees

  It takes eleven days, give or take, to reach Litost from Earth via paradox-fueled aquarium. Back in the mango-colored days of Hope & Ruin, this would have been more than enough time for the Absolute Zeros to knock out a pop anthem that would drench the world in a tsunami of glitter and meaning.

  Now it was just long enough to write absolutely nothing—reveal two things better kept secret and one that should have been laid out ages ago; set three accidental fires; send back seventeen separate meals for being far too surrealistic; pitch six screaming matches; consider suicide by air lock at least once or twice; reject hundreds of potential lyrics and riffs; form one extremely unlikely, inconvenient, and non-Euclidean friendship; invent four entirely new swear words; request separate accommodations; quit in tears; make up in tears; get in a few quality depression sessions; seriously annoy one large, usually serene white cat; and remind them why they’d broken up the band in the first place.

  Capo napped almost the whole way across the galaxy.

  Nico and Siouxsie Calisșkan’s enormous four-year-old Maine Coon–Angora-somebody’s-barn-cat-possibly-a-stray-albino-panther mix was entirely unbothered by suddenly achieving the ability to speak rather posh English. Oh, certainly it had been alarming at first. But adjusting to sudden changes in your circumstances was easy when you didn’t really care about anything. As far as she was concerned, she’d always talked. By some miracle, everyone else had recently achieved the ability to listen properly. She was over the novelty within half an hour. No one listened to her or asked for her input or attended gratefully to her needs any more than they ever had.
They were too busy making big monkey fusses over their big monkey problems. Capo didn’t see why it was ever necessary to make a fuss. Fussing was for dogs and babies. This new house smelled like delicious fish; the steady rumbling of the engine vibrated at almost the exact frequency of a purr; there were scads of birds and scurrying, red, squirrel-type things roaming about; and whenever she was hungry, she could just gnaw on the walls till little shrimps came out to investigate. It was a vast improvement over their old house in terms of cat-comfort.

  The key to a happy life, Capo devoutly believed, was never giving much of a damn what happened in any given day so long as you got in a nap, a kill, and a snuggle, and the snuggle was optional. When Oort and Justine had adopted her from that shelter and taken her to a nice house where she was expected to be a civilized, well-behaved indoor cat despite the whole joint lacking anything like a population of murderable sparrows, field mice, bunnies, and whatnot, she hadn’t run around making grand speeches and crying and questioning the meaning of it all. She’d just carried on and contented herself with spiders, pieces of lint, and occasionally scratching or biting one of the kids just to keep in practice.

  The nap was the really important thing. The nap was all.

  Capo quickly triangulated the prime sleeping spot in their stateroom: a tall coral plinth with a decorative pot of flowering seaweed on top. The pot made a fantastic sound when it smashed against the floor. The massive white cat settled in for what might have been an hour or a lifetime or eleven days. It simply wasn’t any of her concern how long. Occasionally, loud noises or hunger or a drum riff or the blort of an Oortophone or Decibel trying to coax her into eating something that looked like a licorice Allsort woke Capo from her long day’s journey into snooze. She opened her bright green eyes, investigated, protested, or ingested as necessary, turned her rump to the offending thing, and went back to sleep. Thus, for her, the voyage passed by like a training montage in a hastily made feel-bad film, in bits and flits and pieces the feline found it far too much work to understand or care about.