Space Opera

  A lightbulb went on in many, many heads at once. The thirty-first Metagalactic Grand Prix descended into an utter greased-pig clownshow as every Yüz, Yurtmak, and Alunizar tried to ice out their competition before the doors even opened, causing a constitutional crisis on the administrative board of the Grand Prix, two riots, several stern meetings, and a wormhole blockade that lasted for the better part of three weeks, crippling the economy of six commercial bankworlds. It was barbaric, they said. It was immoral. It was against the whole spirit of the thing, the whole idea of sentience. In those days, plenty of old soldiers were still listening in the stands who remembered when being locked in basements had nothing to do with music.

  It had to be stopped.

  But then the Keshet launched their Holistic Live Total Timeline Broadcast. This involved a special camera, still classified as a state secret, with a disturbing, semi-legal amount of Keshet stem cells suspended in a shiny neoplast-gel matrix, so that this low-level techno-biological abomination could travel through all possible timelines as easily as any bouncing red space panda. Suddenly, the galactic audience could gorge themselves on unlimited Metagalactic coverage in quantum real time. They could witness every botched kidnapping, dodged assassination, bungled poisoning, and missed interdimensional trip wire from the comfort of their own recreation zones, and they loved every minute of it.

  Finally, the Oversight Committee gave up, sequestered the barbaric, immoral, vaguely unsentient but massively popular shenanigans into a new semifinal round, and formally instated Rule 20: If a performer fails to show up on the night, they shall be automatically disqualified, ranked last, and their share of communal Galactic Resources forfeited for the year.

  The Grand Prix was never the same again. Before, you could only do your best. After, there was strategy.

  Igneous Lagom Opt died a happy rock. And really, hardly anyone has actually died. Decanted, locked in a maze, semipermanently muted, phased into a pocket universe, frozen under several glaciers, yes, but everyone tries to keep things lighthearted if they can, and simply shooting someone in the face will never pull in the kind of viewership a good causality blast can bring.

  After the trial, Aukafall Avatar 0 was, by a series of even less likely events, elected Prime Minister of Litost, despite rather obviously not being a Klavar or even plant-based. At his swearing-in ceremony, he reprised his Grand Prix performance, took a deep bow, and began to sparkle from beak to foot. He looked into the adoring faces of his people and said:

  “Level up.”

  23.

  In the Waiting Room for Great Luck

  The Klavaret are known throughout the galaxy as wonderfully gracious hosts, but they have always had trouble with the idea of architecture. Being a heliophiliac species, they have simply never seen any reason to build shelters that might keep sun or rain from sufficiently nourishing them. This is the reason Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros found themselves in what could only very generously be called a room, having no roof, no floor, and several objects that looked as though someone had heard about the idea of walls from some foreign traveler who thought they were some kind of modern dance. There were about fifty of them, all quite unnecessarily tall, interleaved frosted-glass slabs of varying oval, diamond, crescent, helix, and bubble shapes, none of which joined up to make anything so limiting as a corner, but rather stayed in constant motion a few centimeters off the ground, rotating round so that, if you just ignored them, you might almost think you were slightly indoors. It was like standing inside a very fancy blender.

  “Sing to it,” the roadrunner coaxed. “Go on.”

  Decibel Jones frowned and put his head to one side. “That is a portable toilet,” he said.

  Indeed, the only other object in the Klavaret’s valiant effort at a greenroom was a large seafoam-green rectangular booth with a peaked roof and silver hinges on the front. To be perfectly fair, it was a lovely porta-potty, extremely tidy and made out of some material that looked rather like wet oil paint despite being several times harder than the Litostian diamonds that filled the spring clouds above them.

  “No, it’s the last nice thing I can do for you before the semifinals, babies,” sighed the Esca. She shut her gentle, enormous eyes as though she were just then experiencing her culture’s first headache. She’d explained the semifinals over and over to them, at least the part she was allowed to tell them about, but they didn’t seem to be absorbing it.

  “Do we need weapons?” Decibel said softly.

  “It’s sort of more of an improv thing,” the roadrunner admitted. “I would just focus on defense. Humans have no special physical attributes whatsoever, it’s really quite remarkable. They’ll go right for you, since you’re brand new. The armor will help.”

  Oort Ultraviolet squinted at the green booth. “It’s definitely a toilet. We’ve played a lot of festivals, so, I know what I’m about, birdie.”

  “I can’t let you compete looking like . . . that. It would be humiliating for you, for your planet, for the Esca as your chaperone.”

  Dess knew he should probably keep his mouth shut, but he hadn’t flown across the galaxy in an honest-to-Christ Alexander McQueen to have his aesthetic insulted by a flamingo. “What do you mean ‘looking like that’? This is vintage! Sure, my hair’s not really earning its wage at the moment, but come on!”

  “Why can’t you take anything seriously, Dess?” Oort complained. He hadn’t slept the night before. His bones ached. He could never get warm when he hadn’t slept.

  Decibel stared at his bandmate.

  “It’s . . . my job. It’s my only job never to take things seriously. Your job is to take everything seriously. If I started, you’d have to stop and the actual universe would actually collapse. I’m sorry, have we met?” Decibel stuck his hand out—too aggressively; Oort flinched. He rolled on anyway. “My name’s Dani, what’s yours?”

  Oort gave him a disgusted look and turned his back to examine the green box. “There’s a picture of a little man on the side with stuff coming out of him,” he informed everyone.

  “No, it’s a late-model Yüzosh Auto-Botanical Frockade. Just one of these costs the gross domestic product of a midsize mining colony. The Trillion Kingdoms of Yüz donated them to the Grand Prix because they are generous and have a real sense of stagecraft and fair play and it was a tax write-off.”

  “It smells like bleach and puberty,” Dess mused.

  “Base elements can’t help what they smell like. Would you just sing to the nice machine? That’s how you’re paying for it. The only currency within the bounds of the Grand Prix is music. Sing for your supper, sing for your breakfast, sing for your bar tab, sing for the clothes on your back. So get out your wallets or you’re going to miss the starting bell.”

  “We’re not ready,” Decibel whispered, gone completely pale. Dark circles of exhaustion ringed his eyes like overdone raccoon liner. “We haven’t finished the song yet. Not even a little finished. Not even almost.”

  The roadrunner hooted in frustration. “Don’t worry about that yet. Does that look like a stage? No. You’re going to step inside, strip off, hold out your arms, get hosed down with one of the great useful goops of the universe—a nice, lightly clairvoyant mist of accelerated spores, micro-bulbs, empathic molds, local rainwater, and a combination of highly efficient fertilizers—then you’ll pop out the other side dressed to the nines and armored to the gills, have a couple of drinks, and then turn in early with a nice cup of milk, knowing you.”

  Jones crossed his arms skeptically over his chest. “But why?”

  The Esca had had enough. Oort had told her not to, but not using her voice to its full potential was just too much work. Mira’s voice poured warmly out of the tall blue anglerfish-flamingo mash-up: “This . . . is part of it, boys. We need to see who you are. You can’t fool the Frockade. You can’t lie to spores. The useful goop of the Yüzosh is going to soak into you, learn as much as it can, and rearrange itself into a fetching outfit that will advertis
e your inner self like a giant neon sign. It’s going to put your insides on the outside, spiritually speaking. The Yüz originally used it as an interrogation device. Then a dating aid. Once, an Andvari went in and came out dressed in a tuxedo of screaming faces on fire. Very good for us to know what he was made of, you see? Ah! I know how to explain. Recall the scene in the hit film of summer 1984, Splash, in which Eugene Levy surprises Darryl Hannah on the New York City street and sprays her down with a hose, which reveals her true mermaid nature for all to see. It is that. That is going to happen to you. Your tail will flap very wetly on the concrete and people will take many pictures of your most secret and intimate self. Not bad, right?”

  “You’re gonna pump us full of more toxic rot, you mean. I don’t even do dairy,” Oort protested. “I take antibacterial gel with me if I’m going down to the shop for crisps. Gotta keep the girls’ hands clean and all.”

  The roadrunner whirled round. Her voice flashed instantly from Mira’s to the creaky leather-and-disapproval voice of Oort’s father: “Omarcik! How many times shall I have to tell you there is no good thing to be had in killing you before the show? Do you know how many species are mucking about down on this town, all possessing of different dietary needs and allergies and stress tolerances? Fifty-seven! To keep halal is nothing to compare! And we’ve not had so much as a batch of bad fish in two hundred dinner rushes of this nature. We have got this sorted, my son. We have got this dialed in. Don’t go swim for an hour after, don’t pick at it, and it rinses right clean in six, seven hours, evet? Is perfectly safe! Sometimes I worry about my boy. No one else has ever made such a problem for me. Look, will it make you feel cozy if I go first?”

  “No,” grumbled Oort.

  “Absolutely,” said Decibel Jones. “And what’s going to happen to our togs?”

  The roadrunner was in full orchestral mode now. She puffed her feathers and shifted hard from Mr. Omar Calisșkan Sr. to Nani of the Blackpool lounge room and crooned:

  “Do not make yourself a fret. I am your laundry machine like always, I am not? Now, you just button your eyes on Nani, Mr. Hot of the Shot. Your big Danesh-head always thinks it is more full of things than the rest of the heads around here, but with it, you cannot even make roti that fails to taste like a foot. Watch tight and presto chango, Nani will do Mr. BunnyBugs best good lipstick trick.”

  The Esca approached the Frockade, casually sang a few bars of something in her own language, something that felt like it was boxing their ears with unspeakable emotion, something so full of grace and need that Dess almost lurched forward to take the alien in his arms like a crying child, before remembering all that nonsense about infrasounds and feeling very silly indeed.

  The seafoam-green surface of the Frockade sagged alarmingly before lurching forward and absorbing the roadrunner so quickly and completely that it pulled in Oort’s and Decibel’s cries of horror as well, leaving them slack-jawed and quiet.

  Oort St. Ultraviolet shrugged. There was nothing more to it, he supposed. Once they’d agreed to this madness, why object to the icing on top? He pulled down his threadbare Glampire Planet Tour T-shirt over the waist of his broad-striped linen pajama pants. No matter what the blue bird said, he felt that he’d traveled in top style for the new jet set. Still no dad-belly, even a cough and a groan past forty. It might not be much to be proud of, but it wasn’t nothing, either. Ultraviolet sang his sole contribution as a lyricist to their debut album much more softly than the roadrunner, bracing involuntarily for the big ooze he knew was coming. No antibacterial gel could help him now. He stood on tiptoes in front of the Yüzosh portable toilet, shrugged, and belted one out for the cheap seats:

  It’s my own fault

  if I’m singing chained to Venus

  It’s my own fault

  if I miss you every day

  It’s my own fault

  ’cause I didn’t read the Terms of Service

  and I loved you anyway

  The Frockade seemed to accept his payment of one slightly wobbly a cappella ex–hit single and slurped the musician up without complaint.

  “He’s fine.” Decibel Jones puffed out a long-held breath. “He’s fine. Totally alive.”

  Everything was suddenly very quiet. The air on this weird Happy Fun World tasted amazingly wholesome. It whipped up his blood like egg whites.

  “See you on the flip side,” said Decibel Jones with a smart salute to no one in particular, and gave it his best song off his solo album because it was a good album, dammit, no matter what Mira or Oort or his garbageman or the Guardian had said, and somebody ought to hear it, even if that somebody was a giant green toilet seven thousand light-years from Croydon:

  I run on love and glitz and beer

  I’m a futuro-grandiose need machine

  And up in lights my name appears

  I am Prozzymandias, Queen of Queens!

  And then Jones was gone too.

  24.

  Party for Everybody

  Decibel Jones stepped alone out of the other end of a rock festival portable toilet and into a cocktail party already in progress.

  He recognized the room immediately. His shoulders relaxed instinctively; his jaw unclenched. He was at home here.

  Sometimes it felt as though Decibel had spent half his life in mid-to-high-end hotel suites and bars and reception lounges from London to Helsinki to Rio to Madison, Wisconsin. Junkets, conventions, corporate glad-handing, meet and greets, charity gigs, bingeing on fried appetizers and drinks-on-the-room after a day in the studio, in the club, at the arena, on the circuit. Whether he’d done it wearing scandalous glitter glad rags or incognito invisibility cloaks consisting of dark glasses and ratty shirts emblazoned with the faded tat of someone else’s band hardly made any difference. You were there to sell yourself, either way, but at least the nosh was free.

  All those hotel bars and ballrooms and suites flowed into one platonic hotel ballroom-bar-suite in Decibel’s memory, and that platonic hotel space flowed out around him now: low light, scuffed tables, bartender unhappy with his choices in life but even less happy with anyone else’s, thin, hard, mean carpet in an indefinable yet ubiquitous shade of nothing somewhere between turquoise and brown, windows on the water in lieu of any real attempt at decor, cheap paper napkins and thin black drink stirrers already dropped all over the floor, chairs that somehow remained uncomfortable no matter how you shifted and scooched, paired with big plush mercenary loungers that sucked you down until any effort to talk to another person made you look like a child in a booster seat trying to talk to the big kids about the serious issues facing applesauce today.

  And there he found himself, in the sky bar of what, for all the world, appeared to be a mid-range Hilton. Banks of windows looked out on Our Mums setting in gorgeous joyful pastels over the lavender sea and the gentle lights of Vlimeux’s notorious Healing White Light District far below. Decibel Jones stared at a broadsheet of dubious fonts stapled to a large sandwich board sign that read WELCOME GRAND PRIX CUNTESTANTS BYOB, complete with the kind of deeply unfortunate typo you only find at events the logistics of which have been left up to embittered unpaid interns bent on low-effort vengeance. The Hilton logo was crooked and looked far more like a drunken hieroglyph than a capital H. It pulsed a little. It bulged. Someone had put down their coffee cup on the bottom left corner and presumably just said, Fuck it, no one will notice. Decibel remembered that typo-and-coffee-stain combo. He and Mira had posed with one on the Glampire Planet tour. Oort had got his thumb on the lens, he was laughing so hard, which made it technically the last photo of all three of them ever taken.

  Decibel reached for a phone that wasn’t there to take another picture, felt a bit stupid, and stepped unto the breach.

  The slightly dingy sky bar was crowded with milling and swilling aliens of every shape, size, density, and attitude toward hygiene, all wearing large, friendly HELLO MY NAME IS stickers on whatever they had that passed for a chest. There were Esca, Decibel saw gratefully,
gingerly trying to sip from large margarita glasses of plankton with slices of fruit hanging off the sugared rims, several different-colored straws, and festive umbrellas, not an easy operation with a beak. A large cloud of multicolored glitter floated over the blue fish-birds, moving and swooping and bulging in a way that was definitely intentful, not decorative. Beneath it, the roadrunner was wearing a cloud of pearls and tears and shifting, illuminated words in a language beyond subjects, objects, or the vaguest concept of transparent prose.

  But there Decibel’s brief study of xenobiology failed him. The roadrunner and Öö had tried. But it was all too much to remember now. Several small, dark creatures with huge eyes out of a goth toddler’s coloring book peered up at the bar resentfully—a bar that was, unmistakably, filled to the brim with dirt like a denuded window planter. A throng of brutally pale, slender people who looked like basketball players rolled in antlers as painted by El Greco stood by the windows, trying to bend subtly at the knee so as not to tower quite so much over a clique of silvery moths awkwardly clutching martinis. The tables were littered with crystal decanters full of bubbling pink muck and weird greenish stones. Five or six vast, globby golden tubes of wet flesh with bright veins of color forking all over them and a gaping hole full of tanning-salon UV light where their faces should have been were discussing something desperately important with a cluster of delicate clear balloons full of apricot gas whose name badges all clearly said URSULA. And just then, somebody with a head like an exploded hippo burst out laughing (possibly laughing) at a joke (possibly a joke) told by what was clearly the rotting, defurred corpse of a Keshet. The ex–red panda turned mid-giggle and stared at him.