Space Opera

  “No,” snarled Oort.

  “Yeah, all right,” said Decibel Jones. “How come we’re doing this dance in a Hilton high-rise instead of on the proverbial mother ship? I expected some kind of Litostian multidimensional torture-palace at least. It smells like speed dating and sales conventions in here. And what’s with the dirt bar?”

  “This is a gift the Octave traditionally organizes for applicant species. We are deeply invested in the field of spiritual ergonomics and want only to make you as comfortable as possible, as this might be the last night in the life of your race. How did we do? It’s the South Wharf Hilton in Melbourne from your first world tour. We spent days learning about various cheeses and trends in contemporary upholstery. You really do enjoy old milk, don’t you? It’s quite extraordinary. You’re doing Brie wrong, of course. If you survive, we will be happy to transmit our corrections. The ‘dirt bar,’ on the other hand, is furnished by the Klavaret as hosts. Please feel free to choose a selection of seeds from the complimentary buffet at any time during the evening. They will germinate in the bar overnight and you can collect your Grand Prix costumes in the morning. Very fair, everyone has the same resources. Now, as you’ve already seen, almost everyone here is going to try to remove you, or at least immobilize you, distract you, confine you, seduce you, bring you up on some kind of charges, or otherwise essentially detain you—the options are endless. You’re more than welcome to return the favor, and you should definitely try—knock one of us out and you’ve secured the future of your species. We wouldn’t count on it, though. Humanity is astonishingly lacking in offensive anatomy. It’s hard to believe you made it this far being that stubby and penetrable and uninterestingly colored. Even the Klavaret have thorns, for fuck’s sake. You’re the easiest pickings imaginable, much easier to go after you than an Utorak.”

  “We wear our thorns on the inside,” Decibel said, and felt pretty good about that line.

  “No, you don’t, you’re soft like pudding,” Clippy snapped. The animated paper clip spun round; a neon-tipped dart flung from some far corner of the room, pranged off his wires, and lodged in the wall behind the bar. The wall promptly phased into a timeline where hydrogen just never really caught on, taking several bottles of booze with it.

  “I thought the Keshet liked us,” Decibel said mournfully. A little mob of red pandas by the elevator dissolved into a throw-down wrestling match over whether it was fair to just reset the last sixty seconds and try again, this time with something a bit more heat-seeking.

  “Öö likes me,” Oort groused. “Those little knockoff lemurs could be the Keshet Mossad for all we know. Maybe they’ve got earpieces and cyanide teeth.”

  The 321 aggregate entity known as Clippy puffed out his paper clip chest. “See? I am your cybersecurity assistant! Would you like to see a list of threats I have detected on your local drive?”

  Oort Ultraviolet wanted to shrug and jut his hip out and take all this as it came, the way Decibel always seemed to do. He wanted to not be terrified. He wanted to have a cup of tea and watch aliens on his flat-screen television with Nico and Siouxsie snuggled up, laughing at the rubbish makeup jobs, assured that they’d be defeated in the end, the way mankind was meant to interact with aliens. But he couldn’t. No matter what had happened, world tours and awards and money and pitching headlong toward Mira and that last night in Edinburgh, Dess remained essentially unflappable, and he remained . . . well. Flappable as a high-strung hen. Why should it change now?

  “You know this is completely barbaric, right?” Oort seethed at the artificial intelligence, who seemed to be taking a rest from its Clippy duties to make eyes at a jar full of magenta goop on a nearby table. One of the towering, viciously slender, many-pronged El Greco knights overheard, reversed course, and careened into the conversation.

  “You’re a long tall drink of tusks, aren’t you?” Decibel turned on a tuppence, from near-death experience to near-porn experience in one breath. Ultraviolet looked at him with disgust.

  God, how can one man so holistically miss the point? Dess thought. We are stubby and penetrable and uninterestingly colored, Mr. Bottom of the Class, and it’s getting crowded. Cheekiness is the only offense or defense I’ve ever had in my life, and if I can get that cairn of mammoth bones to flirt, it will probably put off puncturing us like the sad, weak stuffed toys we are. “Decibel Jones, possibly sentient superstar.”

  “Nessuno Uuf, deeply untalented lead—if such an unpleasant, unattractive, and unlovable being can be allowed to lead anything more complex than a quiet life—singer of the fundamentally artistically bankrupt Smaragdi band No Need to Make a Fuss. You won’t have heard of us. We’ve never sold a single album. Beside you, Mr. Jones, we are but a semiconscious cough in the virulent flu of culture. Now, this personification of mediocrity would like to ask—humbly—what barbarity her betters are discussing?”

  “This!” Oort threw up his hands. “Everything! All of it! You must know it is. It’s pure savagery.”

  Nessuno Uuf bowed and scrunched her long bones so that she would not appear so much taller than the Absolute Zeros, who took to her humility like lemon juice to milk. They had no idea what to do with it. They were musicians. They were born unable to digest modesty.

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, love,” Decibel told her, rallying, and let his hand brush against the frozen pale-green-flanged cartilage of her fingers.

  “I deserve the most severe abuse,” Nessuno demurred.

  The 321 sighed noisily, then interrupted. “Hey there! It looks like you’re trying to talk to a Smaragdin! Would you like help?”

  “Christ, yes,” Dess whispered.

  “This mode of discourse is typical of the race known as Smaragdi. In fact, Nessuno Uuf is a fixture of the stand-up modesty circuit, and No Need to Make a Fuss has sold more albums than every recording artist in the history of your planet combined. On Pallulle, she is considered offensively arrogant and crass. I assure you, in the fashion of her people, Uuf has been mercilessly blowing her own horn while calling you a screaming idiot. Carry on.”

  Nessuno bowed lower, but there was a tiny fraction of a smile on her skeletal face. “This empty, fly-encrusted mayonnaise jar on the unkempt countertop of existence does not wish to presume she has the right to disagree with such a wise and discerning mind, but may I ask—have you got any lions left?”

  “P-pardon?” Oort stuttered.

  “It is unsurprising that this supremely useless melted ice cube failed to make herself understood. Her speech must be as an infection of ear mites to you. On your planet. Have you got any lions left?”

  Oort and Decibel glanced at each other. “Well, no, not . . . overly,” Oort admitted. “No. They went extinct a few years back.”

  “Please forgive the arrogance of a being who cannot even dream of becoming a hat rack for the use of those as exalted as yourselves, but strictly speaking, they didn’t go extinct, you made them extinct. Because they were carnivores. Because they were carnivores and they didn’t look like you or think like you or talk like you, and they were a danger to you and yours, or at least they were years and years ago, because you’re made of the sort of thing they like to eat.”

  “I suppose, but . . .”

  “Even knowing that I am a discarded Popsicle stick on the sidewalk of intellectual discourse and thus wholly incapable of higher-order thinking, I beg you to tolerate the shrill and childlike whine of my asking: How about rhinoceroses? Dodos? Giraffes? Those are herbivores, so they presented no danger to the continuation of your species, but you wiped them out all the same. To a one. And then there are the more immediately pertinent examples of the Lakota, the Cree, the Aboriginal Tasmanians. Now, please tell this execrable excuse for a sentient being who is not worthy to receive your diseased secondhand blankets, before you cut the throat of the last lion or rhinoceros or dodo or Mayan farmer, did you let them sing a song? Did you let them lay down a beat? Did you let them dance for their lives? Did you let them try to pro
ve to you that there was more in them than just a longing to eat and breed and lie in the sun and die with a full belly?”

  Oort thought he was going to be sick. “N-no.”

  “Mmm,” said Nessuno Uuf. The moons of Litost shone in through the sky bar windows, illuminating the beautiful bone knives of her face. “Barbaric. Of course, what can someone like me know?”

  26.

  If My World Stopped Turning

  Seven thousand light-years from the South Wharf Hilton, the highest-rated show in the history of a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth was the Keshet Holistic Live Total Timeline Broadcast of the Metagalactic Grand Prix. No World Cup had ever snatched this level of total attention, no final episode of a beloved show the mysteries of which promised finally to resolve, no aerial bombardment, no war crimes trial, no live taping of any reality television program’s dramatic conclusion ever grabbed so many eyeballs in a grip like bloodshot death like this episode of actual reality, piped into anything with a lick of bandwidth by the kind, but not entirely commercial-free, consideration of the Keshet Effulgence. Every pub TV, every computer screen, every mobile phone, every lounge room home theater system, every ballpark jumbotron, every digital photo frame, every antediluvian waiting room rabbit-ear cathode-ray set shone day and night, washing seven billion anxious, terrified, sleepless faces in the cool blue light of televisual entertainment. Once, people had found that light comforting, even homelike, a hearth in the center of their lives toward which they turned for warmth, togetherness, and safety.

  Now, not so much.

  But most people can only be so anxious and so terrified and so sleepless and so cowed and awed before the yawning abyss of the future for so long. Eventually, the body simply can’t sustain it. Eventually, some work has to get done. Eventually, adrenal glands need a bit of a break. Even in the face of the possible utter extinguishment of the human candle, one does, eventually, if it all goes on long enough and there is absolutely nothing one can do but sit there in one’s own fear-stink, get a bit bored.

  It had been sixteen days since Decibel Jones and Oort St. Ultraviolet got the hell out of Dodge, and the planet had watched every minute of it, broadcast by the nearly invisible, possibly illegally bred, constantly timeline-shifting cameras of the Keshet, one of which ended up manifesting inside Decibel’s digestive tract, so that the graveyard shift in the Western Hemisphere got a good, long lesson on how primate anatomy handles Bataqliq plankton fillets in a dubious facsimile of hollandaise sauce. They’d watched them sleep. They’d watched them practice. They’d watched them try to remember how a number of Shakespearian sonnets went and yelled “ ‘And summer’s lease hath all too short a date,’ you dumb hoofs” exasperatedly while throwing chips and popcorn and candy wrappers at the screen. They’d debated endlessly who would have been a better choice, living or dead, than Decibel bloody Jones and the Absolute stupid Zeros, minus one Zero. They’d drawn pictures of Esca and Keshet on the backs of billions of bar napkins. They’d started cults and prayed to zoo flamingos and old Absolute Zeros posters and the Great Barrier Reef. They’d argued online about how, exactly, the FTL drive on that amazing/hilarious/fucking lame ship worked and whether the space pandas had genders and whether or not the government was obligated to do something more than it was doing, which was currently nothing but watching TV with the rest of them. They’d uploaded millions of garage-recorded songs claiming that this one would win, this one would blow them all away, this one would save us. And they’d discussed, from one end of sixteen days down to the other, in pubs and restaurants and dentists’ offices and ballparks and lounge rooms and in truly infinite Internet comment threads, discussed until it came to throwing punches and screaming and threats of murder and worse and crying in the street in a glittering wreck of broken bottles and spilled booze and broken heels, discussed until sullen silence came out the only winner, whether or not humanity really was sentient at all. Whether Mr. Rogers and St. Francis and Beethoven made up for Hitler and Trujillo and the conquest of the Americas. Whether having invented champagne and pizza and break dancing made up for also having invented social media. Whether the existence of Guernica balanced the existence of the Spanish Civil War. Whether having not actually destroyed one another in a nuclear inferno just yet mattered at all when everyone knew, though not everyone would admit, that there was a pretty high likelihood that someone had tried to nuke the roadrunner before she took off, and if they got another chance, would definitely go for the red button, do not pass Go, do not collect a place in galactic society.

  And just how much the aliens knew about recent Earth history.

  But sixteen days had passed. That small, watery, excitable world was beginning to get bored with facing the nihilism of nonexistence. The species just couldn’t sustain it.

  People started to place bets.

  People started to download past Grand Prix highlight reels from the Keshet database.

  People started to make jokes again.

  People started to root for other bands—not over Decibel Jones, of course, but there were a lot of slots above dead last, and they’d been grooving on Elakh, Escan, Yurtmak, Smaragdi, and Klavaret hits for a while now. The Keshet band Basstime Anomaly actually topped the Billboard charts with one of their moldy oldies, “Clock Lobster.” Nobody wanted to say so, but it seemed pretty unlikely that two thirds of a has-been glamrock duo was going to take first place, so why not support the best and cheer for old DJ to come in ninth or tenth, which would still keep them all safely unincinerated?

  By the time the semifinals were under way, every dodged poisoning and near-miss to a murder echoed on Earth in thunderous cheers, boos, money exchanged, rounds bought, uproarious laughter, uncontrollable sobbing, kisses planted on strangers, and much shaking and rattling of homemade team merchandise full of hasty, ill-advised puns like ABSOLUTE HEROES and DROP THE BASSTIME and BIRD IS THE WORD and MY HEART BEATS AT A MILLION DECIBELS! and TAKE ME TO YOUR LEAD SINGER and WE’RE ACTUALLY VERY NICE ONCE YOU GET TO KNOW US.

  Earth began to get used to the proximity of the end of everything.

  It had a beat.

  And you could dance to it.

  27.

  Unsubstantial Blues

  Decibel Jones pulled up to the bar and collapsed onto a stool. He would have just laid his head down right there until the dizziness and the near-death adrenaline and the intolerably vibrating tension of keeping up some shredded semblance of his old swagger through all of it passed, but the bar remained as it had been when he first walked in: a long, deep planter full of plain black gardening-supply-store dirt. So Jones just stared at it, a really good, long, purposeful stare, as if he could make it be normal with the sheer strength of just how over it he felt on a molecular level. Be a bar, he willed the plank of potting soil. Do it. Do it for your old geezer. Be a regular, ordinary bar. Be wooden and full of soggy coasters. Grow some gum underneath. Spontaneously generate several mysterious puddles. Be Englishblokebar.

  “Rough day at work?” roared the hideous chain-saw hippo-bug massacre with the body of someone’s comfortably retired uncle behind the bar. Ichor dribbled out of his mandibles. His teeth would still leave Shark Week drifting and aimless on the road of life. His name tag still read: HELLO MY NAME IS YILGAR BLOODTUB IV, ESQ. But now Decibel saw that he’d penciled in underneath: Ask Me About MLM (Multi-Level-Murder) Opportunities on Ynt—Make Friends, Create Wealth, Be Yr Own Boss! “Wanna talk about it?”

  Decibel Jones could flirt with a china cabinet and talk it into a committed relationship, but everyone has limitations, and Decibel’s turned out to be that Predator vs. East Enders genetic throw-down back there polishing a pinot noir glass on the hem of his apron.

  “Not really,” Jones said flatly. Behind him, an Esca threw a Klavaret bush through the air with a triumphant infrasonic screech, smashing the poor thing’s runway-ready pot against the wall. Decibel Jones smiled the kind of smile you throw out to everyone else in the queue when the cashier says the com
puter just broke.

  “What’ll it be then, mister?” gnashed Yilgar Bloodtub, entirely untroubled. A glob of acidic saliva hovered on his lip, threatening to fall at any moment.

  “I’m skint at the moment, thanks. I didn’t exactly get to stop by a cash point on the way out of town. Besides, it’ll be poisoned or punch me in the jaw or something.”

  “Naw, this one’s on Olabil the Friendless over there. He said to put anything you want on his tab. And it’s safe. Olabil doesn’t participate in the semifinals. Wouldn’t be fair.”

  Jones looked down the bar, through the rowdy throng, all the way back to the far corner by the utility closet, where an outsize, four-eared, innumerably tusked elephant covered in thousands upon thousands of fireflies was pretending to be terribly interested in a potted ficus.

  “Who is that?” Dess asked.

  Yilgar glanced up at the glowing green elephant. “You are feasting your eyes upon the last remaining member of the Inaki species. Wormhole 66Y71—we call her Big Bubs—took out their homeworld, since it was in the neighborhood anyway, started the whole damned war. Olabil over there was just a little kid. He skipped school and ran off joyriding around the outer planets with his Sziv friends, may the First General Unkillable Fact bless and keep his big dumb heart. He turned up with all his homework done anyway, because Olabil is just about the sweetest idiot who ever lived, and, well, the rest is the utter and fiery annihilation of total war. That’s why it wouldn’t be fair to let him do the semifinals, on account of there’s only one of him. So what’ll it be, mister?”