Space Opera, Page 8

  This carefully balanced neutrality was the second most significant factor in the longevity of their society. The first was Sagrada itself.

  If you look up into the night sky, you will not see Sagrada. Not from Earth, not from Bataqliq, not even from Gakk-Gakk, Sagrada’s largest and most socially toxic moon. The planet reflects almost none of the already miserly light from its shriveled, demented red sun. Rather, it greedily absorbs every photon until its surface shimmers with heat. That surface is wholly, utterly, indescribably black, from pole to pole, peak to peak, sea to shadowed sea. It is far blacker than coal or petroleum or the heart of a high school poet, far blacker than a mere total absence of light. It is surrounded by a mob of moons made of the same swarthy stuff, which block out starlight like bouncers at the hottest club in town. Sagrada is a study in darkness, an adoringly monogamous commitment to the gothic aesthetic. Beside Sagrada, ravens are as bright as parrots, widows are as flamboyant as cabaret dancers, and black holes suffer from crippling penumbra envy. For obvious reasons, in Elakhish, the word “black” and all its synonyms occupy the same linguistic niche as words like “cool,” “sweet,” “brilliant,” “highly skilled,” and “built like a brick shithouse.”

  In order to function in all this dimly red-rimmed darkness, the body of an Elakh is small, dense, nearly indestructible by anything that might be lying about, around, or in wait in the shadows, and mostly eyeballs. If a particularly melancholy child stacked a huge black ball of hard suet on top of a dainty black suet cone, gave it a lot of elegantly styled coaxial cable for hair, and stuck two enormous old-fashioned lightbulbs on it where eyes should generally go, they’d have a pretty solid approximation of an Elakh with which to horrify their parents. And yet, the Elakhon are widely considered to be a beautiful people. Their eyes quickly evolved to occupy nearly all their facial real estate, the better to devour any available light like starving beggars; their long, long lashes are powerful sensory organs like cat’s whiskers, if cats could sense predators, weather systems, and other annoyances miles away. The hard, slightly greasy suet of their flesh is remarkably malleable, able to imitate a wide variety of limbs and other convenient protrusions. Imagine Sagrada in its earliest pastoral days, the Elakhon in their black villages, peacefully tilling black fields of midnight barley in the shadows of onyx mountains, carrying their tiny charcoal children to dig black clams from a black beach near a black sea, looking up into a sky so dark that it depressed itself, when the first alien starship cruised through their atmosphere and dumped a cargo hold full of state secrets onto their planet.

  The Elakhon were able to advance technologically at a rate far faster than any other species to date because the rest of the galaxy used Sagrada as its personal high-end rubbish bin. What better place to hide something you didn’t want anyone else to find than a planet so dark, it was practically invisible? The heavens rained down data-crystals, prototype vessels, unwanted furniture, spent weapons, drugs, bodies, treaties, vast sums of intergalactic currency, more data-crystals, and any commodities a governing body might want to remove from the market in order to create a sudden and profitable demand. Civilizations rose and fell and ran smack into walls, but the Elakhon went on, collecting, analyzing, improving, remembering.

  In fact, in every language other than Elakhish, the word for the massively useful blackworld Sagrada translates to the Memory Bin, and to leave something there was to have it Binned.

  After happily using everyone else’s dirty little secrets to establish dominance over their sector and a continuous, lively civilization whose general tranquility Musmar the Night Manager famously attributed to the fact that light is a well-known irritant to all thinking, feeling beings, the Elakhon made the rather unexpected choice not to tell everyone to shove off and stop using their world as a collective toilet down which to flush any incriminating evidence the second the police come knocking. Instead, they became the great archivers and curators of galactic culture, hyperattentive beatnik librarian-salvagers combing every black inch of Sagrada for debris to analyze, label, and include in climate-controlled exhibits in the long, hexagonal, black granite halls of the Melanoatramentous Library, a palace of knowledge as large as Hungary, as well organized as a retirement home for executive assistants, and as well guarded as the meaning of life.

  The first Metagalactic Grand Prix was held in the Melanoatramentous Library’s Special Collections Room, as it contained the only stage with any real size or grandeur left standing after the war, and afterward, the whole thing could be immediately and efficiently Binned—a word which had come, over the millennia, to mean: “carefully, lovingly recorded for posterity by the Elakhon and preserved against the ravages of time, war, and the children’s disrespect for history.”

  The winner of the first Grand Prix was an Alunizar ultratenor girl group called Glagol Jsem and the Death of All That Came Before, singing what would become the first interstellar smash single, “Maybe We’ll Just Stay in Tonight Instead of Doing the Whole Intergalactic Civil War Thing, Wouldn’t That Be Nice?” Five massive tubular sea squirts, protean tubes of golden and violet and scarlet veined flesh with a round, cilia-fringed siphon at each end that served as mouth, nose, face, cyclopean eye, and simple jet-propulsion system, undulated with passion. Their siphons, gaping with grief and ecstasy, hovered in the air above the weeping crowd, suspended in an orb of moonlit water rescued at the last possible second from their ruined homeworld. Naturally, it wasn’t just the five of them. The Alunizars are the greatest practitioners of attachment parenting in the known universe. When an Alunizar reproduces, their children do not go out into the world to make their fortune and curse the urban dating scene, but simply bud from their mother or father, emerging out of their backs or their bellies as a complete and individual and rebellious bulge, but never leaving home. Each Alunizar is a colony, a generation ship, accumulated centuries of wisdom and experience and quick tempers and belligerent dinner conversations in one extremely lumpy, extremely lovely tube of glowing aquatic flesh. The death of a single Alunizar is the death of an entire nation, and the wars had gone on for years.

  Glagol Jsem and the Death of All That Came Before sang in perfect bone-shattering five-thousand-part harmony, with the combined voices of their entire genetic lines, and they wept the rosy pink electricity generated by five thousand weaponized agony-ducts, and they performed the traditional Alunizar interdimensional two-step, which no foreigner had ever been allowed to witness before that moment in the black library, a dance halfway between Bollywood and Sea World, lit only by the bioluminescent fire of their tears and the transported moonlight of poor, far-off, still-smoldering Aluno Prime. At the climax of the dance there was a brilliant iridescent spiderweb of exploding light, and Glagol Jsem phased into a dimension where the whole notion of sentience had never gotten past committee, wriggled with delight, made a salacious gesture in the general direction she’d come from, and never came back.

  They won by a single point.

  10.

  Don’t Go Without Me

  On a plush paisley couch in a large and tastefully furnished suburban home outside London, Omar Calisșkan, better known as Oort St. Ultraviolet, the only one of the Absolute Zeros to make it through fame and fortune and their opposites without a personality disorder, ambiguously employed royalty-collector, erstwhile boyfrack, about to be ex-husband to a deeply alienated woman in Cardiff, reasonably responsible father of two, and one-man band, slept off the last bender of his marriage, the massive takeout vindaloo he’d ordered in, and through the invasion of Earth on a long cool river of Ambien, absinthe, and regret.

  Omar Calisșkan, like all humans who found themselves asleep at noon on a Thursday, spoke to the roadrunner in his dreams. In the lounge room he shared with Justine and the kids, an ordinary lounge room belonging to an ordinary family, between the well-worn blue-and-copper-striped couch they’d bought before Nico was born and the black lacquered, vaguely Asian-styled end tables they’d picked up for practically nothing when
Justine’s hotel remodeled, the seven-foot-tall ultramarine fish-flamingo looked far less alarming than it did in the real world, being only a dream. The girls played on his mother’s red and gold rug, squabbling over a toy that looked very much like Planet Earth. Their cat, Capo, fortunate refugee from a local shelter and the birthday present he’d never outdo, hissed at the clouds over Australia. The ghost of his father sat in the leather recliner sipping a tropical drink from a glittery pink straw. And a giant bird was telling him he was going to have to save the world with his Oortophone. It was an ordinary dream for an ordinary man under severe emotional and dietary distress, nothing you wouldn’t expect when you knocked back the acknowledged world heavyweight champion of sleeping pills.

  “Remember, Omarcik,” his father’s ghost said in the dream, peering at his son over the sugared rim of his drink, just as he’d said when they were finally given permission to move into their flat in Manchester when Omar was six, just as he’d done every night that Omar had been sober enough to dream since. “We are ordinary English family now. When the world turns the wrong way round, ordinary is the best defense. Nobody bothers an ordinary Englishblokeman. Nobody makes a file on him, nobody asks him who his business is, nobody tells him come with me and don’t make a fuss. If anybody bothers you, you just be so ordinary, evet?”

  Omar stuck hard to his father’s rules. Englishblokeman became a kind of untouchable superhero in his head, a man so normal, nothing abnormal could ever touch him.

  And for a long time, nothing did. Faster than a well-ordered queue, more powerful than a muttered tut, able to walk right by police officers without being harassed. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s the fragile illusion of invulnerability inherent in being just like everyone else. No—it’s Englishblokeman.

  Even at the height of Absolute Zeros mania, Omar Calisșkan saw nothing remotely out of the ordinary about his life. Oort St. Ultraviolet, for all his rhinestones and rouge, was simply the predictable outcome of practicing guitar more than multiplication tables, more than talking to girls, more than looking old enough to buy his own pints, of loving music like it gave birth to him, of moving to London as soon as humanly possible, of doing time in the club scene and at open mics and tolerating the personalities of people who could sing because they wanted to start a band, but not like he wanted a band, of going home with random artistically promising strangers because you never knew which one was your future until you were ordering them ice cream at five in the morning. Omar drew a straight line from their sold-out world tour back and back and back to the day he’d started school in Manchester, when the music teacher had set up every instrument you could play in the band or orchestra in a big circle on the thin, lowest-bidder gray carpet of the classroom that had never been much better than concrete and let all the goggling children go around and toot and twang and whistle and blow on every one of them until they found something they liked or shoved their hands in their pockets and said they only wanted to play football, mum, and so refused to do the one thing that meant anything in this world. Little Omar had approached them all with enormous, worshipful dark eyes, the violin and the oboe and the trumpet and the guitar and the drums and the trombone and the clarinet and the cello, touching them as shyly as he would one day touch Myra and Danesh and Justine, making them all talk with his fingers and his mouth and his breath, and whirled round to hug his parents desperately, whispering into their legs: “But I want to play them all, Mum. I want them all. Don’t make me choose, I can’t, I can’t.”

  Everything that had happened to him afterward was the perfectly normal extension of that day, of that child. Even the trashfire that was Ultraponce, even rehab, even Justine getting pregnant when they’d been so careful, even that horrible night in Edinburgh, even their second daughter, just as unexpected and unimaginable as the first, even Justine’s affair and his and then couples therapy on Tuesday nights for the rest of recorded time, and even working for fifteen years as a session musician like it was an office job, playing anonymously on other people’s albums, other people’s genres and styles and standards, in jeans and a T-shirt for someone else’s band and only enough concealer to conceal his hangover, just as long as he was still playing. That was all fine. That was all normal. If you were writing a book about a failed pop group, that’s how it would go. It was an ordinary story, the story of a thousand other musicians, the story of Englishblokeman. Omar felt safe inside that story, if not happy. If not much of anything else.

  “Does it ever make you sad to only have one moon?” the roadrunner said, grooming Justine’s long brown hair with its dark beak while she stared straight ahead into the nothing of dreams. “It would make me sad.”

  “It’s the usual number, isn’t it?” Omar asked, quite worried.

  “Not overly,” answered the fish-bird, and then Capo was pouncing hard on his snoring chest and licking him and kneading him until Omar Calisșkan groaned himself awake. He opened his gunked-up eyes to find himself meeting the cool mouthwash-green feline gaze of the short-haired white cat that had stayed when his wife had not. Capo seemed to have brought company. Something was looming behind her. Two somethings. Two blurry somethings. Something neither cats nor daughters nor estranged wives nor curry deliverymen.

  Something old. And something blue.

  Omar’s vision finally focused around the roadrunner and Decibel Jones. He had no idea what was going on, but it felt somehow inevitable. He had always been headed for something this unrelentingly, unforgivably stupid.

  “Hiya, Oort,” Decibel said as gently as he could under the circumstances.

  The Esca cleared her long soft throat and asked in an eminently neighborly tone: “Do you think I might trouble you for a steak and a glass of milk? Whole, if you have it. But 2 percent would be fine.”

  11.

  1944

  The Sentience Wars began and ended at a public bus stop.

  Starships are frightfully useful and pleasant things, but not, strictly speaking, a must-have to get around town. Even the jankiest hand-me-down FTL-capable hoopty that couldn’t pass a special relativity inspection to save its intrepid bridge crew is the neon-tracklit, fully stocked wet bar, stripper-pole-fitted superbass party limousine of galactic travel. It doesn’t just get you from planet to planet, it gets you there in comfort, good company, high style, full of canapés, with a good buzz going, and looking like somebody to reckon with, which is very important to most young species trying to splash some cash around and make their mark on the nightlife.

  But you could always take the bus.

  In the early days of the universe, whether or not a habitable planet happened to have a wormhole nearby was as consequential to the eventual political map as whether or not a particular group of humans happened to be born on a continent with domesticable animals on tap or on an island the size of a doorknob where the only source of reliable protein was a semipoisonous tuber. Wormhole or no wormhole had just as little to do with the inherent superiority and/or possibly divine mandate of the smirking bastards who won the cosmic draw as cow or no cow, and yet, everyone everywhere will do, say, and stab nearly anything if it means they get to believe that they are blessed and their neighbors are basically toad-people.

  Listen. The galaxy is a pretty damnably woolly place, and we’ve got a lot to cover in a short time if we’re going to get through the whole war, but try not to forget about the cows. They’re going to be important in a minute.

  For the fortunate suns—the Utorak, the Keshet, the Voorpret, the Alunizar—the invention of space travel was as easy as building a big empty box and chucking it out of your gravitational well like a lucky shot Skee-Ball, straight into the 100-point hole waiting on the left-hand side of history. Everyone else had to grope around in the dark strapped to atomic bombs until they ran face-first into something other than more dark. It took the poor Inaki so long to invent FTL spaceflight that they actually skipped right over it and straight to medium-range instantaneous matter transportation, which is, in re
trospect, much more practical for a species of parasitic fireflies so impossibly tiny that you can’t believe they have enough room for an internal monologue, all clinging to the bodies of gentle-eyed, extremely itchy pachyderms on one perpetually cloudy rock in the constellation of Draco.

  It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t equal. There wasn’t anything to be done about it, since you could no more move an active wormhole than you could move a politician to pity. The distribution of wormholes and livestock with potential was an invisible lottery ticket, purchased long before the first primordial molecules got into the oozing business, which could only be won or lost, never exchanged, ignored, or tried again, and it determined the courses of lives beyond counting.

  Now, these days, wormholes are galactic public transport: taken for granted, run-down, underfunded, unsanitary, and unloved, crammed with commuters and pensioners, unruly young species and drunks who can’t get home on their own power. The walls of any given wormhole are infested with indecipherable graffiti in ancient, impossible tongues, the only evidence of entire cauterized timelines and vast unspeakable intelligences trapped on the other side of the cohesion matrix, as well as whether or not Ursula Was Here. You are almost certain to get gum or vomit or causality or all three on your shoes.

  For a few centuries there, the Alunizar got away with claiming to have invented wormholes. This allowed them to collect spectacular tolls, tax cargo, conduct random security checks and confiscate any particularly exciting items, and shut down routes for regularly scheduled repairs that, by innocent coincidence, happened to be popular with civilizations who objected to the Empire’s habitual interstellar manspreading. Their story passed the smell test, at least: those blobby overgrown stained-glass sea squirts had been around longer than anyone except the Elakhon (whose entire society depended on never spilling anyone else’s sociopolitical beans, no matter how piping hot and juicy), they did seem to know how to patch up the works when the system sprung a reality leak, and Aluno Prime was undeniably parked in just about the most advantageous spot in the whole quadrant, cozily adjacent to the N, F, R, L, and J lines. Besides, how else could they have colonized so much, so fast? Aquatic species have a notoriously tough time handling the usual technological transition from ruining their own planets to ruining whole solar systems. While mammals, insects, and enlightened lichen can zip about as long as they take along a few houseplants to micromanage the air cycle, the unlucky space whales of this universe have to sort out how to get a ship overburdened with the absurd weight of a personal ocean into high orbit. No matter the magnitude of science’s triumph over nature, it will always be much easier to get a helium balloon to fly than a water balloon. Yet everywhere you went, the Alunizar were already there.