Space Opera

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “How do you know how to speak Portuguese?” asked a Brazilian petrol station owner who dreamed of writing mystery novels. “You read my mind? Always figured aliens would read minds. Dirty trick if you ask me.”

  Oh, no, no, no, we’re not that kind of joint, darling. The Esca aren’t telepathic—we leave that to the finer establishments! But, and the good Lord knows I don’t mean to brag, we are what you might call mnemopathic. I can’t tuck a napkin under my chin and go to town on your thoughts in real time, but I can have a wee nibble on a sampler platter of your strongest memories. Think of it like a big, steaming bowl of stew. No, you can’t taste every little onion or bay leaf that went into it. But you can sure as hellfire get a mouthful of meat. So, this, that, and the butter in the roux: you remember speaking Portuguese, so I remember it too.

  “Why did I cry when you first spoke? I never cry. Why do I feel like I want to take care of you and protect you when we’ve only just met and you’re a bird-fish-man?” asked an old man who had swept the chantry in Notre Dame Cathedral every day for forty years.

  Oh, you poor thing! What a clumsy cow I am. We’ll get you cleaned right up. The thing of it is, evolution is such a cutthroat industry! Even a hole-in-the-wall like primeval Bataqliq was just slammed with supercompetitive potentially sentient species. If we wanted to climb to the top of the local scene, we had to get up very early in the morning, I’ll tell you what! We found our niche in the end. Here’s a friendly tip: if you want to protect yourselves from predators, you don’t always have to order up scary teeth and poison sacs. I can heartily recommend trying out disproportionately large eyes, slender, snappable legs, and an invitingly soft and vulnerable neck, all elegantly arranged to arouse feelings of protectiveness, compassion, and love, especially in mammals. Same reason puppies and kittens and babies are so cute—to trick you into taking care of them! Don’t feel bad, it’s not your fault. You literally can’t help it and neither can we. Plus, our famous neoteny is paired with an exquisite auditory capability. The Esca don’t make noise using just plain, store-bought diaphragms and larynxes, but by locally sourced air passing over and through the holes in our rib cages. See? That’s our house-made crystal-cartilage alloy there. Totally unique in the universe. Our specialized anatomy serves up a mouthwatering range of infrasounds, but they can be a bit too spicy for some discerning xenotypes, provoking a profound involuntary emotional response! I’m basically a giant vibrating nonconsensual feelings-flute. Isn’t that something? Humans do seem particularly allergic. I’ll turn the music down, no problem. But no need to tell you lot all that! You’ve built so many infrasound amplifiers over the centuries, such as the one you are currently sterilizing with your mop and broom. You just gotta know how it works! Makes you feel like God’s sitting right there next to ya, stealin’ your frites. Only it’s not God. We’re a bit low on God today. It’s just resonance.

  “Why me? Shouldn’t you be talking to the President or the UN or someone important? Why am I special?” asked a grocery clerk in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

  Aw, that’s so precious! Don’t worry, sweetheart, you’re not special at all! I’m talking to every human entity on this biosphere simultaneously. The Esca are a single Verse of sentient beings, one unified planet at peace with itself that speaks, to outsiders at least, with one voice. You are . . . not. This seemed like the best way to make sure everyone gets their share of supper. I’m not even here, strictly speaking. I am physically present in only one location on this world. No, I’m not gonna tell you where, you naughty thing! That would be cheating! I have projected a dynamic interactive holointrusion of myself into everyone else’s sensorium. These first contact gigs sort of run on rails, anyway. Like chatting with a waitress before she takes your order! It might seem personal and intimate, on account of how going out on the town is a real rare, memorable treat for you, but she lives on the town. She’s done this a hundred times and the girl’s on autopilot. Besides, the information I’ve got waiting under the heat-lamp for you is too important. I can’t wait for your monarchs to decide to hide it, lose control of the narrative, deny the evidence, call me a weather balloon, confess and resign, and finally leak a half-redacted version of what I tried to say to a newspaper friendly to one faction or another. Who has the time? This way, nothing can be hidden from any member of your . . . crowd, I am told, is the correct word, though it is very ugly compared to Verse. You should change it to something with a grander scope. Also, this way, I don’t have to repeat myself seven billion times.

  “How many of you are there?” asked the Prime Minister of Ukraine.

  Our ship is docked on the dark side of your moon. Does it ever make you sad to have only one moon? It would make me sad. We are a small ambassadorial vessel, nothing fancy-pants. We watched your television for a long time and got the feeling you would overreact to an adult-size fleet. Ship’s complement is one hundred fifty-four. However, contextually, I’m pretty sure you mean either how many are here on your planet or how many intelligent nonhumans are there in the galaxy? The answers are, respectively: just me down here and quintillions up there. Septillions. More. And yet, we are many fewer out there than once we were. The dinner rush ain’t what it used to be.

  “That’s a lot of Big Birds,” remarked an ambitious young oxycodone dealer in Connecticut.

  Oh, no, I did not mean to say there are quintillions of Esca. We are a modest species. It’s not considered good table manners to tick off your species’ exact numbers in mixed company, any more than you discuss the locks and alarms you have installed in your house with strangers. It’s not . . . safe.

  “You’re not alone?” asked a wealthy actor in his New York penthouse apartment.

  Not even a little! It’s so nice of you to be concerned, though. The Esca were chosen from among the minor races to contact you by the Great Octave, comprised of the Alunizar Empire, the Utorak Formation, the Keshet Effulgence, the Linearity of Smaragdi, the Trillion Kingdoms of Yüz, the Sziv, the Voorpret, and the 321. The Esca were chosen because, obviously, unspoiled species respond positively to us, given the whole nonconsensual feelings-flute thing. We are also the most recent species to be accepted into the arms of the Warm Fuzzy Galactic Family. You will be given a comment card at the conclusion of our conversation. Your feedback is appreciated.

  “Are you going to kill us all?” asked the Chancellor of Germany’s husband.

  Possibly. Probably? Not me, personally, of course. All signs point to . . . maybe? Very suspenseful, isn’t it? Exciting!

  “If you’re going to slaughter us like dogs anyway, why bother stopping in for a chitchat first? Just nuke us from orbit, why not?” asked a retired accountant on a fixed income in Costa Rica.

  There is a process, señorita! Veggies before dessert! The Keshet picked up radio broadcasts sloshing around this area ages ago. You’re very loud! Table for seven billion, chop-chop! We all found what we heard a bit disturbing, but at least you could dance to it. Here’s the catch, kitten: whenever evidence of a new species with significant potential for expansion is discovered, we all get very nervous. Sometimes, the new kids are clearly on the up-and-up, bright-scaled and bushy-tailed sensitive sweeties who really have their shit together. But not everyone cleans up nice for company. Not everyone can be trusted to play nicely with all the other children. Sometimes, a species gins up the technology necessary to well and truly muck things up for the rest of us before they develop anything like self-awareness or complex reasoning or radical empathic perspective, before their philosophical digestive tract can handle something spicier than malice aforethought or semibenign neglect. These borderline cases must be . . . tested to see if they possess true sentience. You wouldn’t enroll a wolf in a preschool for the gifted and advanced just because it learned how to sit and speak and shake a paw, now, would you? That’s obvious. It would be a slaughterhouse. With juice boxes. We have a responsibility to those who were here already when that chap with fangs and fur turned up pretending to be civilized.

 
“Of course we’re sentient!” protested the newly minted CEO of Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Holdings in Tokyo. “Look around! We’ve done so much! We’ve had . . . Kant! And Einstein! And Descartes! And . . . and Kurosawa and the Internet and Nekobasu and Mr. Rogers and game shows where you don’t even win anything except happiness! We’ve been to the moon! We saved the California condor. You and I are talking, back and forth! You can’t do that with a turtle or a jellyfish or a washing machine. How can you doubt we’re sentient? I donate to charity, you know.”

  Please don’t make a scene, sir. It’s not personal. You’ve got to order off the kiddie menu until you can sit still in your big-boy chair. The galaxy nearly roasted itself to ashes over the question of which species were and were not sentient. The ruins still smoke. The widows still weep. And quite frankly, Mr. Rogers notwithstanding, you’re a mess. I mean, honestly. You just made the argument for the survival of your species and you didn’t even mention a single female, except, presumably, half the condors. I don’t know why you would even bring up the Internet. The xeno-intelligence officer responsible for evaluating your digital communication required invasive emergency therapy after an hour’s exposure. One glance at that thing is the strongest argument possible against the sentience of humanity. I wouldn’t draw attention to it, if I were you. We know very well that you’ve been to the moon. You’re starting to consider mining your asteroid belt as well. You’re just shy of figuring out how to shuffle your horde of hormone-curdled control-obsessed malignant narcissists offworld. In short, you were about to become our problem. But now there is no problem! Now there is a process.

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. “We’re doing great. Turn on any news channel, they’ll tell you. Taxes are low, business is booming, crime is down, the Patriots win the Super Bowl every year, and we’re finally getting our country back. I’ll admit, it used to be a real nightmare around here. If you’d have shown up five years ago, I’d agree with you. So many filthy, ungrateful protestors, clogging up traffic, breaking windows, whining about every little thing that didn’t go their way. But that’s all in the past! Look around! Clean streets. Quiet streets. Empty streets ready for commerce. Everyone I know is happy.”

  Everyone you know is a monster, sweetie. We’ve watched a lot of your media, you know. It’s an excellent way to evaluate societal sentience. You seem to be very concerned with monsters. Monsters from above, monsters from below, monsters among you, monsters from the sea, radioactive monsters, machine monsters, magical monsters, serial monsters who can only be stopped by monsters with badges. It’s a whole thing with you people. We got terrifically bored after a while. After all, you always win against the monsters, even though you’re the ones slowly cooking your planet because you can’t be bothered not to, butchering one another for fun and profit, making up elaborate stories that start with being calm and treating everyone with kindness and equality but somehow always end with somebody getting enslaved, absolutely obliterating the other species with whom you share a world so you can take a photograph with their corpses or gobble up their best features in hopes of achieving a more satisfying erection, and being generally willing to sell the fleeting, unique, fragile lives of everyone you’ve ever met if it means you can consume a slightly larger share of resources than they can. You can’t even agree on whether or not a sick child should get a tissue without having to really work for it. None of you seem to be able to stand one another. How will you treat us, if you are allowed to swarm across the galaxy? Which of us have horns or tusks or claws we feel quite attached to that might arouse your sluggish organs? Yes, of course, you’ve done some clever things with your time. No one is denying that rhythmic gymnastics are really just terrific. But in a clinch, you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don’t have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three. This is not the behavior of a sentient race. It is the behavior of wild animals. Even your babies view anyone who doesn’t look just exactly like their parents with seething suspicion. It’s baked in to you. I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten? At least we let you try to convince us we’re wrong. I doubt you asked the dodo birds what they thought about it before you blasted the last one in the face with a blunderbuss. But lucky you—we’re better than that. We are not monsters. We have our process. The process works. We do not deviate from the process. Perhaps you could think of it as instructions from corporate. Not to be disobeyed, if you don’t want to be sacked.

  “So what is it?” asked a green-haired barista in Melbourne who was considering going back to art school. “The process, I mean. And we’re not all like that, by the way. I’m vegan. I run a dog rescue.”

  Cheer up, humanity! You’ve got reservations at the hottest nightspot in the galaxy! You will send a representative to beautiful Litost, where all the fashionable species have gathered for the Metagalactic Grand Prix. There, you will compete with the Alunizar, the Keshet, the Yüz, the Esca, and all the rest of us, except, of course, the vast Naranca Empire, as they don’t play well with others. They don’t really grasp the idea of a contest that isn’t mostly entirely about them or an aesthetic that isn’t up to its epaulets in military tat, and anyway, their current emperor is a slowly rotting mango on a plastic lawn chair, so their own sentience status is a bit up in the air at the moment. (You will also be judged against other aspiring species rounded up from the corners of what we like to call the “developing multiverse.” It’s nicer than “crapslums” or “under the astronomical bed.”) All of us together will take part in a glorious contest requiring all the strength, intellect, and art of our various kinds. Prove to us that you are more than the sum of your most unpleasant parts. Prove that you’ve learned literally anything from your embarrassing history. Prove that, if we teach you how to plant corn, you won’t give us a repeat performance of Manifest Destiny’s Greatest Hits. Prove you’re better now. You don’t even have to win! As long as you don’t come in dead last, your species will rise and join the party in the sky already in progress. But if you can’t even defeat one measly tone-deaf head-on-backward galactic civilization, I’m afraid all memory of your collective existence will be lovingly collated and archived, your planetary resources tenderly extracted, and your species totally annihilated. Your organic material will be seamlessly reincorporated into your biosphere and your planet left in peace to try again with dolphins or something in another billion years or so. FUN!

  “Never,” proclaimed the President of the United States. “We will not lie down and let you destroy our way of life for your entertainment. We will stand. We will fight. We will never give up. You may frighten others with your little speech, but you’re messing with humanity now. We are capable of so much more than you can imagine. So much more than your barbaric ritual sacrifice. We will rise up and defend this planet, and in the end, our spirit, our courage, and our nuclear stockpiles will prevail.”

  Look at you! Who’s the cutest? YOU’RE THE CUTEST. And what a sense of humor! Your mummy must be so proud. Don’t be stupid, we would obliterate you. My clumsiest offspring play with more powerful weapons than your most psychotic defense contractors dream of on Christmas Eve. We know what you’re packing, and we don’t care. I have fashion accessories more technologically advanced than the business end of your cutting edge. No. This is how it works. This is all we have found that works. You will send your best to Litost and you will compete. Or you will die now—86’d right off the board. And while I’ve enjoyed our time together, I’m really not fussed either way. Though I must say that leaping directly to declaring war on us does not make much of an argument for human sentience. That is the response of an
ant colony. Do better. As for barbaric, there must be a test, mustn’t there? One must separate the sublime from the merely anatomical. Unless you think we should invite your koalas or subway rats to the galactic table? Because I don’t see you setting up diversity programs so that elephants can apply to university, and many of them are a far sight cleverer than your average President. You forget we’ve watched your history live in Technicolor. I’d say you’ve got your trousers on backward if you think thermonuclear war is less barbaric than a little artistic competition among friends.

  “What . . . what’s the contest?” asked a fisherman in Papua New Guinea as he sat down on a long flat rock to weep. “What do we have to do?”

  Don’t cry, baby. It’s not so bad, I promise. All you have to do is sing.

  “But that’s easy!” spluttered a record executive in Los Angeles. “That’s fine! We accept! No problem! Humans are fucking amazing at music, you’ll see. Christ, you had me worried for a minute! But this is gonna be spectacular. This is gonna be iconic. Say hello to your new champion, Big Bird, because mankind shakes its groove thing like nothing you’ve ever seen. We got this one in the bag.”

  No.

  “What do you mean, no?” asked the program director for BBC4.

  N! O! Spells NO! The importantest word you can make out of teensy tiny N and weensy old O—that’s NO! The biggest little word I know, know, know! I mean no. Humans are not particularly good at music. Oh, you’re all right, I suppose. You have some deeply basic understanding of rhythm and melody, but so do dolphins, darling. I hate to break it to you, but, just as an example, without thinking too much about it, the Vulna of Jadro Nebula use their entire homeworld as an instrument. You blow into the northern magnetic pole, as I understand it. Anyway, it’s not just about a good beat, it’s what you do with it. Showmanship. Theater. Flash. The Trillion Kingdoms of Yüz won three cycles ago with an upbeat little earworm called “Love Means Forgiving the Sins of Our Colonial Expansion Phase,” and when the bass dropped, their entire proletariat became a comet. So, you see, coming in second-to-last may be too much to hope for a planet that still uses Auto-Tune. While a guitar and a primate in leather pants are nice and all . . . oh, how to explain so even our live studio audience can understand? You know how, when a baby’s crying and wailing, you put it on your shoulder and pat its back—pat, pat, pat-a-pat-pat? And it sicks up some milk and spit and tummy juices all over Mumsy’s nice jumper and then looks just TERRIFICALLY pleased with itself? THAT’S what human music is like! Compared to the rest of the galaxy, of course; I’m sure it’s just fine for you.