Space Opera

by Catherynne M. Valente

  They lied, of course. Oh, how they lied! They lied through their siphons. They lied shamelessly, for generations, without a single ill-timed giggle to give up the game until the truth took out three Keshet frigates, six moons, a pulsar, an Alunizar mining colony as close to the border of Yüz space as they could manage and still get invited to holiday parties, a Yüz yacht containing the royal family on its way to their annual beach holiday, a bathtub containing Musmar the Night Manager (ancient ruler of the Elakhon, who was very surprised indeed to find himself naked and soapy and cold on the black floor of his ablution chamber) two of the Pleiades, a generous complimentary fruit basket provided to the Sex Pistols by Portobello Hotel in 1978, and the Inaki homeworld.

  None of that makes the least bit of sense, naturally, because you’ve already forgotten the cows.

  Up until that moment, the galactic scientific consensus wasn’t too far off the human scientific consensus on the subject of wormholes, except that we thought they were purely theoretical, and everyone else got really irritated if they were closed for maintenance. A wormhole was a tear in the universe where space and time went to get well and truly hammered. They passed through every physical and temporal point simultaneously and dumped you out wherever the other end of the tunnel is, no worse for wear with only the teensiest bit of cancer. As long as you keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle, there’s almost no danger of permeating the membrane of reality. In the drawing rooms of spacefaring society, the insectoids assured the silicon-based that the prehistoric Alunizar had probably done it with plain old explosives and almost certainly didn’t know any more than anyone else except how to time a fuse.

  They were wrong.

  Despite their big lie, the Alunizar actually did know far more about wormholes than they were willing to share in mixed company. They had lived alongside them for the entire history of their soft and tubular race. They had used them to acquire an interstellar empire at a fabulously steep discount. They had tended and groomed and guarded the cosmic subway for thousands of years. They hadn’t the first thing to do with inventing wormholes; it was the same pure imbecilic drooling luck that so many of the bloody things opened up just outside Aluno Prime’s gravitational sphere of influence that dealt Europe a royal flush of luxury high-speed horses, butter-dispensing cows, jumper-shedding sheep, bacon-distributing pigs, and nonunionized donkeys, and Australia a full hand of fuck all.

  You can’t, after all, invent an animal. You can only domesticate it. It’s all down to cows in the end, you see. Cows, and what wonders can be done with them.

  The fact of the matter is, a great number of people have, for some time now, been merrily lobbing themselves both ways through the digestive tract of incomprehensibly ancient, infinitely unbothered beasts and paying handsomely for the privilege.

  Life is beautiful and life is stupid.

  The life cycle of a Quantum-Tufted Domesticated Wormhole (Lacuna vermis familiaris) takes place on a scale that beggars the imagination, kicks it while its down, and lights it on fire. Admittedly striking anatomical differences aside, of all the species in the known universe, they have the most in common culturally with the giant panda bear of Earth. They are large, slow, solitary creatures whose natural habitat is relentlessly encroached upon by the implacable advance of civilization, and, improbably, if you could ever see a whole wormhole all at once (which you can’t), you’d find them just as chubbily adorable. They spend most of their time sleeping, can only consume a widely available but barely digestible substance that gradually poisons them, and respond to the process of reproduction, which everyone else finds pretty exciting, with little more than a vast, cosmic ennui. They can only mate and give birth at the heat-death of the universe, when all this expanding matter takes a long, hard look at its choices, peels out into a hard reverse, and rapidly compresses itself back down into a ball of white-hot everything, ready to reboot the Big Bang and start the long march of reality all over again, only this time without anyone ever inventing paper clips. The first thing that ever happens to an adorable baby wormhole is that it rather traumatically explodes, so it’s hardly any wonder they’re not terribly good at parties. Like kudzu roots, some small part of them remains forever in that continuous moment of detonating lava and life while the rest of them is flung into every part of space and time by the sheer physics-pummeling force of the beginning of everything. At which point the poor things are so tuckered out that they promptly lie down for a trillion-year nap.

  You can only see a wormhole if it happened to fall asleep with its mouth open. Otherwise, being mostly composed of minimally corporeal time and space and entropy and memory with a sprinkling of platinum molecules and a dash of radioactive PTSD, they are perfectly camouflaged by the darkness of the interstellar void. They dream in sixteen dimensions. They breathe once a millennium. Their language is nothing but umlauts. They drift mindlessly through all that ever was or is or will be, drawn this way and that only by the smell of food that might flow effortlessly into their sleeping mouths.

  The giant panda eats bamboo. The wormhole eats regret.

  As anyone with a passing interest in self-help books knows, new quantum realities are being formed all over the place, anytime some collection of hyperactive molecules decides between sushi and curry for dinner or whether to marry their childhood sweetheart or see what else the world has to offer or whether to sort out how to derive energy from chlorophyll or meat or both or neither. The universe is a very large and very complicated demonstration of having one’s cake and eating it too. It sees no reason not to have it all. But most hyperactive molecules must proceed linearly along their own fork, unless they are a Keshet, only grazing the surface of other timelines as they yearn and brood and wonder what could have been, if only they had chosen the yellowfin sashimi, if they could have been satisfied with loving that one gorgeously familiar face, if they could now stand green in the warmth drinking down the sun. It takes energy for new roads to diverge in new woods, and no energy is spent with complete efficiency, without waste. Where wood has burned, there will be ash. The waste product of the constantly dividing multiverse is a fine, drifting mist of regret, and no wormhole has ever starved.

  A handful of these gentle space yaks found Aluno Prime, a watering hole too good and too deep to ever leave. Two or three fell into a food coma so deep that their gaping mouths shut as they rolled on their sides, snoring soundlessly into oblivion. That’s all. That’s the reason behind the utter cultural and spatial dominance of the ooey, gooey Aluzinar. They screwed up and chose poorly so often; they were so majestically sad that they drew a herd of wormholes to them like the steam from a fresh pie levitating a snoozing dog toward the windowsill on Mr. Looney of the Tunes.

  So what happened that day that whiplashed all those frigates and deep-space miners and moons and pulsars and Musmar’s black bathtub and firefly-encrusted green elephants and Sid Vicious’s complimentary Anjou pears?

  One yawned.

  A wormhole yawned in its sleep and the yawn ricocheted through a stack of realities like a snapped powerline, and suddenly everyone could see a new glittering gap in the sky and on the other side of that gap lay the far side of the galaxy, unexplored, untapped, unreachable by the usual party ships until that moment. On the other side lay the Sziv and the Voorpret and the Vulna and an intelligent twilit mega-hurricane called Hrodos and the Ursulas and the 321 and the Smaragdi and, far beyond even them, a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth.

  Unfortunately, the Yüz thought the Alunizar had blown their royals out of the sky, the Alunizar were convinced that the Yüz had decided to push back their colonies for no good reason at all, a band of Keshet single-timeline-separatists took credit for the moons but blamed the frigates on the Slozhit, the Utorak and the Meleg had disputed ownership of the pulsar for generations and each assumed the other had finally gotten sick of messing about discussing things like adults, and the Elakhon quietly seethed about the theft of their long-dead emperor’s bathtub but, in ord
er not to compound the offense by dishonoring Musmar’s philosophy of neutrality, simply started selling weapons to positively everyone. Half the Milky Way was already steaming by the time they encountered the meat of the other half, and the Sentience Wars progressed at record speed from confusion and posturing to, in technical terms, an intergalactic shitshow.

  Thankfully, the Sex Pistols weren’t really much for apples and pears anyway and never noticed anything amiss.

  12.

  Come on, I’ll Give You a Flower

  In the thirteen minutes and eleven seconds that elapsed between Oort St. Ultraviolet waking from dreams of his daughters growing up and refusing to visit at Christmas and the abrupt disappearance of Decibel Jones from the backseat of a gently used BMW 760Li, the entity known as the roadrunner built a ship capable of traveling at many times the speed of light, engaging in a mild spot of dogfighting, providing roomy accommodations with plenty of lunch, life support, and legroom for four, and making the most advanced human aircraft wet itself and crumple into a heap wondering just what had it been doing with its life.

  Aerospace engineers around the world, take note.

  The tall blue flamingo-fish reached up and scooped the gelatinous green hair accessory off her head like a woman removing an earring at the end of a long day. The alien presented the gummy flower to two of the three Absolute Zeros with obvious pride, though it was no bigger than a paper watercooler cup and parts of it were crusted over with tiny yellow and pinkish warts and all of it smelled like Brighton Beach at low tide.

  “I require a substrate,” chirped the Esca happily. “Are you terribly attached to your headphones?”

  Oort St. Ultraviolet, deeply apologetic creator of the maddening earworm that was the current West Cornwall Pasty Company jingle, “Live and Let Pie,” somewhat reluctantly handed over his bespoke Kuu & Co. oversize, overear, oversensitive headphones in the limited edition Phantom Pearl color scheme.

  “I promise you, Oort,” said the roadrunner with soothing protectiveness, “in terms of audiovisual equipment, anything you have down here, we can do better up there, and . . . well, everything else, too. It’s not your fault. No one expects more from a species that still uses electric kettles.”

  Very carefully, the roadrunner slid her jellied barrette onto the left cup of the headphones and set it all down on Oort’s coffee table. It wobbled there for a moment, then thin gluey tentacles shot out and covered the space where a human head was meant to fit with a fleshy semitransparent spiderweb. The mouth of the flower suckled at the air expectantly. The Esca poured a pint glass of whole milk directly into that almost obscene little polyp, then fed in a large, raw, well-marbled rib eye steak that Oort had fished out of the freezer and shoved into the microwave, whereupon the most piercingly awkward silence of his life descended as his estranged former bandmate and a giant feathered alien waited for the defrost cycle to finish.

  “It’s a kilo steak. I bought it to share with the girls on Saturday,” Oort had mumbled sheepishly. “Cheaper than buying three.” Capo meowed and glanced meaningfully at her empty food bowl. “It takes twenty minutes.” He’d picked at his fingernails and prayed for death. “Sorry.”

  The phlegmy flower chewed the defrosted meat down, inch by inch, with obvious satisfaction.

  “Lucky thing you had rib eye,” the roadrunner mused, unsettlingly, in Oort’s mother’s voice. “We might have had to waste time popping down to the shop. Sirloin doesn’t have the necessary fat content, you know. Fat’s just the thing for spaceflight. Fat, and calcium.”

  “I should call Justine,” Oort said suddenly. “The girls will worry—”

  But the man Rolling Stone once called “Orpheus reincarnated as the holiday decor section of Debenhams” did not get to say what he wanted to tell his daughters or the wife he’d ignored in favor of a music studio far too many times, as things began to happen at an astonishing rate.

  Razor-sharp metallic snowflakes erupted fractally out of the seaflower-headphone combo platter. Fluorescent black coral shot out of it like parachutes deploying. Those thin tentacles or stamens or vines or what-have-you shot out everywhere, grabbing whatever they could find and cramming it into a rapidly expanding mint-jelly maw. In went delicate glass sculptures from Baku, Paris, Lodz, Prague. Out burst pitted, rough red prongs that reminded Oort of the reef he’d snorkeled in the Maldives with Mark Ronson just before Mark, and the Maldives, died. In went his juicer, his espresso machine, his electric kettle, his microwave. The thing on his coffee table vomited forth ropy sapphire starfish-legs that wrapped around the table and gobbled that up too. The whole rubbish heap crashed to the floor, hauling in table lamps and the hallway chandelier after it. Tongues of spiral wire coral snatched his tablet projector, his wafer-screen television, his gaming rig, his wineglasses. The little crusty warts polka-dotting the flower’s distended gullet detonated, covering the now more or less Volkswagen-size love child of the Great Barrier Reef and Oort’s tastefully appointed suburban home in a swarm of what appeared to be yellow-and-fuchsia-striped fish. More polyps gushed out of the holes in the coral, some the same gummy jade color as the original, others in new and exciting wine pastille shades. Now their horrifying round mouths were ringed in a wild tentacular fringe, lurching down the hallway in search of pillows, linens, mobile phone chargers, and electronic readers.

  Oort St. Ultraviolet watched in abject despair. All the physical evidence of his life on Earth was being torn to pieces and keelhauled into the maw of a hungry space flower as though his marriage, his children, his stable work life, his healthy income and investments achieved through years of prudent selling out, and his study of good interior design had just been a long, long setup for a truly mean-spirited punch line. He’d no idea what to do. He’d seen their band’s name at the bottom of the alien’s list, even if, at the time, he’d thought it was a curry-induced dream. If Dess was here, he’d probably already drafted them into an army of two to save the planet. Dess would do anything you asked if you fluttered your eyelashes and told him he was good. And, Oort supposed, he would as well, only no one had fluttered anything yet. If he hauled off and told them to leave his things alone and get out, would that doom humanity? It had to be taken as a serious possibility. In the face of the wanton destruction of all he had ever held dear, Oort uttered a furious tut under his breath and, as that produced no result, gave up.

  Oort barely escaped becoming one with the volcanic steak-fueled repo-beast. His beloved Oortophone was not so lucky. Ultraviolet watched it get sucked down into the biological sinkhole in total horror. In went the hallway mirror, a vase full of Venetian glass dahlias, and Capo’s water bowl. It was slowing down now, but only because it was running out of fuel and room to maneuver. It reminded Oort suddenly of those little brightly colored pills he’d loved as a kid. You put them in a sinkful of water and in thirty seconds they swelled up into a big foam dinosaur you could play with. However, this was not a foam dinosaur you could play with. It was a bespoke late-model oversize, overhauled, overtorqued, guaranteed to work even in the most inhospitable environments Wearable Instant Short-Range Combat Shuttle in the limited edition Kaleidoscope of the Sea color scheme, 100 percent manufactured on Bataqliq by your ever-discreet friends at the Üürgama Conglomerate.

  And it was almost finished.

  Two mauve sea cucumbers shot out of the top of the infant ship and seized the gas range. Four tangerine anemones ripped down the roof, leaving them standing in a gaping sinkhole in the middle of his once-respectable neighborhood. Capo scrambled up his pant leg in a desperate panic, shrieking and leaving serious stab wounds in his calves. The Esca frowned, inasmuch as a beak like an upside-down boomerang can frown. She reached out one long, silvery-blue frond and inserted it directly into the shelter-cat’s pink ear. Capo’s eyes went wide; her pupils blew out. She didn’t shriek again. Her claws retracted and Decibel caught her as she dropped like a rock off Oort’s shoulder. Capo stared up at him, blinking furiously. Then she yawned.

&
nbsp; The ship rose high above them now, a mass of living coral and understated style, swathed in translucent cerulean jellyfish-bells and swarming with every ounce of symbiotic life you could cram into a flying ecosystem the size of a blue whale.

  The roadrunner trilled joyfully. Her eyes filmed over briefly, just licking the surface of their memories. “Your Uber has arrived!”

  A hatch in the underside of the Üürgama Conglomerate Instant Short-Range Combat Shuttle that had, a moment ago, been a white leather couch, opened before them. Six carbonated gluco-amino exhaust ports ignited in the belly of the stern with a sound like overexcited jacuzzi jets, casting candy-cane-colored shadows on the ruins of a very nice place to live.