Space Opera

by Catherynne M. Valente

  While Decibel Jones and Oort St. Ultraviolet still managed to stand next to each other long enough to do the occasional Where Are They Now? photo shoot, Danesh Jalo and Omar Calisșkan had, in fact, not spoken for several years. Something about their never-completed third album, variously reported as having been titled Absence Leaves the Tart to Wander, Shag and Bone Man, or Papa Needs a New Pair of Prudent Investment Portfolios. Something about an autumn night in Edinburgh.

  “Dess, what is going on?” shouted Oort St. Ultraviolet in the sudden quiet, unable to maintain an upper lip of any kind for another second.

  “We’re going to save the planet,” Decibel Jones said in the voice that launched a thousand sexual awakenings. He slung his arm round his old boyfrack’s waist. “I thought you’d want to sit in.”

  A moment later, all three of them, plus one white cat, ceased to occupy Planet Earth.

  Remember that friendly, bouncing disco ball you were following? Hold on tight with everything you’ve got, because now that the band’s back together, that shiny little minx is about to break orbit.

  13.

  Everything Has Rhythm

  The question has never been: Can you build cities?

  Ants do that.

  The question has never been: Are you capable of considering your own existence and getting kind of depressed about it?

  Any animal in captivity does that.

  The question has never been: Can you use tools?

  Crows do that. Otters do that. Apes do that. Good Lord, everybody does that.

  The question has never been: Can you perform complex problem solving?

  Dogs do that.

  The question has never been: Can you experience love?

  Nobody doesn’t.

  The question has never been: Can you use language?

  Parrots and dolphins and cuttlefish do that.

  The question has never even been: Do you understand object permanence, can you recognize yourself in the mirror, do you bury your dead, do you bond emotionally with your young?

  Elephants do all those things, and some humans definitely don’t.

  The only question is this:

  Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other reason than that it rocks?

  Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything pulses to a beat laid down by the Big Bang. Everything feels the drumline of creation from star to sex to song. But can you make that rhythm? In order to create a pop band, the whole apparatus of civilization must be up and running and tapping its toe to the beat. Electricity, poetry, mathematics, sound amplification, textiles, arena architecture, efficient mimetic exchange, dramaturgy, industry, marketing, the bureaucratic classes, cultural critics, audiovisual transmission, special effects, music theory, symbology, metaphor, transportation, banking, enough leisure and excess calories to do anything beyond hunt, all of it, everything.

  Can everyone else trust that, if you must declare war and wipe out half a quadrant, you’ll at least write a sad song about it?

  Yes?

  Well, even that is not quite enough.

  Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play?

  Do you have soul?

  Air

  Go sing it like a hummingbird

  The greatest anthem ever heard.

  —“Heroes,” Måns Zemerlöw

  14.

  Vampires Are Alive

  Mira and Oort were wrong, by the way, on the night they met Decibel Jones and discussed the nature of extraterrestrial culture and determined the course of their entire lives via scoops of pistachio, coconut, and mango gelato. There are shy, nerdy predator scientists. The Things of Thing-World will, very occasionally, venture beyond the opportunities afforded to them by 24/7 slaughterparties and exploding blood.

  Scorpions do go to the moon.

  Take, for example, the Yurtmak of Planet Ynt, a deranged gutter ball of gas-jungles and carnivorous rivers hurtling through the beer-bottle-strewn lanes of the gravitational bowling alley that is septuple star system Nu Scorpii. Improbably, the body of an adult Yurtmak is basically the same as a human’s, if slightly a snailier color and capable of producing a pernicious pheromone from its nipples that has an effect on the IQ of any foreign visitor similar to the effect of a folding chair on a professional wrestler. Unfortunately for all of us, they also have heads. The head of a Yurtmak can best be described as what you would get if a hippo mated with a chain saw and produced something you wouldn’t let into public school even with a hat on, who then went on to have an unhappy affair with a spiny puffer fish, whereupon, at the height of a particularly pustulant, turgid puberty, the resulting grandchild’s face exploded. The Yurtmak are obligate carnivores for whom murder occupies the same cultural space as football does for humans in a World Cup year, complete with merchandising, celebrity players followed by hordes of fans, and families gathering of a Sunday to bond over the spectacle, maybe hitting the backyard to show off a few trick shots for the kids.

  Yet the famed philosopher and beloved children’s author Goguenar Gorecannon was Yurtmak. Even as a juvenile, her carnage was workmanlike and derivative at best, leaving her outcast, underemployed, and unpopular with men of her peer group, despite the best efforts of modern Ynt-wide dating services. Goguenar took this reasonably well, for a Yurtmak. Carefully avoiding major organs, she fondly stabbed her mother and father good-bye and vanished into the wilderness. Eventually, she settled down, built herself a traditional heartvalve-hut in the depths of the fluoro-chloro forest of Yllir and buckled down to invent a way, any way, to get off that rock full of socially challenged chain-saw-faced hooligans.

  That is what Mira and Oort forgot, having been, if not popular, always cool. No matter how mad, bad, and dangerous to know a civilization gets, unto every generation are born the lonely and the uncool, destined to forever stare into the candy-store window of their culture, and loneliness is the mother of ascension. Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species. And so it was that, eventually, between drawing meatship schematics in the dirt and dreaming of a world where she didn’t hate literally everyone, the shiest and most sensitive of Yurtmaks began to plan the most ambitious massacre in the history of the galaxy: the murder of stupidity.

  The fateful weapon? A large-print, mildly venomous picture book for which the general galactic population feels a level of affection and tender attachment that falls somewhere between Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Goodnight Moon. Goguenar Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts contains 99.9 percent pure reliable and comprehensive laws of the universe as observed by an underachieving socially anxious mutant murderhippo and is considered to be as essential to a healthy, balanced childhood as hugs, night-lights, and cellular division. It is nearly impossible to forget one of Goguenar Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts. The gently envenomated pages produce flashes of temporary but breathtakingly colorful pain as you turn them, so that the simple, heartfelt prose is charred into the reader’s sense-memory with incredible efficiency.

  This is Goguenar’s Second General Unkillable Fact: For everything that exists, somewhere in the universe, there is a creature that eats it, breathes it, fucks it, wears it, secretes, perspires, exhales, o
r excretes it. If you want to argue with me on this one, consider the Brick-Breathing Beast of Ballun 4 and shut your cakehole.

  You have already heard the First General Fact: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It goes on to add: You can only ever fix one of these at a time, and wouldn’t it be nice if anyone could agree on which one is the bigger problem?

  Given her sales numbers, Goguenar Gorecannon, Assassin of Ignorance, is, to this day, idolized among the Yurtmak throughout the seven slaloming stars of the Nu Scorpii system as the greatest serial killer ever to play the game.

  Perhaps, if humans had been able to read Goguenar Gorecannon and the First General as a bedtime story like everyone else, they wouldn’t have had such a terribly tough time figuring out the whole trick with interstellar spaceships.

  15.

  The Ship Is Leaving Tonight

  Every civilization comes to the creation of an iconic ship design in their own way and in their own time, just as methodically and tenderly as a planet comes to the configuration of its favorite species. It simply cannot be rushed and, once arrived at, is rarely abandoned. Ask any child to draw a house, and though there may be variations in chimney placement or door shape, it will be recognizable to anyone with as many limbs and lobes as that child as a house. A ship, lovingly crafted by the gravity, raw materials, anatomical pluses and minuses, architectural traditions, and functional-to-fabulous score of its species at the time of mass driver invention is no less cozy and relaxing than the drawings of a house made by the innocent hands of untraumatized juveniles.

  It is, therefore, entirely impossible to mistake one world’s fleet for another. No matter how tactically advantageous such camouflage might be, it’s just not comfy, so why make things more unpleasant for everyone? One would never confuse the soft stacked bubbles of an Alunizar Tuftship for the single hollowed-out moon-gem of an Utorak Octahedro-Sloop or the living wicker-ball of a Keshet Chlorophrigate for the classic silver saucers of the Smaragdi. And no one could ever see an aggressively colorful coral reef floating in space and not know that the Esca had come to town.

  The one vehicular commonality among all the millions of spacefaring species past, present, future, and Prefer Not to State is that it is easier, cheaper, and more fun to grow than to build. This is what Goguenar Gorecannon discovered in the carbonated shadows of the fluoro-chloro forest of Yllir as she tried to invent a way out of loneliness, and it led to both the impressive horror-tonnage of the Yurtmak Meatship and that marvelous Second General Unkillable Fact: For everything that exists, somewhere in the universe, there is a creature that eats it, breathes it, fucks it, wears it, secretes, perspires, exhales, or excretes it. Somewhere on Ynt, there was a mammal the size of a convention center, stuck taxonomically between a bear and a crocodile, the decomposition of whose fresh corpse produced the exact type of gases necessary (when combined with the electrostatic ion acid-sap of Yllir trees) to propel the entire disgusting mass of itself into orbit. Somewhere on Earth is an insect that excretes a golden antibacterial ooze that also does a splendid job sweetening your tea; a terribly picturesque tree whose bark will fix your malaria right up; and a large four-legged, two-horned mammal whose reproductive system dispenses ice cream, brie, and buttercream frosting.

  But somewhere on Bataqliq was an invertebrate coral polyp who, when combined with the profit-motive of the Üürgama Conglomerate Research and Development Bog, could digest a sudden overdose of fat, iron, riboflavin, calcium, and whatever else was unlucky enough to be within a roughly six-meter radius, and crap out a spaceship. And, like overbearing parents pressuring their introverted, artistically inclined children into becoming rich doctors who jump the karaoke queue, the Esca managed, with a little positive reinforcement and an orgy of gene-splicing, to railroad their local bioluminescent moon-jellies into inhaling stellar radiation through their translucent bells and exhaling a healthful oxygen-nitrogen mix, their version of sea cucumbers into ejaculating explosive saltwater plasma at any nearby enemies, their brand of furry brine shrimp into eating space debris and vomiting defensive shields, their six-eyed mussels into filtering solar energy and converting it to usable propulsion, schools of something very like overemotional clown fish into flushing bright green in the presence of foreign long-range radio waves or working FTL drives, and, perhaps most impressively for an aquatic creature lacking anything like the proper glandular setup, their freshwater starfish into sweating gravity.

  For an Üürgama Conglomerate Wearable Instant Short-Range Combat Shuttle, the trip from Earth to the moon took approximately the length of time necessary for the roadrunner to explain all this to her cargo of aging rock stars, look puzzled at their response, and ask: “What do you mean nothing on your planet excretes spaceships?” The “small ambassadorial vessel docked in lunar orbit” loomed up outside a porthole punched in the fluorescent coral wall at “What,” drew closer at “planet,” and by the time of the question mark, they could see nothing but the massive bulk of the Esca frigate.

  If their shuttle was a nice reef in the Maldives, the real interstellar cruise ship was the Great Barrier Reef touched by the drunken god of space, time, and saltwater aquariums. High above the dark side of the moon floated a hypercolored goulash of coral only slightly smaller than Sardinia, studded with all of the above. The unfiltered light of Earth’s familiar yellow sun sparkled on the electric blue and sizzling pink bells of jellyfish who had clearly cleaned their plates at every supper. They were absolutely massive, encasing the entire reefship in a protective barrier of neon mesogleastic skin, their tentacles clustering beneath the craft like a sloppy Christmas bow, ready and eager to dock with any vessel secreting a friendly venom formulation.

  On the starboard flank of the ship, in pristine, enormous English letters, a swarm of phosphorescent sea worms spelled out the name of the great Esca interstellar ship: Cake in the Rain.

  The roadrunner trilled joyfully in the distinct tones of a movie trailer voice-over. “Look, friends! It’s not such a big, scary galaxy out for blood! We respect your primitive culture so deeply that we have named an entire reefship in your honor! You see, even if the song of your people falls flat, we will carry on the best of you into the universe’s promising future!”

  Oort St. Ultraviolet took a breath to say something about the utter and complete nonsense of the entire London Aquarium hanging out on the unfashionable end of the moon with the most rubbish lyric in history blinking on and off on its side like a broken pub sign and demand, once again, that someone explain the last twenty minutes to him, but slowly this time, and with short words. But before he could turn that breath into words, a gulping sound, halfway between a champagne bottle opening and an octopus-sucker latching on, popped their ears painfully as the shuttle corked itself into the mother ship’s mollusk-encrusted cloaca and the air lock began to equalize the pressure between the two ships. On the wall of the shuttle, the encorallated remains of Oort’s microwave display counted down helpfully in large blue numbers.

  On the other side of the jelly-glass docking hatch they could see, improbably, impossibly, a hyperactive red panda jumping up and down and waving his paws at them.

  “That is Öö,” said the blue flamingo. “He is our Mandatory Keshet and my extremely best friend. You will probably like him better than you like me. Everyone does. I accept that.”

  The microwave numbers ticked down slowly. There was nothing to do but wait until the next insanity rushed in with the airflow.

  Decibel tapped his foot awkwardly. “You look great, Oort. Er . . . em. Still teaching?”

  “I have two kids, you arse,” Oort replied.

  You couldn’t ever really get mad at Dess. He didn’t mean anything by not being able to retain information that didn’t concern himself, music, sex, movies, or, bizarrely, Oort had found one night on the tour bus to Dublin, nineteenth-century literature for more than an hour or two. Especially when he smiled sheepishly and dragged that million-watt focus back onto you. That sheepish smile killed him every t
ime. Oort used to find it endearing and even enviable—Decibel Jones always lived in the moment; Omar Calisșkan always lived in an uncertain future. Mira, he supposed, had always lived in her own head and allowed others to visit once in a while. With advance notice. And extensive decontamination protocols.

  “Excuse me, babies,” said the roadrunner, in what both of them instantly recognized as the voice of their old manager, Lila Poole. “But you gotta supper up before a show. How many times have I told you? I swear, you can lead a punk to stardom, but you can’t make ’er eat.”

  The Esca held up one of Oort’s much-used white lacquered tea trays, the handles of which were now fully colonized by vermilion brain coral. On it lay three glass saucers, and on each one of those sat two servings of something that looked a lot like a very expensive mushroom, something that looked like a squashed licorice Allsort from the bottom of the bag, and something that looked like a cappuccino, if the barista had won several prizes for latte art but had an unfortunate seizure while drawing a quadratic equation in your milk foam.

  “This is some hard-core, triple-X, keep-it-in-the-back-room-under-a-curtain, Alice in Wonderland action is what this is,” Decibel said with total delight. “Is it lunch?” His hand was already halfway to one of the mushrooms. That was the power of Lila Poole’s indefatigably upbeat boardroom-mum North Country voice. If Lila said to do it, it was good for you, good for the band, and probably good for humankind at large. And it had been so long. A feeling of oceanic calm he hadn’t felt in years descended over Decibel Jones. Someone else was taking care of the details. Someone else was handling logistics. Thank Christ.

  “I really, really think we need to have a serious discussion about food allergies before we start eating space-Allsorts,” Oort fretted, but he too was under the spell of their old Lila-fueled agreeableness. “Because peanuts are nothing compared to what, I presume, grows on some artisanal asteroid on the underside of the universe. Do you cats have an MHRA? FDA? Anything?”