Space Opera

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Decibel tore his eyes away. He had understood virtually none of what the bartender said. He contemplated the various shelves of escapism fuel, reached down into the storehouse of his soul, and found that he did not, after all, have any obligation to accept his limitations. He could push through, change his mouth guard, rinse his mouth out, and plow back in, the comeback kid.

  “How about a cosmo?” he said sunnily. “I don’t even like them. I just want to see you make one, gorgeous.”

  The drooling space horror blinked several times, turned round to face the diverse bottles of booze on the back wall, picked up a dainty cocktail glass in his thick fingers, glared at it in fury, then turned back around and blinked a bit more.

  “So . . . yeah. How do I . . . you know . . . cosmo?”

  Decibel leaned conspiratorially across the bar. “Honestly, I don’t really know either. I think you sort of . . . interfere with a cranberry. Too complicated! Let’s go for something classic. Strong, manly, easy. Whiskey neat.”

  “Excellent choice.” Yilgar Bloodtub turned around again with the cocktail glass still in his hand. He stood there for several minutes. “And how do I make one of them?”

  “You . . . take a glass and put a lot of whiskey in it.”

  “Right, I get that, but how do I make the whiskey part? And the neat bit? I don’t really neat, if you know what I mean. I’m better at mutilate. Or impale.”

  “Fine, fine, doesn’t matter. Pint of lager. Nothing simpler.”

  The Yurtmak Devourer of Spleens sighed. His vestigial ears oozed pheremonal wax. He turned around, bound and determined not to let go of that cocktail glass, the one thing he felt reasonably good about. He held it up next to a bottle labeled CHERRY SCHNAPPS. Then he started to cry.

  “Oh, come on, I can see the taps right there!” Decibel snapped in frustration.

  “Don’t shout at me!”

  “I thought this was supposed to be the South Wharf Hilton, all done up special for us, mint condition! I have personally gotten completely, totally, paleolithically drunk at that very establishment, and I distinctly recall that the first step to success in that regard was pulling a measly pint of lousy beer.”

  “You’re supposed to be nice to me!” Yilgar Bloodtub sobbed in abject embarrassment. Bloody tears dripped down over his muzzle. “You’re supposed to be on best behavior because we’re all judging you, and if you think I don’t get a vote tomorrow, you’re very seriously mistaken, you muppet. You can’t talk to me like that! You’re descended from bonobos. I’m descended from Goguenar Gorecannon on my mum’s side, and I’m not even making that up! I don’t need to impress a bonobo. I kill nicer boys than you for fun.”

  Decibel Jones deftly sensed that he was losing control of the situation. “All right, you’re right, we’re just having a chat about mixology, aren’t we? Come on, darling, we can do this. We can get through this together. Life is challenge. Just grab a glass and hold it under the tap and pull. Believe and achieve! I saw you make something way fancier than a pint for that Alunizar back there.”

  “No, you don’t understand. That was a Long Slow Wormhole Up Against the Wall with a twist—I know how to make that, everyone loves those. I’ve got all the ingredients right here. Oh, do you want that? Only I don’t know if you have the blood chemistry for it. How many proteins encode your DNA? Under six and I’m supposed to get you to sign a waiver.”

  “I’ll give it a miss.”

  “These aren’t taps, see?” Yilgar waggled a big wooden Boddingtons tap. Nothing came out, but a trapdoor opened over by a guild of Lummutis. They peered over at it, then awarded themselves five points each. “They don’t connect to kegs. It’s all for show. We rather thought you’d never ask. You’re supposed to be professionals. You know alcohol is bad for your throat. Wrecks your mid-range tone. We just tipped a lot of our hooch into your bottles and called it a job well done. It’s like Great-Aunt Goguenar’s Sixth Unkillable Fact: ‘Everything just gets so fucked up sometimes and the natural resting state of reality is not to make any goddamned sense if it can help it and you’ve just got to accept that because it’s not going to get any better from here on in.’ ”

  Decibel Jones felt as though he might just have to have a scream if he had to listen to one more life lesson from something that looked like a zoo tossed into a blender. He made mournful eyes at the fake taps. “Isn’t there anything I can drink back there?”

  Yilgar Bloodtub squatted down and rummaged under the bar. Jones heard a lot of scraping, knocking, and at least one distinct cry for help before the Yurtmak reemerged with a mug of hot tea, a pot of honey, and a fat lemon wedge. He gave Dess a meaningful, motherly look.

  “Careful, it’s hot. Now, look, I’m sorry about my little cry. It’s only because I wanted to bite your face in half and I’ve already been written up twice for maiming the punters so I just didn’t have any other emotional outlet available to me. So. The score is this: even though you yelled at me at my place of business, we Yurtmak remember what it was like when we were new and living with the possibility of everything we’d ever built being summarily vaporized on account of a bum note. We’re all pulling for you. Team Human.”

  “Christ, really? I didn’t think anyone was. Except maybe Clippy. And the roadrunner. I don’t really know what’s going on between Öö and Oort except double vowels, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t extend to the masses. That’s such a relief to hear, you have no idea. It’s a tough room out there.”

  Nessuno Uuf, the brutally elegant Smaragdi performance artist who had so recently and efficiently condemned the better part of human history, sidled up and leaned a pronged elbow against the bar. The low lights glowed against her glossy armored plates. “Hey, sailor,” she said silkily in the direction of Decibel Jones. “This contemptible vermin has been looking for you. Buy a worthless conversational Dumpster fire a drink?”

  “Fuzzy Ruutu?” Yilgar offered. The Smaragdin didn’t much seem to care either way. Her eyes were the most extraordinary violet slits.

  “Listen, about all that lion business back there,” she began. “We all have traumatic puberties . . .”

  “Don’t apologize, you were very fair.” Dess sipped his tea. “The defense will stipulate that we’re rubbish. Genocidal meatbags with mummy issues and embarrassingly poor impulse control. As far as quality housemates to be found on Planet Earth, it goes: dolphins, elephants, orangutans, octopi, then every single spider, then Joan of Arc, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Freddie Mercury, my nan, all the scorpions, German measles, a dented recycling bin, and then maybe some of the rest of us. It’s grim.”

  Nessuno’s remarkable eyes went all wide and warm and soft. She put one severe three-fingered hand on his elbow. “Mr. Jones, are you trying to seduce me?”

  “I’ll tell you what, darling. If low self-esteem and public humiliation is your bag, Earth may not be such a raw deal for you.”

  “How fascinating that you should say so. Perhaps this untitled monochrome canvas in the museum of politico-cultural relevance might have reason to travel there one day soon.”

  “I don’t know what’s in this tea, Yilgar, you charmer.” He peered into the mug. “Honesty, I s’pose. Look, Nessie, my love, the way it’s headed, in about twenty-four hours, the only reason to visit Earth will be if you’re really, really into squirrels.”

  “Perhaps very soon.”

  “I’ll alert the squirrels.”

  The ivory Smaragdin glanced over at Yilgar Bloodtub. “Mr. Jones, do try to focus. This morally depraved dishrag is, perhaps unsurprisingly, given that her soul is a continually oozing oil spill, for sale.”

  “Me too,” chirped the Yurtmak bartender. “Though my soul is more of a piñata full of knives.”

  Decibel blinked. “What do you mean?”

  Nessuno Uuf spread her beautiful claws. “The Smaragdi are members of the Octave. We have significant voting power in the Grand Prix. The Yurtmak are not, but they have a great deal of influence with the smaller specie
s, since they tend to start hitting one another with shovels when they can’t agree on what constitutes good art.”

  “I don’t know why that bothers everyone so much.” Yilgar wiped ichor off his chin with a bar napkin. “We’d never shovel you. We keep it Yurtmak. How else are you supposed to deal with people who like terrible things? Hit them with a shovel till they stop, that’s how. That should be the thirtieth Unkillable Fact, I tell you what.”

  “Be that as it may,” continued Uuf, “the two of us alone is just enough to shift the tally should you do really poorly tomorrow. We’re more than willing to do that for you in exchange for a small fee.”

  Decibel narrowed his eyes. He’d worked with recording studios. He knew when he was about to get body-slammed by the fine print. “How small?”

  Nessuno Uuf lowered her voice to an impossibly seductive murmur. “Infinitesimal,” she said. “Let us say . . . India.”

  Decibel Jones took a long, long sip of tea as several Ursulas and a Slozhit began rounding up Lummo stones and chucking them in the fountain outside to try to short them out. He drank his tea and thought about lions. He thought about rhinoceros horns. He thought about that photo of the nasty little chap sitting pretty on a mountain of dead buffalo. He thought about the Lakota. He thought about Tasmania. He thought about the Belgian Congo and the West Bank. He thought about Nani and Cool Uncle Takumi and Papa Calisșkan, and some part of him just gave up and liquefied.

  But not all. Not quite all.

  “I appreciate your interest in my work,” he said in the voice he always used to turn down endless well-meaning yet humiliating Where Are They Now? programs. “But I must decline due to other commitments.”

  Yilgar thumped the bar with one fist. Dirt scattered. “Listen, bonobo, the 321 are really good this year. Their algorithms are totally unbeatable as far as the bookies are concerned. And then there’s the Meleg, that’s the little bear fellows in the corner by the cold cuts, they literally serve their own hearts sashimi to the crowd, and, via the digestive process, the song of their beings actually becomes a part of you. You can’t compete with that!”

  “Nope.”

  “Then what’s a little India between friends?” coaxed the Smaragdin chanteuse.

  Decibel Jones achieved full mystical, holistic oneness with his tea. “Pro tip,” he said, smacking his lips. “Next time you want to play Colonial Space Monopoly with a British subject whose very favorite grandmother was Pakistani, you may not want to bring up India. Especially after reminding me what a demonic cabbage humanity can be when it wants something bad enough. When it wants to snatch spoils it didn’t earn. Allow me to be one of the few historically significant Britons to say: India is none of my business. Thanks for the tea, Bloodtub. See you on the morrow, as it were. Upon St. Crispin’s Day.”

  “You must be very confident of your song,” Nessuno said with a frown.

  “Oh, I’m not, not at all. And I don’t mean that like you mean you’re worthless and horrible and a dishrag. You weren’t listening earlier. I don’t have a song. We don’t have a song. Nothing good, anyhow. It’s a mess and there’s no bridge and no hook and no time and no hope. You should have seen us on that ship. Bickering like children. Digging up the dead so we could beat each other down with her bones. And now what? Nothing and no time. Good work, everyone. Bravo. Everything’s fucked.”

  “You’re amazing,” Nessuno breathed out. “Such technique! You’d be a sensation on Pallulle. Tell me more. Give me your best set. What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?”

  Decibel Jones went pale. His throat tightened, and his stomach instantly rejected what was almost certainly not tea.

  Mira.

  Nani.

  Ultraponce.

  The last gasp of the Yüzosh Frockade blossomed on his chest: a dark red corsage, a gaping gunshot wound bleeding sequins where his heart should be. Where they weren’t. Where nothing had been right since.

  “There,” said Nessuno Uuf. “Now you’re perfect. My place or yours?”

  28.

  Mister Music Man

  Oort St. Ultraviolet bolted out of the early-twenty-first-century South Wharf Hilton onto a rather needlessly picturesque veranda for a breath of air, blood streaming from the back of his neck where a Slozhit’s stinger had grazed him as he’d tried to pick out a few seeds, with no guidance whatsoever, from bins marked with ridiculous labels like LOVE WASTED and TILL WE MEET AGAIN and THE FOLLY OF YOUTH and THE BAD OLD DAYS and PEACE AT THE END OF ALL THINGS. He’d kicked it so hard, the lavender beastie had crashed through the dessert bar. Clippy assured him the Slozhit possessed no natural venom.

  Oort’s heart tried to make a run for it out of his chest. Christ, he could really die here. Not at home in an instant of cleansing fire along with everything else he’d ever known, but here, right now, with a giant moth’s giggling dumb face goggling at him and making victory fists in the air. Pink ferns and marble statues of famous historical rosebushes lined the Creamsicle-colored Italianate balcony, a cut-glass fountain gurgled pleasantly, spraying everything with citrus-scented mist, and the perpetual twilit breeze of Litost reeked of bubble gum, fresh grass, and the joyful unity of all living things. The view was just showing off, really. Hundreds of feet below, a lavender sea crashed against pearlescent rocks, and every time the waves boomed, it sounded like children laughing.

  “It’s just unnecessary,” Oort said as he cupped his hands in the fountain and splashed water on his face. “That’s what it is.”

  He coughed harshly, then stuck his hand in again and slurped up several handfuls. The fountain was geysering top-shelf gin and tonic out of a vaguely neoclassical crystal cornucopia, because of course it was. The booze flowed up through a curling tunnel full of stained-glass roses, marching gracefully in one end and out the other. Though it was undoubtedly a fine sculptural piece, the whole thing felt unsettlingly intestinal.

  Oort St. Ultraviolet, lately of suburban Cardiff, had no reason on heaven or Earth to recognize a wormhole.

  He wiped his hands on his Englishblokeman suit and peeked over the vertigo-enticing edge. No Hilton had ever stood this tall. And even if one had, they’d have put bars on the balcony to keep people from lobbing themselves off. He doubted anyone had ever committed suicide here on Planet Prozac, and the idea suddenly revolted him. He hated this place. What was the point of a world without debilitating bitterness and despair? How could you even tell you were alive? How could you possibly write a decent pop song if you weren’t a sad sack of tissues or at least fundamentally angry at the world most of the time? Everything could be divided into angerchords, sadchords, and happychords, and anyone worth their liner notes knew you only reached for more than one or two happychords in a genuine fiscal emergency.

  Oort wished he’d brought cigarettes. And that he hadn’t stopped smoking ten years ago.

  A small person leaned forward over the railing beside him. It looked like a basketball glued on top of a traffic cone with a couple of bare birch branches stuck into the sides like some kind of depressed snowman, all spray-painted blacker than midnight on the winter solstice at the bottom of the sea. On the pastel veranda drenched in soft, summery dusk, it looked completely out of place, like someone had cut out a piece of black construction paper and glued it to an Impressionist painting. Its matte charcoal skin seemed to just slurp the light. The childlike thing looked up at him with gorgeous, massive, fishy eyes that had long ago told its nose to clear off and make room.

  “Don’t stay out here too long,” the Elakh said in the voice of a laddish scenester who’d once rolled up an entire star system and smoked it. “You’ll catch happy.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “The atmosphere of this planet is 11 percent serotonin, 4 percent melatonin, and 1 percent aerosolized cocaine. Might as well enjoy it.” The onyx creature clawed somewhere around its presumptive rib cage with those skeletal fingers and came up with two black cigarettes as long and skinny as emo jeans. The brand was printed
around its filter in silver: THE MENTHOL BIN. Oort took it with a rush of ozone-boosted gratitude more powerful than any orgasm he’d ever had. He laughed shakily. God, this planet was the worst. He awkwardly pantomimed checking his coat for a lighter, knowing full well he wouldn’t find one. The alien blinked slowly; the tip of Oort’s ciggy glowed hot green. They resumed looking out at the sea.

  “Haven’t felt a thing,” Oort said gruffly, his knees still trembling.

  “Air-conditioning. You’ll never beat the Klavaret for HVAC installation and repair. Otherwise, who would get any work done?”

  “No name tag?”

  “Nah, fuck that, if they don’t know me by now, I can’t be arsed. Social performance is not my scene. Besides, I respire through my skin. See?” The dark little cone-man stuck his cigarette against his chest. Sooty smoke rings puffed out through his forehead. “I can’t be having with any adhesives, I’ll choke. And they know it, too, they’re just selfish. Ah, but the young always are. Well. My name is Darkboy Zaraz.” Oort started to introduce himself, but Zaraz waved his stick-hand in the air. “Nah, it’s all black. I know who you are. I’m a fan.”

  “Spacecrumpet?”

  “What?”

  “Ultraponce?”

  “Who now?”

  “Must be my seminal work for the West Cornwall Pasty Company that rocks your boat, then.”

  “Nah, I don’t care about that, it’s all rubbish. You want to know my groove?”

  “Definitely.”

  “1998, Didsbury Church of England Primary School, Manchester, England. You were in the choir. Had a solo in the Christmas concert. You sang ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’ while some third year backed you up on alto xylophone. Wasn’t the song. Wasn’t the production values. Damn sure wasn’t the xylo—that poor kid couldn’t find the note with a metal detector and two maps. It was the fear. You opened that primitive sunboy ape mouth, and out came this true-black midnight river of fear and need and disdain—’cause you hated that song, be honest, you’d have drowned it in the nearest toilet if you could. But all that was mixed down with this thumping oontz-oontz one million BPM oversampling of wanting to be good, wanting to be everything, because no way was my pitch-perfect baby gonna let some twee trashcarol get in between him and the love of the crowd. Look, I’m only Elakh. Fully mastered multitrack emotional slagheaps are what I am all about. Weirdest club track I ever heard, but that jam was well dark, son. Pure obsidian.” Darkboy Zaraz snapped his twiggy fingers in appreciation.