Space Opera

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Oort blinked. “How could you possibly have heard that?”

  “They broadcast the whole thing on Radio 4. Some charity drive. The Keshet picked it up when they were doing reconnaissance. Öö knows I collect rare bootlegs; he hooked me up right inky. I played it on repeat for a week—the girls thought I was mad. Threatened to Bin me themselves if I didn’t stop.”

  “The girls?”

  “My band.” Zaraz was starting to get a little manic with all the fresh air. “You know, we’re all bands here. Not gonna claim we’re the best of the best, but we been together forty years now. Call ourselves Once You Go Black. We’re your run-of-the-mill grimecore spectro-tangobilly combo. We play all the oldies. ‘The Dark at the End of the Tunnel,’ ‘When You Wish Upon a Falling Experimental FTL Engine Core,’ ‘Leave It Black’ . . . oh, come on, you must know ‘Leave It Black.’ I see a black door and I’m extremely satisfied with how it looks? I know you’re from a primitive planet, but I feel bad for you, Double O Ultraviolet. I’ll make you a mixtape. Anyway, we’ve been around since the invention of agriculture. You know DJ Lights Out? No? She used to be our stop-stop dancer, before she went solo. The bitch. We mostly play weddings, funerals, pubs, cruise ships, that sort of thing. Summers, we hit resorts up and down the Binary Belt. I do big dance numbers, any rapping or Gregorian chanting that needs doing, and rock the dark-matter didge. My flow is jet, ask anybody. Sagrada sends us to the Grand Prix just about every year even though we never win because we’re the interstellar equivalent of a bunch of adorable grandparents in clogs or lederhosen or boat hats, but I’m telling you we do it so damn sable, they don’t want anyone else. Somebody’s got to get up there in traditional costume and sing the songs of their people and remind these beat-junkies what’s coal.”

  Oort could feel the translator fungus on his throat steaming with the effort of interpreting whatever the Elakh had actually said that came out as “clogs,” “lederhosen,” and “boat hats.” They were quiet for a while. Ultraviolet tried to blow smoke rings and failed endearingly. He never could get that right. His mother could do it, no problem. She’d always start grinning like a little girl for no reason so you knew she was gonna do her trick. Then she’d open her mouth and out would come two neat, perfect Os. Decibel had always assumed that Oort had named himself after the cloud, and he supposed he had, just not the one out beyond Pluto.

  “I don’t know how you heard all that junk in my Christmas carol,” Oort said finally.

  Darkboy Zaraz made a sound like feedback—the rare Elakh laugh. “Sorry, kid. On the big evolutionary board, human ears score somewhere between a retired roadie and a garden gnome. Even your dogs hear better than you, it’s bloody shameful. Sorry, sorry, I’m working on being more culturally sensitive. It’s a struggle, when your culture is so much better and older and more advanced than everyone else’s. I take an extension course. We have mantras and stuff. Always trying to better myself. So let’s try again. It’s not your fault the average Pomeranian has better ears than Mozart on a good day.” Zaraz rolled his eyes and recited his mantras: “I am not morally superior, more deserving of love and wealth, or more fun at parties just because they’re both deaf compared to me. You can choose your friends, you can choose your outfit, but you can’t choose the environmental conditions that led to the evolution of your specialized anatomy.” The Elakh shrugged. “Can’t see for shit on my planet. Anyone who can’t hear the childhood trauma of a Tasaklian porcutiger at a thousand yards is instant amuse-bouche.”

  Oort couldn’t help feeling a bit bruised in the pride. “I have excellent hearing. I test off the charts, always have.”

  “Aw,” Zaraz said, and patted Oort’s velvet-padded elbow. “Precious.”

  Oort wanted to stand up for his side and proclaim the auditory virtues of his species, but the wind was just too soft and sweet and admixed with white-collar drugs. “I was scared, though. You were right. I begged the choirmaster to just let me play the piano like always, but my parents thought it would be good for my anxiety. I stood up there all by myself and everything smelled like poinsettias and middle-class values and everybody’s different brands of dryer sheets and I hated it. I never wanted to sing alone again, so I didn’t. Worked out all right for a while. I’ve never been scared since, except now. The song’s not done, Zaraz. Not even close. I can feel how good it might be in my chest but . . . well, you know, Dess and me . . . without Mira . . . we’re just Dess and Me. Not the Zeros. Just one and two.”

  Darkboy Zaraz stubbed out his cigarette on a marble statue of some war hero rosebush. “Listen, Double O. I like you. You’re in the black with me. Been that way since I first heard little baby-you singing about angels bending near Earth and jamming on golden harps to bring on the end of the history and the beginning of a new era. Where I come from, we call that foreshadowing, my man. You’re the real char, I can tell. And I’m feeling right swarthy at the moment, with all this psychedelic breathing I’m doing. I’m going to make you a midnight offer, one I’ve never made to anybody before, and I’ve seen a lot of weird, shitty, fabulous species come across the Grand Prix stage.”

  Oort’s bloodstream was practically carbonated with the narcotic sea breeze by then. His scalp felt like it had been rubbed all over with velvet valentines and the kind of perfume that came in bottles with squeeze bulbs. “Oh? What’s that?”

  The Elakh lifted his enormous eyes to meet Oort’s. His lashes were so long, they were like burlesque curtains. It was ridiculous. How could he see with those things on? Oort started to giggle, but he stopped when Darkboy Zaraz laid it all out.

  “Let me save you.”

  “God, really? That would be . . . amazing. Shit, I’m so relieved, I can’t even tell you. This has all just been too much. You won’t regret it. You’ll see, humanity is all right, really, we’ve had a few rough spots but we usually sort of . . . lean in the right direction.”

  “Oh, no, sorry, bad form on my part. I didn’t mean humanity. No chance. I collect rare bootlegs, remember? I’ve heard all of your people’s greatest hits. You’re not even borderline sentient in my book. I don’t even know why they’re letting you go on tomorrow.”

  “Ah. You mean . . . Nuremberg, Hiroshima, Soviet State Radio, Kosovo, Rwanda, Calais, the markets crashing in ’29 . . . and ’87 . . . and ’08 . . . and ’24 . . . that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t know what that stuff is. I mean five minutes tuned in to Christian AM radio and/or any given Top 40 station tells me your species is about as sentient as a great white shark with the rickets. The Carpenters alone pretty much disqualify you. No, I mean let me save you. Not humanity, not the choirmaster at Didsbury Church of England Primary School, not Decibel Jones. You. Oort St. Ultraviolet, Omar Calisșkan, let me come through cloven skies with peaceful wings unfurled and get you the hell out of here. We can swing by your place and pick up your offspring and mate if that’s what you’re worried about. My homeworld is where everyone and their furtive uncle puts things to forget about forever. No one will ever know I swiped you off the dock. You can live a nice life on Sagrada. You’ll want for nothing. We’ll set you up in a house down the murky shore. Maybe you can curate the Homo sapiens sapiens exhibit in the Melanoatramentous Library. Maybe not—no pressure at all. Life on shadow street, baby. And hey, you never know, maybe your boy Dess will pull it out in the end and all will be right as ravens. But if not . . . you’ll be safe, and alive, and so will everyone you love.”

  Oort was stunned silent. It had never occurred to him that a way out of this even existed. Now it was holding the escape hatch open for him and yelling for him to go, go, go. The giddy winds of Litost were burning out his higher-order functions, stripping his wiring down to bare Paleolithic caveman copper. Decibel would be fine. He always was. Nico and Siouxsie and Justine would be safe. Did anyone else really matter? It was wrong, of course. Absolutely wrong. Monstrously wrong. But who would be around to know? Just then, in the unconditional light of three rosy, shimmering, nonjudgmental
moons, all he wanted to do was live.

  Oort St. Ultraviolet dragged the last particles of smoke out of his Elakh cigarette. “I hate this planet,” he said, looking out to sea, toward the red glow of Our Mums just below the twilit horizon. “I hated it the minute we landed. The way you can catch happy here, like you said. The antidepressant grass and the diamond rain and the peaceful happy roses being peaceful and happy together, literally breathing in emotional stability with every yawn. But I didn’t really know why it pissed me off so much. Sometimes you meet someone and they just rub you the wrong way. No reason it can’t go that way with a planet. But that wasn’t it. Do you want to know why I hate Litost?”

  “Always want to know your thoughts, Double O.”

  Oort St. Ultraviolet, man of a thousand instruments, flicked his smoke off the balcony, half a mile straight down into the ocean. “Because,” he sighed. “If Mira had been born here and not in fucking Sheffield, she’d never have had the Eeyores so bad that she tried to nail her tail back on with a speeding van and I’d still get to take her for gelato at five in the morning.” He smiled ruefully, and it turned his face twenty years younger. “No sale, Zaraz. Everybody’s got a Nico and a Siouxsie and a Justine. AM radio is not even a thing compared to the guy who leaves them all to burn because he doesn’t want to get up there with the poinsettias and the xylophone and sing about the angels. It’s all of us or none of us.” He straightened his suit jacket. Englishblokeman did not shirk. He did not turn in lackluster work. No matter how the tourists pulled at his hat, he did not move one solitary muscle. “Besides, it’ll be good for my anxiety.”

  “Then let me take out one of the other acts for you,” came a small, sweet voice. Öö dashed out of the party floor and scrambled up the side of a rose statue. He looked at Oort with soft eyes. “I could bludgeon that Voorpret cow and stash it in a broom closet for the duration, and I’d still shut down the after-party before I even felt bad about it. You seemed to really loathe the 321. I can DDoS that paper clip into oblivion without even getting my pulse up. It’s no problem at all, Oort.” The time-traveling red panda put his black paw on Oort’s cheek. “I don’t want you to die. I’m willing to let seven billion rubbish humans live if that’s what it takes.”

  “You’re not doing your superpower stutter,” Oort said uncertainly. “That’s your whole thing. That’s your idiom.”

  “This is a one-timeline deal. It’s a moment of weakness on my part. None of the other versions of me want in. No one will ever think less of you. Rule 20, love. It’s beyond legit.”

  “Do you have to kill them?” Oort asked softly.

  Darkboy Zaraz and Öö exchanged glances. The ancient Elakh took one on the moral center. “Usually we try to avoid nonrefundable fatalities, but if you want to be 100 percent sure, beyond all probability of unforeseen cock-ups, it’s safer that way. You don’t want to see a Yurtmak lounge singer after she’s busted out of a meat freezer.”

  Oort squeezed his eyes shut and shoved his knuckles into them. He couldn’t think. It was like breathing the electric Kool-Aid acid test out here. He’d agree to anything in another minute.

  “Ask me in the morning,” he whispered desperately.

  “I need to know now, sweetness,” whispered the Keshet. “A couple of dumb B-list celebrities you don’t even like for the whole of humanity. It’s not such a tough call, is it? That’s some good math.” Öö bristled his striped tail and laid his chin on Oort’s shoulder. “Even the nicest song has to have a screamy bit, Omarcik.”

  Oort gripped the Creamsicle railing of that absurd, unnecessary balcony. He blinked back tears. “Öö, I can’t. How is that right? The first thing a human being does when confronted with the universe at large would be to stone-cold murder somebody because he got nervous that maybe their music had a little more mass appeal? And if you’re right about us, if we’re way more Mark David Chapman than John Lennon, then it’ll be about thirty seconds before we start blowing you up just to see the light show, so what difference would it make, in the end? If the whole point of this is what we are, whether we are ready, whether we are fundamentally more than beasts . . . that seems like the opposite of sentience to me. I can’t make that decision for everyone. For the whole of us, from Nefertiti and Homer and Aquinas and Beau Brummell and Marie Curie all the way down to Nico and Siouxsie and me. I’m not cut out to be the last man on Earth. I’m just an ordinary guy. I can’t. I’m not fucking Cain. I’m not the first bloke to kill an alien. Not even Clippy. And Clippy is a cunt.”

  A thin spiral shadow fell on the human, the red panda, and the black traffic cone. It spoke in a pleasant, gender-neutral, corporate-approved voice.

  “This concludes the semifinal round,” said Clippy. “You have been cleared to move on to the finals. Would you like to save the changes you’ve made to this document?”

  29.

  My Heart Has No Color

  Capo spent the better part of the evening chasing Yüz particles, which were much more interesting than moths or flies or mice. They kept forming into elaborate word clouds, but as the Esca hadn’t bothered to teach her to read when she was flipping switches in her feline brain, she didn’t really care what they were trying to say. It was probably, No, no, bad kitty, don’t bite. It usually was, in Capo’s experience.

  She wandered out onto the hotel veranda long after Oort had gone. Long after most everyone had gone. They had forgotten about her, but that was all right. She forgot about them plenty. They’d left heaps of food lying everywhere. Creatures who were not cats were terribly slovenly. Capo tried to drink out of the fountain, but it was viciously bitter. She shunned it for offending her and hopped up on the railing, which would have given anyone else vertigo, but she was not anyone else. She was a cat, and height had no meaning to her. The air didn’t get up her nose much either. One percent aerosolized cocaine is a bowl of low-fat milk compared to what goes on beyond the feline blood-brain barrier. In fact, she found the high-octane breezes made her sluggish and irritable.

  “Let me guess,” said a breathy, sweet voice behind Capo. She didn’t turn to look. She licked her paw. If the owner of the voice wanted to be seen, it would come round. Why waste the energy? “Backup singer?”

  A large, expertly groomed topiary studded with healthy pale orange roses leaned into view. Capo licked her other paw in smug satisfaction.

  “No,” she said. “They’re mine, only they don’t know it.”

  “I see. My name is Ekali, I am one of the Klavaret singers this year.”

  Capo yawned. Her eyes bulged. The moons shone on her fangs.

  “We’re called Hug Addiction,” the Klavar said, twisting her leaves nervously. “We have a lot of vibro-cellos. And a fancy clown.”

  Capo whipped her white tail back and forth and regarded the rosebush hungrily.

  “It’s very rare to win two years in a row, of course, but that’s no excuse not to try your best!” A seabird called somewhere in the distance. “Anyway . . . do you plan to perform with them tomorrow or . . . what?”

  Capo’s ears twitched. “What do you want?” she purred.

  “Well, it’s only that you live on Earth as well, you see. And since you’re here, your species deserves some consideration. We do try to limit collateral damage in the event of a loss, but accidents will happen!”

  The cat’s tail curled and uncurled lazily. “But I’ll be fine,” she said. “Because I’m here.”

  “Well, yes, but . . .”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Miss Capo, you really have to learn to relax! I’m your friend! Your happy flower friend! I’m here to make you an offer! The Klavaret have a lot of voting power this year, as hosts. We could probably sway others to your cause. In exchange for a small fee, of course.”

  “Excellent. Do it.”

  “What? You don’t know what the fee is.”

  “Eh.”

  “I was going to say India. Its climate is very advantageous to botanical life.”

>   “Sold. It’s over there. Go get it. I will nap here.”

  The Klavaret maid quivered her petals in distress. “Alternatively, I could perhaps take care of some of your competition for you. As a gesture of alliance. I know that’s a bit gruesome . . .”

  Capo’s bottle-green eyes lit up. “Even better! Can I help? Who are we killing? Can it be the glittery things? They look tasty.”

  “The Yüz are members of the Octave . . .”

  “Don’t care. Tast-y.”

  Ekali turned all her blossoms toward the average British suburban house cat. “Allow me to lay my thorns on the table, as it were. You understand that this is the end of the semifinal round, don’t you? I offer these temptations as a test of sentience. It all goes into the evaluation. Whether you would sell out your homeworld or murder one of your new neighbors or let the rest of your species burn to save yourself.”

  “I have to be honest, that all just sounds really fantastic to me,” Capo meowed. “But if you could just do it for me, that would be brilliant.”

  Ekali rocked back a little on her stems, realization rocketing through her, thorn to petal and back. “You would destroy us,” she whispered. “There is another rising species on Earth. You never invented radio. We didn’t know.”

  “Why bother? The monkeys will make one and then I can sleep on top of it. The static makes my belly tingle.”