Space Opera

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Compared to you,” said the Klavar soprano, “humans are joyful rosebushes bouncing through the stars. If you ever stopped napping long enough to escape Earth, you would sweep across this galaxy like nothing before, an endless wave of carnage. You would hunt our worlds one by one and ruin everything we’ve built. Only your laziness protects us.”

  Capo hopped down off the railing. She lifted her tail in the air haughtily and glanced back over her furry shoulder.

  “Most likely,” she purred. “Best keep mum, don’t you think? Wouldn’t want to wake us up.”

  30.

  Silence and So Many People

  On the subject of interspecies sex, the only reliable rule is Goguenar Gorecannon’s longest, most controversial, and least profanity-riddled Unkillable Fact: the Fourteenth Special. A wide variety of interestingly shaped parents have petitioned to have it redacted on the grounds that, while true, it makes for screamingly awkward postlullaby conversations, and its inclusion makes it very difficult to leave offspring home alone with any unguarded household appliances. All such requests are routinely burned unread by the Gorecannon estate. The Fourteenth Unkillable Fact states the following: Everybody fucks. Well, almost everybody. No force on this plane of reality can equal the drive to get a leg over, because it’s the nondimensional otherspace where all those nice, sophisticated fundamental forces meet and form a weird, wet, messy trashball: tension, friction, gravity, electromagnetism, thrust, torque, resistance, elasticity, drag, momentum, inertia, pressure, chemical reactivity, fusion, conservation of energy, self-loathing, humiliation, and loneliness.

  Being ashamed of it makes about as much sense as being ashamed of the speed of light.

  Everybody is bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes they wouldn’t admit to their grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love. You are bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes you wouldn’t admit to your grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love. It’s a literal goddamned zoo out there, so this is the best I can do you for: don’t giggle when the other entity takes their clothes off, secure enthusiastic consent, don’t mix silicon and carbon without extensive decontamination protocols, tidy up your house if you expect to bring someone home, don’t expect anything you wouldn’t offer, remember that every person is an end in themselves and not a means to an end, don’t worry too much about what goes where and how many of them there are, don’t mistake fun for love, try your best, be kind, always make them breakfast, and use protection. Chromosomes are not nearly such picky eaters as you might think. Just because the other fella is a plank of sentient wood from Planet 2 x 4 doesn’t mean you can’t get pregnant, and the splinters won’t be nearly as fun coming out as they were going in.

  The fact is, neither anatomy nor culture nor inconvenience nor the linearity of time nor distance nor food allergies nor federal law nor a dimensional rift nor strict parents nor the threat of instant and hilariously excruciating death upon contact with one solitary smear of foreign bodily fluids can stop people after a bit of strange, and the stranger the bits the better, because genes are a bunch of thrill-seeking little shits, always looking for the next new thing. The very first time the very first species discovered that they were not alone in the universe, they started eyeing up the other hostile carbolic-acid-blooded space squid, winking compulsively, and asking them if they wanted to intermix and gill.

  Where there’s a wang there’s a way.

  I once saw an Ursula hook up with a mime, a tuberous begonia, and a bottle of expired milk. There’s no unseeing that.

  In the end, there is no atom in this galaxy but that someone hasn’t tried to fuck it.

  Except me.

  Who needs a drink?

  Generally, this holds up to experimentation; otherwise, it would be a Semikillable Fact, included only in older editions. Sex may not look the same in terms of number, kind, duration, pronouns, content, or survivability from species to species, it may not be advisable under even the most hastily drawn up occupational health and safety guidelines, but it’s pretty much always happening everywhere. The variety of genders across disparate species makes the human fixation on rigidly defined sexual orientations seem as adorably, bafflingly old-fashioned as a butter churn in a travel agency. The definitions of sex across worlds vary so much that the Elakh word for “to make love,” which can be loosely translated as “emblackenate,” also means to swim, to dance, to fish, to grow up big and strong, to hide a body for a friend, to be surprised that they’re still making the candy one loved as a child, to really and truly self-actualize, to maintain an antiquated belief in fairies, to jump, to sing, to dig, to secure financing, to stalemate, to lay tile, and to vigorously debate the social issues of the day.

  On some planets, sex isn’t even remotely connected to reproduction. The Smaragdi, for example, have six-and-a-half genders. Nessuno Uuf used the pronouns “she” and “her” only because it seemed, in the cultural documents from Earth, that people utilizing those pronouns got to wear flashier clothes and considerably more tribal paints. The Smaragdi create children via battle royale combat, in which the spilled blood of the losing parents contributes only the most basic recessive, baseline genes to the resulting offspring. They are renowned and sought-after lovers, due to their stamina, open-mindedness, and levitational abilities, although not having to worry about getting one knocked up is probably a contributing factor. For other species, a light cough will land you in midnight feedings and a sensible family car before you can say, Sorry, I’ve got a bit of a cold. In the presence of a pollinating Klavar, it’s best to cover your mouth. There are, naturally, a few asexual species, and they do seem to get a lot more done in a day, but even they give it a try once in a while, just to see what all the fuss is about, before shrugging and going back to grounding their self-esteem in concrete accomplishments and finding fulfillment in skills and hobbies like the twisted kinksters they are.

  Sex is universal, it’s just not evenly distributed.

  In the face of a blistering universe of infinite possibility, mind-smearing variety, hopping nightlife, and a galactic pornography industry as venerable and august as any bank, the innate sexual conservatism of any given species usually lasts about 3.4 seconds.

  Which is how Decibel Jones came to find himself in the executive suite of the South Wharf Hilton on Litost, propped up by the pillows endemic to hotels everywhere, even seven thousand light-years from the nearest hospitality degree program, differing only in the precise manner of their inadequacy, snuggled between the Smaragdin Nessuno Uuf and a beam of exhausted moonlight.

  Decibel knew the basics of Goguenar Gorecannon’s Fourteenth Special, though he couldn’t have put a name to it or expressed it as concisely as a lonely-heart Yurtmak in the midst of a chemically volatile forest. He knew it by instinct and the hard-earned, precariously rigged experience of an adulthood spent being reasonably attractive, a couple of years spent massively famous, and a life spent fascinated by everyone he ever met, if occasionally only for a few minutes at the outside.

  Jones couldn’t entirely be certain that what had transpired over the previous couple of hours fell under the dictionary definition of sex. It was more like a very complete entry in Rogerer’s. The moonlight, who was called Gobo, had been straightforward enough. The Azdrian postpunk filament-harmonic front man had slipped into the elevator with Decibel and Nessuno as the party was shutting down. When he’d asked, rather cheekily, given that tonight might well be Decibel’s last chance for a good time, whether the two of them would be interested in collectivizing, Dess thought he could imagine how sex with a swaggeringly masculine moonbeam might go, and it did, more or less. Gobo shone all over everywhere and promptly passed out without returning the favor.

  Nessuno was more complicated. She’d disappeared into the bathroom the moment Gobo was snoring, which, in a shaft of moonlight, manifested as a slow, steady flicker that, before long, faded away to nothing at all. The Azdr, being mostly p
hotons, have a distinct advantage when it comes to escaping potentially awkward situations and are famous for simply going off like an embarrassed light switch.

  The room was actually Nessuno’s personal suite, though the replicated human hotel room, down to the minbar and flat-screen television accompanied by a remote control with enough buttons to manage the settings on the known universe, could hardly have been less designed for her comfort. A small landfill of suitcases, musical accoutrements, and equipment covered the floor, none of which Decibel could have figured out how to use if you held a mic to his head. It really was a stonking huge remote. It didn’t really fit in with the sleek late-model TV. That thing was the love child of a 1980s home entertainment system and a space shuttle command console. The buttons glowed softly violet.

  With trembling fingers, her eyes wide with desire, Nessuno Uuf emerged from the en suite holding the instrument of her love between them.

  It was a hairbrush.

  “And what do you expect to do with that?” Decibel asked nervously.

  “The . . . usual?” Nessuno said. Her pale eyes glistened with lust and confusion. “You know . . . sex. Copulation. The old in-out. That’s what we’re both after, isn’t it?”

  Decibel Jones shrugged. “Oh, sure, love. I can take a little paddling if that’s what you’re into.”

  “No! Not paddling, for crying out—what . . . what good would that do? This is . . . how we do it on Pallulle. Look, I know you showed that Esca a good time. I didn’t think you’d be such a prude.”

  “Don’t be upset, Nessie my darling. I’m here to learn. Why don’t you walk me through it? Just give me a little preview. What do you like? How do the Smaragdi get down?”

  Nessuno Uuf closed her enormous eyes in a transport of delight. “We brush each other’s hair, and then, if you’re really kinky, we open up and show each other our feelings,” she whispered. Her breathing was getting heavy. “But that’s only if you’re into the hard-core triple-X stuff. Why, how do humans do it?”

  Jones blinked. There were rules to a one-night stand. Protocols. Diplomatic procedures. And the most important one was not to shame the other guy for the way his rudder leaned. He always tried to be open and giving and create a good memory for everyone involved. Good memories rarely included being laughed out of the room. “Um,” he said, pulling the modernist bronze-and-gray-striped sheet over his naked and suddenly unaroused body. “Same. Maybe a hug too, if there’s time, but mostly . . . same.”

  But Dess had to admit, her hair was amazing. It was like brushing a snowbank. With every stroke, the Smaragdin quivered and shook and made soft little moans like strumming a bass underwater. Whenever he hit a tangle, she gasped and dug her nails into his knee. He hoped he was making a decent hash of it. After a while, he tried telling her she was beautiful.

  “Ooh,” the ten-foot-tall horn-rimmed creature sighed out. “I didn’t know you were into humiliation! Yes, yes, do it harder.”

  Decibel froze. But he tried. He always tried. “Er. All right. Yes. Well. You’re a dirty little brush-slut, aren’t you?”

  “What? No. I said humiliate me. Like before! Insult me. Go on. Say something really degrading. Tell me . . . tell me I’m a good person.”

  “Right. You’re . . . you’re a beautiful, accomplished individual worthy of respect, aren’t you?”

  Nessuno shuddered violently from head to toe. She wasn’t half as selfish as Gobo. The Smaragdin leaped up and gave Decibel’s hair a good seeing-to, and though it didn’t have quite the same effect on him, it was comforting, and relaxing, and after an hour or so, just when he really started to think he could get into this in a more direct way, she stopped.

  “Do you want to?” she whispered, hardly daring to hope. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

  “The feelings bit? Yeah, you know me, nothing’s too wild.”

  She collected her limbs onto the bed, careful not to jostle the snoring moonbeam, and the two of them sat cross-legged across from each other on the mattress. A rather medieval painting of a unicorn hung over the bed behind Nessuno’s head. Her pale, bony frame blocked out the hunters and the virgin who were out for the poor pony’s blood.

  “You first,” she encouraged him.

  “Whatever you want, baby. Well. Let’s see. I . . . I’m pretty terrified, if you want to know the truth. I’d never tell Oort this, but I just . . . wish they’d picked someone else. I wish I were someone else. Someone you could rely on to turn it out no matter what. I’m afraid that whatever I had is lost by now. I haven’t had a song out in years. I haven’t had a good day in years. What if I get up there and just completely blow it? Or worse, what if I get up there and give the performance of my sorry life, the best show in the history of me, if the light of the world comes beaming out of me like a bloody Care Bear Stare for the ages, and it’s not good enough? If you lot somehow hear in my voice all the worst of us? Because there’s a lot of worst. There really is. You only know what we’ve done since we invented radio. Before that it gets really hairy. And I’m nobody’s shining example. I’m not innocent. I’m all junked up inside, always have been. No musician isn’t. That’s why we’re musicians. That’s a bit of a flaw in your whole system, honestly.” His voice started to tremble. “All I’ve ever wanted is to be like that thing in the painting behind you. It’s called a unicorn. It’s not a real animal or anything. Back when we thought we were alone in the universe, we made up a lot of other intelligent creatures so we could have someone to talk to at night. Anyway, the thing about unicorns was that they were innocent. So innocent that you couldn’t even lure one out of the forest except with a trick it was too sweet and dumb to figure out, and even then, it still wouldn’t dream of stabbing that bitch in the gut when the hunters came. It forgave. It kept on loving even with a belt around its neck. But I’ve never been like that, not even close. Ask Mira. Ask Oort. Hell, ask the roadrunner. And I’m going to go onstage tomorrow, and even if I sing to shatter the heavens, you’ll see how I really am. How we really are.”

  Nessuno Uuf looked over her shoulder at the rubbish hotel painting and gave a long, low whistle. “I wish I had your confidence,” she said. “Now, don’t make me wait for it. Show me your feelings.”

  Jones narrowed his eyes. “I just did. Honestly, I’m a little hurt. I just laid out my heart. What else do you want?”

  The Smaragdin cocked her head to one side. “Oh. Oh, ew. Was that . . . was that it? Is that how primates externalize emotion? Do you . . . do you really keep your feelings on the inside?”

  “Do you not?”

  Nessuno Uuf grinned. Then she stretched, her lithe rib cage arching toward him, her lips parted. Something emerged from her baroque breastbone. A spur of bone the same color as the rest of her. Then more than a spur. It began to darken as the air hit it, as it squeezed out of her like toothpaste out of the strangest tube. “Like I said,” she panted, “the old in-out. I’ve always felt sorry for people who are limited to verbalization. It’s so easy to fake it.”

  It didn’t seem like a thing that should be happening. It didn’t seem like a thing that should be possible. She was all bone and armor, unpierceable, impregnable. But her chest cavity might as well have been a butter sculpture at a county fair for all the resistance it gave.

  “Smaragdi emotions leave mineral deposits in our organs as they pass through us. Strong feelings can overwhelm our filtering systems, build up too fast, at which point we have to pass them or we can suffer psychological toxicity and require dialysis or even a transplant. Do you have kidneys?”

  Decibel Jones could not look away. It was obscene and clinical and intimate and performative all at the same time, like watching an orgiastic tribal dance about lab results. “Two of them, last I checked,” he answered without blinking.

  It didn’t seem to hurt her. She seemed to love every minute of it, in fact. Her breathing was quick, soft, ecstatic. “Think of it as passing a kidney stone, if your kidneys were located in the pleasure center of
your brain. Most of us do it once a day before bed. We have whole china cabinets full of stones. A perfect, utterly honest record of every emotional state we experience. Symbolic representations, formed in the collective unconscious, but you can’t make them lie any more than you can make your kidneys pretend to be hearts.”

  She pulled the rest of the feeling stone out with her fingertips and placed it in his hand with a shivery, delighted sigh. It was a child’s toy, a small, charcoal-silver figurine, still warm from her body.

  It was one of the unicorn hunters from the painting on the wall.

  As he held it, Decibel was overwhelmed with foreign emotions: satisfaction, triumph, anticipation, relief, fear, crippling social pressure, artistic insecurity, ambition, xenophobia, and a strong, awful flood of schadenfreude. This was the Smaragdi climax, he realized. Eat your heart out, Dr. Kinsey. Jones wanted to shake it off and leave with some devastating quip, but he couldn’t look away from the vicious little action figure. He couldn’t move at all. The inundation of her feelings turned his synapses into a malfunctioning tech rehearsal for fight-or-flight, and he could not move at all.

  Nessuno Uuf looked at him with the last dregs of pleasure in her eyes and what appeared to be genuine regret.

  “Sorry, love,” she crooned. “You know how it is. All’s fair in the semifinals. I really am sorry. I think humans are wonderful. So attractive and creative and musically talented, and obviously deeply sentient.” She stroked his hair fondly. “It’s the Alunizar, see. They’re going bankrupt. Year after year, everyone votes them into oblivion because we’re not allowed to get our war reparations any other way. Every year, they send five-star catering to the galactic table and get back crumbs. Serves them right, if you ask me, but you can’t expect them to just take total economic collapse on the chin. And since these tone-deaf space monsters would rather suck face with a colicky wormhole than award Aluno any points at all, well, our friendly local sea squirt hired me to take out some of the low-hanging fruit.” The skeletal assassin shrugged sheepishly. “Now this . . . this is a bit barbaric, I admit. But galactic society is still . . . well, society. And society is rubbish. Good lord, the Grand Prix is the best thing we’ve ever done, the utter best, and it’s just a bit of song and dance, isn’t it? I never did say we were good; just sentient. It’s like Goguenar Gorecannon’s Eleventh Unkillable Fact always says: You can’t stop people being assholes. They do love it so. The best you can hope for is that some people, sometimes, will turn out to be somewhat less than the absolute worst. When they manage to trip and fall over that incredibly low bar, they’ll make you want to end it all. But when they leap over it, they’ll make you believe this whole mess really was created for a reason—the bastards. Except me, of course. I’m superb. Ask anyone. And you’re all right, I suppose. Welcome to being a people, kid. It’s just dreadful up here.”