Space Opera

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Nessuno Uuf hopped off the bed and bent down close to his ear. Dess sat transfixed by the silver hunter in his hand, still as a photograph. “You’re a beautiful, accomplished species worthy of respect,” she purred in his ear. “And you, Decibel Jones, were the best I’ve ever had.”

  Just as he regained control of his motor functions, the amorous Smaragdin picked up that massive, button-encrusted remote off the bedside table, aimed it directly at Decibel Jones’s vocal cords, and pressed mute.

  “Are you really going to kill me with a Panasonic universal remote?” Jones tried to quip.

  Nothing came out. He groped at his throat. Tried to sing a few bars of “Ziggy Stardust,” “More Than This,” “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme,” “Happy Fucking Birthday,” anything.

  Nothing.

  “See you onstage,” said Nessuno Uuf. “Best of luck.”

  When Oort St. Ultraviolet got back to their room, he found nobody there. No Decibel, no weird alien conquest. Just a quiet suite with a mint on the pillow and their costumes folded neatly on the bed. Grown out of a bar on the other side of the galaxy from seed bins 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.

  On one end of the bed lay a dismembered ladies’ red sequin blazer, low-slung, mercilessly tight trousers that had once been a wine-stained wedding gown, and a cricket jumper with the name GEORGE embroidered lovingly on the hem in purple thread with a jaunty bat on either side. On the other lay a pair of satin paisley trousers with vintage ’80s gold accent chains all over them, platform boots, black plastic bat wings, and Robert, smelling just like roses.

  31.

  Lullaby for a Volcano

  Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros began and ended in nondescript rooms with not much more to recommend them but a couple of beds, a TV, a minifridge, and the reek of destiny. One was the kind of flat you could afford on what Mr. Five Star was willing to pay out.

  The other was a hotel in Scotland.

  Other people are frightfully useful and pleasant things, but not, strictly speaking, a must-have to get around town. Even the jankiest hand-me-down damaged/as-is human heart—one that couldn’t pass a user safety inspection to save its own ventricles—can be the handcrafted, jewel-toned, durable, all-seasons high-end accessory before, during, and after the fact of life on Planet Earth. Other people don’t just get you from day to day; they get you there, despite all their irritating habits and unnecessary mannerisms, in comfort, good company, high style, full of canapés, with a good buzz going, and looking like somebody to reckon with, which is very important to most young species trying to splash some cash around and make their mark on the nightlife.

  But you could always go it alone.

  You can try, anyway. Sometimes, even whole countries try.

  Listen. That small, watery, excitable planet is a pretty damnably woolly place, and we’ve got a lot to cover in a short time if we’re going to get through the whole history of the Zeros, but try not to forget about those lonely countries. They’re going to to be important in a minute.

  In the early days of the band, it had been easy. They never wanted to be apart. Whether or not anyone else happened to be nearby was as consequential to the Absolute Zeros as what was on tap at any given pub on any given day at any given time. But there is a certain energy to cliché, a certain gravity, as inexorable as entropy, and from the same part of town. You can plan for it. You can set your watch by it. It has a beat, and you can dance to it. By the time Decibel Jones, Mira Wonderful Star, and Oort St. Ultraviolent were huddled around a television in Edinburgh as if it were an ancient campfire, while Lila Poole paced back and forth, smoking Israeli cigarettes one after the other, they cared very much about whether anyone else was around, and what was on tap at the local on that particular night, at that particular time.

  You can plan for the slow expansion and dissolution of the energy of the universe. There are equations and formulas to tell you what to pack for the trip, and how much time you’ve got left. You can’t plan for the sudden acceleration of heavenly bodies to intolerable velocities, or for their occasional screeching stop. For the shock of a hidden pocket of heat-death roaring in the dark, ever so much closer than it ought to be.

  They watched it all happen on television, as though they were citizens of a much earlier generation. The revolution was always going to be televised. It wasn’t the kind of revolution that would miss out on those ratings. They’d sung all night on stage, sung until they were dry of music, not knowing that they had already run face-first into the cartoon Wile E. Coyote–wall of the future. That deportations had begun. That Cool Uncle Takumi had died in a riot, trampled underfoot by hundreds trying to pretend time hadn’t run out, that they hadn’t been pinwheeling their legs over a bridgeless chasm for some time now, still imagining they were walking on safe ground. That Nani was already in a processing facility awaiting a flight to Islamabad because Mr. Prime of the Minister said in a sad, carefully empathizing tone that she didn’t have the right passport and had stolen enough resources for one lifetime.

  That no one had come to the show, not entirely because the Zeros were yesterday’s hotness, but because they were home watching the world as they knew it end.

  For Oort and Dess, it happened in Mira’s eyes, reflections of the news, backward and inverted, chyrons rolling across her unbelieving irises. They ate everything in the minibar mechanically, methodically, tasting nothing, saying nothing. In fact, no one said anything at all until Mira turned to her friend and whispered: marry me.

  And Decibel Jones laughed. Nervously, instinctively, afraid and thrown sideways. But a laugh all the same.

  If he hadn’t laughed, she would have said the rest. She would have said it, and he would have understood. But he laughed, because it seemed like the most idiotic thing in the world, so he laughed, because how can you live when everything is lava on top of acid on top of fascist cream pie, let alone marry anyone or make the slightest plan that involves a future? He laughed in her face, and Mira Wonderful Star, hopped up on candy and crackers and shock, didn’t have the right octane fuel for that. So she didn’t finish. She just let it end with “marry me” instead of Marry me, marry me, Dess, and we’ll be safe, we’ll be a nice straight couple with money in the bank and no one can be offended by that, no one can come after that in the night, we’ll be together and we’ll smile our best Englishblokeman smiles, and no one will be able to touch us. You were born here. I wasn’t. Without you, I’m not safe. Oort has Justine. It’s just us kittens left, and the rain is coming. Marry me, and we’ll make a little bubble universe where nothing has to change and the elections never happened and it’s just Arkable Us, neon against the night, ice cream against the world.

  How could I know? Decibel would say to Oort fifteen years later on a spaceship to nowhere. How could I know what she meant?

  Unfortunately, Decibel Jones’s laugh blew Mira out of the sky. Oort was convinced that it was cruelty and not terrified, confused hysteria borne of Nani not answering her phone, not answering, still not answering, why wasn’t she answering? A band of glamrock gutter-glitz punks took the end of the world on the chin, each blamed the other, no one explained themselves, and Lila Poole quietly seethed about their refusal to stop messing about and discuss things like adults. Half of humanity was already steaming and scrambling against the other half by the time Decibel’s father called to tell him about Nani, Mira never did find out about her uncle, and the next ten years progressed at record speed from confusion and posturing to, in technical terms, an intergalactic shitshow.

  One way or another, the Absolute Zeros weren’t really much for situational awareness, and never noticed Mira grab the keys to the van off the top of the refrigerator and slip out the door onto a much longer road than any of the rest of them could imagine.

  Heart

  Forever and ever together, we sail into infinity,

  We’re higher
and higher and higher, we’re reaching for divinity.

  —“Euphoria,” Loreen

  32.

  Every Song Is a Cry for Love

  The one hundredth Metagalactic Grand Prix was held on Litost, the Klavaret homeworld, on the ruins of Vlimeux, where the war ended.

  It was the first Grand Prix in twenty-one years to feature a new applicant species, after all that unpleasantness with Flus and Muntun. To all the gathered Alunizar and Keshet, Smaragdi and Elakhon, Sziv and Voorpret, Lummutis and Slozhit, Esca and Azdr and Ursulas and Meleg and Yüz and Yurtmak and 321 and the single, solitary remaining Inaki, it seemed somehow appropriate that the hundredth anniversary gala should have real stakes, should prove the purpose of the Grand Prix all over again, should rock the goddamned house down.

  Doors opened at seven, the show started at eight. In pubs and clubs and house parties across the galaxy, the viewers at home were drunk by six.

  The Mamtak Aggregate and DJ Lights Out—beloved, though getting on in years, Masters of Ceremonies, sanctioned haters, and winners of the second and sixth Grand Prix—floated and hobbled onto the Stage of Life, respectively. The Yüzosh beatvoxer swirled into the shape of a massive disco ball and spun round for the delight of the crowds. The constant twilight of Litost glittered on the silicate beings, and the air smelled of roses and cocaine.

  “Welcome to the one hundredth Metagalactic Grand Prix!” thundered the little Elakh DJ Lights Out. The audience roared; the cheap seats stomped whatever they had in the way of feet. “It’s probably going to be a bit shit, but it’s better than another war, am I right?”

  In the dive bars and speakeasies and orbital bistros of the civilized galaxy, a blast of applause blew out windows, cracked tables, and short-circuited the mood lighting.

  In the bars, pubs, restaurants, hotel lobbies, airports, offices, and quiet, tense lounge rooms of Earth, no one thought the joke was particularly funny.

  The hypno-kelp dimmed, the crowds went quiet, the Ocean of Unconditional Acceptance crashed against the shore, and the Grand Prix began.

  The Alunizar, as the prime political mover in the galaxy, were granted the first performance slot by the Grand Prix governing body, which meant that by the time voting started, no one would even remember the name of their song. Better Than You swept onto the stage in a rush of aquatic explosions and radical interpretive plopping. Slekke5 and their four lumbering, electric-veined gold bandmates slung the straps of their heat-seeking mandolins over what passed for their shoulders. They strummed the delicate fleshy strings with their nubs while geysers of locally sourced, eel-lit seawater detonated behind them, filling the Stage of Life with a melancholy, classical melody as heartfelt and skillful as any backwoods grandfather showing his boys what real music was. After about forty-five seconds of that, Slekke5 belted out a neuron-curdling war-yodel and the beat kicked in. “Is Your Continual Mistreatment of Our Entire Species Fair Trade?” would be heard in every convenience store and mall elevator on the settled worlds that summer—the Muzak version, anyway. But despite the truly self-righteous beat, the Grand Prix audience wouldn’t give those overgrown painted goiters the satisfaction, not even during the final verse in which the Alunizar rockers removed their budded offspring, one by one by ruby-threaded one, letting them slide onto the stage like jeweled tears, and assembling a chorus of generations vibrating at a frequency only the cool could hear.

  The Mamtak Aggregate formed itself into the shape of a lonely, overturned can of soup. DJ Lights Out nodded. “Leave it to the Alunizar to try to make things political,” she said, making sarcastic air quotes with her long, twiggy fingers. “Somebody cut their waaamplifiers, my ears can’t take the nubhurt.”

  Color drained from the faces of the fifty or so cops at a police bar in Birmingham. “How is this not political?” shouted the chief, through the film of his fifth scotch.

  The Voorpret hitmakers Vigor Mortis Overdrive cut in with a slamming drum riff. Puvinys Blek, who had ditched its rapidly curdling Keshet body for a nearly fresh Slozhit one, spread its rotting wings, lifted a ceremonial Gageba shovel high into the dusky sky, and, accompanied by gouts of purple flame and gutteral death metal vocals, smashed it against the stage, obliterating a cleverly concealed nest-sac burst open beneath the floorboards and releasing a swarm of frenzied earworms into the stands like a comedian smashing a watermelon all over the front row. No one could get “No Antibody for Love” out of their heads as the infectious song spread from host to host and the euphoria-secreting worms burrowed deep into various and sundry ocular organs to lay their eggs.

  The Mamtak Aggregate coalesced into an old droopy sock with holes in it. “I thought it was great!” enthused the Elakh, her gigantic eyes shining. “I got my vaccinations! Didn’t hear a thing!”

  The 321, no longer stored in the body of Clippy but simply downloaded into a mixing board that bore more than a passing resemblance to Captain Nemo’s organ, played their anthem of loss, hope, and the inability to escape the rainbow wheel of suffering and end the cycle of life, death, and the categorical oppression of synthetic life by gross, moist organics, “Abort, Retry, Fail,” without fanfare or effects, which put everyone right off from the start. The 321 had calculated it to be the perfect song, a precisely tuned slice of electro-pop confectionary that nevertheless spoke of deep universal themes everyone could relate to, immaculate in every respect from melody to rhythm to emotional effect. It went on to become the most-refunded single in the history of the galactic musical economy, for reasons given variously as: “You can’t really dance to it,” “I think I’m going to go off music for a while,” and “It’s hard to work out when you feel a deep sense of unease in the presence of the gym equipment.”

  Up next was the home team, the Klavaret sensation Hug Addiction. A holographic garden erupted over the stage, each hyperreal flower concealing a mister that pumped out a scent chemically formulated to lower the artistic standards of anyone within range. The rose topiaries performed a traditional Dance of Conflict Resolution, vibrating their stamens into the memories of everyone who heard even a single note of their song like a heart-seeking laser, finding, targeting, sampling, and remixing the songs that were playing when each person felt the most perfect love and acceptance in their lives and mixing it down into what would go on to be the dance craze of the decade, “I Wanna Be Elated.”

  In a modest house outside Budapest, a woman heard her mother, her sisters, her daughters, and her child self all singing a thousand Hungarian folk songs and old photo-film commercial themes in such piercing harmony that she collapsed on the floor in a rictus of emotional cohesion.

  The lights went out just as Once You Go Black got the crowd on its feet. They rocked out the Sagrada way, and unless your eyes evolved in a world like a locked broom closet, you never saw their pyrotechnic darkshow or their synchronized Sagradan tango. Darkboy Zaraz played the dark-matter didge so fine, the vibrations slid a cool black cosmic calm into every cell of every poor, benighted lightbody so that they could finally know some peace, some peace called “Black Is the New Black.”

  Decibel Jones and Oort St. Ultraviolet watched it all from the wings.

  They watched the Utorak thump out a thunderous rock anthem called “Tell Me About Your Mother” by hurling themselves against one another until the cracks and booms became a percussion and their cries of pain became a melody line and the whole of Litost danced along. They watched the Esca infrapop duo Birdward let the sweet wind of the sea play over their chest cavities to the tune of “You’ll Feel What I Tell You and You’ll Like It” and wash the stage in such bright light from their lamps that the afterimages sparkled emerald in everyone’s vision for days. They watched the Sziv supergroup Us swathe the stage in their algae until seabirds came, and the song of the seabirds was the song of the Sziv, until they ate the seabirds, and that was their song, too. They watched the Yurtmak punch the stage in the face and slaughter their yellcore ballad “In the End We’re Actually Kind of Sorry We Missed the War Yo
u Guys Have All the Fun.” They watched the soulful Nessuno Uuf stand center stage with her violet eyes full of tears singing “And I Am Telling You I Am Not Sentient,” which brought the house to its knees and sobbing. And they watched Olabil the Friendless swing up a long trumpet with his firefly-coated trunk and play the deepest blues of all time until the strange elephant sank onto its stomach singing the immortal chorus: I miss them all so much I promise never to skip school again I swear just come back. It’s so lonely being the last of us.

  The songs went on and on, beggaring the mind, the ear, the very definition of music.

  Until the end. New species go last.

  Decibel coughed. He looked pleadingly at Oort.

  “Stage fright?” his old friend asked, and he was not even a little bit teasing, as he felt certain the first musical note the civilized galaxy was going to hear out of humanity was him violently throwing up into a tuba. “Don’t worry. We got this. It’s a good song, Dess. I promise. Well, it’s all right. Just . . . do your best. Pretend everyone’s not watching. Close your eyes if you have to. It’s just us up there. Us and Mira. Only . . . her mic doesn’t work, you know? Hey. Hey, Danesh.” Oort St. Ultraviolet put his hand on his old friend’s cheek. “It’s all okay. I still love you. Always did.”