Space Opera

by Catherynne M. Valente

  And he kissed her gently on the forehead, as if to make it true. Then once—briefly, warmly, and so arkably—on the lips.

  Dess gestured emphatically at his throat for the millionth time that day. He’d tried to find a pen. He’d tried to find paper. He’d tried scratching it into his arms in blood, but fingernails really don’t do much of a job. Oort rolled his eyes impatiently.

  “What is your problem? You’ve been acting so weird and quiet. Where were you all day? Are you mad at me? So I didn’t spend all day spooning with you. I was out with friends for once. You should meet them. They’re really something, the Elakhon. I got here in time, didn’t I?”

  Decibel Jones tried again to claw I CAN’T SING THAT TALL BINT STOLE MY VOICE into his forearm, tears of frustration and real, boiling fear welling up in his eyes.

  But Oort St. Ultraviolet was already half onstage. “Ugh, fine, be that way. Just do your thing and let’s go home. I don’t know why you always have to be so dramatic.”

  It was time for Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros, or at least what was left of them, to save the world.

  33.

  Tell Me Who You Are

  Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros went on just as the storm clouds began to gather over the Stage of Life.

  They had no gouts of flame.

  They had no bioluminescent burlesque.

  They had no teleportation or time travel technical effects.

  They had two people standing center stage in the dark. They had a microphone. They had something that looked like a glass house made out of a tuba. And they had a voice.

  Dess opened his mouth to sing for his life. Maybe whatever that walking pile of coat hangers had done to him would go away if he sang hard enough, if he blew out his capillaries singing for all he was worth, which, he knew, in the end, wasn’t much. But if he could do anything, he could talk when he wasn’t supposed to. Sing when he was meant to be a good, quiet boy, seen and not heard. He’d been doing it since the day he was born. Maybe he could do it now. Maybe it would be enough.

  Oort started up the overture. He thumped the drums with his foot pedal and folded himself into the Oortophone. Music began to hit the speakers and flow out into the ears of too many people to think about. Perfect music. Every note a crystal. Decibel Jones took a breath. He took a breath to sing what they’d written in the reefship, their clever clever plan, hiding behind all that poetry, all that human genius, so they never had to risk their own voices being the ones to damn a planet to silence. He’d blow out that stupid mute button with the sheer need to live, the need to matter. It would all be fine. He stepped up to the mic.

  All he sang was silence.

  He didn’t come in on the downbeat. Or the upbeat. Or any beat.

  Decibel froze. Just like he had at the Hope & Ruin that long-ago first day of all days. Just like that day in Nani’s scarves. He was right back there, standing on that worn red rug trying to sing along with Marvin the Martian till his face felt like it was going to explode with the effort of making no sound at all. It was like he wasn’t even there, like he’d never existed in the first place. Like always. Like forever.

  “What the fuck, Dess?” hissed Oort. “Sing, you bastard, what are you playing at?”

  Decibel turned to his friend and pointed at his throat again. Tears streamed down his face. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead. Christ, I’m trying. I’m trying so hard.

  Finally, Oort St. Ultraviolet got it. The lovely boom and trill of the Oortophone went silent as the realization went through him. We’re all going to die. Dess is broken, and we’re all going to die. My girls are going to burn. What the fuck do I do?

  He tried to think of a song. Not their song. Any song. A Zeros song. A Bowie song. A nursery song. Anything. But his terror-addled brain formally informed him that it had never heard a single song ever, and had no idea what music even was, so kindly leave it alone. My girls are going to burn. Sing something, Omarcik. Sing anything.

  A solitary, clear, pure voice filled up the stadium on Litost. It trembled a little, but it was true. In front of God and aliens and everybody, Omar Calisșkan sang the only song he could think of.

  It came upon the midnight clear,

  That glorious song of old,

  From angels bending near the earth,

  To touch their harps of gold:

  “Peace on the earth, goodwill to men

  From heaven’s all gracious King!”

  The world in solemn stillness lay

  To hear the angels sing.

  Still through the cloven skies they come,

  With peaceful wings unfurled;

  And still their heavenly music floats

  O’er all the weary world:

  Above its sad and lowly plains

  They bend on hovering wing,

  And ever o’er its Babel sounds

  The blessed angels sing.

  34.

  Time Is Lonely

  Öö and the roadrunner watched from the Octave’s posh jury box. Drinks and small plates of delightful foods littered the floor. Half the judges had gone to the toilets. The rest were discussing how marvelous “I Wanna Be Elated” had been or whether to rank the Elakhon above or below poor Olabil, who really did try his best without a backup band.

  “It’s not going wellgoodwellwellanywherefast,” Öö said, twisting his paws.

  “Not even as well as I thought it would,” agreed the roadrunner, “and I thought it would be a disaster.”

  “I could help,” said the time-traveling red panda quietly. “I could do the thing. I did a few test runsrunsgoestriesattempts during the semifinals. It’d be easy. It would be donedonebackdone before he’s through with the second verse.”

  “You could. But it’s cheating, Öö.”

  “Mmmm,” said Klloshar Avatar 9, enjoying a refreshing cocktail after her performance. They hadn’t seen her standing there, but the jury box was littered with dormant Lummo stones, so any of them could turn up at any time. You had to be prepared for that, with Lummutis. “Mini-game. Exciting.”

  “Not technically cheatingcheatingfudgingagainstherulescheatingcheating. And look, you only spent a few hours on Earth. I’ve been all over their timelinestimelinesquantumfoampossibleforkstimelines. That’s a lot of Decembers. I would do just about anything to make a Christmas carol stop.”

  The tall, blue ultramarine fish-flamingo dropped her eyes to the floor. “There is a process. We don’t interfere. They have to do it on their own, or not at all.”

  “I thought you liked him!”

  “I do,” said the former lead singer of Bird’s Eye Blue. “He calls me the Road Runner. That makes him the coyote. How can you not love that stupid coyote?”

  “Then I’ll dodofindgetdograb it.”

  “Mmmm,” Klloshar Avatar 9 said again, smacking her colorful lips. “Cheat code. Nice.”

  “You can’t. It’s against the rules. No one has ever helped another species before. Not even when that Ursula died mid–power ballad. We don’t interfere.”

  Öö thrashed his long, striped tail furiously. “It’s not interfering. The name on the list was Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros. All I’m doing is finishing your job. I’m getting the band to the venuevenuestagedoor all in one piece.”

  The Keshet grabbed two little toasts with creamed sunlight on top, crammed them in his mouth, stuck his tongue out at his avian friend, and vanished.

  Klloshar Avatar 9 stared after him with enormous cartoon eyes. “One hundred points,” she whispered.

  Öö was the first outsider to score in the grand game of the Lummutis, and, to date, the last.

  35.

  It’s All About You

  Oort was nearly out of Christmas and Decibel Jones was still trying to sing. He dropped to his knees, clinging to the mic stand in horror and gut-voiding terror of the totality of this failure above all his other failures. It shouldn’t have gone like this. Maybe somewhere inside he’d always known it would go like thi
s without her, without Mira to keep the beat out into the infinite future the way she always had, the way he thought she always would. His jaw ached from trying to birth the song horribly from the depths of him. He kept trying. He kept trying as people in the audience began to cough and look away in embarrassment. He kept trying as the sky grew darker and darker and the voting officials began to noisily rummage backstage. He tried for Nani and his brothers and sisters and Mr. Looney of the Tunes and the sold-out Hippodrome and Dr. Collins his psychiatrist and Lila Poole and poor lost Mira and that stupid badger, too, for Yoko Ono and “Revolution 9” and nice flats you couldn’t afford and kebabs you could and short-haired white cats and overly friendly waitresses named Ruby and Alexander McQueen and Cool Uncle Takumi and Englishblokeman and government agents and thrift shop eye shadow duos and lions and rhinoceroses that were never coming back and Mr. Five Star’s chip shop and Marvin the Martian and the West Cornwall Pasty Company and Acme Brand Instant Tunnels and the Things of Thing-World and Arkable Gelato and science fiction movies in which everything was simple and very few musical numbers turned up and even the bloody Daily Mail, all of it sacred, all of it real, all of it loved in that moment by those two souls seven thousand light-years away.

  But it was no good. He had nothing. He was nothing. He was invisible, voiceless, no one. Oort had very little left of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” and the only person who seemed to be picking up what he was laying down was a short little Elakh in the front row clicking his fingers with his eyes closed. He tried again. It would work this time. These were his last seconds of existence. He wondered if they’d just incinerate him immediately or ship him back to Earth for the big barbecue. He’d come so far to fail.

  Decibel Jones gave up.

  Fuck it all to hell. Good-bye, life. Good-bye, Earth. Good-bye, rosé wine. Good-bye, Hope. Good-bye, Ruin. My tail’s unnailed for good. God, I miss you so much, Mira, his brutally muted vocal cords strained to say. I promise never to skip school again, just come back. It’s lonely being the last of us. I wish I could fix it all. I wish I could have been better. That’s all. I just wish I was better.

  The storm overhead broke. Tiny diamonds rained down from the absurd skies of the happiest planet in the galaxy, where sentient civilization almost cannibalized itself and burned its own bones to ash. The clouds were so unfathomably dark. Beyond dark, into shades of the void. They swirled and pooled and yawned sickeningly, the way the surf retreats before a tsunami hits. It’s counterintuitive. It doesn’t look like what it is. But it’s a dead giveaway. Pulsating neon vortexes began to show through the clouds.

  Decibel felt something very wrong. The breath under the notes that would not come was stuck. Pinned to his diaphragm. Sawed in half over that awful, vicious heartburn he hadn’t been able to shake since he’d left the planet. The air was seeping up out of his throat all wrong, without the right power behind it, but with something else sucking at it. Something new. Something borrowed.

  Something with feathers.

  The breath burst free and flowed over the larynx of the glamrock glitterpunk messiah, bringing with it a small black and blue infant bird with long Esca fronds and clever human eyes and a rib cage like a nonconsensual feelings-flute. Decibel Jones’s love child lodged in his throat. It would have been no problem for an Esca. There would have been fourteen of them, and they’d have flown out prettily through the gaps in his chest cavity and into the warm, welcoming light bath of their other parent. But thrill-seeking genes had to make due with available materials. There was only one baby, conceived in a garret in Croydon, gestated in a paradox-fueled reefship, and born on Litost at the best part of a song that never was. And it was a breech birth.

  Decibel Jones collapsed in a heap of agony. His head fell beside the ghostly footlights as sinkholes appeared in the boiling clouds. His breath blew past the holes in his love child’s rib cage, and a voice, not quite his and not quite his baby’s, burst out over the sea of dropped jaws.

  “EVERYTHING JUST GETS SO FUCKED UP SOMETIMES!” Decibel shriek-sobbed out a screamy bit to raise Yoko Ono from the grave and make her proud, and a tiny, brand-new creature hopped out of his mouth and nestled down in Robert’s baroque sleeve. A plaintive, desperate bird’s cry went up from the back of the house as the roadrunner began to run in earnest, birthlight pouring from her lantern, trying to catch her baby in her grotto before it suffocated in shadows.

  A sound like someone belly flopping onto a church organ and hitting every note at once shattered the air over what was once Vlimeux. Incandescent blue-violet mouths opened in the sky, a dozen of them, sucking at the sweet Litostian gravity, dragging up waves against the coliseum, shearing pearly mountains into the Ocean that was no longer quite so into the idea of Unconditional Acceptance, gaping holes punched in reality, hungry maws opening into the infinite guts of space-time.

  The wormholes had come to feast on the banquet of regret that was Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros.

  And now the wormholes were singing.

  A tentative drumbeat tapped in somewhere in the depths of the stage. Decibel held out his finger for his kid to hop on. The roadrunner’s light drenched them both. She was looking up in parental panic from the mosh pit. He looked from her back into the little bird with human eyes. Nani’s eyes, actually. More Mr. Looney of the Tunes than Mr. Ridley of the Scott.

  “I’m gonna name you Marvin,” Decibel said softly, and to his shock, he actually said it. The trauma of delivery had seemingly broken whatever boot the Smaragdi and the Alunizar had put on his voice.

  Marvin whistled a little tune that felt like the cathedral of Notre Dame when it hit Dess’s bones, all lit up and everywhere to go.

  It was so beautiful. His baby. It was unique in the history of the universe. It was just a hell of a thing. It didn’t really matter, of course. They were all going to die. Everyone he’d ever known, and him, too. They’d failed and you couldn’t unfail something just because you suddenly needed a spot of maternity leave. But at least this had happened first. Another tap of drumstick on drumskin.

  Wouldn’t it have been nice to get a note in? Dess thought. Just one.

  “Come on,” a voice said softly from the direction of the drums. “Up you get. Time to get that tail nailed back on.”

  Decibel sighed. That was it, then. The roadrunner had come with a big vaudeville hook to pull him offstage and collect her offspring. Using Mira’s voice was poor form, though. There were limits.

  The voice changed abruptly. “Oh, get up, Danesh, you lazy wanker.”

  Oort St. Ultraviolet turned to look. His blood attempted to escape his body by leaping a foot to the left. But he was faster than a well-regulated public health system, more powerful than the need for tea at three in the afternoon. He was Englishblokeman. And Englishblokeman did not shirk. He shimmied into his Oortophone before his brain could start questioning everything that was happening and spraying antibacterial gel all over it. He got in and watched a dead girl with cheeks as bright as the future count off the beat.

  She saved them. The last time of many times. Mira Wonderful Star, lately of the London underground scene, her uncle’s flat, and a timeline plundered by a well-meaning red panda who had cornered her after their last show in a shitty club and told her her friends were waiting for her, the last show when everything had gone perfectly, when everything was roses and the air was as good as cocaine, when the future was dry of all possible tears, Mira Wonderful Star, reeling from her first hit single off of Spacecrumpet, Apocalyptic Girl Spill #4 , damaged/as-is, clad in a spandex “Slutty C-3PO” costume, silver brocade Christmas tree skirt, a gauzy black shower curtain with metallic blue appliqué roses all over it, and blissful ignorance of all that was to come, banged out a riff on her drums behind him, leaned into her mic, and yelled into the sold-out arena, loud enough to blow a dart from 1 to 20, loud enough to stun Arthur Archibald Gormley sober.

  “WE ARE DECIBEL JONES AND THE ABSOLUTE ZEROS!” she screamed over the pituitary-m
elting harmonies of the wormhole chorus above.

  “Mushy, mushy, Wonderful,” whispered Decibel Jones in utter and religious awe just before the roadrunner’s undersea birthbeams poured out over the stage and his skin and their child like the most glorious spotlight in the world.

  “Mushy, mushy, Dess,” said a living, breathing paradox, and the resurrected queen of glam.

  “Everything Just Gets So Fucked Up Sometimes” was the song of the century. And it barely even had any lyrics. Just full-throated, shimmering, babbling music and the title and a bit of Christmas carol, repeated over and over until the words lost all meaning, in dozens of combinations and several keys and a handful of languages dredged out of primary school lessons buried deep in the subconscious. Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros finally had the Christmas pop single that year. The newborn and the dead and the long-suffering and the extremely well-traveled, the baby and the girl and the boys in the band and the wormholes—all of them singing the screamy bit like a song could save the world, roaring like lions and squawking like dodos and thundering like rhinoceroses and weeping like a man who died with a final mix in his hands and dancing like a kid wearing a hundred scarves and howling like an interdimensional wind tunnel of regret, belting it out with your future gurgling in your arms like sentient human goddamned beings.

  The arena was silent.

  Then the cheers began.

  “Well,” said DJ Lights Out after it died down. “I guess that was all right.”

  The Mamtak Aggregate could not, just yet, form itself into anything at all. It lay in glittering pieces across the jury’s couches, enraptured and inconsolable.