Space Opera (Space Opera 1)

“All right, Eeyore,” Oort had said, grabbing one of Decibel’s shirts off the floor instead of his own. “There’s only one thing for dismal donkeys, and that’s ice cream for breakfast.”

“Come on, up you get,” Mira had said, laughing, groping for her bra under his crappy bed. “Let’s get that tail nailed back on, Mr. Thing of Thing-World.”

She hadn’t known the effect her phraseology would have on him, she’d just said the perfect words without trying. She was just perfect, without trying.

They’d only been able to find gelato at that hour, but one pistachio, one coconut, and one mango madness turned them from hungover kids into a cozy nation with a population of three, their Magna Carta signed in sugar and dairy under the improbably auspicious half-burned-out electric sign of Mackimmie’s Remarkable Gelato, which, due to Mrs. Mackimmie’s reluctance to throw out anything that still worked by the vaguest of definitions, read only: ACME ARKABLE GELATO.

A decade and a half later, ten pounds (pounds that he rather needed, really) lighter, with “Moon Scorpion Mega Disco” having had its day on the Spacecrumpet B-side and the encore of “Alien Sexqueue” improbably blowing out the sound system in the Royal Albert Hall that Christmas Eve, Decibel Jones still thought any interstellar contact would look just like his beloved flickies. The business would proceed, given the bent of governments everywhere, more or less instantaneously from first contact to all-out war, Do Not Pass Diplomacy, all stern gray manly ships and even manlier military mustering and one-piece identical futuro-communist uniforms and ray guns that meant business and stoic, long-faced generals facing off against stoic worm-farm-faced extraterrestrials like it was bloody laser-light-show Waterloo, and all of it just waiting for one sexy, sexy human hero to sort it all out for them.

But when it finally did happen, the alien invasion turned out to be much more like Mr. Looney of the Tunes than Mr. Ridley of the Scott.

Point to Nani.

They landed, if it could be called a landing, in everyone’s lounge rooms at once at two in the afternoon on a Thursday in late April. One minute the entire planet was planet-ing along, making the best of things, frying eggs or watching Countdown or playing repetitive endorphin-slurping games or whatnot on various devices, and the next there was a seven-foot-tall ultramarine half-flamingo, half-anglerfish thing standing awkwardly on the good rug. Crystal-crusted bones showed through its feathery chest, and a wet, gelatinous jade flower wobbled on its head like an old woman headed off to church. It stared at every person in the world, intimately and individually, out of big, dark, fringed eyes sparkling with points of pale light, eyes as full of unnameable yearning and vulnerability as any Disney princess’s. Those not in possession of lounge rooms encountered the newcomer in whatever places were most familiar and intimate to them. Anyone at work had quite a surprise waiting in the break room. Some, absorbed in accounts payable or receivable, absentmindedly hung their suit jackets up on its towering hat rack of a head; its long greenish-ivory neck flushed pink with embarrassment. A slender, glassy proboscis arced up from the center of its avian skull until the weight of the round luminous lamp at its tip bent the whole thing down quail-style between those trusting eyes, where it flickered nervously, its fragile-looking legs poised like a ballet dancer about to give the Giselle of her life. But every Homo sapiens sapiens in the biosphere, at that moment, came face-to-face with the feathered beyond.

Decibel Jones groaned.

He tried to open his eyes. Unfortunately, he hadn’t washed his face before collapsing into a bitter heap of despair, and the maquillage from last night’s gig at some top-shelf forty-something’s birthday to-do had solidified between his eyelashes into a cement composed entirely of shame and fuchsia glitter. Nothing for it. Eyes will do what eyes will do. Back to bed, that was the thing. Or back to floor. Floor had always been a good friend. Yet Dess had that primitive mammalian sense that he was being watched, somehow, and not in the way he liked to be. Not by adoring crowds of thousands, but by one singularly focused creature in the shadows beyond the watering hole, a creature not like himself, a creature much faster, stronger, and hungrier than he had ever been in all his days of running down nothing more wily than a Korean-fusion food truck. He clawed the smears of last night’s sparkles from his eyelashes and sat up, upsetting several bottles of cream sherry and rosé and one of those shiny metallic pet rocks with brand reboots and limited edition colors that were all the moronic rage at the moment. His looked something like a guava from the future. Oort always said he drank like a pensioner.

“The later the worm the farther from the bird,” said the seven-foot-tall alien lantern-fish-flamingo softly. Its voice tiptoed around the attic room. “According to me, you will spend your whole Danesh-life sleeping not peeping. You see, while you were in Snoozepool, I was making a rhyme about your nature because you are lazyful and I am not. Most Efficient Nani makes proverbials and tea both at the same time and wins gold for England.”

Decibel Jones began to cry.

It wasn’t that his head felt like someone had smashed it in with a cricket bat wrapped in raw rancid bacon, though it did. It wasn’t that the alien was speaking in his grandmother’s voice, though it was, a gesture Dess would later decide showed real effort. It had nothing to do with the words. Everyone cried when the creature first spoke to them. No, not cried. They wept. They wept like the cavemen of Lascaux suddenly transported into the Sistine Chapel just in time for a live performance of Phantom of the Opera as sung by Tolkien’s elves. Their senses simply were not built for this, weren’t meant to come anywhere near this kind of velvet-barreled sensory shotgun, loaded for bear. Humanity wept in baffled, unspeakable, religious awe. They fell on their faces; they forgot to breathe. The sound of the alien’s voice hit their ears like every ecstatic moment, every compassionate instinct, and every profound sorrow all wrapped up in a ballad about protecting the beautiful and innocent and fragile from a darkness full of teeth. To each of seven billion humans, it was as though they were hearing, not an alien greet their species for the first time, but their favorite children and their ailing parents singing a duet about how much and how desperately they needed them.

In that first moment of the new age, humanity would have happily annihilated itself rather than let the big blue bird in their lounge rooms come to the slightest harm.

“Please do not be distressed,” continued the creature in a somewhat less resonant voice. “I can readily speak in whatever manner results in the most manageable level of ontological crisis for you. Some crisis is to be expected, given the circumstances. I chose a dialect you associate with warmth and safety, but I have obviously overshot my mark. I will fish inside the wetlands of your memory for another.” The anglerfish-flamingo’s deep, lovely eyes filmed over with a reptilian translucent eyelid. It seemed very troubled by the quality of the fish in Decibel’s swampy head. Finally, the eyelid retracted. The alien opened its dark beak and bonged out five loud, psyche-rattling, but tremendously familiar musical notes into the sad, empty flat.

“What the blithering hell did you do to yourself last night, Dess?” mumbled the former greatest rock star in the world as he came out of his awestruck daze to find his forehead stuck prayerfully to the filthy floor. If he’d have known company was coming round, he would’ve tidied up.

The alien trumpeted out the same five notes again. It seemed to be enjoying itself.

“Got to call Dr. Collins,” Decibel coughed out. “Got to tell her there’s a blue flamingo in my flat quoting my nan and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She’ll have a pill for that. Always does, old girl. She’s a good egg. She’s no Lila, but her egg, it is emphatically good.”

The alien’s endless eyes filmed over again. The light dangling over its thick, curved beak dimmed and brightened fitfully. Finally, it began to sing, skipping back and forth between voices, voices Dess knew like his own, voices speckled with static from the pocket radio he’d saved up for when he was eight:

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to travel the world and the seven seas everyone’s looking for London calling from outer space I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face now all the young dudes carry the news red gold and green gunpowder and gelatin dynamite with a laser beam two thousand zero zero party over, oops, out of time you can watch the humans trying to run to all tomorrow’s parties but there is nothing more than this starman waiting in the sky he’d love to come and meet us but tonight Mr. Kite is topping the biiiiilllll . . .” The interstellar flamingo trailed off, lifting its long beak like a wolf howling. Then it added quietly: “And the colored birds go doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo . . .” It paused. “Is this timbre and syntactical style acceptable, Mr. Jones? Do you feel secure and at ease and fully able to process what is happening to you? The remaining representations of extraspecies contact in your psyche are . . . much more aggressive, but I can try if that is what you need to relax. However, I should warn you that I do not feel comfortable with them, as I do not personally identify as a predator. I eat plankton.”

“If you could turn down the fortissimo just a tick, that would be grand.” Decibel tried to get up and abandoned that idea right away. “Hand me that water, will you? There’s a love. There’s a good figment of my imagination. Here, Figgy, Figgy, Figgy.”

The ultramarine being’s gaze flicked over toward a plastic bottle with an inch or two of water still going stale in it. It shifted its weight awkwardly on those long, long reedy legs, legs that looked totally incapable of supporting its weight, and cleared its long throat. The Jell-O flower fascinator on the side of its head drooped. The bioluminescent lantern hanging down from its proboscis flickered with watery light. The light seemed to swell at the tip of the bulb, like a raindrop about t

o fall. The glow swirled, pregnant, a thousand and one shades of blue. The creature shifted its weight from one impossibly slender blown-glass leg to the other. Its clawed foot left something in the thin, cheap carpet, something alive, a fuzz of silver spores, spreading out from its footprint in an unsettling imitation of henna patterns. A flurry of loose fibers stuck to the dark talons like dandelion seeds.

And Danesh could smell it.

He could hear it breathing and feel an incredible heat pouring off of it, and he could smell it. A sopping, salt-green-sweet smell, like sugar and seaweed baking in an oven.

“Come on, up you get, time to get your tail nailed on,” that Thing of Thing-World said in the raspy-soft cigarettes-and-cynicism alto of Mira Wonderful Star.

“Mushy, mushy, Wonderful,” Jones said automatically, before he could stop himself. Greeting Mira like he always had, because he’d been so delighted with the way she answered the phone, as delighted as if she had invented it herself and no one else in the world had ever said moshi moshi instead of “hello” before.

“Mushy, mushy, Dess.”

Mira’s lovely platinum-plated voice hung in garlands around his flat like they were still kids with toy ambitions and nothing bad had happened to any of them yet, and that, finally, was more than Jones could take.

“What the fuck?” he screamed, scrambling away from the impossibility of what was happening to him until his back came up against the wall with a hard thud. “What is going on?”