Space Opera (Space Opera 1)

The outer space abomination gave up and snapped irritably: “I’m afraid we really must be moving along. The situation has already been successfully explained to 64.1 percent of your population, whereas you and I are making very little progress. I am not angry, only disappointed. All our precontact simulations categorized you as a Down-to-Clown Unflappable Guy Who Can Handle This Sort of Thing No Problem with a high probability of Being Actually into It All the Way.”

Dess rubbed his eyes and popped his knuckles against his temple while the big blue bird did its trick with the eye-film again. “Listen, I’m just . . . I’m just having a bit of a rough go of it today, what with the preponderance of gin that happened to me last night and being a useless lump and serving no further purpose to anyone anywhere and being visited by the Flamingo of Christmas Future way before the bell strikes normalcy. I need a minute. I’ll be into anything you want after breakfast and a coffee and serious medication, okay?”

The beautiful beast took a deep breath of Croydon air. When it spoke again, it sounded exactly like a waitress Decibel had met a thousand years ago, on the star-spangled leg of the Glampire Planet Tour. His first contact with an American in her native habitat. Cleveland, midnight, the Blue Lite Diner. The alleged food should’ve been reported to The Hague, but the waitress had been pretty in a dairy country sort of way: red hair, pink lip gloss, a lot going on up top. RUBY, her name tag had read, and Ruby’d been the most aggressively, positively militantly friendly person he’d ever met. She’d touched their shoulders affectionately while she took their order, called Dess “honey,” “sweetheart,” and worse, and most horrid of all, she seemed to genuinely care how he was getting along with his jet lag. Afterward, he’d felt as though he’d been run over by a semitruck full of high-fructose corn syrup, giggles, and goodwill toward one’s fellow man. It had all been deeply off-putting. And though they toured there for three months straight, his first impression of the colonies was never proven wrong: Americans all acted like they were trying to pretend they hadn’t just chased a fistful of ecstasy with a noseful of coke to save themselves from a police officer only they could see.

And now the big blue bird was trying Ruby’s voice on like a dress six sizes too small.

“Hello there, cutie! My name is Altonaut Who Runs Faster Than Wisdom Along the Milk Road, fourteenth Lyric of the Aaba Verse, and I’ll be your galactic liaison this afternoon! Can I tell you about our specials? As our appetizer tonight, we’ve got a totally scrumptious annihilation of everything you ever thought was true served on a bed of mashed anthropocentrism! My species’ name is so rich and thick and ooey-gooey, you couldn’t possibly get your adorable little noisehole around it, so just call us the Esca and we’ll get along just fine! Fresh off the griddle and drenched in a delicate diplomatic glaze, the Esca have shipped in all the way from Bataqliq, a yummy little world of semiaquatic goodness served alongside a medium-rare red giant star in the constellation you call Cetus. Now, sweetie, I know trying new things is scary, but you just gotta give us a try! And for dessert, we’ve prepared a positively decadent transgalactic civilization while you were spending happy hour chowing down on a deep-fried sampler platter of total and complete ignorance. Well, sorry, darling, but happy hour is over and the drinks are all full-menu price. Luckily, you’ve got a tall glass of me to put a little courage in ya. And, as I come with a free slice of information vital to the survival of your species, you pretty much can’t afford not to clean your plate.” The leggy blue monster lifted its beak and trumpeted cheerfully. “Congratulations! You are the sentient galaxy’s ten thousandth customer!”

“Road Runner,” mumbled the ultimate glamgrind messiah of the late 2010s, still not entirely amenable to having this conversation that would not stop having him.

“I’m sorry, but I need more grammatical context to understand your statement,” the creature’s voice said, abruptly abandoning its waitress’s uniform. It blossomed all over again into cosmic grief at the ultimate impossibility of communication between two living beings.

“Your name, what you just said.” Dess spoke more clearly this time, forcing back the vomit that wanted so badly to add itself to the other stains on his floor. “Altonaut Who Runs Faster Than . . . Faster Than . . . urk.”

“Faster Than Wisdom Along the Milk Road, yes indeedy, quick ’n’ speedy!” Ruby the American Waitress and Emissary of the Great Galactic Empires was back. “It’s a family name, honeybuns. Don’t make fun, now. It’s not nice.”

“You’re the Road Runner. Meep, meep.” He began to laugh harder than he’d wept. “Point to Nani,” he choked out between bouts of laughter. Finally, he opened his eyes wide and spread his fingers into a jazzy shimmy. If only he had an amusing sign to hold up as gravity kicked in and he fell off the cliff that hadn’t been under his feet for quite some time now.

YIKES.

HELP.

GOING DOWN.

“Meep, meep, Nani! Meep, meep, boom.”

Then, with great conviction, Decibel Jones threw up.

4.

Sing Little Birdie

Interestingly, a remarkably high percentage of the Homo sapiens population opted for a fondly remembered waitress or bartender when that tall drink of otherworldly water offered them their choice from a nostalgic buffet of comforting, familiar voices. Perhaps this is because humans are accustomed to receiving information from girls with notepads and name tags without getting their pride bruised by a girl with a notepad and a name tag knowing more than them about anything at all. Perhaps because, no matter their luck in life, they knew in their bones that at least they were better than the kid who brought them their steak medium, not medium-rare, and so could cling to the idea that humans were still the ones being served with a smile, the ones who were always right, the ones with a place at the table, not a place at the dishwasher, for a few precious minutes longer. Perhaps it was just because, when the paradigm shifts directly into a brick wall, all anybody really wants is a stiff drink.

Even more interestingly, almost everyone else chose the voice of their favorite children’s television show host to spell it all out for them.

Those with access to neither restaurants nor quality children’s television had to content themselves with hearing the news from an enormous mutant bird-fish that sounded uncannily like their parents.

Thus, with minor alterations accounting for personality, nationality, sheer gibbering terror, and surprisingly frequent attempts to pick up the Esca representative like it really was a poor bartender just

trying to do her job and get through the night, roughly the same conversation took place over the next ninety minutes or so in every lounge room on the planet.

This is that conversation.

“You’re an alien,” said a stay-at-home mum in Inverness.

You betcha!

“From another planet, is that the general idea?” asked the Queen of Denmark, Margaret II.

Got it in one! What a clever little Mags you are! Who gets a gold star? HER MAJESTY DOES!

“Is it a good planet? Do you like it there? Does it have peppermints and toys that light up?” asked an eight-year-old boy in Ghana.

I’m so glad you asked! Bataqliq is a real tasty cup of soup: small, hot, watery, thickened with valuable exotic muds and tender chunks of nutrient-dense holoplankton! As homeworlds go, the old BQ is just enough to whet your appetite and leave you wanting more out of the universe. But it’s home, and home is where you hang your haplogroup! You know, I betcha you’d just love the larva of the porla urchin—tastes a lot like peppermint! Well, peppermint that’s been locked up in a tower to go mad for years and years. And yes, honey, all my toys light up.

“What’s that ‘fourteenth Lyric of the Aaba Verse’ thing all about? What’s a verse?” asked the arthritic owner of a fish thali cart in Goa.