Space Opera (Space Opera 1)

“What do you mean, no?” asked the program director for BBC4.

N! O! Spells NO! The importantest word you can make out of teensy tiny N and weensy old O—that’s NO! The biggest little word I know, know, know! I mean no. Humans are not particularly good at music. Oh, you’re all right, I suppose. You have some deeply basic understanding of rhythm and melody, but so do dolphins, darling. I hate to break it to you, but, just as an example, without thinking too much about it, the Vulna of Jadro Nebula use their entire homeworld as an instrument. You blow into the northern magnetic pole, as I understand it. Anyway, it’s not just about a good beat, it’s what you do with it. Showmanship. Theater. Flash. The Trillion Kingdoms of Yüz won three cycles ago with an upbeat little earworm called “Love Means Forgiving the Sins of Our Colonial Expansion Phase,” and when the bass dropped, their entire proletariat became a comet. So, you see, coming in second-to-last may be too much to hope for a planet that still uses Auto-Tune. While a guitar and a primate in leather pants are nice and all . . . oh, how to explain so even our live studio audience can understand? You know how, when a baby’s crying and wailing, you put it on your shoulder and pat its back—pat, pat, pat-a-pat-pat? And it sicks up some milk and spit and tummy juices all over Mumsy’s nice jumper and then looks just TERRIFICALLY pleased with itself? THAT’S what human music is like! Compared to the rest of the galaxy, of course; I’m sure it’s just fine for you.

“That seems . . . rather rigged in favor of the hegemony,” said an anthropology professor in Zurich. “Has any ‘borderline case’ ever actually pulled that off? Or is this an elaborate sacrifice ritual?”

Gosh! What you must think of us! Of course the new kids in town come through sometimes! It’d be pretty damn horrible, otherwise. I said, we’re not monsters.

“Uh-huh. When’s the last time a newbie won?” asked a professional gamer in Seoul.

Won? Never. Successfully avoided obliteration? Here’s lookin’ at me, kid. The last newly added species to triumph on the biggest stage in the universe was us. Me, in fact. In my pre-interstellar diplomacy life, I was the lead singer of the brinefunk underwater big band combo Bird’s Eye Blue. So you see, I sympathize with you, I really do. I get it, all the way. This is all so overwhelming and not at all how you want to spend a Thursday afternoon. The Esca used to be a really nasty piece of work, I don’t mind telling you. Selfish, temperamental, clinically depressed—seriously, a doctor on Pallulle diagnosed our whole species. Someone killed my grandfather for being under eight feet tall. Half our planet had been turned into broiling salt flats by the Üürgama Conglomerate’s experiments. We just couldn’t see past how much the other Esca pissed us off. Plus, we had a real problem with libertarians. But we pulled it out in the end. I don’t know, I guess something about the radical upending of our perception by the sudden invasion of a vast, technologically superior galactic civilization really brought us together. Bird’s Eye Blue dazzled the crowds with our interstellar hit “Please Don’t Incinerate Us, We’ll Be Good from Now On, We Promise.” We came in tenth. It was a sensation, nearly a scandal—no new fauna on the block had ever placed so high. The royalties still fund our entire defense industry.

“And how long ago was that?” asked the President of Mozambique.

A mere thirty-four years ago, by your commemorative word-of-the-day calendar. Last year, by the Tunicate Calendar of Aluno Secundus. Time is a constant annoyance in the great beyond.

“How many have lost?” asked a science fiction writer in Lublin, Poland. “How many species have you destroyed?”

Six. Well, seven technically, but the Andvari barely count, as they launched a preemptive strike before curtain call. Oh, sorry, eight. I forgot Flus. Before my time. And hardly controversial or even very interesting. Borderline cases only come up every once in a while. And not all of them completely fail to prove their worth.

“So you’re saying we’ll lose. There’s no hope. It’s . . . it’s over,” said a lonely marine biologist on assignment in Antarctica. “Probably for the best. Used to be a lot more ice around here, you know.”

There, there, poppet. Let’s turn that frown upside down! That’s not what I’m saying at all! We have prepared a list of human musicians we think might do reasonably well, given current trends in popular music throughout the civilized galaxy and the relative advantages and disadvantages of your psycho-audio-anatomical makeup.

“This has to be a joke,” said a theater critic in Chicago, staring at the names glowing on the slice of crystal the Esca held up helpfully at her eye level. “Yoko Ono?”

Oh, yes! My friend Öö is really, really hoping she’s available! He’s become quite the fan. He knows all the words to “Don’t Worry Kyoko” and asked me to check while I am here and see that Kyoko is all right. Öö is very concerned. We know she must be just horribly busy, world tours and masses of fans and the like, but it is fairly important. Do you think she’d be interested?

“Well, she’s dead, so, no,” said a leather-clad teen punkster in Toronto. “And so is Kraftwerk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tangerine Dream, Brian Slade, the freaking Spice Girls, are you kidding me? Ugh, okay, Insane Clown Posse got themselves paralyzed from the neck down screwing around with magnets, Björk lost her voice in an accident with a narwhal and a spinning wheel years ago, and just go fuck yourself, no, Skrillex is not going to go down as the savior of humanity. It’s just not happening. I’d rather die in a sea of nuclear fire.”

How embarrassing! It seems our research is somewhat out-of-date. I will speak to Öö. The Keshet are time travelers and excellent at cultural reconnaissance—but not very organized. They eat all the stationery supplies. I’ve tried to give Öö a day planner so many times, you’d never believe it! He just buries it for the winter and expects an orderly workspace to come up in the spring. But there are many more possibilities! We were very thorough.

“What’s . . . what’s wrong with you? Why do you like this stuff?” asked a middle-aged graphic designer in Berlin. “Grace Jones, I get. Brian Eno, I suppose, if you must. Even RuPaul, I can almost understand. But Jefferson Starship? Nicki Minaj? Hüsker Dü? Courtney Love? I mean, really? And Donna Summer just seems wildly out of place with all the rest of them. There’s no aesthetic unity here at all.”

I love “MacArthur Park.”

“Right. Okay. Cool. No, sorry, it’s not cool, that’s awful. Good Lord.” A Liverpudlian nightclub owner crossed her arms over her chest. “A moment ago I was nearly pissing myself in terror, but now I’m just . . . well, I’m just a bit offended, frankly. We’ve got a lot better than this, you know. And nearly everyone on this stupid list is dead or old as the sands of sodding time. Didn’t you find Beyoncé while you were flipping through the oldies section? Bowie? Led Zeppelin? The Beatles?”

Oh, certainly! The Beatles? Sure did! Fat lot of rubbish if you ask me, except for “Revolution 9.” Yes, well, if they’re willing to stick to that sort of thing, maybe we could come around to the idea eventually.

“I don’t even know what to say,” said a psychologist in Perth, Western Australia. “This is just embarrassing for everyone involved. ‘Whoever wrote the theme songs for the television programs He-Man and She-Ra’? ‘Apple II’? Those made your list?”

There has to be someone we can all agree on. Someone still alive and reasonably healthy whom we can bear to listen to for more than thirty seconds without severe nausea or instantaneous narcolepsy. Come on, you can do it! Let’s all put on our thinking caps and work together!

“I seriously doubt it,” sighed out a Mongolian yak herder.

“Not if those are the only options,” snapped a Hungarian actuary.

“Truly, we are not amused,” said the Queen of England, Charlotte I.

But in a drafty, unfurnished, utilities-not-included flat on the far, far, far outskirts of London, a single, furious voice rose above them all.

“What the bloody goddamned rabbit-fucking hell is my name doing at the bottom of that list?” shouted Decibel Jones.

5.

We Wear Spring Clothes in the Wintertime

The first Absolute Zeros show was held on the hot, vast, dark second floor of the Hope & Ruin pub in Brighton, home of pound-a-pint Tuesdays; the toughest pub quiz in the Anglosphere, which featured questions chosen by anyone who could prove to the MC that they were tits-deep in a doctoral dissertation; an open mic night that bashed up the conceptual boundaries of the terms “open,” “microphone,” and, indeed, “night,” with reckless abandon; and Archibald Arthur Gormley, owner, operator, and the oldest functioning alcoholic in the Eurozone. Gormley was ancient already when the Kinks had the grand idea of a well-respected bowl haircut. He was yelling at punters to get off his stool in those fat and rosy days when the place was just called Hope and the bit about Ruin was but a twinkle in the Commonwealth’s economic eye. In his smug middle age, he saw Bowie come in for a pint when he was still a slip of a thing called Davie, playing weddings in a three-piece suit, and in the spotty, nervous face of the future grand duke of glam, Archibald Arthur Gormley yawned.