You couldn’t ever really get mad at Dess. He didn’t mean anything by not being able to retain information that didn’t concern himself, music, sex, movies, or, bizarrely, Oort had found one night on the tour bus to Dublin, nineteenth-century literature for more than an hour or two. Especially when he smiled sheepishly and dragged that million-watt focus back onto you. That sheepish smile killed him every t
ime. Oort used to find it endearing and even enviable—Decibel Jones always lived in the moment; Omar Calis?kan always lived in an uncertain future. Mira, he supposed, had always lived in her own head and allowed others to visit once in a while. With advance notice. And extensive decontamination protocols.
“Excuse me, babies,” said the roadrunner, in what both of them instantly recognized as the voice of their old manager, Lila Poole. “But you gotta supper up before a show. How many times have I told you? I swear, you can lead a punk to stardom, but you can’t make ’er eat.”
The Esca held up one of Oort’s much-used white lacquered tea trays, the handles of which were now fully colonized by vermilion brain coral. On it lay three glass saucers, and on each one of those sat two servings of something that looked a lot like a very expensive mushroom, something that looked like a squashed licorice Allsort from the bottom of the bag, and something that looked like a cappuccino, if the barista had won several prizes for latte art but had an unfortunate seizure while drawing a quadratic equation in your milk foam.
“This is some hard-core, triple-X, keep-it-in-the-back-room-under-a-curtain, Alice in Wonderland action is what this is,” Decibel said with total delight. “Is it lunch?” His hand was already halfway to one of the mushrooms. That was the power of Lila Poole’s indefatigably upbeat boardroom-mum North Country voice. If Lila said to do it, it was good for you, good for the band, and probably good for humankind at large. And it had been so long. A feeling of oceanic calm he hadn’t felt in years descended over Decibel Jones. Someone else was taking care of the details. Someone else was handling logistics. Thank Christ.
“I really, really think we need to have a serious discussion about food allergies before we start eating space-Allsorts,” Oort fretted, but he too was under the spell of their old Lila-fueled agreeableness. “Because peanuts are nothing compared to what, I presume, grows on some artisanal asteroid on the underside of the universe. Do you cats have an MHRA? FDA? Anything?”
“Don’t whine, kittens. It’s not lunch. Think of these as the jabs for your Pan-Asian tour—there’s your hep A, there’s your hep B, and there’s your typhoid vaccine. Not everybody you’ll meet is as conveniently mnemonopathic, oxygen-breathing, and gravitationally compatible as your girl Friday here. The mushroom’s actually a dormant fungal agent that will infect your brain stem with a pretty laid-back strain of Yoompian encephalitis—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” shouted Dess and Oort. They leaped back as though the tea tray were full of spiders and credit-card bills. Decibel tried to recover quickly, telling himself that he really ought to have gotten over any squeamishness with regards to alien biological compounds back in Croydon. But it was instinctive, as deep as dirt.
“Take it easy! Jesus Christ, you gotta learn to trust a little! You’d think I’d threatened to wipe out your whole planet! Ha-ha, my little joke. They’re all completely safe, I promise. Look, my whole job is getting you to Litost in one piece and ready to shine, so I wouldn’t hurt you for love nor money nor sociopolitical advantage. Friends, Decibel, Oort, lend me your ears! Only speaking languages you’ve actually learned is a sign of a healthy mind. Where’s the fun in that? Once your cute wee antibodies get a load of Yoompian encephalitis, they’ll start working like the rent’s due tonight. You know how your nose gets all snotty and your throat swells up when you have the flu? Well, turns out, as long as you’re carbon-based and keep your brain on the inside, the body’s natural immune response to this is to produce a kind of linguistic acid reflux that blows out the bits of your brain that insist on having to conjugate and decline and punctuate things before it can understand them like cheap subwoofers. Doesn’t work on the Yoomps, though, poor sods. They’re pretty resentful about it. You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen potbellied plesiosaurs trying to speed-read through sixteen local phrase books at once. Oh! You two are now officially allergic to penicillin. That shit clears the infection right up. Right. So. The Allsorts is just gonna paste in some of the Ursulas’s junk DNA and mutate your lungs into being a bit less closed-minded when it comes to respiratory partners, and the coffee is just a caffeine jolt to your inner ear with a nice foamy agile-gravity agent so you don’t barf, drift off, or explode when we land. Thank the Yüz—it’s mostly their toenails. We share up here, you know? Makes it a homier galaxy for everyone. Plus, if you don’t open source your assets, we quarantine your planet and any further attempts to holiday outside your system will be met with big, big cannons. I mean, giant. Huge. Still! It’s all right, isn’t it? Couple of bites and a slurp and you’re ready for anything. It’s like Goguenar’s Fourth General Unkillable Fact says: ‘Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience. All things, from evolution to municipal sanitation to marriage to the Big Bang to diplomacy to the distribution of shops in urban centers, trend toward the most convenient outcome for the greatest number of lazy bastards, because the inconvenient stuff ends up alone without any friends and a foot growing out of their head and who has the time?’?”
“This is disgusting,” Oort Ultraviolet snorted.
“This is amazing,” Dess whispered. “Much less invasive than Heathrow customs, anyway.”
Oort’s microwave chimed. Their docking procedures had finished defrosting. A cheerful blue popcorn kernel made of asterisks signaled the completion of the decompression cycle.
“You know I’d never hurt you,” Mira’s throaty voice came pouring out of that dark alien beak.
“Hey,” said Oort quietly. “Don’t. You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what, baby?”
“Talk like Mira. Or Lila. Or my dad or Dess’s nan or anyone.”
“Do you not enjoy it? Does it not put you at ease?”
“No. Just be normal. Just be yourself. Just be . . . whatever passes for an ordinary sort of bloke where you come from. Like me, see? Decibel can swan about, and, well, if you’d ever met her, Mira could make eyes at you and turn you to jelly in an instant, but I’m just Omar. I like music and football and a laugh, and half the reason the band lasted as long as it did is that I’m so easy to get along with that those two only ever had each other to pick on. It’s fine, we don’t need to be at ease. This isn’t an at ease kind of gig. And honestly, it’s really, really creepy.”
The bird’s fishy eyes narrowed. “You don’t really like football. I can see it in your cerebral structure.”
“But I want to like it, and that’s just as good in the end. Just . . . be the roadrunner. Be like me, and when he starts up being Dess again, which he will, you and I can go smoke a ciggy together and make fun of his accent. Deal?”
“Deal, Mr. Ultraviolet.”
The air lock released, a seven-foot-tall blue bird punched a gold-plated starfish, and Decibel Jones and the last of the Absolute Zeros stepped from obscurity onto the biggest stage in the universe.
16.
I Am a Real Boy
The nineteenth Metagalactic Grand Prix was held on Pallulle, the Smaragdi homeworld.
It was the first time a species who did not fight in the war, on account of their having been minding their own business at the time, toddling about with endearing hesitance on their own moons, and not bothering anyone except the moon-bears, attempted to sing their way into the upper echelons of galactic society.
Contrary to popular opinion concerning the desirability of getting in early on Alpha Centauri real estate development, Pallulle is the nearest planet to Earth that wouldn’t entirely murder any human being who set foot on it. At the very least, you’d have time to get a nice shark’s heart sausage in at one of Blue Ruutu’s finer bistros before the low-gravity, high-pressure atmosphere and the global, rather well-founded cynicism on the subject of strangers started rather dramatically forcing blood out of the ends of your hair. Some forty light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius, Pallulle revolves around an ultracool blue dwarf star that humans have designated TRAPPIST-1. The Smaragdi, however, call their pale, minimalist sun Lagom, a word that means, in their exceedingly specific language: “a spouse who habitually withholds affection but comes through with a squeeze when you really need them and always pays the bills on time.” Pallulle itself means: “the parent who gives and gives, but it is never enough for their ungrateful children, who will probably never amount to anything, anyway.”
Among the Smaragdi, self-deprecation has been refined into an art. You have not truly embraced the possibilities of intergalactic life until you have awkwardly nibbled vapor-cheese and drunk platinum wine at a stand-up modesty show on Pallulle. It is a cold crystal place covered in cold crystal oceans and warm crystal people.
At least it was.
Because Lagom is never much in the mood for the whole sensually nurturing solar warmth gig, Pallulle is a semihollow world. If you were to stand on the opal-crusted peak of Mt. Ailinin, far from the lights of the great Smaragdi cities, and look into the sky, you would see, just before your eyelashes started bleeding, what the ancient Smaragdi were doing while life on Earth was just sorting out whether two cells could ever really be better than one. Even the Alunizar were astonished when they careened drunkenly into this little world of grotesque monsters surrounded by engineering’s answer to the Sistine Chapel. (Unfortunately for them, the Smaragdi seemed to have been created in a lab for the express purpose of scaring the salt water out of an Alunizar. A Smaragdin looks very much as though someone built the most unnecessarily elaborate set of eighteenth-century Spanish plate armor out of bleached ivory and quartz, gave it a head of blue-white hair like a 1970s shampoo commercial, stretched the whole thing out to nine or ten feet like particularly stern and judgmental taffy, then thought it might be a bit intimidating and painted a bit of pastel green and lavender on the joint-blades for a more festive spring look. The overall effect would seem quite beautiful and haunting to a human, but to a short, Technicolor invertebrate Alunizar, they look like the devil’s own sk