Space Opera (Space Opera 1)

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Pallulle is snugly encased in Old Ruutu’s Bindle: a crosshatched topiary of translucent solar rods designed by the classical poet-engineer Old Ruutu to catch Lagom’s emotionally unavailable light, beef it up a bit, and direct it usefully to the most inhabited parts of the surface. The glaciated surface of Pallulle was suddenly polka-dotted with pools of Ruutu-blessed artificial alpine climate full of silver ferns, blue-gray orchards heavy with gin-fruit, and liquid oceans in which the neon-blooded suflet shark swims free. The name of Old Ruutu is, among the Smaragdi, spoken with an awe equivalent to Jesus Christ and Nikola Tesla borrowing Buddha’s tandem bicycle for a quick Sunday ride through Shakespeare’s back garden. On Activation Day, every city on Pallulle scrambled to rename itself after him, which caused a great deal of confusion, upset feelings, cancelled family reunions, Ruutu absolutely forbidding anyone to do any such stupid thing as it was no big deal, I was up there anyway, might as well do a spot of DIY while I’ve still got my health, you know if you have someone in they’ll only rip you off, and besides, you’d all do the same for me, anyway it’s a bit rubbish, I was in a rush, two regional wars, and a small but feisty economic crisis until it was decided that everyone was pretty, they all loved the old man equally, and there was quite enough Ruutu to go around and the mapmakers would just have to seek out anxiety medication. Hence, on Pallulle, you will find no London, Paris, Vlimeux, or Alun, but only Blue Ruutu, White Ruutu, Little Ruutu, New Ruutu, Ruutu-by-the-Sea, Dirty Ruutu, Brokedown Ruutu, Backwoods Ruutu, and so on and so forth.

Controversially, the twenty-second Metagalactic Grand Prix was held in Dirty Ruutu, the Smaragdi answer to Prague—once the capital of a great empire, torn apart by war, religion, vanished industry, and tourists who know in their hearts that it’s not wrong to get so phenomenally plastered that you punch a police horse because everyone knows horses vote Tory, just so long as you do it while ignoring some of the most sublime architecture in the universe. The general idea was that, whether or not the Yurtmak turned out to be sentient, it would be rather poor form to rub their alleged noses in the cosmopolitan delights of Blue Ruutu and then send them home full of envy and the slow, wistful poisoning of a farmboy’s dissatisfaction with his pigs after he has seen palaces. Even if they ended up having to roast the poor things shortly afterward, it just didn’t seem very nice.

No one expected much of anything out of the Yurtmak in the way of danceable pop hits. The Utorak had discovered their world by accident and immediately wished they hadn’t. The first officer on a deep-space fishing boat, hunting the vast, delicious, and deadly zabok crabs that scuttled through the galaxy suckling at hidden tide pools of dark matter, picked up the faint broadcast of what their xenothropologist surmised was a folk festival emanating from a little planet by the name of Ynt. Had the Utorak then required all zabok trawlers to carry accredited translators on board as they do now, the poor Utorak commander would have known right away that the folk festival in question was the Yurtmak Super Murderderby 9000 and very likely turned right around and headed toward the safer embraces of giant dark-matter crabs in the lonely depths of the void. The Yurtmak were clownishly violent, disgusting to look at, in possession of a language that sounded like someone enthusiastically smashing pots and pans together in a hot tar pit, and hadn’t even gotten around to inventing agriculture before somehow, bafflingly, managing spaceflight. They were exactly the sort of species the Sentience Wars had raged across the known cosmos to prevent from getting too big for their interstellar trousers.

But rules are rules. No blowing up the horrifying deathgoblins next door without a bit of song and dance first.

The Sziv won that year. Being a group intelligence comprised of hot pink algae genetically fused with nanocomputational spores, the Sziv never formed rock bands per se. They sent the same supergroup to the Grand Prix every year, some 60 percent of their species, decanted into artful vases and simply called Us. They sang by pheromone, a crescendo of infectious hormones that maddened the mating instincts of every species in the Dirty Ruutu Flophouse and Grill—a vast, glittering, state-of-the-art performance arena seating over one hundred thousand—until the slightest whisper sounded like a techno-erotic laser light show of the soul, at which point Us spilled out of their vases in an undulating rosy wave, spun up into a towering spiral of velvet sparkling life, and sang an ancient Sziv folk ballad called “Love Is Easy When You’re a Hive Mind” coupled with a thumping, thrusting, subwoofer-slaughtering beat, dispersing on the downbeat, slamming back into their magenta spire on the upbeat, and bringing the house all the way down.

Iatagan Yoomp, Murderderby champion and celebrated torch singer, walked across the spotless frozen floor of the Flophouse dressed in a traditional Yurtmak lung-gown, her dripping, pustulant face hidden beneath a black veil so long, it wrapped twice around the stage. She held something in her arms. The lights turned red and heavy and dim. A slow drum pulsed. Iatagan tore open the veil with her claws and revealed her instrument: the skeleton of her mate, cleaned and polished and hollowed so that when she wrapped her arms around him and tenderly kissed his fangs, her breath filled up his bones and emerged from his rib cage as a savage and anguished melody called “Death Is a Wish Your Fists Make.” It’s not what you think, went the chorus, don’t be afraid. To love is to slaughter, to slaughter is to love, but by the rocks below and the rocks above, you don’t do either one unless the other guy’s really into it.

At the conclusion of the song, which went on to become a popular choice for wedding DJs, Iatagan set herself on fire and burned to death in front of everyone with a smile on her face, waving delightedly to her fans as the audience threw flowers into her pyre and watched them sizzle up into the heavens.

The judging was not quick. A hundred thousand dinners were ordered in from neighboring Ruutus. In the early hours of the next morning, it was decided, by a very slim margin, that Iatagan Yoomp and all her people were undeniably alive, intelligent, and possessed of a complex inner life, especially since the Utorak had really phoned it in that year with the entirely forgettable “Shall I Compare Thee to a Dark-Matter Crab?” Yet, if not for Iatagan Yoomp’s sacrifice, the galaxy’s children would never have grown up under the not-terribly-gentle ministrations of Goguenar Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts, the twentieth of which, penned for the occasion of the twenty-third Grand Prix on Ynt, is: No one is ever really satisfied with what they’ve got, look at that skinny bastard Old Ruutu, he heated up his whole planet like a leftover takeaway, and he still wasn’t really that happy, if you ask me. People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most.

Before and after, they’re all monsters.

17.

Every Way That I Can

“Hi! Hi! HiHiHulloHi!”

Oort St. Ultraviolet and Decibel Jones, individually and collectively, assumed the time-traveling red panda called Öö leaped up as they boarded, made a high-pitched squealing noise, and careened over backward waving his paws in the air because he was just so feverishly excited to meet them. However, among the Keshet, this is a cool, eminently diplomatic, even standoffish greeting. Down to the soles of its cells, a Keshet is a constant atomic, temporal, and emotional ball-pit into which an infinite army of cake-addled toddlers jumps, over and over, and it is every single one of their birthdays, forever.

And he wasn’t happy to see them at all.

“Öö! ÖöÖöÖö is me and you are them and we are all—but whoooooooa waitwaitstopwait are you not Yoko Ono? Whatwhathowwhat the fuck, Al? I gave you a picture of her and everything! Do all primates still look the samesameidenticalsame to you? We practiced, Al! We practiced all the way here! It was so boring!”

“Al?” Dess asked. “You’re not Al. Al runs a chip shop on the corner. Al fixes the furnace. You’re the roadrunner.”

“That’s what you call me, and look, Dess, I like you a lot, but I’ve nibbled heaps of memories in the last twenty-four hours so I know what a Looney Tunes is, and frankly

, I think it’s a bit insensitive. Öö’s time is far too valuable and volatile to dribble it away calling me Altonaut Who Runs Faster Than Wisdom Down the Milk Road, but at least he uses part of my actual name, because that’s respect, isn’t it?”

“Sorry,” mumbled Decibel.

“Sorry,” Oort Ultraviolet repeated with a shrug.

“Nononoyesyesno, I love it, it’s perfect, farwayfar better than Al. We received the dogandbirdandbombandcanyon show in the big radio wave haul off this world. It was excellentgreatexcellentallright. A song of nihilism and the hopelessness of desire. At first we thought it was such an obvious allegory for the war that we ignored it. Must be one of us, youknowyeahyouknowno? Some pirate cartoon channel out of Octave space junking up the signal. Nope. Coincidencechancechancefatechance. An echo in the great unconscious. I hate that. Makes my job harder. But it’s perfectperfectcorrect—that’s you, Al, you’re the roadrunner! I’m gonna call you that from now on. I’ll alert the other Keshet when I get back into the continuity. They won’t be happy about Yoko Ono, though.”

“It seems Mrs. Ono died, Öö,” the great blue fish-flamingo went on, in what Dess could only assume was her own voice. Or perhaps one of the hyperactive red panda’s school friends. He wondered, suddenly, if it was very tough to keep it all straight, to skim for the right voice every time you talked to someone. Decibel Jones rather wished he could scrape off the top of an audience’s memory and sing however the fuck they wanted him to sing. He’d supposed he’d known how, once. Once. “Very sorry, I did try. And I can tell them apart! They all have different thumbnails, it turns out. You didn’t tell me that. And you told me Yoko Ono was alive. That’s two major stuff-ups. If you’d use even one of those day planners I keep buying you, we wouldn’t keep having these embarrassing mistakes.”

“DIED? Whenwhenwhy? How could this HAPPEN? Oh no! Oh NOOOO. What about KYOKO? Did she ever find her mommy’s hand inthesnowinthesnowinthesnowintherain . . . ?”

“Three years ago, I think?” Oort Ultraviolet said helpfully. “She died of . . . well, of being an old lady, really.”

Öö blinked his adorable brown eyes and rubbed his fuzzy apricot-colored cheeks with his paws. “I don’t get it.”

“What’s there to get, love? She was ninety or something, wasn’t she?”

The red panda wriggled his button nose. “No, butwhybutwhybuthow should that killkillhurtkill anybody?”

Al let that question drift pointedly unacknowledged among them like a fart at a dinner party. “This is what’s left of the band. Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros, Öö. They’ll do fine. Probably.”

The Keshet made a face like he’d just eaten kale for the first time and scrambled down a long corridor lit with a calming dappled undersea light that flowed out from holes in the thick black coral. He spun around in circles, found things to eat hidden in his striped tail, and bounced over himself several times.