Space Opera (Space Opera 1)

Decibel Jones sprung into action. Yeah, sure, he was a drunk and a fool wearing last night’s rhinestones and tomorrow’s hangover, long past his salad days or even his soup days. He was, in fact, approaching middle age at the speed of paradox. But if he could still do anything in this universe, he could get his band onstage when they got the Eeyores, which had been, if he really thought about it, mostly all the time.

“Okay, okay, Oort. Omar. My darling. My Arkable love. It’s fine. It’s fine! You don’t need to call little Sarah and Samantha—”

“Nico and Siouxsie.”

“God, really? Bit on the nose, don’t you think? No, no, of course. Lovely names. Good old Sue,” Dess said soothingly. “Anyway, you don’t need to call them because we’ll be fine. Write the greatest song ever composed by man, beast, or polyp in eleven days? No problem! Don’t you remember when we were writing Spacecrumpet? Days laid out on the floor of some godforsaken flop, nights on the floor of some godforsaken nightclub, and all of it paradise. All of it us. The lyrics came like honey, my dearest darling space oddity. The melodies came like wine. So we just do it again. Wind back the clock. And you know what? We save the world like motherfucking caped crusaders and the history books get printed in glitter from now on, and on page one they all say: THANK YOU DECIBEL JONES AND THE ABSOLUTE ZEROS! They chose us, gorgeous. Don’t forget it. Out of everyone singing and playing and Auto-Tuning their hearts out all over the sodding stupid planet. They chose us.”

“Only because everyone else was dead,” mused Oort, stroking his cat’s silky head and watching Dess do what he always did, which was to shove everyone else’s feelings into a sack and drown them in the ocean of his own enthusiasm.

“So what? So destiny, that’s what. So immortality! So me and you and Mira.” Decibel’s face fell. “Well. Me and you. So your stupid cat. So flying a fuck-fueled aquarium to Planet Music and rocking so hard and so true, they’ll know just how alive glamkind is. I can already hear it, Oort. I can hear the song that’s gonna save us all, and you are gonna blast it from the quasars to the Queen’s ears, and you and me are gonna sing it till the stars rain down like applause, my glorious, gloomy boyfrack.”

“Öö and I will leave you to it,” said the space flamingo, bowing with the space panda and beating a surprisingly sensitive retreat.

Oort looked up at Dess with moist eyes. Almost like they used to look at him, when he’d believed they’d find a manager, a label, a venue, a place on the charts, a place in the world. When he’d believed and they couldn’t quite yet. When his belief and a kebab shared among them could keep them going through a thousand and one Brobdingnagian nights.

“I’m not your boy-anything anymore,” Oort said stonily as soon as the cabin door shut. “So just don’t.”

Decibel blinked in hurt confusion. Hadn’t Oort heard him? Hadn’t he just been giving him the old eyes?

“Okay, Dess,” Oort said, playing the reconciling middle child between Decibel and the ghost of the Zero who’d missed the flight, as he’d done a hundred thousand times before. “Okay. Let’s hear it. Let’s hear the song that’s gonna get me back to my girls. Give us a few bars.”

Decibel Jones clapped his hands together and broke into a smile that once graced the cover of every magazine worth its gloss.

“Oh, sorry, that was a lie. I have no idea.”

18.

All the Things That Nobody Sees

It takes eleven days, give or take, to reach Litost from Earth via paradox-fueled aquarium. Back in the mango-colored days of Hope & Ruin, this would have been more than enough time for the Absolute Zeros to knock out a pop anthem that would drench the world in a tsunami of glitter and meaning.

Now it was just long enough to write absolutely nothing—reveal two things better kept secret and one that should have been laid out ages ago; set three accidental fires; send back seventeen separate meals for being far too surrealistic; pitch six screaming matches; consider suicide by air lock at least once or twice; reject hundreds of potential lyrics and riffs; form one extremely unlikely, inconvenient, and non-Euclidean friendship; invent four entirely new swear words; request separate accommodations; quit in tears; make up in tears; get in a few quality depression sessions; seriously annoy one large, usually serene white cat; and remind them why they’d broken up the band in the first place.

Capo napped almost the whole way across the galaxy.

Nico and Siouxsie Calis?kan’s enormous four-year-old Maine Coon–Angora-somebody’s-barn-cat-possibly-a-stray-albino-panther mix was entirely unbothered by suddenly achieving the ability to speak rather posh English. Oh, certainly it had been alarming at first. But adjusting to sudden changes in your circumstances was easy when you didn’t really care about anything. As far as she was concerned, she’d always talked. By some miracle, everyone else had recently achieved the ability to listen properly. She was over the novelty within half an hour. No one listened to her or asked for her input or attended gratefully to her needs any more than they ever had.

They were too busy making big monkey fusses over their big monkey problems. Capo didn’t see why it was ever necessary to make a fuss. Fussing was for dogs and babies. This new house smelled like delicious fish; the steady rumbling of the engine vibrated at almost the exact frequency of a purr; there were scads of birds and scurrying, red, squirrel-type things roaming about; and whenever she was hungry, she could just gnaw on the walls till little shrimps came out to investigate. It was a vast improvement over their old house in terms of cat-comfort.

The key to a happy life, Capo devoutly believed, was never giving much of a damn what happened in any given day so long as you got in a nap, a kill, and a snuggle, and the snuggle was optional. When Oort and Justine had adopted her from that shelter and taken her to a nice house where she was expected to be a civilized, well-behaved indoor cat despite the whole joint lacking anything like a population of murderable sparrows, field mice, bunnies, and whatnot, she hadn’t run around making grand speeches and crying and questioning the meaning of it all. She’d just carried on and contented herself with spiders, pieces of lint, and occasionally scratching or biting one of the kids just to keep in practice.

The nap was the really important thing. The nap was all.

Capo quickly triangulated the prime sleeping spot in their stateroom: a tall coral plinth with a decorative pot of flowering seaweed on top. The pot made a fantastic sound when it smashed against the floor. The massive white cat settled in for what might have been an hour or a lifetime or eleven days. It simply wasn’t any of her concern how long. Occasionally, loud noises or hunger or a drum riff or the blort of an Oortophone or Decibel trying to coax her into eating something that looked like a licorice Allsort woke Capo from her long day’s journey into snooze. She opened her bright green eyes, investigated, protested, or ingested as necessary, turned her rump to the offending thing, and went back to sleep. Thus, for her, the voyage passed by like a training montage in a hastily made feel-bad film, in bits and flits and pieces the feline found it far too much work to understand or care about.

“I think it’s time for a radical suggestion, Oort. It’s time to bring back Ultraponce.”

“NO.”

“What? I don’t care what the critics said. The critics are all back on Earth, praying they were wrong about us, and they were. The literal heavens opened, and magical beings descended and said we rocked. This is what those birds and pandas and whatnots want to hear! Ultraponce, King of Time and Space, shooting sadness in the face and snogging gods and lighting up the dark. It’s perfect! It was our opus!”

“It was your opus. That was the whole problem, Mr. Wee Tate of the Modern. Spacecrumpet was us, all of us, passing a napkin around at three a.m. and writing out a song line by line by line and humming together till something real came out; writing lyrics for one another’s tunes, and tunes for one another’s lyrics. It was communal, you prat. That was the point. Ultraponce was you. Just you. Inventing this bigger and better version of yourself in a superhero cape and making us your fucking backup band. Oh, no, it was better to have a unified voice, wasn’t it? But unified just meant your voice. Your words. Even though the second-biggest hit off Spacecrumpet was Mira’s, and you know it, and it just eats you alive inside, doesn’t it? You don’t get to do that again. You don’t get to ignore us. Me. We were on that list too. Remind me how well Decibel Jones has been doing without the Zeros?”

“I don’t know, Omar. How’s writing pie jingles coming? Having fun playing bass on some reality star’s vanity album, are we? Writing a jingle for a luxury-car commercial? You fucking sold out. At least I’m still trying. God, they always go straight at the end, don’t they? One way or the other or both. Excuse me for not sticking around your little one-man misery society.”

Capo’s ruff rippled. She flexed her claws and rolled over, paws splayed out, white belly to the ceiling, and soon enough she was snoring tinily. Eyes shut. Eyes open. Eyes shut again. Eyes open.

“C’mere, ya fuzzy redness. It’s late, and Dess and the roadrunner are at it again, and I miss my wife and I miss my kids, and I’ve got this feeling in my chest like I’m going to have a very undignified nonsentient freak-out if I don’t focus on something other than the fact that the chandelier is staring at me and there’s nothing outside but empty all the way down and everything I love is probably going to get burned to the ground. I’ll sing you some Yoko. I think I remember ‘Walking on Thin Ice,’ more or less.”