Space Opera (Space Opera 1)

“I shouldn’t have come. I’ll just sludge it up. I’m already sludging it up. All I’ve ever wanted was to make something beautiful, and everything I touch just disappears in a poof of fuckery.” Capo wrinkled her muzzle in distaste. She was, as all cats, ultimately conservative on the subject of interspecies relations.

Decibel changed subjects like a drunk changing lanes. “Look, are we a thing? An item? I don’t know how this works.”

“I’m sorry. There is only one of you. Esca do not pair-bond. Perhaps if all the Zeros were here, we could manage a flock, but as it is, you and I are just friends with a short-term benefit plan. But I do like you. Even if you’re only plausibly sentient.”

A long silence.

“How long do Esca live?”

“If we’re careful, around three hundred years. I am one hundred twenty-one, if you’re asking. Not too old for you, I hope.”

“It’s . . . less. For us. A lot less.”

The Esca nuzzled him with her thick black beak. “That’s because your science is tiny and ridiculous and adorable like a plush toy.”

“You shouldn’t come round anymore. It’s not good for you. I’ll sludge you up too. I won’t mean to, but I will. Plus, I think it really bothers Oort’s cat.”

The great ultramarine fish-flamingo made a soft, awful sound with her rib cage. “I am having fun. Please do not make me go.”

“I loved Mira and she left. I loved Oort and . . . well, Oort seems fine. But I loved my parents and I loved my grandmother and I loved Lila Poole and I loved my life, and it’s all gone. Being around me is a high-risk enterprise.”

“?‘Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between the stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all. Well, it isn’t, really, it isn’t at all, and believing and achieving is just something sportscasters say, but what are you gonna do, not die? Try it. I’ll wait.’?”

“What?”

“It is Goguenar Gorecannon’s Seventh Unkillable Fact.”

“Who the hell is Goguenar Gorecannon?”

“I will bring you my copy,” the roadrunner said softly, and when she said it, she said it in Mira’s lilting, amused voice.

Capo hissed in her dreams, chasing red pandas and blue flamingos through an infinite suburban garden. Eyes squeezed tight. Eyes blinked open.

“Heya, Öö. Roadrunner.”

“Heya, Oort.”

“So . . . I think we have a melody. It’s . . . it’s good. Hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck good. It’s something.”

The red panda scratched his hind leg. “That’s nice.”

“And Dess has a plan for lyrics. It’s pretty clever, actually. We agreed we were never going to write the perfect song to encapsulate ourselves and our species and our hopes and dreams for the universe, for the future, for everything humanity ever has been or hopes to be, but that also has a great beat and summer pop chart potential. Using pyrotechnics we don’t have, costumes that somehow magically manifest without Mira, and a hope and a prayer that an Oortophone is compatible with the local voltage. It would have to be the greatest song ever written, and let’s be honest, even our best was never Mozart. So we’re going to copy off humanity’s homework. Every poem brilliant enough for us to remember without a Wi-Fi connection, every line, every immortal pentameter. We’ll string it together with a few prepositions and voilà: instant genius.”

The stranger that was so good at upsetting Capo’s human picked at something on his shoe. A mouse? A spider? Ah, no, nothing. Of course. Humans were the worst. The stranger spat out a few lines like he wanted to be anywhere else:

Quoth the Raven: to be or not to be

that is the question

whether I am the master of my fate

in form how like an angel

in apprehension how

to strive to seek to find and not to yield

and though I could not stop for Death