Space Opera (Space Opera 1)

O love there is no other life than here

burning bright in the forest of the night

calling for our fiddlers three . . .

“I’m still working on the bridge.”

“Come on, Dess, give it something. A bit of the old oomph.”

The bird talked, which irritated Capo because she was reminded that she hadn’t yet eaten the bird. “It’s . . . a bit awkward. I’m not sure I follow the sentiment completely.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Decibel mumbled.

“Look, Dess, I’m sorry about last night. You don’t have to be like that. It’s me, remember? Your old Oort. Do the part with dulce et decorum est. Come on, it’s good, I promise. I wouldn’t tell you it was good if it wasn’t; that’s not me.”

Decibel Jones pushed a mauve anemone on the wall. A clear jelly-glass screen flickered on, half swallowed up by the coral hull.

“It’s not about that. I was a rotten little brat, all right? I was Mr. Devil of Tasmania. But it doesn’t matter now. I’ve been up all night while you were in Snoozepool. Doing reconnaissance. Research. I used to be good at that, you know. At a lot of things.”

Decibel Jones and Oort St. Ultraviolet watched on the screen as a century of Grand Prix performances began to play, one after the other. Glorious golden tubes of sea-flesh pulsing; huge-eyed, childlike black creatures chanting; some kind of horrific monster dancing with a skeleton; a pale thorny suit of armor blushing, somehow; out loud, seven graceful blue Esca sieving the wind through their bones. And there was the roadrunner, at the head of the band, projecting a waterbird made of light from her lantern; another Esca, dancing silently on another stage, somewhere else, somewhere far. Behind her, others moved like eggs floating in a marsh, waiting to become alive. When the lantern-bird opened her throat to sing, another light shone—light within light, light from its own lantern streamed out and shaped itself into glowing, glittering, horrifying ruins. Planetary ruins, the ruins of constellations. Alunizar ships crushed to death and drifting among the stars; the crystalline cities of the Keshet turned to rubble; the starlit weeping of the Yüz over the molten surface of their homeworld. And over all this stretched the wings of the Esca—their Esca, the roadrunner, the infrasound, vibratory, kindly voice of her people with their huge eyes begging for protection, their soft throats that anyone could cut at any moment. With her wings and piscine fronds and lantern light, the Esca lay herself over the ruins, gave up her body and her song to keep what was left from harm, took the terrible fire still raining down from the ultramarine biolamps of her backup dancers on the silken feathers and scales of her back until she was gone; she was gone and her voice vanished, but the galaxy remained. Civilization remained.

And then another song began, better than that one. Each song was so impossible, so perfect, so complex, so anatomically baffling, and they only grew more heartbreaking and piercing, the special effects more dazzling, the fire and the ice and the psychic manipulation of the audience, that both of them sobbed and sobbed as if they had lost every last thing in the world. Hours passed.

The humans watched in an agony of feeling, in a rictus of involuntary ecstasy and horror and grief and artistic nirvana, their bodies shuddering, their brains a sea of flaming blue emotion.

The cat watched with semi-mild interest. It was all right, she supposed, if you were into that sort of thing.

When it was over, Decibel Jones turned to the last Absolute Zero and said:

“So . . . I suppose what I’m saying is we’re all going to die.”

19.

> The War Is Not Over

The twenty-ninth Metagalactic Grand Prix was held on Fenek, the homeworld of the Voorpret Mutation.

It was the first time a member species of the Great Octave declined to participate, ruining everyone’s fun over an argument about sand.

It was the first time a performer died onstage as a result of a weaponized key change, bass drop, and/or costume detonation.

It was the first time a newly discovered species sang for their sentience, sang for the survival of their fittest, sang their externally stored hearts out, and failed.

And it was the first time anyone felt safe enough to hold the thing on Fenek.

It was a very complicated year.

There was absolutely nothing unusual about Fenek. It was the avatar of the average, the model of the median, a beautifully boilerplate world. It orbited an even-tempered, comfortably middle-class yellow sun at a respectful distance, boasted a galactic biodiversity rating of exactly meh, and kept its gravity to a considerate low roar, except on weekends. Before the Voorpret, Fenek’s best shot at a sentient species was something not unlike an Earth sparrow the size of an underachieving mountain gorilla, with five eyes and dull, brown feathers and dull, brown minds that very nearly made it all the way up to inventing the participle before everything went tails-up. It was the planetary equivalent of the girl next door with the nice personality whose face you instantly forget when you move away to college, destined from birth to have a house with beige carpeting, 2.5 moons, and a casual home business selling scented candles to people who hate scented candles.

Or at least it was, before the zombie apocalypse.

Now Fenek is a very unusual world indeed. The Voorpret have been at work for a long, long time, tinkering and pottering and DIY-ing and messing about with the landscaping, and they’ve almost got the place just the way they always wanted it, their dreamworld, every plank in place. Fenek has become a vast necropolis, a massive cemetery extending from pole to pole, around the equator, carpeting all nine continents, the ice caps and the seafloor with tombs and mausoleums and graves and towering urns like high-rise apartment buildings. It is a planet to make the dreariest goth giddy with joy and, if not for the Voorpret themselves, would be a lucrative tourist destination for statuary and monument enthusiasts, of which there are more than you might think.

Unfortunately, there are the Voorpret themselves, easily the most problematic species encountered by the Alunizar, Utorak, Keshet, and Yüz ships that poured out of the surprise wormhole nearby. They were the last accepted into the Great Octave after the war, and only by a single vote. It is difficult enough to accept magenta algae or gas-filled balloons or computer code as living, sentient, valuable entities, without having to get your head around anything as instinctively repulsive as the Voorpret. You cannot, technically speaking, see a Voorpret. You cannot smell one or hear one or taste one or put one in a cage. And if you’ve touched a Voorpret, it’s already too late.

A Voorpret is a virus. Simply the most successful viral outbreak in the history of the galaxy, infecting, replicating, mutating, spreading, and absolutely liquefying their hosts since before humans ever imagined that oversize frontal lobes were this season’s must-have accessory. In the halcyon days of their youth, the Voorpret were a humble hemorrhagic fever originating in the rain forests of Fenek’s northern hemisphere, toddling about learning their pathogenic ABCs, killing proto-primates and ungulates far too quickly to become a pandemic to write home about. But they mutated, and replicated, and learned, as life has a tendency to do, and since the dull, brown giant sparrows at the top of Fenek’s unsuspecting food chain had barely mastered subtraction, they had little in the way of virology experts, vaccines, or affordable treatment options, and the Voorpret had all the time in the world to reign in their adolescent hormones and graduate into a lucrative career in what polite society calls “soft real estate.”

Once a Voorpret infection occurs, the virus fully inhabits the host within a few hours, resulting in lesions, fevers, hair loss, bleeding from places no one is meant to bleed from, chunks of liver shooting out of the eyeballs, total annihilation of personality, the usual horror-movie floor show of symptoms. The invading Voorpret reservoir can and does work the unfortunate body like a marionette, speaking, dancing, using tools, building a civilization. They are the hand within the glove, the kid underneath a sheet on Halloween yelling to anyone who will listen that he’s a really real ghost and he’s gonna get you. There is no cure. The Voorpret consider immunological research to be a declaration of war. Death follows within a week or so. But death no longer presents any sort of roadblock for the Voorpret virus. They continue to squat in the empty corpse as long as decomposition can hold the ligaments together, dispersing to new digs only when the old ones have soupified into a chunky stew.