A lightbulb went on in many, many heads at once. The thirty-first Metagalactic Grand Prix descended into an utter greased-pig clownshow as every Yüz, Yurtmak, and Alunizar tried to ice out their competition before the doors even opened, causing a constitutional crisis on the administrative board of the Grand Prix, two riots, several stern meetings, and a wormhole blockade that lasted for the better part of three weeks, crippling the economy of six commercial bankworlds. It was barbaric, they said. It was immoral. It was against the whole spirit of the thing, the whole idea of sentience. In those days, plenty of old soldiers were still listening in the stands who remembered when being locked in basements had nothing to do with music.
It had to be stopped.
But then the Keshet launched their Holistic Live Total Timeline Broadcast. This involved a special camera, still classified as a state secret, with a disturbing, semi-legal amount of Keshet stem cells suspended in a shiny neoplast-gel matrix, so that this low-level techno-biological abomination could travel through all possible timelines as easily as any bouncing red space panda. Suddenly, the galactic audience could gorge themselves on unlimited Metagalactic coverage in quantum real time. They could witness every botched kidnapping, dodged assassination, bungled poisoning, and missed interdimensional trip wire from the comfort of their own recreation zones, and they loved every minute of it.
Finally, the Oversight Committee gave up, sequestered the barbaric, immoral, vaguely unsentient but massively popular shenanigans into a new semifinal round, and formally instated Rule 20: If a performer fails to show up on the night, they shall be automatically disqualified, ranked last, and their share of communal Galactic Resources forfeited for the year.
The Grand Prix was never the same again. Before, you could only do your best. After, there was strategy.
Igneous Lagom Opt died a happy rock. And really, hardly anyone has actually died. Decanted, locked in a maze, semipermanently muted, phased into a pocket universe, frozen under several glaciers, yes, but everyone tries to keep things lighthearted if they can, and simply shooting someone in the face will never pull in the kind of viewership a good causality blast can bring.
After the trial, Aukafall Avatar 0 was, by a series of even less likely events, elected Prime Minister of Litost, despite rather obviously not being a Klavar or even plant-based. At his swearing-in ceremony, he reprised his Grand Prix performance, took a deep bow, and began to sparkle from beak to foot. He looked into the adoring faces of his people and said:
“Level up.”
23.
In the Waiting Room for Great Luck
The Klavaret are known throughout the galaxy as wonderfully gracious hosts, but they have always had trouble with the idea of architecture. Being a heliophiliac species, they have simply never seen any reason to build shelters that might keep sun or rain from sufficiently nourishing them. This is the reason Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros found themselves in what could only very generously be called a room, having no roof, no floor, and several objects that looked as though someone had heard about the idea of walls from some foreign traveler who thought they were some kind of modern dance. There were about fifty of them, all quite unnecessarily tall, interleaved frosted-glass slabs of varying oval, diamond, crescent, helix, and bubble shapes, none of which joined up to make anything so limiting as a corner, but rather stayed in constant motion a few centimeters off the ground, rotating round so that, if you just ignored them, you might almost think you were slightly indoors. It was like standing inside a very fancy blender.
“Sing to it,” the roadrunner coaxed. “Go on.”
Decibel Jones frowned and put his head to one side. “That is a portable toilet,” he said.
Indeed, the only other object in the Klavaret’s valiant effort at a greenroom was a large seafoam-green rectangular booth with a peaked roof and silver hinges on the front. To be perfectly fair, it was a lovely porta-potty, extremely tidy and made out of some material that looked rather like wet oil paint despite being several times harder than the Litostian diamonds that filled the spring clouds above them.
“No, it’s the last nice thing I can do for you before the semifinals, babies,” sighed the Esca. She shut her gentle, enormous eyes as though she were just then experiencing her culture’s first headache. She’d explained the semifinals over and over to them, at least the part she was allowed to tell them about, but they didn’t seem to be absorbing it.
“Do we need weapons?” Decibel said softly.
“It’s sort of more of an improv thing,” the roadrunner admitted. “I would just focus on defense. Humans have no special physical attributes whatsoever, it’s really quite remarkable. They’ll go right for you, since you’re brand new. The armor will help.”
Oort Ultraviolet squinted at the green booth. “It’s definitely a toilet. We’ve played a lot of festivals, so, I know what I’m about, birdie.”
“I can’t let you compete looking like . . . that. It would be humiliating for you, for your planet, for the Esca as your chaperone.”
Dess knew he should probably keep his mouth shut, but he hadn’t flown across the galaxy in an honest-to-Christ Alexander McQueen to have his aesthetic insulted by a flamingo. “What do you mean ‘looking like that’? This is vintage! Sure, my hair’s not really earning its wage at the moment, but come on!”
“Why can’t you take anything seriously, Dess?” Oort complained. He hadn’t slept the night before. His bones ached. He could never get warm when he hadn’t slept.
Decibel stared at his bandmate.
“It’s . . . my job. It’s my only job never to take things seriously. Your job is to take everything seriously. If I started, you’d have to stop and the actual universe would actually collapse. I’m sorry, have we met?” Decibel stuck his hand out—too aggressively; Oort flinched. He rolled on anyway. “My name’s Dani, what’s yours?”
Oort gave him a disgusted look and turned his back to examine the green box. “There’s a picture of a little man on the side with stuff coming out of him,” he informed everyone.
“No, it’s a late-model Yüzosh Auto-Botanical Frockade. Just one of these costs the gross domestic product of a midsize mining colony. The Trillion Kingdoms of Yüz donated them to the Grand Prix because they are generous and have a real sense of stagecraft and fair play and it was a tax write-off.”
“It smells like bleach and puberty,” Dess mused.
“Base elements can’t help what they smell like. Would you just sing to the nice machine? That’s how you’re paying for it. The only currency within the bounds of the Grand Prix is music. Sing for your supper, sing for your breakfast, sing for your bar tab, sing for the clothes on your back. So get out your wallets or you’re going to miss the starting bell.”
“We’re not ready,” Decibel whispered, gone completely pale. Dark circles of exhaustion ringed his eyes like overdone raccoon liner. “We haven’t finished the song yet. Not even a little finished. Not even almost.”
The roadrunner hooted in frustration. “Don’t worry about that yet. Does that look like a stage? No. You’re going to step inside, strip off, hold out your arms, get hosed down with one of the great useful goops of the universe—a nice, lightly clairvoyant mist of accelerated spores, micro-bulbs, empathic molds, local rainwater, and a combination of highly efficient fertilizers—then you’ll pop out the other side dressed to the nines and armored to the gills, have a couple of drinks, and then turn in early with a nice cup of milk, knowing you.”
Jones crossed his arms skeptically over his chest. “But why?”