Space Opera (Space Opera 1)

He recognized the room immediately. His shoulders relaxed instinctively; his jaw unclenched. He was at home here.

Sometimes it felt as though Decibel had spent half his life in mid-to-high-end hotel suites and bars and reception lounges from London to Helsinki to Rio to Madison, Wisconsin. Junkets, conventions, corporate glad-handing, meet and greets, charity gigs, bingeing on fried appetizers and drinks-on-the-room after a day in the studio, in the club, at the arena, on the circuit. Whether he’d done it wearing scandalous glitter glad rags or incognito invisibility cloaks consisting of dark glasses and ratty shirts emblazoned with the faded tat of someone else’s band hardly made any difference. You were there to sell yourself, either way, but at least the nosh was free.

All those hotel bars and ballrooms and suites flowed into one platonic hotel ballroom-bar-suite in Decibel’s memory, and that platonic hotel space flowed out around him now: low light, scuffed tables, bartender unhappy with his choices in life but even less happy with anyone else’s, thin, hard, mean carpet in an indefinable yet ubiquitous shade of nothing somewhere between turquoise and brown, windows on the water in lieu of any real attempt at decor, cheap paper napkins and thin black drink stirrers already dropped all over the floor, chairs that somehow remained uncomfortable no matter how you shifted and scooched, paired with big plush mercenary loungers that sucked you down until any effort to talk to another person made you look like a child in a booster seat trying to talk to the big kids about the serious issues facing applesauce today.

And there he found himself, in the sky bar of what, for all the world, appeared to be a mid-range Hilton. Banks of windows looked out on Our Mums setting in gorgeous joyful pastels over the lavender sea and the gentle lights of Vlimeux’s notorious Healing White Light District far below. Decibel Jones stared at a broadsheet of dubious fonts stapled to a large sandwich board sign that read WELCOME GRAND PRIX CUNTESTANTS BYOB, complete with the kind of deeply unfortunate typo you only find at events the logistics of which have been left up to embittered unpaid interns bent on low-effort vengeance. The Hilton logo was crooked and looked far more like a drunken hieroglyph than a capital H. It pulsed a little. It bulged. Someone had put down their coffee cup on the bottom left corner and presumably just said, Fuck it, no one will notice. Decibel remembered that typo-and-coffee-stain combo. He and Mira had posed with one on the Glampire Planet tour. Oort had got his thumb on the lens, he was laughing so hard, which made it technically the last photo of all three of them ever taken.

Decibel reached for a phone that wasn’t there to take another picture, felt a bit stupid, and stepped unto the breach.

The slightly dingy sky bar was crowded with milling and swilling aliens of every shape, size, density, and attitude toward hygiene, all wearing large, friendly HELLO MY NAME IS stickers on whatever they had that passed for a chest. There were Esca, Decibel saw gratefully,

gingerly trying to sip from large margarita glasses of plankton with slices of fruit hanging off the sugared rims, several different-colored straws, and festive umbrellas, not an easy operation with a beak. A large cloud of multicolored glitter floated over the blue fish-birds, moving and swooping and bulging in a way that was definitely intentful, not decorative. Beneath it, the roadrunner was wearing a cloud of pearls and tears and shifting, illuminated words in a language beyond subjects, objects, or the vaguest concept of transparent prose.

But there Decibel’s brief study of xenobiology failed him. The roadrunner and Öö had tried. But it was all too much to remember now. Several small, dark creatures with huge eyes out of a goth toddler’s coloring book peered up at the bar resentfully—a bar that was, unmistakably, filled to the brim with dirt like a denuded window planter. A throng of brutally pale, slender people who looked like basketball players rolled in antlers as painted by El Greco stood by the windows, trying to bend subtly at the knee so as not to tower quite so much over a clique of silvery moths awkwardly clutching martinis. The tables were littered with crystal decanters full of bubbling pink muck and weird greenish stones. Five or six vast, globby golden tubes of wet flesh with bright veins of color forking all over them and a gaping hole full of tanning-salon UV light where their faces should have been were discussing something desperately important with a cluster of delicate clear balloons full of apricot gas whose name badges all clearly said URSULA. And just then, somebody with a head like an exploded hippo burst out laughing (possibly laughing) at a joke (possibly a joke) told by what was clearly the rotting, defurred corpse of a Keshet. The ex–red panda turned mid-giggle and stared at him.

Because it was a platonically perfect lobby-bar-suite-ballroom, the walls behind the bar were covered in ill-advised mirrors so you could see just how pompous you were coming off to everyone around you. Decibel Jones was filled with a powerful, primal urge to run and save himself from the shambling zombie raccoon-corpse lurching toward him with a huge smile on its rotting face—but like Narcissus at the watering hole, he was too captivated by his own reflection to move. He hadn’t seen himself at first. He hadn’t known where to look. But he saw it all now.

The Voorpret wore gray. He wore blue.

And red. And green. And purple. And black. And electric tangerine-turquoise paisley.

He was dressed as a punch-drunk, postapocalyptic go-go-dancing Mr. Darcy. As Oscar Wilde finally stripped clean of even the thinnest vestige of English propriety, restraint, or subtlety. As Madame de Pompadour on her way to interview for a CEO position she already had in the bag. And worst, or best, of all, he could feel it all growing out of him, giving new meaning to the phrase “skintight” as it bloomed, budded, sprouted directly out of his flesh as naturally as hair or sweat. He winced a little, unused to the feeling of his skin really and actually crawling, still moving and adjusting with exquisite purpose as the useful goop of the Yüz continued to merge with his mind and churn out its idea of fashion.

Decibel seemed to be wearing Bowie’s exact metallic mango-pistachio-coconut-striped trousers from the 1975 Ziggy Stardust shoot, buckled below the knee over chartreuse stockings printed with all his worst reviews in tiny block letters. A loose, vaguely piratical, late-night neon-light shirt peeked out fetchingly beneath a savage underbust corset made of something not unlike xenomorph skin as hunted, cut, and drenched in black glitter by Versace and a cravat braided and stitched and hemmed from all the laciest underthings thrown at all the rowdiest stages he’d known. A square-cut patchwork Regency coat squeezed it all in, its tails exploding into a shower of every one of Nani’s gorgeous silk scarves, trailing all the way to the floor. His lanky, dark hair was bejeweled and beribboned like a Lost Boy who’d recently discovered Neverland’s underground club scene; he wore that lilac lipstick of his long-ago lounge room show and eyeliner fit for a raccoon in heat. He carried, to his surprised delight, a dandy’s cane that looked suspiciously like a hacked-off mic stand. Lastly, because Dess had always said Coco Chanel was full of insipidly scented shit and, before he left the house every day, looked in the mirror and put one more thing on, a huge, plush, glowing cartoon coyote-skin draped over his shoulders, its cel-animated outline wriggling and jumping and popping like an old recording played too many times.

Dess had walked his share of red carpets in far more than his share of lurid please-notice-me outfits. He’d heeded the bleats of tabloid reporters over and over, so instinctive and helpless and native to their kind. A cow goes moo; a sheep goes baa; a celebrity correspondent goes who are you wearing? But if one of those pull-string See ’n Say barnyard creatures had appeared out of the long light-years between here and home to ask him who he was wearing now, all he could have answered was: Myself.

Decibel Jones was dressed in the glorious bombed-out rubble of his whole life. He was Raggedy Dandy, big as life and twice as hard. He never wanted to take it off.

“BRAINS,” yelled the gray, oozing, hairless, pustulant Keshet as it lurched toward Decibel, dragging one munted leg behind it. He could see splintered ribs through its moldering skin. Its gums peeled back horribly from sharp yellow teeth. “BRAINS!”

“Darling!” hummed a thick, sopping voice behind him. Not one voice—dozens, a hundred, maybe, in perfect, simultaneous, harmonious diction. It oozed expensive vowels, oligarchical consonants, the poshest of diphthongs. It dripped with sincerity and wisdom. It dripped its sincerity and wisdom all over the floor and got a bit on the cold cuts platter. “Don’t you just look marvelous.”

Five feet of velvety, undulating gold lamé gumdrop waved one nub at him from beside the cheese plates. Its skin seemed to be made of Venetian glass, swirling with veins of gold and vivid color. It—he? she? zie? they?—had no face, only a round, glowing, cilia-fringed hole where a face might think about setting up shop, and another one in the general belly area. The sticker on—plausibly—its chest, read: HELLO MY NAME IS: SLEKKE5.

Decibel Jones had just met his first Alunizar.

The talking gumdrop looked him over appraisingly and offered him a friendly martini glass full of something that looked like raw petroleum with a disk of white lust-scented foam floating three inches off the rim. It picked up a cube of slightly sweaty Jarlsberg and delicately inserted the cheese into its stomach lumps, pulling the toothpick out clean with a satisfied grunt. “Not to say we’re entirely sure what to make of all . . . this business.” Slekke5 gestured vaguely at Dess’s cravat and leaned forward confidentially. “It’s not a completely emotionally balanced look, if you know what we mean. A bit of a mess, if we’re to be honest with ourselves, and we really think we must be, considering the circumstances. Your ensemble lacks an underlying spiritual and emotional cohesion. The carpet of the id doesn’t match the drapes of the superego, if you know what we mean. Doubtless some essential savagery afoot in there, no? And where is your friend, dear? It’s a dangerous room to take on alone.”

“BRAINS!” shouted the undeniably dead Keshet again. It picked up speed, stepping on the silky wings of a moth-person, who squealed ultrasonic indignation, causing half the room to turn and stare at the impending human-zombie collision. Decibel looked around for Oort, for the roadrunner, for Öö, for a convenient social escape hatch, but the only things within reach were this dreadful conversation and a small model of Earth made out of water crackers and what he hoped was prosciutto.

The Alunizar ignored the incoming zombie-raccoon rocket. It focused its attention on Decibel like a weaponized Eton prefect. “We presume we need no introduction,” it trilled wetly.

Something clicked in Decibel’s back-brain, and his autonomous systems switched into a new mode: after-party high-octane industrial flirt machine. Meet the fans, smile for the camera, charm the venue management, chuck anything that smacked of weakness or desperation or fear of the rapidly approaching future, secure the best possible bed for the night. The trick of it was to be ever-so-slightly too honest. No one warmed up to a perfectly professional musician, not even other musicians. They wanted you to be a little more real, a little more raw, a little more broken than they were, so they could feel magnanimous about booking you, buying your shit, promoting you, fucking you. So they could feel a little more human by osmosis. It was an equation Decibel had learned on Day One of Life with the Zeros. Pain becomes playful, playful becomes pretty, pretty becomes pleasure, pleasure becomes profit, profit becomes safety, another day not working at Mr. Five Star, another day further from invisibility. He laughed like the fate of his planet was a pickup line at a pub.

“Listen, mate, I was in a cab halfway to Adam Lambert’s beach house with my tongue halfway down the venerable old chap’s throat and my brain stem halfway to totally obliterated by rum and imposter syndrome before I knew he used to be anybody at all, and all you’ve done is buy me a drink.”

“We are not your mate, friend, nor do we understand what you mean by ‘imposter syndrome.’ Is that a popular narcotic on your world?”

Decibel Jones gave this a beautiful, ephemeral, jewel-like moment of genuine thought. “Just about the hottest one going,” he admitted. “And we all get high on our own supply. It’s that thing where no matter what you do or how high you rise in the world, you still think you’re a wet smear of nothing and everyone’s just about to find out what a grubby little fraud you really are.”

“But we are not a fraud. We don’t get it.”

Decibel tried again. “You know, sometimes, even though everything is going your way and you’re doing the whole type A overachiever shimmy, you still can’t quite believe you’re deserving of . . . well, anything. Love, success, happiness, stability.”

“But we ach

ieved.”