Space Opera (Space Opera 1)

“Oh, no, sorry, bad form on my part. I didn’t mean humanity. No chance. I collect rare bootlegs, remember? I’ve heard all of your people’s greatest hits. You’re not even borderline sentient in my book. I don’t even know why they’re letting you go on tomorrow.”

“Ah. You mean . . . Nuremberg, Hiroshima, Soviet State Radio, Kosovo, Rwanda, Calais, the markets crashing in ’29 . . . and ’87 . . . and ’08 . . . and ’24 . . . that sort of thing.”

“I don’t know what that stuff is. I mean five minutes tuned in to Christian AM radio and/or any given Top 40 station tells me your species is about as sentient as a great white shark with the rickets. The Carpenters alone pretty much disqualify you. No, I mean let me save you. Not humanity, not the choirmaster at Didsbury Church of England Primary School, not Decibel Jones. You. Oort St. Ultraviolet, Omar Calis?kan, let me come through cloven skies with peaceful wings unfurled and get you the hell out of here. We can swing by your place and pick up your offspring and mate if that’s what you’re worried about. My homeworld is where everyone and their furtive uncle puts things to forget about forever. No one will ever know I swiped you off the dock. You can live a nice life on Sagrada. You’ll want for nothing. We’ll set you up in a house down the murky shore. Maybe you can curate the Homo sapiens sapiens exhibit in the Melanoatramentous Library. Maybe not—no pressure at all. Life on shadow street, baby. And hey, you never know, maybe your boy Dess will pull it out in the end and all will be right as ravens. But if not . . . you’ll be safe, and alive, and so will everyone you love.”

Oort was stunned silent. It had never occurred to him that a way out of this even existed. Now it was holding the escape hatch open for him and yelling for him to go, go, go. The giddy winds of Litost were burning out his higher-order functions, stripping his wiring down to bare Paleolithic caveman copper. Decibel would be fine. He always was. Nico and Siouxsie and Justine would be safe. Did anyone else really matter? It was wrong, of course. Absolutely wrong. Monstrously wrong. But who would be around to know? Just then, in the unconditional light of three rosy, shimmering, nonjudgmental

moons, all he wanted to do was live.

Oort St. Ultraviolet dragged the last particles of smoke out of his Elakh cigarette. “I hate this planet,” he said, looking out to sea, toward the red glow of Our Mums just below the twilit horizon. “I hated it the minute we landed. The way you can catch happy here, like you said. The antidepressant grass and the diamond rain and the peaceful happy roses being peaceful and happy together, literally breathing in emotional stability with every yawn. But I didn’t really know why it pissed me off so much. Sometimes you meet someone and they just rub you the wrong way. No reason it can’t go that way with a planet. But that wasn’t it. Do you want to know why I hate Litost?”

“Always want to know your thoughts, Double O.”

Oort St. Ultraviolet, man of a thousand instruments, flicked his smoke off the balcony, half a mile straight down into the ocean. “Because,” he sighed. “If Mira had been born here and not in fucking Sheffield, she’d never have had the Eeyores so bad that she tried to nail her tail back on with a speeding van and I’d still get to take her for gelato at five in the morning.” He smiled ruefully, and it turned his face twenty years younger. “No sale, Zaraz. Everybody’s got a Nico and a Siouxsie and a Justine. AM radio is not even a thing compared to the guy who leaves them all to burn because he doesn’t want to get up there with the poinsettias and the xylophone and sing about the angels. It’s all of us or none of us.” He straightened his suit jacket. Englishblokeman did not shirk. He did not turn in lackluster work. No matter how the tourists pulled at his hat, he did not move one solitary muscle. “Besides, it’ll be good for my anxiety.”

“Then let me take out one of the other acts for you,” came a small, sweet voice. Öö dashed out of the party floor and scrambled up the side of a rose statue. He looked at Oort with soft eyes. “I could bludgeon that Voorpret cow and stash it in a broom closet for the duration, and I’d still shut down the after-party before I even felt bad about it. You seemed to really loathe the 321. I can DDoS that paper clip into oblivion without even getting my pulse up. It’s no problem at all, Oort.” The time-traveling red panda put his black paw on Oort’s cheek. “I don’t want you to die. I’m willing to let seven billion rubbish humans live if that’s what it takes.”

“You’re not doing your superpower stutter,” Oort said uncertainly. “That’s your whole thing. That’s your idiom.”

“This is a one-timeline deal. It’s a moment of weakness on my part. None of the other versions of me want in. No one will ever think less of you. Rule 20, love. It’s beyond legit.”

“Do you have to kill them?” Oort asked softly.

Darkboy Zaraz and Öö exchanged glances. The ancient Elakh took one on the moral center. “Usually we try to avoid nonrefundable fatalities, but if you want to be 100 percent sure, beyond all probability of unforeseen cock-ups, it’s safer that way. You don’t want to see a Yurtmak lounge singer after she’s busted out of a meat freezer.”

Oort squeezed his eyes shut and shoved his knuckles into them. He couldn’t think. It was like breathing the electric Kool-Aid acid test out here. He’d agree to anything in another minute.

“Ask me in the morning,” he whispered desperately.

“I need to know now, sweetness,” whispered the Keshet. “A couple of dumb B-list celebrities you don’t even like for the whole of humanity. It’s not such a tough call, is it? That’s some good math.” Öö bristled his striped tail and laid his chin on Oort’s shoulder. “Even the nicest song has to have a screamy bit, Omarcik.”

Oort gripped the Creamsicle railing of that absurd, unnecessary balcony. He blinked back tears. “Öö, I can’t. How is that right? The first thing a human being does when confronted with the universe at large would be to stone-cold murder somebody because he got nervous that maybe their music had a little more mass appeal? And if you’re right about us, if we’re way more Mark David Chapman than John Lennon, then it’ll be about thirty seconds before we start blowing you up just to see the light show, so what difference would it make, in the end? If the whole point of this is what we are, whether we are ready, whether we are fundamentally more than beasts . . . that seems like the opposite of sentience to me. I can’t make that decision for everyone. For the whole of us, from Nefertiti and Homer and Aquinas and Beau Brummell and Marie Curie all the way down to Nico and Siouxsie and me. I’m not cut out to be the last man on Earth. I’m just an ordinary guy. I can’t. I’m not fucking Cain. I’m not the first bloke to kill an alien. Not even Clippy. And Clippy is a cunt.”

A thin spiral shadow fell on the human, the red panda, and the black traffic cone. It spoke in a pleasant, gender-neutral, corporate-approved voice.

“This concludes the semifinal round,” said Clippy. “You have been cleared to move on to the finals. Would you like to save the changes you’ve made to this document?”

29.

My Heart Has No Color

Capo spent the better part of the evening chasing Yüz particles, which were much more interesting than moths or flies or mice. They kept forming into elaborate word clouds, but as the Esca hadn’t bothered to teach her to read when she was flipping switches in her feline brain, she didn’t really care what they were trying to say. It was probably, No, no, bad kitty, don’t bite. It usually was, in Capo’s experience.

She wandered out onto the hotel veranda long after Oort had gone. Long after most everyone had gone. They had forgotten about her, but that was all right. She forgot about them plenty. They’d left heaps of food lying everywhere. Creatures who were not cats were terribly slovenly. Capo tried to drink out of the fountain, but it was viciously bitter. She shunned it for offending her and hopped up on the railing, which would have given anyone else vertigo, but she was not anyone else. She was a cat, and height had no meaning to her. The air didn’t get up her nose much either. One percent aerosolized cocaine is a bowl of low-fat milk compared to what goes on beyond the feline blood-brain barrier. In fact, she found the high-octane breezes made her sluggish and irritable.

“Let me guess,” said a breathy, sweet voice behind Capo. She didn’t turn to look. She licked her paw. If the owner of the voice wanted to be seen, it would come round. Why waste the energy? “Backup singer?”

A large, expertly groomed topiary studded with healthy pale orange roses leaned into view. Capo licked her other paw in smug satisfaction.

“No,” she said. “They’re mine, only they don’t know it.”

“I see. My name is Ekali, I am one of the Klavaret singers this year.”

Capo yawned. Her eyes bulged. The moons shone on her fangs.

“We’re called Hug Addiction,” the Klavar said, twisting her leaves nervously. “We have a lot of vibro-cellos. And a fancy clown.”

Capo whipped her white tail back and forth and regarded the rosebush hungrily.