Space Opera (Space Opera 1)

“The feelings bit? Yeah, you know me, nothing’s too wild.”

She collected her limbs onto the bed, careful not to jostle the snoring moonbeam, and the two of them sat cross-legged across from each other on the mattress. A rather medieval painting of a unicorn hung over the bed behind Nessuno’s head. Her pale, bony frame blocked out the hunters and the virgin who were out for the poor pony’s blood.

“You first,” she encouraged him.

“Whatever you want, baby. Well. Let’s see. I . . . I’m pretty terrified, if you want to know the truth. I’d never tell Oort this, but I just . . . wish they’d picked someone else. I wish I were someone else. Someone you could rely on to turn it out no matter what. I’m afraid that whatever I had is lost by now. I haven’t had a song out in years. I haven’t had a good day in years. What if I get up there and just completely blow it? Or worse, what if I get up there and give the performance of my sorry life, the best show in the history of me, if the light of the world comes beaming out of me like a bloody Care Bear Stare for the ages, and it’s not good enough? If you lot somehow hear in my voice all the worst of us? Because there’s a lot of worst. There really is. You only know what we’ve done since we invented radio. Before that it gets really hairy. And I’m nobody’s shining example. I’m not innocent. I’m all junked up inside, always have been. No musician isn’t. That’s why we’re musicians. That’s a bit of a flaw in your whole system, honestly.” His voice started to tremble. “All I’ve ever wanted is to be like that thing in the painting behind you. It’s called a unicorn. It’s not a real animal or anything. Back when we thought we were alone in the universe, we made up a lot of other intelligent creatures so we could have someone to talk to at night. Anyway, the thing about unicorns was that they were innocent. So innocent that you couldn’t even lure one out of the forest except with a trick it was too sweet and dumb to figure out, and even then, it still wouldn’t dream of stabbing that bitch in the gut when the hunters came. It forgave. It kept on loving even with a belt around its neck. But I’ve never been like that, not even close. Ask Mira. Ask Oort. Hell, ask the roadrunner. And I’m going to go onstage tomorrow, and even if I sing to shatter the heavens, you’ll see how I really am. How we really are.”

Nessuno Uuf looked over her shoulder at the rubbish hotel painting and gave a long, low whistle. “I wish I had your confidence,” she said. “Now, don’t make me wait for it. Show me your feelings.”

Jones narrowed his eyes. “I just did. Honestly, I’m a little hurt. I just laid out my heart. What else do you want?”

The Smaragdin cocked her head to one side. “Oh. Oh, ew. Was that . . . was that it? Is that how primates externalize emotion? Do you . . . do you really keep your feelings on the inside?”

“Do you not?”

Nessuno Uuf grinned. Then she stretched, her lithe rib cage arching toward him, her lips parted. Something emerged from her baroque breastbone. A spur of bone the same color as the rest of her. Then more than a spur. It began to darken as the air hit it, as it squeezed out of her like toothpaste out of the strangest tube. “Like I said,” she panted, “the old in-out. I’ve always felt sorry for people who are limited to verbalization. It’s so easy to fake it.”

It didn’t seem like a thing that should be happening. It didn’t seem like a thing that should be possible. She was all bone and armor, unpierceable, impregnable. But her chest cavity might as well have been a butter sculpture at a county fair for all the resistance it gave.

“Smaragdi emotions leave mineral deposits in our organs as they pass through us. Strong feelings can overwhelm our filtering systems, build up too fast, at which point we have to pass them or we can suffer psychological toxicity and require dialysis or even a transplant. Do you have kidneys?”

Decibel Jones could not look away. It was obscene and clinical and intimate and performative all at the same time, like watching an orgiastic tribal dance about lab results. “Two of them, last I checked,” he answered without blinking.

It didn’t seem to hurt her. She seemed to love every minute of it, in fact. Her breathing was quick, soft, ecstatic. “Think of it as passing a kidney stone, if your kidneys were located in the pleasure center of

your brain. Most of us do it once a day before bed. We have whole china cabinets full of stones. A perfect, utterly honest record of every emotional state we experience. Symbolic representations, formed in the collective unconscious, but you can’t make them lie any more than you can make your kidneys pretend to be hearts.”

She pulled the rest of the feeling stone out with her fingertips and placed it in his hand with a shivery, delighted sigh. It was a child’s toy, a small, charcoal-silver figurine, still warm from her body.

It was one of the unicorn hunters from the painting on the wall.

As he held it, Decibel was overwhelmed with foreign emotions: satisfaction, triumph, anticipation, relief, fear, crippling social pressure, artistic insecurity, ambition, xenophobia, and a strong, awful flood of schadenfreude. This was the Smaragdi climax, he realized. Eat your heart out, Dr. Kinsey. Jones wanted to shake it off and leave with some devastating quip, but he couldn’t look away from the vicious little action figure. He couldn’t move at all. The inundation of her feelings turned his synapses into a malfunctioning tech rehearsal for fight-or-flight, and he could not move at all.

Nessuno Uuf looked at him with the last dregs of pleasure in her eyes and what appeared to be genuine regret.

“Sorry, love,” she crooned. “You know how it is. All’s fair in the semifinals. I really am sorry. I think humans are wonderful. So attractive and creative and musically talented, and obviously deeply sentient.” She stroked his hair fondly. “It’s the Alunizar, see. They’re going bankrupt. Year after year, everyone votes them into oblivion because we’re not allowed to get our war reparations any other way. Every year, they send five-star catering to the galactic table and get back crumbs. Serves them right, if you ask me, but you can’t expect them to just take total economic collapse on the chin. And since these tone-deaf space monsters would rather suck face with a colicky wormhole than award Aluno any points at all, well, our friendly local sea squirt hired me to take out some of the low-hanging fruit.” The skeletal assassin shrugged sheepishly. “Now this . . . this is a bit barbaric, I admit. But galactic society is still . . . well, society. And society is rubbish. Good lord, the Grand Prix is the best thing we’ve ever done, the utter best, and it’s just a bit of song and dance, isn’t it? I never did say we were good; just sentient. It’s like Goguenar Gorecannon’s Eleventh Unkillable Fact always says: You can’t stop people being assholes. They do love it so. The best you can hope for is that some people, sometimes, will turn out to be somewhat less than the absolute worst. When they manage to trip and fall over that incredibly low bar, they’ll make you want to end it all. But when they leap over it, they’ll make you believe this whole mess really was created for a reason—the bastards. Except me, of course. I’m superb. Ask anyone. And you’re all right, I suppose. Welcome to being a people, kid. It’s just dreadful up here.”

Nessuno Uuf hopped off the bed and bent down close to his ear. Dess sat transfixed by the silver hunter in his hand, still as a photograph. “You’re a beautiful, accomplished species worthy of respect,” she purred in his ear. “And you, Decibel Jones, were the best I’ve ever had.”

Just as he regained control of his motor functions, the amorous Smaragdin picked up that massive, button-encrusted remote off the bedside table, aimed it directly at Decibel Jones’s vocal cords, and pressed mute.

“Are you really going to kill me with a Panasonic universal remote?” Jones tried to quip.

Nothing came out. He groped at his throat. Tried to sing a few bars of “Ziggy Stardust,” “More Than This,” “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme,” “Happy Fucking Birthday,” anything.

Nothing.

“See you onstage,” said Nessuno Uuf. “Best of luck.”

When Oort St. Ultraviolet got back to their room, he found nobody there. No Decibel, no weird alien conquest. Just a quiet suite with a mint on the pillow and their costumes folded neatly on the bed. Grown out of a bar on the other side of the galaxy from seed bins with ridiculous labels like LOVE WASTED and TILL WE MEET AGAIN and THE FOLLY OF YOUTH and THE BAD OLD DAYS and PEACE AT THE END OF ALL THINGS.

On one end of the bed lay a dismembered ladies’ red sequin blazer, low-slung, mercilessly tight trousers that had once been a wine-stained wedding gown, and a cricket jumper with the name GEORGE embroidered lovingly on the hem in purple thread with a jaunty bat on either side. On the other lay a pair of satin paisley trousers with vintage ’80s gold accent chains all over them, platform boots, black plastic bat wings, and Robert, smelling just like roses.

31.

Lullaby for a Volcano

Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros began and ended in nondescript rooms with not much more to recommend them but a couple of beds, a TV, a minifridge, and the reek of destiny. One was the kind of flat you could afford on what Mr. Five Star was willing to pay out.