“I could help,” said the time-traveling red panda quietly. “I could do the thing. I did a few test runsrunsgoestriesattempts during the semifinals. It’d be easy. It would be donedonebackdone before he’s through with the second verse.”
“You could. But it’s cheating, Öö.”
“Mmmm,” said Klloshar Avatar 9, enjoying a refreshing cocktail after her performance. They hadn’t seen her standing there, but the jury box was littered with dormant Lummo stones, so any of them could turn up at any time. You had to be prepared for that, with Lummutis. “Mini-game. Exciting.”
“Not technically cheatingcheatingfudgingagainstherulescheatingcheating. And look, you only spent a few hours on Earth. I’ve been all over their timelinestimelinesquantumfoampossibleforkstimelines. That’s a lot of Decembers. I would do just about anything to make a Christmas carol stop.”
The tall, blue ultramarine fish-flamingo dropped her eyes to the floor. “There is a process. We don’t interfere. They have to do it on their own, or not at all.”
“I thought you liked him!”
“I do,” said the former lead singer of Bird’s Eye Blue. “He calls me the Road Runner. That makes him the coyote. How can you not love that stupid coyote?”
“Then I’ll dodofindgetdograb it.”
“Mmmm,” Klloshar Avatar 9 said again, smacking her colorful lips. “Cheat code. Nice.”
“You can’t. It’s against the rules. No one has ever helped another species before. Not even when that Ursula died mid–power ballad. We don’t interfere.”
Öö thrashed his long, striped tail furiously. “It’s not interfering. The name on the list was Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros. All I’m doing is finishing your job. I’m getting the band to the venuevenuestagedoor all in one piece.”
The Keshet grabbed two little toasts with creamed sunlight on top, crammed them in his mouth, stuck his tongue out at his avian friend, and vanished.
Klloshar Avatar 9 stared after him with enormous cartoon eyes. “One hundred points,” she whispered.
Öö was the first outsider to score in the grand game of the Lummutis, and, to date, the last.
35.
It’s All About You
Oort was nearly out of Christmas and Decibel Jones was still trying to sing. He dropped to his knees, clinging to the mic stand in horror and gut-voiding terror of the totality of this failure above all his other failures. It shouldn’t have gone like this. Maybe somewhere inside he’d always known it would go like thi
s without her, without Mira to keep the beat out into the infinite future the way she always had, the way he thought she always would. His jaw ached from trying to birth the song horribly from the depths of him. He kept trying. He kept trying as people in the audience began to cough and look away in embarrassment. He kept trying as the sky grew darker and darker and the voting officials began to noisily rummage backstage. He tried for Nani and his brothers and sisters and Mr. Looney of the Tunes and the sold-out Hippodrome and Dr. Collins his psychiatrist and Lila Poole and poor lost Mira and that stupid badger, too, for Yoko Ono and “Revolution 9” and nice flats you couldn’t afford and kebabs you could and short-haired white cats and overly friendly waitresses named Ruby and Alexander McQueen and Cool Uncle Takumi and Englishblokeman and government agents and thrift shop eye shadow duos and lions and rhinoceroses that were never coming back and Mr. Five Star’s chip shop and Marvin the Martian and the West Cornwall Pasty Company and Acme Brand Instant Tunnels and the Things of Thing-World and Arkable Gelato and science fiction movies in which everything was simple and very few musical numbers turned up and even the bloody Daily Mail, all of it sacred, all of it real, all of it loved in that moment by those two souls seven thousand light-years away.
But it was no good. He had nothing. He was nothing. He was invisible, voiceless, no one. Oort had very little left of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” and the only person who seemed to be picking up what he was laying down was a short little Elakh in the front row clicking his fingers with his eyes closed. He tried again. It would work this time. These were his last seconds of existence. He wondered if they’d just incinerate him immediately or ship him back to Earth for the big barbecue. He’d come so far to fail.
Decibel Jones gave up.
Fuck it all to hell. Good-bye, life. Good-bye, Earth. Good-bye, rosé wine. Good-bye, Hope. Good-bye, Ruin. My tail’s unnailed for good. God, I miss you so much, Mira, his brutally muted vocal cords strained to say. I promise never to skip school again, just come back. It’s lonely being the last of us. I wish I could fix it all. I wish I could have been better. That’s all. I just wish I was better.
The storm overhead broke. Tiny diamonds rained down from the absurd skies of the happiest planet in the galaxy, where sentient civilization almost cannibalized itself and burned its own bones to ash. The clouds were so unfathomably dark. Beyond dark, into shades of the void. They swirled and pooled and yawned sickeningly, the way the surf retreats before a tsunami hits. It’s counterintuitive. It doesn’t look like what it is. But it’s a dead giveaway. Pulsating neon vortexes began to show through the clouds.
Decibel felt something very wrong. The breath under the notes that would not come was stuck. Pinned to his diaphragm. Sawed in half over that awful, vicious heartburn he hadn’t been able to shake since he’d left the planet. The air was seeping up out of his throat all wrong, without the right power behind it, but with something else sucking at it. Something new. Something borrowed.
Something with feathers.
The breath burst free and flowed over the larynx of the glamrock glitterpunk messiah, bringing with it a small black and blue infant bird with long Esca fronds and clever human eyes and a rib cage like a nonconsensual feelings-flute. Decibel Jones’s love child lodged in his throat. It would have been no problem for an Esca. There would have been fourteen of them, and they’d have flown out prettily through the gaps in his chest cavity and into the warm, welcoming light bath of their other parent. But thrill-seeking genes had to make due with available materials. There was only one baby, conceived in a garret in Croydon, gestated in a paradox-fueled reefship, and born on Litost at the best part of a song that never was. And it was a breech birth.
Decibel Jones collapsed in a heap of agony. His head fell beside the ghostly footlights as sinkholes appeared in the boiling clouds. His breath blew past the holes in his love child’s rib cage, and a voice, not quite his and not quite his baby’s, burst out over the sea of dropped jaws.
“EVERYTHING JUST GETS SO FUCKED UP SOMETIMES!” Decibel shriek-sobbed out a screamy bit to raise Yoko Ono from the grave and make her proud, and a tiny, brand-new creature hopped out of his mouth and nestled down in Robert’s baroque sleeve. A plaintive, desperate bird’s cry went up from the back of the house as the roadrunner began to run in earnest, birthlight pouring from her lantern, trying to catch her baby in her grotto before it suffocated in shadows.
A sound like someone belly flopping onto a church organ and hitting every note at once shattered the air over what was once Vlimeux. Incandescent blue-violet mouths opened in the sky, a dozen of them, sucking at the sweet Litostian gravity, dragging up waves against the coliseum, shearing pearly mountains into the Ocean that was no longer quite so into the idea of Unconditional Acceptance, gaping holes punched in reality, hungry maws opening into the infinite guts of space-time.
The wormholes had come to feast on the banquet of regret that was Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros.
And now the wormholes were singing.