Space Opera (Space Opera 1)

A tentative drumbeat tapped in somewhere in the depths of the stage. Decibel held out his finger for his kid to hop on. The roadrunner’s light drenched them both. She was looking up in parental panic from the mosh pit. He looked from her back into the little bird with human eyes. Nani’s eyes, actually. More Mr. Looney of the Tunes than Mr. Ridley of the Scott.

“I’m gonna name you Marvin,” Decibel said softly, and to his shock, he actually said it. The trauma of delivery had seemingly broken whatever boot the Smaragdi and the Alunizar had put on his voice.

Marvin whistled a little tune that felt like the cathedral of Notre Dame when it hit Dess’s bones, all lit up and everywhere to go.

It was so beautiful. His baby. It was unique in the history of the universe. It was just a hell of a thing. It didn’t really matter, of course. They were all going to die. Everyone he’d ever known, and him, too. They’d failed and you couldn’t unfail something just because you suddenly needed a spot of maternity leave. But at least this had happened first. Another tap of drumstick on drumskin.

Wouldn’t it have been nice to get a note in? Dess thought. Just one.

“Come on,” a voice said softly from the direction of the drums. “Up you get. Time to get that tail nailed back on.”

Decibel sighed. That was it, then. The roadrunner had come with a big vaudeville hook to pull him offstage and collect her offspring. Using Mira’s voice was poor form, though. There were limits.

The voice changed abruptly. “Oh, get up, Danesh, you lazy wanker.”

Oort St. Ultraviolet turned to look. His blood attempted to escape his body by leaping a foot to the left. But he was faster than a well-regulated public health system, more powerful than the need for tea at three in the afternoon. He was Englishblokeman. And Englishblokeman did not shirk. He shimmied into his Oortophone before his brain could start questioning everything that was happening and spraying antibacterial gel all over it. He got in and watched a dead girl with cheeks as bright as the future count off the beat.

She saved them. The last time of many times. Mira Wonderful Star, lately of the London underground scene, her uncle’s flat, and a timeline plundered by a well-meaning red panda who had cornered her after their last show in a shitty club and told her her friends were waiting for her, the last show when everything had gone perfectly, when everything was roses and the air was as good as cocaine, when the future was dry of all possible tears, Mira Wonderful Star, reeling from her first hit single off of Spacecrumpet, Apocalyptic Girl Spill #4 , damaged/as-is, clad in a spandex “Slutty C-3PO” costume, silver brocade Christmas tree skirt, a gauzy black shower curtain with metallic blue appliqué roses all over it, and blissful ignorance of all that was to come, banged out a riff on her drums behind him, leaned into her mic, and yelled into the sold-out arena, loud enough to blow a dart from 1 to 20, loud enough to stun Arthur Archibald Gormley sober.

“WE ARE DECIBEL JONES AND THE ABSOLUTE ZEROS!” she screamed over the pituitary-m

elting harmonies of the wormhole chorus above.

“Mushy, mushy, Wonderful,” whispered Decibel Jones in utter and religious awe just before the roadrunner’s undersea birthbeams poured out over the stage and his skin and their child like the most glorious spotlight in the world.

“Mushy, mushy, Dess,” said a living, breathing paradox, and the resurrected queen of glam.

“Everything Just Gets So Fucked Up Sometimes” was the song of the century. And it barely even had any lyrics. Just full-throated, shimmering, babbling music and the title and a bit of Christmas carol, repeated over and over until the words lost all meaning, in dozens of combinations and several keys and a handful of languages dredged out of primary school lessons buried deep in the subconscious. Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros finally had the Christmas pop single that year. The newborn and the dead and the long-suffering and the extremely well-traveled, the baby and the girl and the boys in the band and the wormholes—all of them singing the screamy bit like a song could save the world, roaring like lions and squawking like dodos and thundering like rhinoceroses and weeping like a man who died with a final mix in his hands and dancing like a kid wearing a hundred scarves and howling like an interdimensional wind tunnel of regret, belting it out with your future gurgling in your arms like sentient human goddamned beings.

The arena was silent.

Then the cheers began.

“Well,” said DJ Lights Out after it died down. “I guess that was all right.”

The Mamtak Aggregate could not, just yet, form itself into anything at all. It lay in glittering pieces across the jury’s couches, enraptured and inconsolable.

36.

They Can’t Stop the Spring

Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, a soft, rather nice-looking dawn broke over the sea and the green land. It was a usual sort of thing, the dawn. Yellow and quiet and uneventful. Soon there would be movement and sound and the rhythms of sentient life galloping along its absurd way, shaking its head to a new beat.

Until next year.

Two little girls in Cardiff woke to a kind voice and a kiss on the forehead. “Daddy’s home, darlings. And he’s brought your kitty back all safe and sound. I think Capo should live with you from now on, don’t you, poppets?”

An old grandmother in government housing in Kabul woke to see her grandson’s face, fifty feet tall all over again, on every screen in the world.

Point to Nani.

A Klavar on Litost woke to see a young woman with hair like an oil slick, an Esca, and a man in an absolutely splendid coat laughing on the beach, leaping up like they were dancing, trying to touch the wings of a tiny brilliant blue bird with long-lashed human eyes flying just out of their reach.

A red panda waited just down the shore, wondering how to break the news about the necessity of containing volatile entities removed from their timelines. He fretted. Perhaps the girl would like being a Paradox Box. Just her existence was paradox enough to fuel something truly tricked out. State of the art. He would furnish her Box in style. Maybe she could even write a new album in there, if he made the thing really grand. Being a massively powerful ship sailing the infinite deep was better than being dead, anyway. Perhaps Decibel would be interested in a career in captaining starships. All things were possible.

A large golden sea squirt woke to the censure of its government, which never looked kindly on big fat failures.

Despite the judgment of the jury being that the wormholes had placed third-to-last in the Grand Prix and therefore now possessed the rights and privileges of galactic citizens, most of the great, infinite, gorgeous beasts just drifted off into the long light-years in search of more food.