“Don’t whine, kittens. It’s not lunch. Think of these as the jabs for your Pan-Asian tour—there’s your hep A, there’s your hep B, and there’s your typhoid vaccine. Not everybody you’ll meet is as conveniently mnemonopathic, oxygen-breathing, and gravitationally compatible as your girl Friday here. The mushroom’s actually a dormant fungal agent that will infect your brain stem with a pretty laid-back strain of Yoompian encephalitis—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” shouted Dess and Oort. They leaped back as though the tea tray were full of spiders and credit-card bills. Decibel tried to recover quickly, telling himself that he really ought to have gotten over any squeamishness with regards to alien biological compounds back in Croydon. But it was instinctive, as deep as dirt.
“Take it easy! Jesus Christ, you gotta learn to trust a little! You’d think I’d threatened to wipe out your whole planet! Ha-ha, my little joke. They’re all completely safe, I promise. Look, my whole job is getting you to Litost in one piece and ready to shine, so I wouldn’t hurt you for love nor money nor sociopolitical advantage. Friends, Decibel, Oort, lend me your ears! Only speaking languages you’ve actually learned is a sign of a healthy mind. Where’s the fun in that? Once your cute wee antibodies get a load of Yoompian encephalitis, they’ll start working like the rent’s due tonight. You know how your nose gets all snotty and your throat swells up when you have the flu? Well, turns out, as long as you’re carbon-based and keep your brain on the inside, the body’s natural immune response to this is to produce a kind of linguistic acid reflux that blows out the bits of your brain that insist on having to conjugate and decline and punctuate things before it can understand them like cheap subwoofers. Doesn’t work on the Yoomps, though, poor sods. They’re pretty resentful about it. You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen potbellied plesiosaurs trying to speed-read through sixteen local phrase books at once. Oh! You two are now officially allergic to penicillin. That shit clears the infection right up. Right. So. The Allsorts is just gonna paste in some of the Ursulas’s junk DNA and mutate your lungs into being a bit less closed-minded when it comes to respiratory partners, and the coffee is just a caffeine jolt to your inner ear with a nice foamy agile-gravity agent so you don’t barf, drift off, or explode when we land. Thank the Yüz—it’s mostly their toenails. We share up here, you know? Makes it a homier galaxy for everyone. Plus, if you don’t open source your assets, we quarantine your planet and any further attempts to holiday outside your system will be met with big, big cannons. I mean, giant. Huge. Still! It’s all right, isn’t it? Couple of bites and a slurp and you’re ready for anything. It’s like Goguenar’s Fourth General Unkillable Fact says: ‘Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience. All things, from evolution to municipal sanitation to marriage to the Big Bang to diplomacy to the distribution of shops in urban centers, trend toward the most convenient outcome for the greatest number of lazy bastards, because the inconvenient stuff ends up alone without any friends and a foot growing out of their head and who has the time?’ ”
“This is disgusting,” Oort Ultraviolet snorted.
“This is amazing,” Dess whispered. “Much less invasive than Heathrow customs, anyway.”
Oort’s microwave chimed. Their docking procedures had finished defrosting. A cheerful blue popcorn kernel made of asterisks signaled the completion of the decompression cycle.
“You know I’d never hurt you,” Mira’s throaty voice came pouring out of that dark alien beak.
“Hey,” said Oort quietly. “Don’t. You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what, baby?”
“Talk like Mira. Or Lila. Or my dad or Dess’s nan or anyone.”
“Do you not enjoy it? Does it not put you at ease?”
“No. Just be normal. Just be yourself. Just be . . . whatever passes for an ordinary sort of bloke where you come from. Like me, see? Decibel can swan about, and, well, if you’d ever met her, Mira could make eyes at you and turn you to jelly in an instant, but I’m just Omar. I like music and football and a laugh, and half the reason the band lasted as long as it did is that I’m so easy to get along with that those two only ever had each other to pick on. It’s fine, we don’t need to be at ease. This isn’t an at ease kind of gig. And honestly, it’s really, really creepy.”
The bird’s fishy eyes narrowed. “You don’t really like football. I can see it in your cerebral structure.”
“But I want to like it, and that’s just as good in the end. Just . . . be the roadrunner. Be like me, and when he starts up being Dess again, which he will, you and I can go smoke a ciggy together and make fun of his accent. Deal?”
“Deal, Mr. Ultraviolet.”
The air lock released, a seven-foot-tall blue bird punched a gold-plated starfish, and Decibel Jones and the last of the Absolute Zeros stepped from obscurity onto the biggest stage in the universe.
16.
I Am a Real Boy
The nineteenth Metagalactic Grand Prix was held on Pallulle, the Smaragdi homeworld.
It was the first time a species who did not fight in the war, on account of their having been minding their own business at the time, toddling about with endearing hesitance on their own moons, and not bothering anyone except the moon-bears, attempted to sing their way into the upper echelons of galactic society.
Contrary to popular opinion concerning the desirability of getting in early on Alpha Centauri real estate development, Pallulle is the nearest planet to Earth that wouldn’t entirely murder any human being who set foot on it. At the very least, you’d have time to get a nice shark’s heart sausage in at one of Blue Ruutu’s finer bistros before the low-gravity, high-pressure atmosphere and the global, rather well-founded cynicism on the subject of strangers started rather dramatically forcing blood out of the ends of your hair. Some forty light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius, Pallulle revolves around an ultracool blue dwarf star that humans have designated TRAPPIST-1. The Smaragdi, however, call their pale, minimalist sun Lagom, a word that means, in their exceedingly specific language: “a spouse who habitually withholds affection but comes through with a squeeze when you really need them and always pays the bills on time.” Pallulle itself means: “the parent who gives and gives, but it is never enough for their ungrateful children, who will probably never amount to anything, anyway.”
Among the Smaragdi, self-deprecation has been refined into an art. You have not truly embraced the possibilities of intergalactic life until you have awkwardly nibbled vapor-cheese and drunk platinum wine at a stand-up modesty show on Pallulle. It is a cold crystal place covered in cold crystal oceans and warm crystal people.
At least it was.
Because Lagom is never much in the mood for the whole sensually nurturing solar warmth gig, Pallulle is a semihollow world. If you were to stand on the opal-crusted peak of Mt. Ailinin, far from the lights of the great Smaragdi cities, and look into the sky, you would see, just before your eyelashes started bleeding, what the ancient Smaragdi were doing while life on Earth was just sorting out whether two cells could ever really be better than one. Even the Alunizar were astonished when they careened drunkenly into this little world of grotesque monsters surrounded by engineering’s answer to the Sistine Chapel. (Unfortunately for them, the Smaragdi seemed to have been created in a lab for the express purpose of scaring the salt water out of an Alunizar. A Smaragdin looks very much as though someone built the most unnecessarily elaborate set of eighteenth-century Spanish plate armor out of bleached ivory and quartz, gave it a head of blue-white hair like a 1970s shampoo commercial, stretched the whole thing out to nine or ten feet like particularly stern and judgmental taffy, then thought it might be a bit intimidating and painted a bit of pastel green and lavender on the joint-blades for a more festive spring look. The overall effect would seem quite beautiful and haunting to a human, but to a short, Technicolor invertebrate Alunizar, they look like the devil’s own sk
eleton.)
Pallulle is snugly encased in Old Ruutu’s Bindle: a crosshatched topiary of translucent solar rods designed by the classical poet-engineer Old Ruutu to catch Lagom’s emotionally unavailable light, beef it up a bit, and direct it usefully to the most inhabited parts of the surface. The glaciated surface of Pallulle was suddenly polka-dotted with pools of Ruutu-blessed artificial alpine climate full of silver ferns, blue-gray orchards heavy with gin-fruit, and liquid oceans in which the neon-blooded suflet shark swims free. The name of Old Ruutu is, among the Smaragdi, spoken with an awe equivalent to Jesus Christ and Nikola Tesla borrowing Buddha’s tandem bicycle for a quick Sunday ride through Shakespeare’s back garden. On Activation Day, every city on Pallulle scrambled to rename itself after him, which caused a great deal of confusion, upset feelings, cancelled family reunions, Ruutu absolutely forbidding anyone to do any such stupid thing as it was no big deal, I was up there anyway, might as well do a spot of DIY while I’ve still got my health, you know if you have someone in they’ll only rip you off, and besides, you’d all do the same for me, anyway it’s a bit rubbish, I was in a rush, two regional wars, and a small but feisty economic crisis until it was decided that everyone was pretty, they all loved the old man equally, and there was quite enough Ruutu to go around and the mapmakers would just have to seek out anxiety medication. Hence, on Pallulle, you will find no London, Paris, Vlimeux, or Alun, but only Blue Ruutu, White Ruutu, Little Ruutu, New Ruutu, Ruutu-by-the-Sea, Dirty Ruutu, Brokedown Ruutu, Backwoods Ruutu, and so on and so forth.
Controversially, the twenty-second Metagalactic Grand Prix was held in Dirty Ruutu, the Smaragdi answer to Prague—once the capital of a great empire, torn apart by war, religion, vanished industry, and tourists who know in their hearts that it’s not wrong to get so phenomenally plastered that you punch a police horse because everyone knows horses vote Tory, just so long as you do it while ignoring some of the most sublime architecture in the universe. The general idea was that, whether or not the Yurtmak turned out to be sentient, it would be rather poor form to rub their alleged noses in the cosmopolitan delights of Blue Ruutu and then send them home full of envy and the slow, wistful poisoning of a farmboy’s dissatisfaction with his pigs after he has seen palaces. Even if they ended up having to roast the poor things shortly afterward, it just didn’t seem very nice.
No one expected much of anything out of the Yurtmak in the way of danceable pop hits. The Utorak had discovered their world by accident and immediately wished they hadn’t. The first officer on a deep-space fishing boat, hunting the vast, delicious, and deadly zabok crabs that scuttled through the galaxy suckling at hidden tide pools of dark matter, picked up the faint broadcast of what their xenothropologist surmised was a folk festival emanating from a little planet by the name of Ynt. Had the Utorak then required all zabok trawlers to carry accredited translators on board as they do now, the poor Utorak commander would have known right away that the folk festival in question was the Yurtmak Super Murderderby 9000 and very likely turned right around and headed toward the safer embraces of giant dark-matter crabs in the lonely depths of the void. The Yurtmak were clownishly violent, disgusting to look at, in possession of a language that sounded like someone enthusiastically smashing pots and pans together in a hot tar pit, and hadn’t even gotten around to inventing agriculture before somehow, bafflingly, managing spaceflight. They were exactly the sort of species the Sentience Wars had raged across the known cosmos to prevent from getting too big for their interstellar trousers.
But rules are rules. No blowing up the horrifying deathgoblins next door without a bit of song and dance first.
The Sziv won that year. Being a group intelligence comprised of hot pink algae genetically fused with nanocomputational spores, the Sziv never formed rock bands per se. They sent the same supergroup to the Grand Prix every year, some 60 percent of their species, decanted into artful vases and simply called Us. They sang by pheromone, a crescendo of infectious hormones that maddened the mating instincts of every species in the Dirty Ruutu Flophouse and Grill—a vast, glittering, state-of-the-art performance arena seating over one hundred thousand—until the slightest whisper sounded like a techno-erotic laser light show of the soul, at which point Us spilled out of their vases in an undulating rosy wave, spun up into a towering spiral of velvet sparkling life, and sang an ancient Sziv folk ballad called “Love Is Easy When You’re a Hive Mind” coupled with a thumping, thrusting, subwoofer-slaughtering beat, dispersing on the downbeat, slamming back into their magenta spire on the upbeat, and bringing the house all the way down.
Iatagan Yoomp, Murderderby champion and celebrated torch singer, walked across the spotless frozen floor of the Flophouse dressed in a traditional Yurtmak lung-gown, her dripping, pustulant face hidden beneath a black veil so long, it wrapped twice around the stage. She held something in her arms. The lights turned red and heavy and dim. A slow drum pulsed. Iatagan tore open the veil with her claws and revealed her instrument: the skeleton of her mate, cleaned and polished and hollowed so that when she wrapped her arms around him and tenderly kissed his fangs, her breath filled up his bones and emerged from his rib cage as a savage and anguished melody called “Death Is a Wish Your Fists Make.” It’s not what you think, went the chorus, don’t be afraid. To love is to slaughter, to slaughter is to love, but by the rocks below and the rocks above, you don’t do either one unless the other guy’s really into it.
At the conclusion of the song, which went on to become a popular choice for wedding DJs, Iatagan set herself on fire and burned to death in front of everyone with a smile on her face, waving delightedly to her fans as the audience threw flowers into her pyre and watched them sizzle up into the heavens.
The judging was not quick. A hundred thousand dinners were ordered in from neighboring Ruutus. In the early hours of the next morning, it was decided, by a very slim margin, that Iatagan Yoomp and all her people were undeniably alive, intelligent, and possessed of a complex inner life, especially since the Utorak had really phoned it in that year with the entirely forgettable “Shall I Compare Thee to a Dark-Matter Crab?” Yet, if not for Iatagan Yoomp’s sacrifice, the galaxy’s children would never have grown up under the not-terribly-gentle ministrations of Goguenar Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts, the twentieth of which, penned for the occasion of the twenty-third Grand Prix on Ynt, is: No one is ever really satisfied with what they’ve got, look at that skinny bastard Old Ruutu, he heated up his whole planet like a leftover takeaway, and he still wasn’t really that happy, if you ask me. People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most.
Before and after, they’re all monsters.
17.
Every Way That I Can
“Hi! Hi! HiHiHulloHi!”
Oort St. Ultraviolet and Decibel Jones, individually and collectively, assumed the time-traveling red panda called Öö leaped up as they boarded, made a high-pitched squealing noise, and careened over backward waving his paws in the air because he was just so feverishly excited to meet them. However, among the Keshet, this is a cool, eminently diplomatic, even standoffish greeting. Down to the soles of its cells, a Keshet is a constant atomic, temporal, and emotional ball-pit into which an infinite army of cake-addled toddlers jumps, over and over, and it is every single one of their birthdays, forever.
And he wasn’t happy to see them at all.
“Öö! ÖöÖöÖö is me and you are them and we are all—but whoooooooa waitwaitstopwait are you not Yoko Ono? Whatwhathowwhat the fuck, Al? I gave you a picture of her and everything! Do all primates still look the samesameidenticalsame to you? We practiced, Al! We practiced all the way here! It was so boring!”
“Al?” Dess asked. “You’re not Al. Al runs a chip shop on the corner. Al fixes the furnace. You’re the roadrunner.”
“That’s what you call me, and look, Dess, I like you a lot, but I’ve nibbled heaps of memories in the last twenty-four hours so I know what a Looney Tunes is, and frankly
, I think it’s a bit insensitive. Öö’s time is far too valuable and volatile to dribble it away calling me Altonaut Who Runs Faster Than Wisdom Down the Milk Road, but at least he uses part of my actual name, because that’s respect, isn’t it?”
“Sorry,” mumbled Decibel.
“Sorry,” Oort Ultraviolet repeated with a shrug.
“Nononoyesyesno, I love it, it’s perfect, farwayfar better than Al. We received the dogandbirdandbombandcanyon show in the big radio wave haul off this world. It was excellentgreatexcellentallright. A song of nihilism and the hopelessness of desire. At first we thought it was such an obvious allegory for the war that we ignored it. Must be one of us, youknowyeahyouknowno? Some pirate cartoon channel out of Octave space junking up the signal. Nope. Coincidencechancechancefatechance. An echo in the great unconscious. I hate that. Makes my job harder. But it’s perfectperfectcorrect—that’s you, Al, you’re the roadrunner! I’m gonna call you that from now on. I’ll alert the other Keshet when I get back into the continuity. They won’t be happy about Yoko Ono, though.”
“It seems Mrs. Ono died, Öö,” the great blue fish-flamingo went on, in what Dess could only assume was her own voice. Or perhaps one of the hyperactive red panda’s school friends. He wondered, suddenly, if it was very tough to keep it all straight, to skim for the right voice every time you talked to someone. Decibel Jones rather wished he could scrape off the top of an audience’s memory and sing however the fuck they wanted him to sing. He’d supposed he’d known how, once. Once. “Very sorry, I did try. And I can tell them apart! They all have different thumbnails, it turns out. You didn’t tell me that. And you told me Yoko Ono was alive. That’s two major stuff-ups. If you’d use even one of those day planners I keep buying you, we wouldn’t keep having these embarrassing mistakes.”