“I think it’s time for a radical suggestion, Oort. It’s time to bring back Ultraponce.”
“NO.”
“What? I don’t care what the critics said. The critics are all back on Earth, praying they were wrong about us, and they were. The literal heavens opened, and magical beings descended and said we rocked. This is what those birds and pandas and whatnots want to hear! Ultraponce, King of Time and Space, shooting sadness in the face and snogging gods and lighting up the dark. It’s perfect! It was our opus!”
“It was your opus. That was the whole problem, Mr. Wee Tate of the Modern. Spacecrumpet was us, all of us, passing a napkin around at three a.m. and writing out a song line by line by line and humming together till something real came out; writing lyrics for one another’s tunes, and tunes for one another’s lyrics. It was communal, you prat. That was the point. Ultraponce was you. Just you. Inventing this bigger and better version of yourself in a superhero cape and making us your fucking backup band. Oh, no, it was better to have a unified voice, wasn’t it? But unified just meant your voice. Your words. Even though the second-biggest hit off Spacecrumpet was Mira’s, and you know it, and it just eats you alive inside, doesn’t it? You don’t get to do that again. You don’t get to ignore us. Me. We were on that list too. Remind me how well Decibel Jones has been doing without the Zeros?”
“I don’t know, Omar. How’s writing pie jingles coming? Having fun playing bass on some reality star’s vanity album, are we? Writing a jingle for a luxury-car commercial? You fucking sold out. At least I’m still trying. God, they always go straight at the end, don’t they? One way or the other or both. Excuse me for not sticking around your little one-man misery society.”
Capo’s ruff rippled. She flexed her claws and rolled over, paws splayed out, white belly to the ceiling, and soon enough she was snoring tinily. Eyes shut. Eyes open. Eyes shut again. Eyes open.
“C’mere, ya fuzzy redness. It’s late, and Dess and the roadrunner are at it again, and I miss my wife and I miss my kids, and I’ve got this feeling in my chest like I’m going to have a very undignified nonsentient freak-out if I don’t focus on something other than the fact that the chandelier is staring at me and there’s nothing outside but empty all the way down and everything I love is probably going to get burned to the ground. I’ll sing you some Yoko. I think I remember ‘Walking on Thin Ice,’ more or less.”
Mandatory Keshet Öö scrunched up his cream-colored face and wrinkled his black nose. Capo wanted to bite his cream-colored face and his black nose so badly her fangs itched. “That’s got Lennon all over it,” the uncatchable time-traveling prey animal said doubtfully.
“Yeah, well, so do I, mate.”
Oort St. Ultraviolet began to strum softly in the long dark between worlds, singing about a lake as big as the ocean.
“Do the scream, though,” the red panda insisted.
“Come on, that’s the worst bit. I’m more of a cerebral crooner than a screamer.”
“This is why we’re worriedworriedconcerneddubious about your sentience. How can you sing a song without a scream from the gut of your soulmindbodyheartsoulsoulsoul? What even is a songsonganthemchantsong without the screamy bit? Listen, this will be very awkwardweirdawkwardsociallytwisted for you, but I hatehatecan’tbear this part I want to skip pastpastfuturepresentpast it as fast as we can. Come on, let’s go fasterfasterfaster. We are always already friends. I have had this interaction with you twelve thousand six hundred and three times alreadybeforealreadyalready. I have already scrambledclimbedwiggled back and forth through every interaction we have ever had or ever will never have but might, every permutation of our mutual sympatheticemotionalempathicintellectualsnuggle experience, every outcomewinlosedrawnuclearannihilation of the Grand Prix, of your band, of your marriage, of every cell that makes up you and me and the future and the past. This is our first real conversation for you, but it is the billionth for me. I currently rank you fifthfifthfourthsixth of my favorite entities of all time. And I know you can do the screamy bit really really good. You can. I don’t know about your crooning. But I believe utterly in your screamy bits. Do the thing, Englishblokeman. Just onceoncetwiceinfinityforever.”
Oort St. Ultraviolet shut his eyes in the depths of space, took a deep breath, and screech-sang the ghost of Yoko Ono proud. He stopped short.
“Lennon got shot right after he recorded that, you know. Played away the afternoon, didn’t make it through the night. He was holding the final tape in his hand when he died.”
“I knowknowwentsaw. I was thereheretherethereeverywhereallthetimenowheretherehere.”
Oort’s eyes went dark and wet and pained. “You might have a point about us.”
“I know that, too.”
Whiskers quivered. Eyes shut. Eyes open again.
“I’m sorry, Oort. I’m so sorry. You’re right. You’re always so bloody right. I hate that about you. I was just . . . I was happy, then. For one stupid minute. I was happy. I was in the middle of things and I wanted to stay there, I wanted it to be like that forever, and Mira wanted to write all these Important Songs about What’s Going On and you wanted to do, like, concept jazz or something, and I felt it slipping away. I felt like I was the only one who understood that the only wall we could ever build against What’s Going On was the glitter and the shine and the synth and the knowing grin that never stops knowing. The show. Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down. You didn’t get it, I didn’t think you understood, you can’t sing a dirge to the reaper, he’s already heard them all. You gotta slaughter him with joy and a beat like the best of all possible shags, and because somehow, somehow, my nan’s cartoons always had it right and the Care Bear Stare is the most powerful force in the world, and I wanted to shine and you wanted to scream, and we just failed, we failed at both and neither because of me.”
“It’s always all about you, somehow. Even when you’re apologizing. It’s kind of impressive.”
“I’m trying.”
“So you were an arrogant, selfish arseface because ‘the world, man’? Or because me and Mira were just too thick to comprehend your genius?”
“God, you just do not crack, do you? What is this about? Why do you hate me so much? You used to love me. I still love you.”
“I don’t hate you. I just don’t like looking at you too much these days.”
“Fine. Don’t tell me. Don’t use your outside voice like a grownup. Go back to interfering with your panda friend. Is this because of Edinburgh? Do you really still hate me for that? Because I didn’t marry her?”
Capo watched her human set the device she was named for down carefully on a knob of black coral. He spoke very quietly and clearly. “Go fuck yourself, Funshine Bear. You’re the stupidest man I’ve ever known. Even if the rest of us are sentient . . . And you? Are decisively not. She didn’t want to marry you, you arse. Everything was on fire and all we could do was watch it happen on TV. It was a weird night. She got weird. It was a natural reaction.”
“None of us stopped her. None of us even saw her leave. You didn’t either. Neither did Lila. How is it still my fault?”
“It’s your fault because if you’d just told her you loved her, because you did, and not to cry, because that’s what a human being does, and that everything was going to be okay, because who knew, maybe it would have been. Instead of laughing in her face like a goddamned monster, she wouldn’t have had to go calm herself down by driving, and she would be here in this horrible, stupid, gorgeous, fucking spaceship with us, and the song would already be written and nothing bad would ever have happened to us. It’s your fault she’s dead, and I’ve never much felt like forgiving you so just leave me be.”
A long silence. Long enough to lie down in. Long enough to forget you ever knew how to talk.
“We’re not, you know.”
“Not w
hat, Oort?”
“Sentient. Nobody sentient would have let any of it happen. Would have let that night come, or go on after. I’m not either. Nobody sentient would have let Mira drive.”
Eyes slid closed. Eyes slitted open.
Decibel Jones lay in the dark alongside the roadrunner’s long, lithe, blue body. “Were you afraid, before the Grand Prix?”
“Very much.”
“I shouldn’t have come. I’ll just sludge it up. I’m already sludging it up. All I’ve ever wanted was to make something beautiful, and everything I touch just disappears in a poof of fuckery.” Capo wrinkled her muzzle in distaste. She was, as all cats, ultimately conservative on the subject of interspecies relations.
Decibel changed subjects like a drunk changing lanes. “Look, are we a thing? An item? I don’t know how this works.”
“I’m sorry. There is only one of you. Esca do not pair-bond. Perhaps if all the Zeros were here, we could manage a flock, but as it is, you and I are just friends with a short-term benefit plan. But I do like you. Even if you’re only plausibly sentient.”
A long silence.
“How long do Esca live?”
“If we’re careful, around three hundred years. I am one hundred twenty-one, if you’re asking. Not too old for you, I hope.”
“It’s . . . less. For us. A lot less.”
The Esca nuzzled him with her thick black beak. “That’s because your science is tiny and ridiculous and adorable like a plush toy.”
“You shouldn’t come round anymore. It’s not good for you. I’ll sludge you up too. I won’t mean to, but I will. Plus, I think it really bothers Oort’s cat.”
The great ultramarine fish-flamingo made a soft, awful sound with her rib cage. “I am having fun. Please do not make me go.”
“I loved Mira and she left. I loved Oort and . . . well, Oort seems fine. But I loved my parents and I loved my grandmother and I loved Lila Poole and I loved my life, and it’s all gone. Being around me is a high-risk enterprise.”
“ ‘Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between the stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all. Well, it isn’t, really, it isn’t at all, and believing and achieving is just something sportscasters say, but what are you gonna do, not die? Try it. I’ll wait.’ ”
“What?”
“It is Goguenar Gorecannon’s Seventh Unkillable Fact.”
“Who the hell is Goguenar Gorecannon?”
“I will bring you my copy,” the roadrunner said softly, and when she said it, she said it in Mira’s lilting, amused voice.
Capo hissed in her dreams, chasing red pandas and blue flamingos through an infinite suburban garden. Eyes squeezed tight. Eyes blinked open.
“Heya, Öö. Roadrunner.”
“Heya, Oort.”
“So . . . I think we have a melody. It’s . . . it’s good. Hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck good. It’s something.”
The red panda scratched his hind leg. “That’s nice.”
“And Dess has a plan for lyrics. It’s pretty clever, actually. We agreed we were never going to write the perfect song to encapsulate ourselves and our species and our hopes and dreams for the universe, for the future, for everything humanity ever has been or hopes to be, but that also has a great beat and summer pop chart potential. Using pyrotechnics we don’t have, costumes that somehow magically manifest without Mira, and a hope and a prayer that an Oortophone is compatible with the local voltage. It would have to be the greatest song ever written, and let’s be honest, even our best was never Mozart. So we’re going to copy off humanity’s homework. Every poem brilliant enough for us to remember without a Wi-Fi connection, every line, every immortal pentameter. We’ll string it together with a few prepositions and voilà: instant genius.”
The stranger that was so good at upsetting Capo’s human picked at something on his shoe. A mouse? A spider? Ah, no, nothing. Of course. Humans were the worst. The stranger spat out a few lines like he wanted to be anywhere else:
Quoth the Raven: to be or not to be
that is the question
whether I am the master of my fate
in form how like an angel
in apprehension how
to strive to seek to find and not to yield
and though I could not stop for Death
O love there is no other life than here
burning bright in the forest of the night
calling for our fiddlers three . . .
“I’m still working on the bridge.”
“Come on, Dess, give it something. A bit of the old oomph.”
The bird talked, which irritated Capo because she was reminded that she hadn’t yet eaten the bird. “It’s . . . a bit awkward. I’m not sure I follow the sentiment completely.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Decibel mumbled.
“Look, Dess, I’m sorry about last night. You don’t have to be like that. It’s me, remember? Your old Oort. Do the part with dulce et decorum est. Come on, it’s good, I promise. I wouldn’t tell you it was good if it wasn’t; that’s not me.”
Decibel Jones pushed a mauve anemone on the wall. A clear jelly-glass screen flickered on, half swallowed up by the coral hull.
“It’s not about that. I was a rotten little brat, all right? I was Mr. Devil of Tasmania. But it doesn’t matter now. I’ve been up all night while you were in Snoozepool. Doing reconnaissance. Research. I used to be good at that, you know. At a lot of things.”
Decibel Jones and Oort St. Ultraviolet watched on the screen as a century of Grand Prix performances began to play, one after the other. Glorious golden tubes of sea-flesh pulsing; huge-eyed, childlike black creatures chanting; some kind of horrific monster dancing with a skeleton; a pale thorny suit of armor blushing, somehow; out loud, seven graceful blue Esca sieving the wind through their bones. And there was the roadrunner, at the head of the band, projecting a waterbird made of light from her lantern; another Esca, dancing silently on another stage, somewhere else, somewhere far. Behind her, others moved like eggs floating in a marsh, waiting to become alive. When the lantern-bird opened her throat to sing, another light shone—light within light, light from its own lantern streamed out and shaped itself into glowing, glittering, horrifying ruins. Planetary ruins, the ruins of constellations. Alunizar ships crushed to death and drifting among the stars; the crystalline cities of the Keshet turned to rubble; the starlit weeping of the Yüz over the molten surface of their homeworld. And over all this stretched the wings of the Esca—their Esca, the roadrunner, the infrasound, vibratory, kindly voice of her people with their huge eyes begging for protection, their soft throats that anyone could cut at any moment. With her wings and piscine fronds and lantern light, the Esca lay herself over the ruins, gave up her body and her song to keep what was left from harm, took the terrible fire still raining down from the ultramarine biolamps of her backup dancers on the silken feathers and scales of her back until she was gone; she was gone and her voice vanished, but the galaxy remained. Civilization remained.
And then another song began, better than that one. Each song was so impossible, so perfect, so complex, so anatomically baffling, and they only grew more heartbreaking and piercing, the special effects more dazzling, the fire and the ice and the psychic manipulation of the audience, that both of them sobbed and sobbed as if they had lost every last thing in the world. Hours passed.
The humans watched in an agony of feeling, in a rictus of involuntary ecstasy and horror and grief and artistic nirvana, their bodies shuddering, their brains a sea of flaming blue emotion.
The cat watched with semi-mild interest. It was all right, she supposed, if you were into that sort of thing.
When it was over, Decibel Jones turned to the last Absolute Zero and said:
“So . . . I suppose what I’m saying is we’re all going to die.”
19.
> The War Is Not Over
The twenty-ninth Metagalactic Grand Prix was held on Fenek, the homeworld of the Voorpret Mutation.
It was the first time a member species of the Great Octave declined to participate, ruining everyone’s fun over an argument about sand.
It was the first time a performer died onstage as a result of a weaponized key change, bass drop, and/or costume detonation.
It was the first time a newly discovered species sang for their sentience, sang for the survival of their fittest, sang their externally stored hearts out, and failed.
And it was the first time anyone felt safe enough to hold the thing on Fenek.
It was a very complicated year.
There was absolutely nothing unusual about Fenek. It was the avatar of the average, the model of the median, a beautifully boilerplate world. It orbited an even-tempered, comfortably middle-class yellow sun at a respectful distance, boasted a galactic biodiversity rating of exactly meh, and kept its gravity to a considerate low roar, except on weekends. Before the Voorpret, Fenek’s best shot at a sentient species was something not unlike an Earth sparrow the size of an underachieving mountain gorilla, with five eyes and dull, brown feathers and dull, brown minds that very nearly made it all the way up to inventing the participle before everything went tails-up. It was the planetary equivalent of the girl next door with the nice personality whose face you instantly forget when you move away to college, destined from birth to have a house with beige carpeting, 2.5 moons, and a casual home business selling scented candles to people who hate scented candles.
Or at least it was, before the zombie apocalypse.
Now Fenek is a very unusual world indeed. The Voorpret have been at work for a long, long time, tinkering and pottering and DIY-ing and messing about with the landscaping, and they’ve almost got the place just the way they always wanted it, their dreamworld, every plank in place. Fenek has become a vast necropolis, a massive cemetery extending from pole to pole, around the equator, carpeting all nine continents, the ice caps and the seafloor with tombs and mausoleums and graves and towering urns like high-rise apartment buildings. It is a planet to make the dreariest goth giddy with joy and, if not for the Voorpret themselves, would be a lucrative tourist destination for statuary and monument enthusiasts, of which there are more than you might think.