“Mr. Jalo, I’m with MI5, and you’ll need to come with me at once.”
“MI6, Mr. Jalo, and this is my jurisdiction, Evans, so fuck off. Overseas intelligence. Very, very overseas, I should say.”
“The intelligence may be foreign, but Danesh here is quite domestic, Taylor, which is MI5’s territory, so it’s you who’ll be fucking off, I’m afraid. Better luck next invasion.”
“Now, Danny, my lad, don’t let these two confuse you. Metropolitan Police Antiterrorism Squad, at your service. Get in the car, there’s a good fellow.”
“Stand down, Davies, you’re relieved. You can all stand down. Downing Street calling, Mr. Jalo. The Prime Minister wants you.”
“Well, I can’t say I haven’t given it the occasional thought—the PM’s a bit of all right,” Dess managed to quip. If he lost everything else, pride, priapism, and producer credit, Decibel Jones would never, never give up his swagger.
“That’s enough of that, sir. Now, I’m to bring you to COBRA to meet with the emergency committee, of which the Prime Minister is chair, so there must be some manner of mix-up, but it’ll all sort out at Whitehall.”
“Son, I’m your liaison to the United Nations, it’s imperative that I take you into protective custody. This clearly isn’t a UK op, you asshats. Go have a cup of tea or whatever it is you all do while the big boys are talking.”
“The Foreign and Commonwealth Office kindly invites you to eat a shit, Yank. He’s ours and you know it. We’ll let you know if anybody descends from the heavens asking for Taylor Swift, won’t we, lads?”
The caws of the authoritarian brood started coming thicker and faster, until Decibel felt vomit rising again. He knew better than to struggle when in the grip of bureaucracy, but he couldn’t breathe. The smell of dry-cleaned blazers and recently-signed-in-triplicate forms was overpowering. Where was a bloody damned giant space flamingo when you needed one?
“SAS, Jalo, on your feet, look lively, fall in.”
“Home Office, Danesh, come along now.”
“UKSA, sir, you’ll want to follow me.”
“GCHQ, Mr. J, on you get.”
“OAA, Dan, let’s get a move on, shall we?”
“Wait, what the hell’s an OAA?” yelled the Prime Minister’s secretary from the back of the rookery.
“Office of Alien Affairs. We’re new.” The OAA agent checked his watch. “In . . . two and a half minutes, it’ll be the ninety-minute anniversary of our founding.”
“Daily Mail, Dess, let’s get you away from these jolly jackboots and down to the newsroom on the double-quick. The people have a right to know what kind of person is going to represent them! Now, be honest, mate, don’t you think the first UK ambassador to another world ought to be a bit more, I don’t know, English?”
Decibel yanked his overmistered arm out of the reporter’s skinny talons. “Oh, go eat an entire bucket of co—”
“Beg pardon, Mr. Jones—I’m a great fan of your work, by the way, really, I’ve set my employer’s ringtone to ‘Terms of Service’ for years. I’ve been charged by the Queen to convey you directly to Her Majesty’s Audience Room. I believe you’ll find that Head of State trumps these earnest chaps any way you look at it. Right this way, sir.”
Decibel Jones sighed and shook his head. Today was fired. Today was well and truly sacked. Today could, in point of fact, fuck all the way off. “Well, ‘Terms of Service’ is just about the only song on that album I didn’t write, so what a fantastic job you’ve done with your sucking up. Full marks.”
There were too many of them. Decibel pinballed through the parliament of men in black, from manful grip to manful grip, until he just toppled into a car the way he used to when his manager had to beat off a gauntlet of handsy fans to get him to his next gig. They were screeching down a side road in reverse before he even figured out what car had got him in the end.
The glitterpunk glamrock messiah peered across the shadowy expanse of the official vehicle of Decibel Jones’s Grand Tour of Government Agencies. It was a kind of munted limousine, with a cavernous rear arranged so that the two passenger benches faced each other. Four oversize, oddly insectoid sunglass lenses reflected the sunlight flitting through tinted windows.
“Afternoon, gents,” Dess said, and hoped to Christ his voice wasn’t actually shaking as much as it felt like it was.
Silence. Cool, unfeeling, taxpayer-funded silence.
“That arse from the Daily Mail had a point, Mr. Price,” one of the mystery men said finally.
“Indeed he did, Mr. Brown,” the other said with a nod. “It’s quite a little bit of egg on the face of the Commonwealth. Of the three of them, he’s the only one actually born here, and he’s what . . . Pakistani-Nigerian on his dad’s side and Welsh-Swedish on the matrilineal? How does that even get past the first date? The girl was some sort of Japanese/Franco-Jewish muddle from Dublin by way of sodding Warsaw, but I gather she’s out of the picture, and the other chap is a God-and-all-the-angels-save us refugee Turk. Of course, it’s unclear whether they actually want his backing band, but I can’t imagine they crossed the void of space on the strength of his solo album. Why our new friends couldn’t have opted for a nice English band instead of this porridge of regrettably issued work visas, I’ll never know.”
“We are English, you tit,” Decibel said with a sigh, glancing at his fingernails, which were much in need of a filing. He was used to this sort of thing. He was used to this sort of thing by the time he was twelve. He’d always had the kind of face that made people squint and try to think of a polite way to say, Just what exactly are you, kid? As though he might legitimately answer rhinoceros or sea-cow or Aldebaran. And that bit of genetic luck had saved him more than once. If they couldn’t tell, they couldn’t bring themselves to do anything about it. Usually. “So was my nan, if you want to have a squabble about it. Not that that stopped you lot. Some might say we were a pretty nice spread of humanity between the three of us. Two, now, but still covering a lot of territory. Rather ideal, if you ask me.”
His escorts continued to ignore him. He was used to that, too. Ten million teenagers once screaming your name never meant one piddly thing to the authorities when you dressed like he did.
“It’s certainly not a good look on us. Is he gay as well? Good Lord.”
“I’m sitting right here,” Decibel sighed.
Mr. Brown flipped through a folder on the seat next to him and continued on as though Decibel Jones were no more than a cupholder. “It’s a bit unclear, but that’s the youth for you these days. There’s been the odd paternity suit, but none paid out. The three of them were always a bit suspect, if you ask me. All musicians are. Jones did say he was an ‘equal-opportunity bisexual’ in an interview right after Spacecrumpet hit, but his female fans got their feathers ruffled—or, rather, their parents did—at which point he said he was omnisexual, whatever that means, and then he seems to have made up a lot of words that give me a right headache. What in blazes is a ‘boyfrack’ other than an insult to the language?”
“Oort St. Ultraviolet shook loose all my combustibles,” Dess answered with the gentle smile of having lost something wonderful. He picked at a loose stitch in the leather of the door handle. “And every time we touched, it was an endless earthquake in a faultless land.”
Mr. Price gave him a disgusted look, which was impressive, given that his eyes were still invisible behind dark glasses. Correctly deployed, a curled lip can communicate entire essays on the effects of moral turpitude. “At least Mr. Calisșkan is married to someone the name of Justine in Cardiff with two kids.”
“I don’t see where you get off fretting about whether or not the end of the world is family-friendly. Do you really think the giant singing space aliens care? Every minute you spend sniffing around bedrooms past is a minute I’m not writing the song that saves the species, you know.” The words went all sour in Dess’s mouth, and for the first time in his life, he started to feel the black adrenaline of stage frig
ht coming on. It was an old arrogance, one that still fit him around the shoulders, but was far too tight in the middle. He hadn’t written a new song in four or five years, at least, and it hadn’t been a good one then. This was a joke, a very unfunny joke, and whether he was the setup or the punch line, he’d no idea.
Humanity was doomed.
At last, the men in black deigned to speak directly to him.
“Obviously, we have a team of the best songwriters working round-the-clock to create a winning track for you, so don’t worry about that.”
Dess stared resentfully out the window at the passing lampposts. “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought they wanted us,” he grumbled.
“Can’t leave this sort of thing to the people who thought Ultraponce would be a smash, can we? You’ll also be outfitted with the latest in audiovisual recording equipment. The emergency committee will run down the most important data to acquire, particularly in terms of propulsion, ship design, weaponry, cultural intel in terms of what that might tell us about their tactical predilections, once you arrive at Litost—which is, what, Price, sixty-five-hundred-odd light-years away? In the Eagle Nebula, we think. Now, unfortunately, we don’t actually have any way of transmitting information at that distance, so unless you can sort out how they do it, it’ll all be recorded and retrieved when you return.”
“That is entirely unnecessary,” said a new voice. Decibel Jones turned his head toward it, and his mind was genuinely delighted to see the roadrunner, or at least its projection, suddenly sitting calmly next to him in the back of the car. His body, however, reverted instantly to the primeval instinct to escape predators by jumping out of a closed shatterproof window into traffic. He bounced off of it and back into his seat, trying, halfway through, to look cool doing it and failing profoundly. The Esca’s proboscis-lantern was cramped by the low roof. It did not seem bothered.
The alien spoke in the voice of Her Majesty Queen Charlotte I, having skimmed the mind of Mr. Brown and Mr. Price and found there an abject longing to have lived at a time when being in service to a monarch granted a great deal more leeway in the pummeling-of-peasants department.
“The Grand Prix is the most-watched event in the galaxy, more popular even than Live from Aluno It’s an Exceedingly Censored Comedy Night and The Yurtmak Present: Super Murderderby 9000. It will be broadcast throughout the galaxy from the moment the human hopefuls land on Litost.”
The agents glanced at each other, which was the only expression of shock and horror at the sudden appearance of an alien in their car that their training allowed.
“Ma’am,” Mr. Brown began automatically, though the Queen was quite clearly not present. “I really don’t see why we don’t get a say in all this. Mightn’t we have an audition process of some sort? Or at least present you with a more contemporary list of our own favorites? I quite like the new Parental Guidance album. Have you heard them? Real spit-and-shine boys. British boys. We could be proud to have those lads stand up for England . . . er. For the planet. Really, how are we meant to put ‘gendersplat’ on a personnel intake form?”
The Esca turned its oceanic gaze on Decibel Jones. “We presumed it meant he was like us. The Esca possess four genders: male, female, fugue, and clef. The male inseminates the eggs of the female, the fugue then ingests the eggs and provides nutrients over the period of gestation, and the clef prepares the birthing grotto by producing a genetic bath of virile fluid, song, and information-rich light generated by its kuma.” The creature raised those large, gentle eyes to the lantern hanging from its head by a ribbon of glassy flesh. “At which point the infant offspring explode rather forcefully from the flutecage of the fugue and complete their development immersed in the aforementioned multisensory broth. It’s all rather beautiful, even if the fugue does not generally survive. I myself am clef and took ‘gendersplat’ to mean Mr. Jones was also. Is that not correct, Mr. Jones?”
“Close enough, darling,” Dess replied, shrugging, unable to beat back a deeply inappropriate bout of laughter. “What’s the pronoun on that?”
“You do not have the embouchure to pronounce it, more’s the pity. You may use ‘she’ for your convenience, as it contains both your limited binary terms. It is inaccurate, but English leaves us few options, as ‘it’ implies an inanimate object, which we are not, though you may be—that is, of course, the question at hand. Regardless, your input is neither needed, wanted, valued, nor at all welcome, gentlemen,” the Queen’s voice said out of the beak of a blue lantern-bird. “You may not believe it, but we are helping you. You are terribly lucky; another chaperone species might have actually let you audition your own performers. But the Esca are sensitive to the needs of lesser worlds, having only recently earned our place among the great ones. We have chosen. We have given you an advantage you may not deserve. Our ship awaits. Impatiently.”
“Wait,” Decibel Jones said with a sudden frantic horror. “Parental Guidance isn’t so bad, really. At least they churn out albums every year. At least they’re dependable. I’m . . .” He looked pleadingly into the eyes of the weird blue future, and even he had no idea whether he was pleading to be excused or to be told he was everything the world had ever needed. His voice dropped to a whisper. “You have to know I’m a has-been, if I’m even that. A barely-was, really. I’m . . . I’m the coyote. I make the most magnificent contraptions, and I always think this time, this time everyone will see how good I really am, but they only ever burn me up and leave me starving to death.”
The roadrunner nodded kindly. “Mr. Jones, would it help if I told you that somewhere out there, so far away that, if you left today, your great-great-grandchildren would die before they ever got to try the sandwiches at the first available fuel depot, on a world of lava and oceans of acid orbiting a double star, there is a crystal balloon filled with intelligent gas named Ursula who knows all the words to ‘Raggedy Dandy’?”
Decibel Jones’s matinee eyes went soft and round. He grinned.
“It does, actually.”
“I am gratified,” said the Esca.
Mr. Price and Mr. Brown were not finished. “This is rank madness, ma’am. Begging your pardon. You say we’ve got to sing better than some lizard-person from Planet X or we’ll be destroyed. Fine. You say we’ve got no choice. Fine. But we’re all human beings. We all stand to get blown to bits if this . . . this boy doesn’t pull it off!”
“I . . . I need my band, though,” Decibel said softly. He put his hand on the roadrunner’s spindly knee. His fingers slipped through the projection and onto the black leather seat beneath. He stared at that for a bit, feeling strongly as though he’d had his fill of oddity for the moment and knowing there was only more to come in the pudding. “What’s left of it, anyway. It’s no good without Oort. And Robert. Fuck, I left Robert! Everything happened so fast. You’ve got to get him back for me or the whole thing’s off.”
“We would never book Decibel Jones without the Zeros. As I’ve said, we aren’t monsters,” the roadrunner assured him. “I am afraid, however, that forgetting your coat does not constitute an emergency. Every world has coats. You will survive.”
“We are representatives of Her Majesty’s government and the office of the Prime Minister and Homo sapiens sapiens, goddammit,” spluttered the agents, half out of their seats though the car was still hurtling along. “We should be allowed to choose our own representatives. Our own warriors!”
“I am sorry, dear boys. But this is not a war. It is not about you, nor are you a part of it. Every child in the galaxy learns the truth about politics at their mother’s proboscis. For lo, does not Goguenar’s Third Unkillable Fact tell us: ‘Though any species on any dumb gobworld may develop sentience (the poor bastards), no government ever does’? Think on it, Mr. Brown. Mr. Price.”
Only meters from the Whitehall car park, Decibel Jones and the roadrunner dissolved into a very pretty swirl of magenta steam that smelled largely of fish and disdain.
9.
Diamond of Night
The first Metagalactic Grand Prix was held on the hot, vast, dark planet of Sagrada, homeworld of the Elakhon, the oldest functioning civilization in the galaxy. They were ancient already when the first Alunizar had the grand idea of opposable nubs. They were yelling at gravity to get off their lawn when the Keshet were nothing but a twinkle in the space-time continuum’s eye. In their smug middle age, they saw the fall of the great Empire of the Itrij, who started the whole trend of rings round planets just so that they could remember where they parked, and in the face of their glory, the Elakhon yawned.
Sagrada was chosen for the Grand Prix because, despite the Elakhon’s mind-smearingly advanced military, they had stayed neutral in the Sentience Wars, as they did in all wars if they could possibly manage it without looking like a bunch of trustafarian art school seniors who weren’t even going to bother with the group gallery show because, you know, the system, man. As Musmar the Night Manager, the greatest of all Elakhon rulers, wrote in his autobiography Who Moved My Invincible Doomsday Device? neutrality was always a much more delicate operation than war or peace. Neutrality without a respectable bulge of firepower in your pocket was as good as telling the universe, I am a helpless vulnerable fuzzy baby with a wet pink nose, please annihilate me at your earliest convenience. But declaring neutrality from beneath an elaborate pillow fort of prosperity, military dominance, and a diverse entertainment industry made you look as enticing to all your postwar neighbors as a rich kid’s lunch money. After all, it’s always the fancy house that keeps its lights off and won’t shell out for candy that’s first pillaged on Halloween. (You might think that Musmar the Night Manager could not possibly have known about the regional human holiday known as Halloween, but by one of those many curious coincidences that comprise the only real evidence for a divine and wobbling hand in the design of the universe, some variant of Halloween is celebrated by every sentient species in the galaxy. There is, it would appear, something about the achievement of sentience that immediately fills the afflicted with the longing to become something else, something brighter, something wilder and more fearsome and morbid and covered in felt and glue and glitter, to escape into the mask of some other impossible life, and to afterward consume vast quantities of sweets.)