Space Opera Read online

  But when it finally did happen, the alien invasion turned out to be much more like Mr. Looney of the Tunes than Mr. Ridley of the Scott.

  Point to Nani.

  They landed, if it could be called a landing, in everyone’s lounge rooms at once at two in the afternoon on a Thursday in late April. One minute the entire planet was planet-ing along, making the best of things, frying eggs or watching Countdown or playing repetitive endorphin-slurping games or whatnot on various devices, and the next there was a seven-foot-tall ultramarine half-flamingo, half-anglerfish thing standing awkwardly on the good rug. Crystal-crusted bones showed through its feathery chest, and a wet, gelatinous jade flower wobbled on its head like an old woman headed off to church. It stared at every person in the world, intimately and individually, out of big, dark, fringed eyes sparkling with points of pale light, eyes as full of unnameable yearning and vulnerability as any Disney princess’s. Those not in possession of lounge rooms encountered the newcomer in whatever places were most familiar and intimate to them. Anyone at work had quite a surprise waiting in the break room. Some, absorbed in accounts payable or receivable, absentmindedly hung their suit jackets up on its towering hat rack of a head; its long greenish-ivory neck flushed pink with embarrassment. A slender, glassy proboscis arced up from the center of its avian skull until the weight of the round luminous lamp at its tip bent the whole thing down quail-style between those trusting eyes, where it flickered nervously, its fragile-looking legs poised like a ballet dancer about to give the Giselle of her life. But every Homo sapiens sapiens in the biosphere, at that moment, came face-to-face with the feathered beyond.

  Decibel Jones groaned.

  He tried to open his eyes. Unfortunately, he hadn’t washed his face before collapsing into a bitter heap of despair, and the maquillage from last night’s gig at some top-shelf forty-something’s birthday to-do had solidified between his eyelashes into a cement composed entirely of shame and fuchsia glitter. Nothing for it. Eyes will do what eyes will do. Back to bed, that was the thing. Or back to floor. Floor had always been a good friend. Yet Dess had that primitive mammalian sense that he was being watched, somehow, and not in the way he liked to be. Not by adoring crowds of thousands, but by one singularly focused creature in the shadows beyond the watering hole, a creature not like himself, a creature much faster, stronger, and hungrier than he had ever been in all his days of running down nothing more wily than a Korean-fusion food truck. He clawed the smears of last night’s sparkles from his eyelashes and sat up, upsetting several bottles of cream sherry and rosé and one of those shiny metallic pet rocks with brand reboots and limited edition colors that were all the moronic rage at the moment. His looked something like a guava from the future. Oort always said he drank like a pensioner.

  “The later the worm the farther from the bird,” said the seven-foot-tall alien lantern-fish-flamingo softly. Its voice tiptoed around the attic room. “According to me, you will spend your whole Danesh-life sleeping not peeping. You see, while you were in Snoozepool, I was making a rhyme about your nature because you are lazyful and I am not. Most Efficient Nani makes proverbials and tea both at the same time and wins gold for England.”

  Decibel Jones began to cry.

  It wasn’t that his head felt like someone had smashed it in with a cricket bat wrapped in raw rancid bacon, though it did. It wasn’t that the alien was speaking in his grandmother’s voice, though it was, a gesture Dess would later decide showed real effort. It had nothing to do with the words. Everyone cried when the creature first spoke to them. No, not cried. They wept. They wept like the cavemen of Lascaux suddenly transported into the Sistine Chapel just in time for a live performance of Phantom of the Opera as sung by Tolkien’s elves. Their senses simply were not built for this, weren’t meant to come anywhere near this kind of velvet-barreled sensory shotgun, loaded for bear. Humanity wept in baffled, unspeakable, religious awe. They fell on their faces; they forgot to breathe. The sound of the alien’s voice hit their ears like every ecstatic moment, every compassionate instinct, and every profound sorrow all wrapped up in a ballad about protecting the beautiful and innocent and fragile from a darkness full of teeth. To each of seven billion humans, it was as though they were hearing, not an alien greet their species for the first time, but their favorite children and their ailing parents singing a duet about how much and how desperately they needed them.

  In that first moment of the new age, humanity would have happily annihilated itself rather than let the big blue bird in their lounge rooms come to the slightest harm.

  “Please do not be distressed,” continued the creature in a somewhat less resonant voice. “I can readily speak in whatever manner results in the most manageable level of ontological crisis for you. Some crisis is to be expected, given the circumstances. I chose a dialect you associate with warmth and safety, but I have obviously overshot my mark. I will fish inside the wetlands of your memory for another.” The anglerfish-flamingo’s deep, lovely eyes filmed over with a reptilian translucent eyelid. It seemed very troubled by the quality of the fish in Decibel’s swampy head. Finally, the eyelid retracted. The alien opened its dark beak and bonged out five loud, psyche-rattling, but tremendously familiar musical notes into the sad, empty flat.

  “What the blithering hell did you do to yourself last night, Dess?” mumbled the former greatest rock star in the world as he came out of his awestruck daze to find his forehead stuck prayerfully to the filthy floor. If he’d have known company was coming round, he would’ve tidied up.

  The alien trumpeted out the same five notes again. It seemed to be enjoying itself.

  “Got to call Dr. Collins,” Decibel coughed out. “Got to tell her there’s a blue flamingo in my flat quoting my nan and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She’ll have a pill for that. Always does, old girl. She’s a good egg. She’s no Lila, but her egg, it is emphatically good.”

  The alien’s endless eyes filmed over again. The light dangling over its thick, curved beak dimmed and brightened fitfully. Finally, it began to sing, skipping back and forth between voices, voices Dess knew like his own, voices speckled with static from the pocket radio he’d saved up for when he was eight:

  “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to travel the world and the seven seas everyone’s looking for London calling from outer space I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face now all the young dudes carry the news red gold and green gunpowder and gelatin dynamite with a laser beam two thousand zero zero party over, oops, out of time you can watch the humans trying to run to all tomorrow’s parties but there is nothing more than this starman waiting in the sky he’d love to come and meet us but tonight Mr. Kite is topping the biiiiilllll . . .” The interstellar flamingo trailed off, lifting its long beak like a wolf howling. Then it added quietly: “And the colored birds go doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo . . .” It paused. “Is this timbre and syntactical style acceptable, Mr. Jones? Do you feel secure and at ease and fully able to process what is happening to you? The remaining representations of extraspecies contact in your psyche are . . . much more aggressive, but I can try if that is what you need to relax. However, I should warn you that I do not feel comfortable with them, as I do not personally identify as a predator. I eat plankton.”

  “If you could turn down the fortissimo just a tick, that would be grand.” Decibel tried to get up and abandoned that idea right away. “Hand me that water, will you? There’s a love. There’s a good figment of my imagination. Here, Figgy, Figgy, Figgy.”

  The ultramarine being’s gaze flicked over toward a plastic bottle with an inch or two of water still going stale in it. It shifted its weight awkwardly on those long, long reedy legs, legs that looked totally incapable of supporting its weight, and cleared its long throat. The Jell-O flower fascinator on the side of its head drooped. The bioluminescent lantern hanging down from its proboscis flickered with watery light. The light seemed to swell at the tip of the bulb, like a raindrop about t
o fall. The glow swirled, pregnant, a thousand and one shades of blue. The creature shifted its weight from one impossibly slender blown-glass leg to the other. Its clawed foot left something in the thin, cheap carpet, something alive, a fuzz of silver spores, spreading out from its footprint in an unsettling imitation of henna patterns. A flurry of loose fibers stuck to the dark talons like dandelion seeds.

  And Danesh could smell it.

  He could hear it breathing and feel an incredible heat pouring off of it, and he could smell it. A sopping, salt-green-sweet smell, like sugar and seaweed baking in an oven.

  “Come on, up you get, time to get your tail nailed on,” that Thing of Thing-World said in the raspy-soft cigarettes-and-cynicism alto of Mira Wonderful Star.

  “Mushy, mushy, Wonderful,” Jones said automatically, before he could stop himself. Greeting Mira like he always had, because he’d been so delighted with the way she answered the phone, as delighted as if she had invented it herself and no one else in the world had ever said moshi moshi instead of “hello” before.

  “Mushy, mushy, Dess.”

  Mira’s lovely platinum-plated voice hung in garlands around his flat like they were still kids with toy ambitions and nothing bad had happened to any of them yet, and that, finally, was more than Jones could take.

  “What the fuck?” he screamed, scrambling away from the impossibility of what was happening to him until his back came up against the wall with a hard thud. “What is going on?”

  The outer space abomination gave up and snapped irritably: “I’m afraid we really must be moving along. The situation has already been successfully explained to 64.1 percent of your population, whereas you and I are making very little progress. I am not angry, only disappointed. All our precontact simulations categorized you as a Down-to-Clown Unflappable Guy Who Can Handle This Sort of Thing No Problem with a high probability of Being Actually into It All the Way.”

  Dess rubbed his eyes and popped his knuckles against his temple while the big blue bird did its trick with the eye-film again. “Listen, I’m just . . . I’m just having a bit of a rough go of it today, what with the preponderance of gin that happened to me last night and being a useless lump and serving no further purpose to anyone anywhere and being visited by the Flamingo of Christmas Future way before the bell strikes normalcy. I need a minute. I’ll be into anything you want after breakfast and a coffee and serious medication, okay?”

  The beautiful beast took a deep breath of Croydon air. When it spoke again, it sounded exactly like a waitress Decibel had met a thousand years ago, on the star-spangled leg of the Glampire Planet Tour. His first contact with an American in her native habitat. Cleveland, midnight, the Blue Lite Diner. The alleged food should’ve been reported to The Hague, but the waitress had been pretty in a dairy country sort of way: red hair, pink lip gloss, a lot going on up top. RUBY, her name tag had read, and Ruby’d been the most aggressively, positively militantly friendly person he’d ever met. She’d touched their shoulders affectionately while she took their order, called Dess “honey,” “sweetheart,” and worse, and most horrid of all, she seemed to genuinely care how he was getting along with his jet lag. Afterward, he’d felt as though he’d been run over by a semitruck full of high-fructose corn syrup, giggles, and goodwill toward one’s fellow man. It had all been deeply off-putting. And though they toured there for three months straight, his first impression of the colonies was never proven wrong: Americans all acted like they were trying to pretend they hadn’t just chased a fistful of ecstasy with a noseful of coke to save themselves from a police officer only they could see.

  And now the big blue bird was trying Ruby’s voice on like a dress six sizes too small.

  “Hello there, cutie! My name is Altonaut Who Runs Faster Than Wisdom Along the Milk Road, fourteenth Lyric of the Aaba Verse, and I’ll be your galactic liaison this afternoon! Can I tell you about our specials? As our appetizer tonight, we’ve got a totally scrumptious annihilation of everything you ever thought was true served on a bed of mashed anthropocentrism! My species’ name is so rich and thick and ooey-gooey, you couldn’t possibly get your adorable little noisehole around it, so just call us the Esca and we’ll get along just fine! Fresh off the griddle and drenched in a delicate diplomatic glaze, the Esca have shipped in all the way from Bataqliq, a yummy little world of semiaquatic goodness served alongside a medium-rare red giant star in the constellation you call Cetus. Now, sweetie, I know trying new things is scary, but you just gotta give us a try! And for dessert, we’ve prepared a positively decadent transgalactic civilization while you were spending happy hour chowing down on a deep-fried sampler platter of total and complete ignorance. Well, sorry, darling, but happy hour is over and the drinks are all full-menu price. Luckily, you’ve got a tall glass of me to put a little courage in ya. And, as I come with a free slice of information vital to the survival of your species, you pretty much can’t afford not to clean your plate.” The leggy blue monster lifted its beak and trumpeted cheerfully. “Congratulations! You are the sentient galaxy’s ten thousandth customer!”

  “Road Runner,” mumbled the ultimate glamgrind messiah of the late 2010s, still not entirely amenable to having this conversation that would not stop having him.

  “I’m sorry, but I need more grammatical context to understand your statement,” the creature’s voice said, abruptly abandoning its waitress’s uniform. It blossomed all over again into cosmic grief at the ultimate impossibility of communication between two living beings.

  “Your name, what you just said.” Dess spoke more clearly this time, forcing back the vomit that wanted so badly to add itself to the other stains on his floor. “Altonaut Who Runs Faster Than . . . Faster Than . . . urk.”

  “Faster Than Wisdom Along the Milk Road, yes indeedy, quick ’n’ speedy!” Ruby the American Waitress and Emissary of the Great Galactic Empires was back. “It’s a family name, honeybuns. Don’t make fun, now. It’s not nice.”

  “You’re the Road Runner. Meep, meep.” He began to laugh harder than he’d wept. “Point to Nani,” he choked out between bouts of laughter. Finally, he opened his eyes wide and spread his fingers into a jazzy shimmy. If only he had an amusing sign to hold up as gravity kicked in and he fell off the cliff that hadn’t been under his feet for quite some time now.

  YIKES.

  HELP.

  GOING DOWN.

  “Meep, meep, Nani! Meep, meep, boom.”

  Then, with great conviction, Decibel Jones threw up.

  4.

  Sing Little Birdie

  Interestingly, a remarkably high percentage of the Homo sapiens population opted for a fondly remembered waitress or bartender when that tall drink of otherworldly water offered them their choice from a nostalgic buffet of comforting, familiar voices. Perhaps this is because humans are accustomed to receiving information from girls with notepads and name tags without getting their pride bruised by a girl with a notepad and a name tag knowing more than them about anything at all. Perhaps because, no matter their luck in life, they knew in their bones that at least they were better than the kid who brought them their steak medium, not medium-rare, and so could cling to the idea that humans were still the ones being served with a smile, the ones who were always right, the ones with a place at the table, not a place at the dishwasher, for a few precious minutes longer. Perhaps it was just because, when the paradigm shifts directly into a brick wall, all anybody really wants is a stiff drink.

  Even more interestingly, almost everyone else chose the voice of their favorite children’s television show host to spell it all out for them.

  Those with access to neither restaurants nor quality children’s television had to content themselves with hearing the news from an enormous mutant bird-fish that sounded uncannily like their parents.

  Thus, with minor alterations accounting for personality, nationality, sheer gibbering terror, and surprisingly frequent attempts to pick up the Esca representative like it really was a poor bartender just
trying to do her job and get through the night, roughly the same conversation took place over the next ninety minutes or so in every lounge room on the planet.

  This is that conversation.

  “You’re an alien,” said a stay-at-home mum in Inverness.

  You betcha!

  “From another planet, is that the general idea?” asked the Queen of Denmark, Margaret II.

  Got it in one! What a clever little Mags you are! Who gets a gold star? HER MAJESTY DOES!

  “Is it a good planet? Do you like it there? Does it have peppermints and toys that light up?” asked an eight-year-old boy in Ghana.

  I’m so glad you asked! Bataqliq is a real tasty cup of soup: small, hot, watery, thickened with valuable exotic muds and tender chunks of nutrient-dense holoplankton! As homeworlds go, the old BQ is just enough to whet your appetite and leave you wanting more out of the universe. But it’s home, and home is where you hang your haplogroup! You know, I betcha you’d just love the larva of the porla urchin—tastes a lot like peppermint! Well, peppermint that’s been locked up in a tower to go mad for years and years. And yes, honey, all my toys light up.

  “What’s that ‘fourteenth Lyric of the Aaba Verse’ thing all about? What’s a verse?” asked the arthritic owner of a fish thali cart in Goa.

  Now, kids, new words don’t scare us, do they? Of course not! Learning is FUN! “Verse” is just about the closest word I can find in your language for what we call ourselves. Today’s lesson is all about the supercool stratified sociology of the Esca! A breeding pair and their offspring are a Verse, the kidlets are Lyrics, the ruling classes are the Chorus, the proletariat are the Key, and the mercantiles are the Bridge. All Esca together, on any planet, we call the Choir. Can you remember all that? I knew you could! But enough about li’l old me! What’s the collective noun for you folks at home? We are very interested in your culture, if you have one to share with the class.