Space Opera Read online

  “That seems . . . rather rigged in favor of the hegemony,” said an anthropology professor in Zurich. “Has any ‘borderline case’ ever actually pulled that off? Or is this an elaborate sacrifice ritual?”

  Gosh! What you must think of us! Of course the new kids in town come through sometimes! It’d be pretty damn horrible, otherwise. I said, we’re not monsters.

  “Uh-huh. When’s the last time a newbie won?” asked a professional gamer in Seoul.

  Won? Never. Successfully avoided obliteration? Here’s lookin’ at me, kid. The last newly added species to triumph on the biggest stage in the universe was us. Me, in fact. In my pre-interstellar diplomacy life, I was the lead singer of the brinefunk underwater big band combo Bird’s Eye Blue. So you see, I sympathize with you, I really do. I get it, all the way. This is all so overwhelming and not at all how you want to spend a Thursday afternoon. The Esca used to be a really nasty piece of work, I don’t mind telling you. Selfish, temperamental, clinically depressed—seriously, a doctor on Pallulle diagnosed our whole species. Someone killed my grandfather for being under eight feet tall. Half our planet had been turned into broiling salt flats by the Üürgama Conglomerate’s experiments. We just couldn’t see past how much the other Esca pissed us off. Plus, we had a real problem with libertarians. But we pulled it out in the end. I don’t know, I guess something about the radical upending of our perception by the sudden invasion of a vast, technologically superior galactic civilization really brought us together. Bird’s Eye Blue dazzled the crowds with our interstellar hit “Please Don’t Incinerate Us, We’ll Be Good from Now On, We Promise.” We came in tenth. It was a sensation, nearly a scandal—no new fauna on the block had ever placed so high. The royalties still fund our entire defense industry.

  “And how long ago was that?” asked the President of Mozambique.

  A mere thirty-four years ago, by your commemorative word-of-the-day calendar. Last year, by the Tunicate Calendar of Aluno Secundus. Time is a constant annoyance in the great beyond.

  “How many have lost?” asked a science fiction writer in Lublin, Poland. “How many species have you destroyed?”

  Six. Well, seven technically, but the Andvari barely count, as they launched a preemptive strike before curtain call. Oh, sorry, eight. I forgot Flus. Before my time. And hardly controversial or even very interesting. Borderline cases only come up every once in a while. And not all of them completely fail to prove their worth.

  “So you’re saying we’ll lose. There’s no hope. It’s . . . it’s over,” said a lonely marine biologist on assignment in Antarctica. “Probably for the best. Used to be a lot more ice around here, you know.”

  There, there, poppet. Let’s turn that frown upside down! That’s not what I’m saying at all! We have prepared a list of human musicians we think might do reasonably well, given current trends in popular music throughout the civilized galaxy and the relative advantages and disadvantages of your psycho-audio-anatomical makeup.

  “This has to be a joke,” said a theater critic in Chicago, staring at the names glowing on the slice of crystal the Esca held up helpfully at her eye level. “Yoko Ono?”

  Oh, yes! My friend Öö is really, really hoping she’s available! He’s become quite the fan. He knows all the words to “Don’t Worry Kyoko” and asked me to check while I am here and see that Kyoko is all right. Öö is very concerned. We know she must be just horribly busy, world tours and masses of fans and the like, but it is fairly important. Do you think she’d be interested?

  “Well, she’s dead, so, no,” said a leather-clad teen punkster in Toronto. “And so is Kraftwerk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tangerine Dream, Brian Slade, the freaking Spice Girls, are you kidding me? Ugh, okay, Insane Clown Posse got themselves paralyzed from the neck down screwing around with magnets, Björk lost her voice in an accident with a narwhal and a spinning wheel years ago, and just go fuck yourself, no, Skrillex is not going to go down as the savior of humanity. It’s just not happening. I’d rather die in a sea of nuclear fire.”

  How embarrassing! It seems our research is somewhat out-of-date. I will speak to Öö. The Keshet are time travelers and excellent at cultural reconnaissance—but not very organized. They eat all the stationery supplies. I’ve tried to give Öö a day planner so many times, you’d never believe it! He just buries it for the winter and expects an orderly workspace to come up in the spring. But there are many more possibilities! We were very thorough.

  “What’s . . . what’s wrong with you? Why do you like this stuff?” asked a middle-aged graphic designer in Berlin. “Grace Jones, I get. Brian Eno, I suppose, if you must. Even RuPaul, I can almost understand. But Jefferson Starship? Nicki Minaj? Hüsker Dü? Courtney Love? I mean, really? And Donna Summer just seems wildly out of place with all the rest of them. There’s no aesthetic unity here at all.”

  I love “MacArthur Park.”

  “Right. Okay. Cool. No, sorry, it’s not cool, that’s awful. Good Lord.” A Liverpudlian nightclub owner crossed her arms over her chest. “A moment ago I was nearly pissing myself in terror, but now I’m just . . . well, I’m just a bit offended, frankly. We’ve got a lot better than this, you know. And nearly everyone on this stupid list is dead or old as the sands of sodding time. Didn’t you find Beyoncé while you were flipping through the oldies section? Bowie? Led Zeppelin? The Beatles?”

  Oh, certainly! The Beatles? Sure did! Fat lot of rubbish if you ask me, except for “Revolution 9.” Yes, well, if they’re willing to stick to that sort of thing, maybe we could come around to the idea eventually.

  “I don’t even know what to say,” said a psychologist in Perth, Western Australia. “This is just embarrassing for everyone involved. ‘Whoever wrote the theme songs for the television programs He-Man and She-Ra’? ‘Apple II’? Those made your list?”

  There has to be someone we can all agree on. Someone still alive and reasonably healthy whom we can bear to listen to for more than thirty seconds without severe nausea or instantaneous narcolepsy. Come on, you can do it! Let’s all put on our thinking caps and work together!

  “I seriously doubt it,” sighed out a Mongolian yak herder.

  “Not if those are the only options,” snapped a Hungarian actuary.

  “Truly, we are not amused,” said the Queen of England, Charlotte I.

  But in a drafty, unfurnished, utilities-not-included flat on the far, far, far outskirts of London, a single, furious voice rose above them all.

  “What the bloody goddamned rabbit-fucking hell is my name doing at the bottom of that list?” shouted Decibel Jones.

  5.

  We Wear Spring Clothes in the Wintertime

  The first Absolute Zeros show was held on the hot, vast, dark second floor of the Hope & Ruin pub in Brighton, home of pound-a-pint Tuesdays; the toughest pub quiz in the Anglosphere, which featured questions chosen by anyone who could prove to the MC that they were tits-deep in a doctoral dissertation; an open mic night that bashed up the conceptual boundaries of the terms “open,” “microphone,” and, indeed, “night,” with reckless abandon; and Archibald Arthur Gormley, owner, operator, and the oldest functioning alcoholic in the Eurozone. Gormley was ancient already when the Kinks had the grand idea of a well-respected bowl haircut. He was yelling at punters to get off his stool in those fat and rosy days when the place was just called Hope and the bit about Ruin was but a twinkle in the Commonwealth’s economic eye. In his smug middle age, he saw Bowie come in for a pint when he was still a slip of a thing called Davie, playing weddings in a three-piece suit, and in the spotty, nervous face of the future grand duke of glam, Archibald Arthur Gormley yawned.

  As the band’s designated Organized Person, Oort St. Ultraviolet had chosen the Hope & Ruin for their debut because, despite their mind-smearingly cool sound, actual London venues had proven mystifyingly indifferent toward smashing rookie acts of unadulterated musical genius, as they were toward all bright-eyed, irresponsibly coiffed kids fresh off the home-editing software suite, a
nd really, anybody whose drinks they might have to comp for the night, if they could possibly pull it off without offending any particular glowering council housing castaway who might, by some horrible accident, turn out to be the future of rock-’n’-roll. As Musad Atallah, the talent manager for Robot Custard, the hottest indie stage in South London, told his interns: gatekeeping is a noble calling, much more delicate than fannish enthusiasm or hipster disdain. An uncurated open mic was as good as a neon sign blinking out: I AM A HELPLESS FUZZY DUCKLING WANNABE TASTEMAKER WITH NO TASTE TO SPEAK OF AND UNGUARDED TAPS, PLEASE ASSAULT MY EARS AND ABUSE MY GENEROUS NATURE AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE. But velvet ropes that never opened would have to be replaced by video poker machines and a secondhand snooker table within the year.

  Oort had to go all the way to Brighton to find an open mic that didn’t have a positively gladiatorial audition process and a waiting list as long as the M1.

  This careful velvet aloofness of any scene accessible via London public transport was the third most significant factor in the meteoric rise and awkward, plummeting face-plant of Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros. They were all the cooler and more seemingly exclusive for being hard to find, hard to see, and easy to talk about to everyone you met. The second factor was a woman wearing a crochet dress and a mushroom-bob haircut while trying to chat up Archibald Arthur Gormley when Oort, Mira, and Dess started to tune up for their first real set at two p.m. on a Wednesday—a set that consisted of two songs they’d written on a series of increasingly moist Acme Arkable Gelato napkins and an upbeat champagne-bubble cover of “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath. The first was that, against all laws of interpersonal and artistic probability, the Absolute Zeros, once upon a time, were incredibly, irresistibly, downright irritatingly good.

  If you’d looked up that afternoon from your admittedly absorbing IPA toward the stage of the Hope & Ruin, you wouldn’t have seen anyone you’d recognize as Decibel Jones. Not from those rickety singleton tables as ringed with pint-glass condensation as an Ent’s arse, not from Archibald Arthur Gormley’s cracked leather stool as he cringed away from the aggressively jolly Yorkshire bird hovering at him with her ginger 1970s mushroom-bob hair, so disturbingly unchic that it came around to being almost, if not quite, punk. Not even from the back of the joint, for whom standing room only was but a distant dream. There was no vintage McQueen then, no style consultants to tell them no. Mira Wonderful Star had cut and stitched and remixed the contents of their local Oxfam’s damaged/as-is bin like a garage mash-up track. In a deconstructed ballroom gown whacked up out of a spandex “Slutty C-3PO” costume, a silver brocade Christmas tree skirt, and a gauzy black shower curtain with metallic blue appliqué roses all over it, Mira Wonderful Star sat at a drum set the quality of which wavered between obnoxious child’s toy and legitimate rubbish, with a retrotrash white 1984 Casio mini keyboard propped up to her left on an empty Boddingtons keg. Her uncle Takumi had given the drums to her for Christmas when she was thirteen, purely to fulfill what he saw as a solemn duty to embody the Archetype of the Cool Uncle as depicted in the twentieth-century domestic comedies he lovingly annotated and catalogued the way some people catalogue exotic butterflies, his efforts having been made somewhat more difficult by the fact that Cool Uncle Takumi had raised his beloved embodiment of the Rebellious Niece from the age of four. Oort St. Ultraviolet, not yet the man of a thousand instruments, fiddled with a crappy plastic capo and his grandmother’s begrudgingly lent hundred-year-old concertina, in an alleged outfit consisting of a dismembered ladies’ red sequin blazer, low-slung, mercilessly tight trousers that had been a wine-stained wedding gown only a few hours before, and a cricket jumper with the name GEORGE embroidered lovingly on the hem in purple thread with a jaunty bat on either side.

  Decibel Jones stood at the mic stand shirtless, petrified, in his own set of what Mira firmly believed was the only correct type of trousers for a rock star, treating hip bones on a boy like cleavage on a girl and choking off blood supply like a pre-suffrage corset. Dess’s pair had pretty clearly been someone’s mum’s idea of a formal St. Patrick’s Day frock in its previous life, all green satin paisley and vintage ’80s gold accent chains. Over it all, but under the black plastic bat wings, he wore the one thing you’d recognize from the Spacecrumpet album art, the one article of clothing that survived the transition from coming home smelling of potatoes and rancid oil to smelling of cigarettes and his own cologne brand and barely coming home at all, from Danesh Jalo to Decibel Jones: a long, flared, faux-fur-lined, lightly distressed rose-and-cream aristo-coat from a local community theater production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Mira had unstrung a heap of dollar-store fake colored pearls to edge the collar, sleeves, and hem, doused the fur with her corner chemist Apocalyptic Oil Spill #4 hair dye, and after that night, Dess never washed that Technicolor dreamcoat once.

  He named it Robert.

  Unfortunately, pearls and sequins and metallic appliqué roses reflected almost none of the already miserly light from the Hope & Ruin’s deeply basic rig. Shadows loitered where no experienced stage manager would let them. An unkind white spotlight washed out those three terribly young and hungry faces, dappled by the corpses of a couple of spiders that’d gotten stuck between the gel and the lamp around the time when disco was cool. The air outside shimmered with muggy afternoon heat. The stage was wholly, utterly, indescribably black, crisscrossed with the stellar cartography of a thousand hopeful handsome smolderers all made of the same needy stuff, scraping their bootheels, dragging their guitar stands, and dumping their hearts into a sound system more suited to calling bingo than calling London. It was, to be perfectly honest, a depressingly bleak sight, far bleaker than a lifetime spent working in air-conditioned cubicles or watching a kebab slowly revolve in front of a space heater like a sweaty meat planet or ringing up an eternity of cough suppressants in your dad’s tiny one-location drugstore after he finally gives up the till, far bleaker than a mere total absence of anything to look forward to. They were a study in absurdity, a near-psychotic commitment to an aesthetic no one had had a chance to laugh at yet.

  Decibel Jones wrapped his fingers around the shaft of the mic and opened his mauve-and-glitter-painted mouth.

  “Er. Hiya. How’s everyone doing tonight? Er. This afternoon?”

  The bartender blew his nose on the tail of his shirt. Six other open mic’ers sat in the front with six soda waters slowly decarbonating before them, all dressed in earnest, sincere, salt-of-the-stage flannel and jeans, an on-trend uniform of off-the-rack authenticity tailored perfectly to the current white-knuckle zeitgeist of homespun artisanal emotions strung on banjos of working-class vulnerability, all trying their hardest to look as though they’d have come even if they weren’t on the roster. A cashier from Ladbrokes chomped down a curry on his lunch break with one eye on his phone. Three or four unemployed twenty-somethings pranged darts into the wall without looking over or lowering their voices. Cool Uncle Takumi looked up from editing his new article on the quest for the divine in John Candy’s oeuvre and clapped with football-mum supportiveness from a respectful distance, in case a legion of front-row fans miraculously appeared, fashionably late.

  “Yer holdin’ back on yer old Gormer,” a truly Stygian horror-drone buzzed out of Archibald Arthur Gormley’s tracheotomy valve, which his wife had called his “smoke hole” before she left him for that chap who ran all those marathons in his seventies. “Whaddoaye come ’ere for if ye won’t gimme a full legal pour?”

  “We’re doing splendidly, darling,” called the lady with the ginger mushroom-bob, a music critic done in by the death of print journalism whose name was Lila Poole. “You all look a treat!”

  “Right. Yeah. So . . . we are . . .”

  Decibel Jones coughed, not himself yet, not twenty feet tall in Piccadilly, not praised to death by the Guardian, not flirting with Ruby the American waitress, nobody’s messiah, not anyone at all, not even properly Decibel Jones yet—last night, they’d been the Möbius Hips, t
his morning they’d definitely decided on the Things, and then Mira had chucked that one between, she said, a scotch to steel her nerves and a Midori to light her up insides. And suddenly, he couldn’t think of what they’d come up with instead, couldn’t think of the lyrics to “Raggedy Dandy,” still so new that they ached, couldn’t think of what train they were meant to take home or what time he had to be at the shop tomorrow, couldn’t think of anything but the unlovely mating honks of those twenty-something dartheads battering his cochlear well-being, honks that, if he was down a dark street or on a playground, usually meant he was about to get the shit kicked out of him for being a mincing little ponce or whatever vivid racial slur they had in stock that week. Words and phrases bobbed to the surface of their monotonous posturing pubstep drone: arsenal, piss-up, I know a bloke, it’s your round, it’s not mine, I don’t care what she says, fucking West Ham, mate.