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“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. Calis?kan 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.”
