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“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.)
This carefully balanced neutrality was the second most significant factor in the longevity of their society. The first was Sagrada itself.
If you look up into the night sky, you will not see Sagrada. Not from Earth, not from Bataqliq, not even from Gakk-Gakk, Sagrada’s largest and most socially toxic moon. The planet reflects almost none of the already miserly light from its shriveled, demented red sun. Rather, it greedily absorbs every photon until its surface shimmers with heat. That surface is wholly, utterly, indescribably black, from pole to pole, peak to peak, sea to shadowed sea. It is far blacker than coal or petroleum or the heart of a high school poet, far blacker than a mere total absence of light. It is surrounded by a mob of moons made of the same swarthy stuff, which block out starlight like bouncers at the hottest club in town. Sagrada is a study in darkness, an adoringly monogamous commitment to the gothic aesthetic. Beside Sagrada, ravens are as bright as parrots, widows are as flamboyant as cabaret dancers, and black holes suffer from crippling penumbra envy. For obvious reasons, in Elakhish, the word “black” and all its synonyms occupy the same linguistic niche as words like “cool,” “sweet,” “brilliant,” “highly skilled,” and “built like a brick shithouse.”
In order to function in all this dimly red-rimmed darkness, the body of an Elakh is small, dense, nearly indestructible by anything that might be lying about, around, or in wait in the shadows, and mostly eyeballs. If a particularly melancholy child stacked a huge black ball of hard suet on top of a dainty black suet cone, gave it a lot of elegantly styled coaxial cable for hair, and stuck two enormous old-fashioned lightbulbs on it where eyes should generally go, they’d have a pretty solid approximation of an Elakh with which to horrify their parents. And yet, the Elakhon are widely considered to be a beautiful people. Their eyes quickly evolved to occupy nearly all their facial real estate, the better to devour any available light like starving beggars; their long, long lashes are powerful sensory organs like cat’s whiskers, if cats could sense predators, weather systems, and other annoyances miles away. The hard, slightly greasy suet of their flesh is remarkably malleable, able to imitate a wide variety of limbs and other convenient protrusions. Imagine Sagrada in its earliest pastoral days, the Elakhon in their black villages, peacefully tilling black fields of midnight barley in the shadows of onyx mountains, carrying their tiny charcoal children to dig black clams from a black beach near a black sea, looking up into a sky so dark that it depressed itself, when the first alien starship cruised through their atmosphere and dumped a cargo hold full of state secrets onto their planet.
The Elakhon were able to advance technologically at a rate far faster than any other species to date because the rest of the galaxy used Sagrada as its personal high-end rubbish bin. What better place to hide something you didn’t want anyone else to find than a planet so dark, it was practically invisible? The heavens rained down data-crystals, prototype vessels, unwanted furniture, spent weapons, drugs, bodies, treaties, vast sums of intergalactic currency, more data-crystals, and any commodities a governing body might want to remove from the market in order to create a sudden and profitable demand. Civilizations rose and fell and ran smack into walls, but the Elakhon went on, collecting, analyzing, improving, remembering.
In fact, in every language other than Elakhish, the word for the massively useful blackworld Sagrada translates to the Memory Bin, and to leave something there was to have it Binned.
After happily using everyone else’s dirty little secrets to establish dominance over their sector and a continuous, lively civilization whose general tranquility Musmar the Night Manager famously attributed to the fact that light is a well-known irritant to all thinking, feeling beings, the Elakhon made the rather unexpected choice not to tell everyone to shove off and stop using their world as a collective toilet down which to flush any incriminating evidence the second the police come knocking. Instead, they became the great archivers and curators of galactic culture, hyperattentive beatnik librarian-salvagers combing every black inch of Sagrada for debris to analyze, label, and include in climate-controlled exhibits in the long, hexagonal, black granite halls of the Melanoatramentous Library, a palace of knowledge as large as Hungary, as well organized as a retirement home for executive assistants, and as well guarded as the meaning of life.
The first Metagalactic Grand Prix was held in the Melanoatramentous Library’s Special Collections Room, as it contained the only stage with any real size or grandeur left standing after the war, and afterward, the whole thing could be immediately and efficiently Binned—a word which had come, over the millennia, to mean: “carefully, lovingly recorded for posterity by the Elakhon and preserved against the ravages of time, war, and the children’s disrespect for history.”
The winner of the first Grand Prix was an Alunizar ultratenor girl group called Glagol Jsem and the Death of All That Came Before, singing what would become the first interstellar smash single, “Maybe We’ll Just Stay in Tonight Instead of Doing the Whole Intergalactic Civil War Thing, Wouldn’t That Be Nice?” Five massive tubular sea squirts, protean tubes of golden and violet and scarlet veined flesh with a round, cilia-fringed siphon at each end that served as mouth, nose, face, cyclopean eye, and simple jet-propulsion system, undulated with passion. Their siphons, gaping with grief and ecstasy, hovered in the air above the weeping crowd, suspended in an orb of moonlit water rescued at the last possible second from their ruined homeworld. Naturally, it wasn’t just the five of them. The Alunizars are the greatest practitioners of attachment parenting in the known universe. When an Alunizar reproduces, their children do not go out into the world to make their fortune and curse the urban dating scene, but simply bud from their mother or father, emerging out of their backs or their bellies as a complete and individual and rebellious bulge, but never leaving home. Each Alunizar is a colony, a generation ship, accumulated centuries of wisdom and experience and quick tempers and belligerent dinner conversations in one extremely lumpy, extremely lovely tube of glowing aquatic flesh. The death of a single Alunizar is the death of an entire nation, and the wars had gone on for years.
Glagol Jsem and the Death of All That Came Before sang in perfect bone-shattering five-thousand-part harmony, with the combined voices of their entire genetic lines, and they wept the rosy pink electricity generated by five thousand weaponized agony-ducts, and they performed the traditional Alunizar interdimensional two-step, which no foreigner had ever been allowed to witness before that moment in the black library, a dance halfway between Bollywood and Sea World, lit only by the bioluminescent fire of their tears and the transported moonlight of poor, far-off, still-smoldering Aluno Prime. At the climax of the dance there was a brilliant iridescent spiderweb of exploding light, and Glagol Jsem phased into a dimension where the whole notion of sentience had never gotten past committee, wriggled with delight, made a salacious gesture in the general direction she’d come from, and never came back.
They won by a single point.
10.
Don’t Go Without Me
On a plush paisley couch in a large and tastefully furnished suburban home outside London, Omar Calis?kan, better known as Oort St. Ultraviolet, the only one of the Absolute Zeros to make it through fame and fortune and their opposites without a personality disorder, ambiguously employed royalty-collector, erstwhile boyfrack, about to be ex-husband to a deeply alienated woman in Cardiff, reasonably responsible father of two, and one-man band, slept off the last bender of his marriage, the massive takeout vindaloo he’d ordered in, and through the invasion of Earth on a long cool river of Ambien, absinthe, and regret.
Omar Calis?kan, like all humans who found themselves asleep at noon on a Thursday, spoke to the roadrunner in his dreams. In the lounge room he shared with Justine and the kids, an ordinary lounge room belonging to an ordinary family, between the well-worn blue-and-copper-striped couch they’d bought before Nico was born and the black lacquered, vaguely Asian-styled end tables they’d picked up for practically nothing when
Justine’s hotel remodeled, the seven-foot-tall ultramarine fish-flamingo looked far less alarming than it did in the real world, being only a dream. The girls played on his mother’s red and gold rug, squabbling over a toy that looked very much like Planet Earth. Their cat, Capo, fortunate refugee from a local shelter and the birthday present he’d never outdo, hissed at the clouds over Australia. The ghost of his father sat in the leather recliner sipping a tropical drink from a glittery pink straw. And a giant bird was telling him he was going to have to save the world with his Oortophone. It was an ordinary dream for an ordinary man under severe emotional and dietary distress, nothing you wouldn’t expect when you knocked back the acknowledged world heavyweight champion of sleeping pills.
“Remember, Omarcik,” his father’s ghost said in the dream, peering at his son over the sugared rim of his drink, just as he’d said when they were finally given permission to move into their flat in Manchester when Omar was six, just as he’d done every night that Omar had been sober enough to dream since. “We are ordinary English family now. When the world turns the wrong way round, ordinary is the best defense. Nobody bothers an ordinary Englishblokeman. Nobody makes a file on him, nobody asks him who his business is, nobody tells him come with me and don’t make a fuss. If anybody bothers you, you just be so ordinary, evet?”
Omar stuck hard to his father’s rules. Englishblokeman became a kind of untouchable superhero in his head, a man so normal, nothing abnormal could ever touch him.
And for a long time, nothing did. Faster than a well-ordered queue, more powerful than a muttered tut, able to walk right by police officers without being harassed. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s the fragile illusion of invulnerability inherent in being just like everyone else. No—it’s Englishblokeman.
Even at the height of Absolute Zeros mania, Omar Calis?kan saw nothing remotely out of the ordinary about his life. Oort St. Ultraviolet, for all his rhinestones and rouge, was simply the predictable outcome of practicing guitar more than multiplication tables, more than talking to girls, more than looking old enough to buy his own pints, of loving music like it gave birth to him, of moving to London as soon as humanly possible, of doing time in the club scene and at open mics and tolerating the personalities of people who could sing because they wanted to start a band, but not like he wanted a band, of going home with random artistically promising strangers because you never knew which one was your future until you were ordering them ice cream at five in the morning. Omar drew a straight line from their sold-out world tour back and back and back to the day he’d started school in Manchester, when the music teacher had set up every instrument you could play in the band or orchestra in a big circle on the thin, lowest-bidder gray carpet of the classroom that had never been much better than concrete and let all the goggling children go around and toot and twang and whistle and blow on every one of them until they found something they liked or shoved their hands in their pockets and said they only wanted to play football, mum, and so refused to do the one thing that meant anything in this world. Little Omar had approached them all with enormous, worshipful dark eyes, the violin and the oboe and the trumpet and the guitar and the drums and the trombone and the clarinet and the cello, touching them as shyly as he would one day touch Myra and Danesh and Justine, making them all talk with his fingers and his mouth and his breath, and whirled round to hug his parents desperately, whispering into their legs: “But I want to play them all, Mum. I want them all. Don’t make me choose, I can’t, I can’t.”
Everything that had happened to him afterward was the perfectly normal extension of that day, of that child. Even the trashfire that was Ultraponce, even rehab, even Justine getting pregnant when they’d been so careful, even that horrible night in Edinburgh, even their second daughter, just as unexpected and unimaginable as the first, even Justine’s affair and his and then couples therapy on Tuesday nights for the rest of recorded time, and even working for fifteen years as a session musician like it was an office job, playing anonymously on other people’s albums, other people’s genres and styles and standards, in jeans and a T-shirt for someone else’s band and only enough concealer to conceal his hangover, just as long as he was still playing. That was all fine. That was all normal. If you were writing a book about a failed pop group, that’s how it would go. It was an ordinary story, the story of a thousand other musicians, the story of Englishblokeman. Omar felt safe inside that story, if not happy. If not much of anything else.
“Does it ever make you sad to only have one moon?” the roadrunner said, grooming Justine’s long brown hair with its dark beak while she stared straight ahead into the nothing of dreams. “It would make me sad.”
“It’s the usual number, isn’t it?” Omar asked, quite worried.
“Not overly,” answered the fish-bird, and then Capo was pouncing hard on his snoring chest and licking him and kneading him until Omar Calis?kan groaned himself awake. He opened his gunked-up eyes to find himself meeting the cool mouthwash-green feline gaze of the short-haired white cat that had stayed when his wife had not. Capo seemed to have brought company. Something was looming behind her. Two somethings. Two blurry somethings. Something neither cats nor daughters nor estranged wives nor curry deliverymen.
