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Something old. And something blue.
Omar’s vision finally focused around the roadrunner and Decibel Jones. He had no idea what was going on, but it felt somehow inevitable. He had always been headed for something this unrelentingly, unforgivably stupid.
“Hiya, Oort,” Decibel said as gently as he could under the circumstances.
The Esca cleared her long soft throat and asked in an eminently neighborly tone: “Do you think I might trouble you for a steak and a glass of milk? Whole, if you have it. But 2 percent would be fine.”
11.
1944
The Sentience Wars began and ended at a public bus stop.
Starships are frightfully useful and pleasant things, but not, strictly speaking, a must-have to get around town. Even the jankiest hand-me-down FTL-capable hoopty that couldn’t pass a special relativity inspection to save its intrepid bridge crew is the neon-tracklit, fully stocked wet bar, stripper-pole-fitted superbass party limousine of galactic travel. It doesn’t just get you from planet to planet, it gets you there in comfort, good company, high style, full of canapés, with a good buzz going, and looking like somebody to reckon with, which is very important to most young species trying to splash some cash around and make their mark on the nightlife.
But you could always take the bus.
In the early days of the universe, whether or not a habitable planet happened to have a wormhole nearby was as consequential to the eventual political map as whether or not a particular group of humans happened to be born on a continent with domesticable animals on tap or on an island the size of a doorknob where the only source of reliable protein was a semipoisonous tuber. Wormhole or no wormhole had just as little to do with the inherent superiority and/or possibly divine mandate of the smirking bastards who won the cosmic draw as cow or no cow, and yet, everyone everywhere will do, say, and stab nearly anything if it means they get to believe that they are blessed and their neighbors are basically toad-people.
Listen. The galaxy is a pretty damnably woolly place, and we’ve got a lot to cover in a short time if we’re going to get through the whole war, but try not to forget about the cows. They’re going to be important in a minute.
For the fortunate suns—the Utorak, the Keshet, the Voorpret, the Alunizar—the invention of space travel was as easy as building a big empty box and chucking it out of your gravitational well like a lucky shot Skee-Ball, straight into the 100-point hole waiting on the left-hand side of history. Everyone else had to grope around in the dark strapped to atomic bombs until they ran face-first into something other than more dark. It took the poor Inaki so long to invent FTL spaceflight that they actually skipped right over it and straight to medium-range instantaneous matter transportation, which is, in re
trospect, much more practical for a species of parasitic fireflies so impossibly tiny that you can’t believe they have enough room for an internal monologue, all clinging to the bodies of gentle-eyed, extremely itchy pachyderms on one perpetually cloudy rock in the constellation of Draco.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t equal. There wasn’t anything to be done about it, since you could no more move an active wormhole than you could move a politician to pity. The distribution of wormholes and livestock with potential was an invisible lottery ticket, purchased long before the first primordial molecules got into the oozing business, which could only be won or lost, never exchanged, ignored, or tried again, and it determined the courses of lives beyond counting.
Now, these days, wormholes are galactic public transport: taken for granted, run-down, underfunded, unsanitary, and unloved, crammed with commuters and pensioners, unruly young species and drunks who can’t get home on their own power. The walls of any given wormhole are infested with indecipherable graffiti in ancient, impossible tongues, the only evidence of entire cauterized timelines and vast unspeakable intelligences trapped on the other side of the cohesion matrix, as well as whether or not Ursula Was Here. You are almost certain to get gum or vomit or causality or all three on your shoes.
For a few centuries there, the Alunizar got away with claiming to have invented wormholes. This allowed them to collect spectacular tolls, tax cargo, conduct random security checks and confiscate any particularly exciting items, and shut down routes for regularly scheduled repairs that, by innocent coincidence, happened to be popular with civilizations who objected to the Empire’s habitual interstellar manspreading. Their story passed the smell test, at least: those blobby overgrown stained-glass sea squirts had been around longer than anyone except the Elakhon (whose entire society depended on never spilling anyone else’s sociopolitical beans, no matter how piping hot and juicy), they did seem to know how to patch up the works when the system sprung a reality leak, and Aluno Prime was undeniably parked in just about the most advantageous spot in the whole quadrant, cozily adjacent to the N, F, R, L, and J lines. Besides, how else could they have colonized so much, so fast? Aquatic species have a notoriously tough time handling the usual technological transition from ruining their own planets to ruining whole solar systems. While mammals, insects, and enlightened lichen can zip about as long as they take along a few houseplants to micromanage the air cycle, the unlucky space whales of this universe have to sort out how to get a ship overburdened with the absurd weight of a personal ocean into high orbit. No matter the magnitude of science’s triumph over nature, it will always be much easier to get a helium balloon to fly than a water balloon. Yet everywhere you went, the Alunizar were already there.
They lied, of course. Oh, how they lied! They lied through their siphons. They lied shamelessly, for generations, without a single ill-timed giggle to give up the game until the truth took out three Keshet frigates, six moons, a pulsar, an Alunizar mining colony as close to the border of Yüz space as they could manage and still get invited to holiday parties, a Yüz yacht containing the royal family on its way to their annual beach holiday, a bathtub containing Musmar the Night Manager (ancient ruler of the Elakhon, who was very surprised indeed to find himself naked and soapy and cold on the black floor of his ablution chamber) two of the Pleiades, a generous complimentary fruit basket provided to the Sex Pistols by Portobello Hotel in 1978, and the Inaki homeworld.
None of that makes the least bit of sense, naturally, because you’ve already forgotten the cows.
Up until that moment, the galactic scientific consensus wasn’t too far off the human scientific consensus on the subject of wormholes, except that we thought they were purely theoretical, and everyone else got really irritated if they were closed for maintenance. A wormhole was a tear in the universe where space and time went to get well and truly hammered. They passed through every physical and temporal point simultaneously and dumped you out wherever the other end of the tunnel is, no worse for wear with only the teensiest bit of cancer. As long as you keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle, there’s almost no danger of permeating the membrane of reality. In the drawing rooms of spacefaring society, the insectoids assured the silicon-based that the prehistoric Alunizar had probably done it with plain old explosives and almost certainly didn’t know any more than anyone else except how to time a fuse.
They were wrong.
Despite their big lie, the Alunizar actually did know far more about wormholes than they were willing to share in mixed company. They had lived alongside them for the entire history of their soft and tubular race. They had used them to acquire an interstellar empire at a fabulously steep discount. They had tended and groomed and guarded the cosmic subway for thousands of years. They hadn’t the first thing to do with inventing wormholes; it was the same pure imbecilic drooling luck that so many of the bloody things opened up just outside Aluno Prime’s gravitational sphere of influence that dealt Europe a royal flush of luxury high-speed horses, butter-dispensing cows, jumper-shedding sheep, bacon-distributing pigs, and nonunionized donkeys, and Australia a full hand of fuck all.
You can’t, after all, invent an animal. You can only domesticate it. It’s all down to cows in the end, you see. Cows, and what wonders can be done with them.
The fact of the matter is, a great number of people have, for some time now, been merrily lobbing themselves both ways through the digestive tract of incomprehensibly ancient, infinitely unbothered beasts and paying handsomely for the privilege.
Life is beautiful and life is stupid.
The life cycle of a Quantum-Tufted Domesticated Wormhole (Lacuna vermis familiaris) takes place on a scale that beggars the imagination, kicks it while its down, and lights it on fire. Admittedly striking anatomical differences aside, of all the species in the known universe, they have the most in common culturally with the giant panda bear of Earth. They are large, slow, solitary creatures whose natural habitat is relentlessly encroached upon by the implacable advance of civilization, and, improbably, if you could ever see a whole wormhole all at once (which you can’t), you’d find them just as chubbily adorable. They spend most of their time sleeping, can only consume a widely available but barely digestible substance that gradually poisons them, and respond to the process of reproduction, which everyone else finds pretty exciting, with little more than a vast, cosmic ennui. They can only mate and give birth at the heat-death of the universe, when all this expanding matter takes a long, hard look at its choices, peels out into a hard reverse, and rapidly compresses itself back down into a ball of white-hot everything, ready to reboot the Big Bang and start the long march of reality all over again, only this time without anyone ever inventing paper clips. The first thing that ever happens to an adorable baby wormhole is that it rather traumatically explodes, so it’s hardly any wonder they’re not terribly good at parties. Like kudzu roots, some small part of them remains forever in that continuous moment of detonating lava and life while the rest of them is flung into every part of space and time by the sheer physics-pummeling force of the beginning of everything. At which point the poor things are so tuckered out that they promptly lie down for a trillion-year nap.
You can only see a wormhole if it happened to fall asleep with its mouth open. Otherwise, being mostly composed of minimally corporeal time and space and entropy and memory with a sprinkling of platinum molecules and a dash of radioactive PTSD, they are perfectly camouflaged by the darkness of the interstellar void. They dream in sixteen dimensions. They breathe once a millennium. Their language is nothing but umlauts. They drift mindlessly through all that ever was or is or will be, drawn this way and that only by the smell of food that might flow effortlessly into their sleeping mouths.
The giant panda eats bamboo. The wormhole eats regret.
As anyone with a passing interest in self-help books knows, new quantum realities are being formed all over the place, anytime some collection of hyperactive molecules decides between sushi and curry for dinner or whether to marry their childhood sweetheart or see what else the world has to offer or whether to sort out how to derive energy from chlorophyll or meat or both or neither. The universe is a very large and very complicated demonstration of having one’s cake and eating it too. It sees no reason not to have it all. But most hyperactive molecules must proceed linearly along their own fork, unless they are a Keshet, only grazing the surface of other timelines as they yearn and brood and wonder what could have been, if only they had chosen the yellowfin sashimi, if they could have been satisfied with loving that one gorgeously familiar face, if they could now stand green in the warmth drinking down the sun. It takes energy for new roads to diverge in new woods, and no energy is spent with complete efficiency, without waste. Where wood has burned, there will be ash. The waste product of the constantly dividing multiverse is a fine, drifting mist of regret, and no wormhole has ever starved.
A handful of these gentle space yaks found Aluno Prime, a watering hole too good and too deep to ever leave. Two or three fell into a food coma so deep that their gaping mouths shut as they rolled on their sides, snoring soundlessly into oblivion. That’s all. That’s the reason behind the utter cultural and spatial dominance of the ooey, gooey Aluzinar. They screwed up and chose poorly so often; they were so majestically sad that they drew a herd of wormholes to them like the steam from a fresh pie levitating a snoozing dog toward the windowsill on Mr. Looney of the Tunes.
So what happened that day that whiplashed all those frigates and deep-space miners and moons and pulsars and Musmar’s black bathtub and firefly-encrusted green elephants and Sid Vicious’s complimentary Anjou pears?
