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“Right, sorry again. But you do?”
“Yes, for God’s sake.”
“And you see every timeline, all laid out like taxes, every single way every single everything could ever or would ever go?”
“This is pornographic, Mr. Jones.”
“And you went rummaging through timelines on Earth and whatnot? You had to, to get Walter o
ver there in the engine room his leg over, yeah?”
“Please stop. I have to go. I . . . I left the Industrial Revolution running.”
Decibel Jones, glitterpunk saint, sinner, and siren, stared down at the plush red creature wringing his tail between his hands in abject embarrassment.
“I was only wondering . . . can you tell me where I went wrong? Please. Everything was so good, everything was like Elmer finally catching Bugs, and it was like that over and over for months and years . . . and then it wasn’t . . . I had something and then all of the sudden I couldn’t ever, ever get it back, but it’s like I couldn’t tell the difference between the day before it all got its face bashed in and the day after. When did I fuck it up? Was it that night? Should I have said yes? Should I have kissed her until she stopped crying and then ordered room service? What should I have done different? There had to be a moment . . . a moment when I could have kept it all together, but I didn’t. I didn’t.”
Infinite timelines and possibilities unfolded in the eyes of the Keshet like points on a map of the galaxy. Grids and branches and forks and veins of mathematical destiny, flashing away into the dark like spent sparklers on a deep summer night in someone else’s childhood.
Öö patted Decibel’s knee.
“What if you did?”
Fire
You know I will rise like a phoenix
But you’re my flame.
—“Rise Like a Phoenix,” Conchita Wurst
21.
Hello from Mars
Litost is a neutral planet in the dragonfly-colored dust cloud formation we call the Pillars of Creation and everyone else calls a bit of an unsightly mess, almost seven thousand light-years from Earth and almost seven and a half light-years from its nearest drunken, hostile, politically conservative neighbor. This was a lucky thing for Litost, considering the dominant species that lived there, the previous year’s winner of the Metagalactic Grand Prix, the Klavaret.
Litost is the kind of world a child would design if that child had never been harmed by the world in even the smallest way and wanted to be a rainbow when it grew up and only ever read books about unicorns, wildflowers, and everything working out very nicely, not only in the end, but in the beginning and the middle, too. It has two small white suns, three pink moons, several lavender oceans with the same sugar content as Earth’s oceans have salt, a single huge continent full of rich green antidepressant grasses watered by refreshing diamond showers, healing rivers, and forests where no one can ever get too lost, on account of the night-light lichen. While this continent is home to a number of gentle variations on the basic bear-cow-fish-bird playset living in peaceful symbiotic harmony, Litost’s crowning evolutionary achievement is the Klavaret, a species of large, intellectually gifted patches of seafaring pastel flowers, something of a three-way hybrid of roses, tulips, and doilies. They have all the natural defenses of a pillow in a tiger enclosure. At least twice, the planet escaped being overrun by the aforementioned neighbors after the invaders grew exhausted with having to explain, slowly, patiently, and using large, friendly diagrams, charts, and illustrations, the concept of war to a field of flowers, giving up halfway through a run of supplementary comic books starring Sebastian, the Conflict Marshmallow.
The Yurtmak call Litost proof that God hates us and wants us to suffer.
The existence of the Klavaret was discovered by the Voorpret just after the species on the other side of the new wormhole decided turnabout was fair play, followed the rude parade of colonial ships crashing their sector of space, and started pouring through to points unknown. The parasitic viral life-forms picked up the radio waves from a telenovela that was wildly popular on Litost in those days, Everyone Gets Enough Love. The most famous Klavaret rock group of all time, Suns n’ Roses, won the fourth Metagalactic Grand Prix, on the homeworld of the Alunizar, who dominated the Grand Prix in the early years, much to the annoyance of everyone else. In fact, that winning streak, combined with their overwhelming cultural and military hegemony, proved so irritating to the rest of the galaxy that it has become something of a beloved tradition to vote them down into the lower ranks every single year until they cry. The Klavaret won resoundingly that year, singing in their traditional method: vibrating their stamens at the precise frequency of empathy, allowing the audience to hear one another’s favorite childhood lullabies, thousands upon thousands of them, at which point Suns n’ Roses broke down, mashed up, and remixed that noise into a truly sick beat.
Last year, they finally managed to snatch the crown again with their dance craze “Let’s Talk About Our Feelings So No One Has to Hurt Inside.” It would have been a unanimous verdict, except for the Yurtmak, who vomited on their ballot and then put it in the box with a huge, razor-toothed grin.
Litost is also home to what was once an unassuming market town of no particular strategic or cultural importance called Vlimeux, where the final battle screamed itself mute and the war finally ended. Vlimeux rests on the tip of a heart-shaped peninsula kissed by the carbonated lilac Ocean of Unconditional Acceptance. It looks like anywhere else. It has no memorials, no statues, no museums or weekend historical reenactments to commemorate the final annihilation of the old world and the painful, strangling, blue-faced birth of the new one.
But it does have a fantastic concert venue.
The Cake in the Rain made planetfall in the seas just offshore the brand-new, paid-nearly-in-full-we-promise coliseum the Klavaret built for this year’s Grand Prix and named the Stage of Life. Massive slabs of chamomile-crystalline herbstone the color of watermelon-flavored smoke formed a state-of-the-art rock arena approximately the size of the Isle of Man, crowded with towering subwoofer topiaries, shaded by hypno-kelp lighting rigs, mined with hidden gouts and hoses for fire, water, and vaporized hallucinogen effects, gravity geysers, weather sinks in case a song required a Pallullian winter to really pop, holographic floats, and an army of tough, proud stamen-mics ready to take a beating and without so much as a whimper of feedback.
The first two human beings to set foot on another world stepped out of the jelly-hatch and into the warm, ever-so-slightly joy-colored light of Litost’s twin suns, which the Klavaret refer to collectively as Our Mums.
The second their feet touched the talcum sand of the alien beach (not actually silicate, but a very pleasant strain of powdered MDMA), a searing bolt of laser fire sliced through the ground in front of them and the top of Decibel Jones’s left shoe, scorching both as black as bad feelings.
A little lacy giggle vibrated through the fresh sea air. Up the strand, a large patch of pastel flowers twisted up into a topiary with a .74-caliber Utorak pumice pistol tangled in its vines. The Klavaret maiden waggled a few briars at them and called out in a cheerful, bubbly soprano voice:
“Sorry! I’m just ever so clumsy!” Behind her, a large, striped camera bobbed and darted in the air, disappearing and reappearing as rapidly as any paparazzi flash bomb.
