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“Be that as it may,” continued Uuf, “the two of us alone is just enough to shift the tally should you do really poorly tomorrow. We’re more than willing to do that for you in exchange for a small fee.”
Decibel narrowed his eyes. He’d worked with recording studios. He knew when he was about to get body-slammed by the fine print. “How small?”
Nessuno Uuf lowered her voice to an impossibly seductive murmur. “Infinitesimal,” she said. “Let us say . . . India.”
Decibel Jones took a long, long sip of tea as several Ursulas and a Slozhit began rounding up Lummo stones and chucking them in the fountain outside to try to short them out. He drank his tea and thought about lions. He thought about rhinoceros horns. He thought about that photo of the nasty little chap sitting pretty on a mountain of dead buffalo. He thought about the Lakota. He thought about Tasmania. He thought about the Belgian Congo and the West Bank. He thought about Nani and Cool Uncle Takumi and Papa Calis?kan, and some part of him just gave up and liquefied.
But not all. Not quite all.
“I appreciate your interest in my work,” he said in the voice he always used to turn down endless well-meaning yet humiliating Where Are They Now? programs. “But I must decline due to other commitments.”
Yilgar thumped the bar with one fist. Dirt scattered. “Listen, bonobo, the 321 are really good this year. Their algorithms are totally unbeatable as far as the bookies are concerned. And then there’s the Meleg, that’s the little bear fellows in the corner by the cold cuts, they literally serve their own hearts sashimi to the crowd, and, via the digestive process, the song of their beings actually becomes a part of you. You can’t compete with that!”
“Nope.”
“Then what’s a little India between friends?” coaxed the Smaragdin chanteuse.
Decibel Jones achieved full mystical, holistic oneness with his tea. “Pro tip,” he said, smacking his lips. “Next time you want to play Colonial Space Monopoly with a British subject whose very favorite grandmother was Pakistani, you may not want to bring up India. Especially after reminding me what a demonic cabbage humanity can be when it wants something bad enough. When it wants to snatch spoils it didn’t earn. Allow me to be one of the few historically significant Britons to say: India is none of my business. Thanks for the tea, Bloodtub. See you on the morrow, as it were. Upon St. Crispin’s Day.”
“You must be very confident of your song,” Nessuno said with a frown.
“Oh, I’m not, not at all. And I don’t mean that like you mean you’re worthless and horrible and a dishrag. You weren’t listening earlier. I don’t have a song. We don’t have a song. Nothing good, anyhow. It’s a mess and there’s no bridge and no hook and no time and no hope. You should have seen us on that ship. Bickering like children. Digging up the dead so we could beat each other down with her bones. And now what? Nothing and no time. Good work, everyone. Bravo. Everything’s fucked.”
“You’re amazing,” Nessuno breathed out. “Such technique! You’d be a sensation on Pallulle. Tell me more. Give me your best set. What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?”
Decibel Jones went pale. His throat tightened, and his stomach instantly rejected what was almost certainly not tea.
Mira.
Nani.
Ultraponce.
The last gasp of the Yüzosh Frockade blossomed on his chest: a dark red corsage, a gaping gunshot wound bleeding sequins where his heart should be. Where they weren’t. Where nothing had been right since.
“There,” said Nessuno Uuf. “Now you’re perfect. My place or yours?”
28.
Mister Music Man
Oort St. Ultraviolet bolted out of the early-twenty-first-century South Wharf Hilton onto a rather needlessly picturesque veranda for a breath of air, blood streaming from the back of his neck where a Slozhit’s stinger had grazed him as he’d tried to pick out a few seeds, with no guidance whatsoever, from bins marked with ridiculous labels like LOVE WASTED and TILL WE MEET AGAIN and THE FOLLY OF YOUTH and THE BAD OLD DAYS and PEACE AT THE END OF ALL THINGS. He’d kicked it so hard, the lavender beastie had crashed through the dessert bar. Clippy assured him the Slozhit possessed no natural venom.
Oort’s heart tried to make a run for it out of his chest. Christ, he could really die here. Not at home in an instant of cleansing fire along with everything else he’d ever known, but here, right now, with a giant moth’s giggling dumb face goggling at him and making victory fists in the air. Pink ferns and marble statues of famous historical rosebushes lined the Creamsicle-colored Italianate balcony, a cut-glass fountain gurgled pleasantly, spraying everything with citrus-scented mist, and the perpetual twilit breeze of Litost reeked of bubble gum, fresh grass, and the joyful unity of all living things. The view was just showing off, really. Hundreds of feet below, a lavender sea crashed against pearlescent rocks, and every time the waves boomed, it sounded like children laughing.
“It’s just unnecessary,” Oort said as he cupped his hands in the fountain and splashed water on his face. “That’s what it is.”
He coughed harshly, then stuck his hand in again and slurped up several handfuls. The fountain was geysering top-shelf gin and tonic out of a vaguely neoclassical crystal cornucopia, because of course it was. The booze flowed up through a curling tunnel full of stained-glass roses, marching gracefully in one end and out the other. Though it was undoubtedly a fine sculptural piece, the whole thing felt unsettlingly intestinal.
Oort St. Ultraviolet, lately of suburban Cardiff, had no reason on heaven or Earth to recognize a wormhole.
He wiped his hands on his Englishblokeman suit and peeked over the vertigo-enticing edge. No Hilton had ever stood this tall. And even if one had, they’d have put bars on the balcony to keep people from lobbing themselves off. He doubted anyone had ever committed suicide here on Planet Prozac, and the idea suddenly revolted him. He hated this place. What was the point of a world without debilitating bitterness and despair? How could you even tell you were alive? How could you possibly write a decent pop song if you weren’t a sad sack of tissues or at least fundamentally angry at the world most of the time? Everything could be divided into angerchords, sadchords, and happychords, and anyone worth their liner notes knew you only reached for more than one or two happychords in a genuine fiscal emergency.
Oort wished he’d brought cigarettes. And that he hadn’t stopped smoking ten years ago.
A small person leaned forward over the railing beside him. It looked like a basketball glued on top of a traffic cone with a couple of bare birch branches stuck into the sides like some kind of depressed snowman, all spray-painted blacker than midnight on the winter solstice at the bottom of the sea. On the pastel veranda drenched in soft, summery dusk, it looked completely out of place, like someone had cut out a piece of black construction paper and glued it to an Impressionist painting. Its matte charcoal skin seemed to just slurp the light. The childlike thing looked up at him with gorgeous, massive, fishy eyes that had long ago told its nose to clear off and make room.
“Don’t stay out here too long,” the Elakh said in the voice of a laddish scenester who’d once rolled up an entire star system and smoked it. “You’ll catch happy.”
