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“It’s very rare to win two years in a row, of course, but that’s no excuse not to try your best!” A seabird called somewhere in the distance. “Anyway . . . do you plan to perform with them tomorrow or . . . what?”
Capo’s ears twitched. “What do you want?” she purred.
“Well, it’s only that you live on Earth as well, you see. And since you’re here, your species deserves some consideration. We do try to limit collateral damage in the event of a loss, but accidents will happen!”
The cat’s tail curled and uncurled lazily. “But I’ll be fine,” she said. “Because I’m here.”
“Well, yes, but . . .”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Miss Capo, you really have to learn to relax! I’m your friend! Your happy flower friend! I’m here to make you an offer! The Klavaret have a lot of voting power this year, as hosts. We could probably sway others to your cause. In exchange for a small fee, of course.”
“Excellent. Do it.”
“What? You don’t know what the fee is.”
“Eh.”
“I was going to say India. Its climate is very advantageous to botanical life.”
> “Sold. It’s over there. Go get it. I will nap here.”
The Klavaret maid quivered her petals in distress. “Alternatively, I could perhaps take care of some of your competition for you. As a gesture of alliance. I know that’s a bit gruesome . . .”
Capo’s bottle-green eyes lit up. “Even better! Can I help? Who are we killing? Can it be the glittery things? They look tasty.”
“The Yüz are members of the Octave . . .”
“Don’t care. Tast-y.”
Ekali turned all her blossoms toward the average British suburban house cat. “Allow me to lay my thorns on the table, as it were. You understand that this is the end of the semifinal round, don’t you? I offer these temptations as a test of sentience. It all goes into the evaluation. Whether you would sell out your homeworld or murder one of your new neighbors or let the rest of your species burn to save yourself.”
“I have to be honest, that all just sounds really fantastic to me,” Capo meowed. “But if you could just do it for me, that would be brilliant.”
Ekali rocked back a little on her stems, realization rocketing through her, thorn to petal and back. “You would destroy us,” she whispered. “There is another rising species on Earth. You never invented radio. We didn’t know.”
“Why bother? The monkeys will make one and then I can sleep on top of it. The static makes my belly tingle.”
“Compared to you,” said the Klavar soprano, “humans are joyful rosebushes bouncing through the stars. If you ever stopped napping long enough to escape Earth, you would sweep across this galaxy like nothing before, an endless wave of carnage. You would hunt our worlds one by one and ruin everything we’ve built. Only your laziness protects us.”
Capo hopped down off the railing. She lifted her tail in the air haughtily and glanced back over her furry shoulder.
“Most likely,” she purred. “Best keep mum, don’t you think? Wouldn’t want to wake us up.”
30.
Silence and So Many People
On the subject of interspecies sex, the only reliable rule is Goguenar Gorecannon’s longest, most controversial, and least profanity-riddled Unkillable Fact: the Fourteenth Special. A wide variety of interestingly shaped parents have petitioned to have it redacted on the grounds that, while true, it makes for screamingly awkward postlullaby conversations, and its inclusion makes it very difficult to leave offspring home alone with any unguarded household appliances. All such requests are routinely burned unread by the Gorecannon estate. The Fourteenth Unkillable Fact states the following: Everybody fucks. Well, almost everybody. No force on this plane of reality can equal the drive to get a leg over, because it’s the nondimensional otherspace where all those nice, sophisticated fundamental forces meet and form a weird, wet, messy trashball: tension, friction, gravity, electromagnetism, thrust, torque, resistance, elasticity, drag, momentum, inertia, pressure, chemical reactivity, fusion, conservation of energy, self-loathing, humiliation, and loneliness.
Being ashamed of it makes about as much sense as being ashamed of the speed of light.
Everybody is bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes they wouldn’t admit to their grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love. You are bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes you wouldn’t admit to your grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love. It’s a literal goddamned zoo out there, so this is the best I can do you for: don’t giggle when the other entity takes their clothes off, secure enthusiastic consent, don’t mix silicon and carbon without extensive decontamination protocols, tidy up your house if you expect to bring someone home, don’t expect anything you wouldn’t offer, remember that every person is an end in themselves and not a means to an end, don’t worry too much about what goes where and how many of them there are, don’t mistake fun for love, try your best, be kind, always make them breakfast, and use protection. Chromosomes are not nearly such picky eaters as you might think. Just because the other fella is a plank of sentient wood from Planet 2 x 4 doesn’t mean you can’t get pregnant, and the splinters won’t be nearly as fun coming out as they were going in.
The fact is, neither anatomy nor culture nor inconvenience nor the linearity of time nor distance nor food allergies nor federal law nor a dimensional rift nor strict parents nor the threat of instant and hilariously excruciating death upon contact with one solitary smear of foreign bodily fluids can stop people after a bit of strange, and the stranger the bits the better, because genes are a bunch of thrill-seeking little shits, always looking for the next new thing. The very first time the very first species discovered that they were not alone in the universe, they started eyeing up the other hostile carbolic-acid-blooded space squid, winking compulsively, and asking them if they wanted to intermix and gill.
Where there’s a wang there’s a way.
