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The other was a hotel in Scotland.
Other people are frightfully useful and pleasant things, but not, strictly speaking, a must-have to get around town. Even the jankiest hand-me-down damaged/as-is human heart—one that couldn’t pass a user safety inspection to save its own ventricles—can be the handcrafted, jewel-toned, durable, all-seasons high-end accessory before, during, and after the fact of life on Planet Earth. Other people don’t just get you from day to day; they get you there, despite all their irritating habits and unnecessary mannerisms, 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 go it alone.
You can try, anyway. Sometimes, even whole countries try.
Listen. That small, watery, excitable planet 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 history of the Zeros, but try not to forget about those lonely countries. They’re going to to be important in a minute.
In the early days of the band, it had been easy. They never wanted to be apart. Whether or not anyone else happened to be nearby was as consequential to the Absolute Zeros as what was on tap at any given pub on any given day at any given time. But there is a certain energy to cliché, a certain gravity, as inexorable as entropy, and from the same part of town. You can plan for it. You can set your watch by it. It has a beat, and you can dance to it. By the time Decibel Jones, Mira Wonderful Star, and Oort St. Ultraviolent were huddled around a television in Edinburgh as if it were an ancient campfire, while Lila Poole paced back and forth, smoking Israeli cigarettes one after the other, they cared very much about whether anyone else was around, and what was on tap at the local on that particular night, at that particular time.
You can plan for the slow expansion and dissolution of the energy of the universe. There are equations and formulas to tell you what to pack for the trip, and how much time you’ve got left. You can’t plan for the sudden acceleration of heavenly bodies to intolerable velocities, or for their occasional screeching stop. For the shock of a hidden pocket of heat-death roaring in the dark, ever so much closer than it ought to be.
They watched it all happen on television, as though they were citizens of a much earlier generation. The revolution was always going to be televised. It wasn’t the kind of revolution that would miss out on those ratings. They’d sung all night on stage, sung until they were dry of music, not knowing that they had already run face-first into the cartoon Wile E. Coyote–wall of the future. That deportations had begun. That Cool Uncle Takumi had died in a riot, trampled underfoot by hundreds trying to pretend time hadn’t run out, that they hadn’t been pinwheeling their legs over a bridgeless chasm for some time now, still imagining they were walking on safe ground. That Nani was already in a processing facility awaiting a flight to Islamabad because Mr. Prime of the Minister said in a sad, carefully empathizing tone that she didn’t have the right passport and had stolen enough resources for one lifetime.
That no one had come to the show, not entirely because the Zeros were yesterday’s hotness, but because they were home watching the world as they knew it end.
For Oort and Dess, it happened in Mira’s eyes, reflections of the news, backward and inverted, chyrons rolling across her unbelieving irises. They ate everything in the minibar mechanically, methodically, tasting nothing, saying nothing. In fact, no one said anything at all until Mira turned to her friend and whispered: marry me.
And Decibel Jones laughed. Nervously, instinctively, afraid and thrown sideways. But a laugh all the same.
If he hadn’t laughed, she would have said the rest. She would have said it, and he would have understood. But he laughed, because it seemed like the most idiotic thing in the world, so he laughed, because how can you live when everything is lava on top of acid on top of fascist cream pie, let alone marry anyone or make the slightest plan that involves a future? He laughed in her face, and Mira Wonderful Star, hopped up on candy and crackers and shock, didn’t have the right octane fuel for that. So she didn’t finish. She just let it end with “marry me” instead of Marry me, marry me, Dess, and we’ll be safe, we’ll be a nice straight couple with money in the bank and no one can be offended by that, no one can come after that in the night, we’ll be together and we’ll smile our best Englishblokeman smiles, and no one will be able to touch us. You were born here. I wasn’t. Without you, I’m not safe. Oort has Justine. It’s just us kittens left, and the rain is coming. Marry me, and we’ll make a little bubble universe where nothing has to change and the elections never happened and it’s just Arkable Us, neon against the night, ice cream against the world.
How could I know? Decibel would say to Oort fifteen years later on a spaceship to nowhere. How could I know what she meant?
Unfortunately, Decibel Jones’s laugh blew Mira out of the sky. Oort was convinced that it was cruelty and not terrified, confused hysteria borne of Nani not answering her phone, not answering, still not answering, why wasn’t she answering? A band of glamrock gutter-glitz punks took the end of the world on the chin, each blamed the other, no one explained themselves, and Lila Poole quietly seethed about their refusal to stop messing about and discuss things like adults. Half of humanity was already steaming and scrambling against the other half by the time Decibel’s father called to tell him about Nani, Mira never did find out about her uncle, and the next ten years progressed at record speed from confusion and posturing to, in technical terms, an intergalactic shitshow.
One way or another, the Absolute Zeros weren’t really much for situational awareness, and never noticed Mira grab the keys to the van off the top of the refrigerator and slip out the door onto a much longer road than any of the rest of them could imagine.
Heart
Forever and ever together, we sail into infinity,
We’re higher
and higher and higher, we’re reaching for divinity.
—“Euphoria,” Loreen
32.
Every Song Is a Cry for Love
The one hundredth Metagalactic Grand Prix was held on Litost, the Klavaret homeworld, on the ruins of Vlimeux, where the war ended.
It was the first Grand Prix in twenty-one years to feature a new applicant species, after all that unpleasantness with Flus and Muntun. To all the gathered Alunizar and Keshet, Smaragdi and Elakhon, Sziv and Voorpret, Lummutis and Slozhit, Esca and Azdr and Ursulas and Meleg and Yüz and Yurtmak and 321 and the single, solitary remaining Inaki, it seemed somehow appropriate that the hundredth anniversary gala should have real stakes, should prove the purpose of the Grand Prix all over again, should rock the goddamned house down.
Doors opened at seven, the show started at eight. In pubs and clubs and house parties across the galaxy, the viewers at home were drunk by six.
The Mamtak Aggregate and DJ Lights Out—beloved, though getting on in years, Masters of Ceremonies, sanctioned haters, and winners of the second and sixth Grand Prix—floated and hobbled onto the Stage of Life, respectively. The Yüzosh beatvoxer swirled into the shape of a massive disco ball and spun round for the delight of the crowds. The constant twilight of Litost glittered on the silicate beings, and the air smelled of roses and cocaine.
“Welcome to the one hundredth Metagalactic Grand Prix!” thundered the little Elakh DJ Lights Out. The audience roared; the cheap seats stomped whatever they had in the way of feet. “It’s probably going to be a bit shit, but it’s better than another war, am I right?”
In the dive bars and speakeasies and orbital bistros of the civilized galaxy, a blast of applause blew out windows, cracked tables, and short-circuited the mood lighting.
In the bars, pubs, restaurants, hotel lobbies, airports, offices, and quiet, tense lounge rooms of Earth, no one thought the joke was particularly funny.
The hypno-kelp dimmed, the crowds went quiet, the Ocean of Unconditional Acceptance crashed against the shore, and the Grand Prix began.
