Space Opera (Space Opera, #1)

by Catherynne M. Valente

Life isn’t difficult, it isn’t picky, it isn’t unique, and fate doesn’t enter into the thing. Kick-starting the gas-guzzling subcompact go-cart of organic sentience is as easy as shoving it down a hill and watching the whole thing spontaneously explode. Life wants to happen. It can’t stand not happening. Evolution is ready to go at a moment’s notice, hopping from one foot to another like a kid waiting in line for a roller coaster, so excited to get on with the colored lights and the loud music and the upside-down parts, it practically pees itself before it even pays the ticket price. And that ticket price is low, low, low. U-Pick-Em inhabitable planets, a dollar a bag! Buy-one-get-one specials on attractive and/or menacing flora and fauna! Oxygen! Carbon! Water! Nitrogen! Cheap! Cheap! Cheap! And, of course, all the intelligent species you can eat. They spin up overnight, hit the midway of industrial civilization, and ride the Giant Dipper Ultra-Cyclone till they puke themselves to death or achieve escape velocity and sail their little painted plastic bobsleds out into the fathomless deep. Lather, rinse, repeat. Yes, life is the opposite of rare and precious. It’s everywhere; it’s wet and sticky; it has all the restraint of a toddler left too long at day care without a juice box. And life, in all its infinite and tender intergalactic variety, would have gravely disappointed poor gentle-eyed Enrico Fermi had he lived only a little longer, for it is deeply, profoundly, execr...

Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.

Americans all acted like they were trying to pretend they hadn’t just chased a fistful of ecstasy with a noseful of coke to save themselves from a police officer only they could see.

And quite frankly, Mr. Rogers notwithstanding, you’re a mess.

I don’t know why you would even bring up the Internet. The xeno-intelligence officer responsible for evaluating your digital communication required invasive emergency therapy after an hour’s exposure. One glance at that thing is the strongest argument possible against the sentience of humanity. I wouldn’t draw attention to it, if I were you.

Everyone you know is a monster, sweetie. We’ve watched a lot of your media, you know. It’s an excellent way to evaluate societal sentience. You seem to be very concerned with monsters. Monsters from above, monsters from below, monsters among you, monsters from the sea, radioactive monsters, machine monsters, magical monsters, serial monsters who can only be stopped by monsters with badges. It’s a whole thing with you people. We got terrifically bored after a while. After all, you always win against the monsters, even though you’re the ones slowly cooking your planet because you can’t be bothered not to, butchering one another for fun and profit, making up elaborate stories that start with being calm and treating everyone with kindness and equality but somehow always end with somebody getting enslaved, absolutely obliterating the other species with whom you share a world so you can take a photograph with their corpses or gobble up their best features in hopes of achieving a more satisfying erection, and being generally willing to sell the fleeting, unique, fragile lives of everyone you’ve ever met if it means you can consume a slightly larger share of resources than they can. You can’t even agree on whether or not a sick child should get a tissue without having to really work for it. None of you seem to be able to stand one another. How will you treat us, if you are allowed to swarm across the galaxy? Which of us have horns or tusks or claws we feel quite attached to that m...

You can’t even agree on whether or not a sick child should get a tissue without having to really work for it. None of you seem to be able to stand one another.

But in a clinch, you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don’t have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three.

I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten?

Prove to us that you are more than the sum of your most unpleasant parts. Prove that you’ve learned literally anything from your embarrassing history. Prove that, if we teach you how to plant corn, you won’t give us a repeat performance of Manifest Destiny’s Greatest Hits. Prove you’re better now.

Because I don’t see you setting up diversity programs so that elephants can apply to university, and many of them are a far sight cleverer than your average President.

N! O! Spells NO! The importantest word

you can make out of teensy tiny N and weensy old O—that’s NO! The biggest little word I know, know, know! I mean no.

So, you see, coming in second-to-last may be too much to hope for a planet that still uses Auto-Tune.

Failure was here before you and she’ll be here after you and she won’t even notice you go.

“No, it makes sense to me. It’s perfect.” “Why?” Decibel shrugged. “Life is stupid and beautiful that way.”

We’ll let you know if anybody descends from the heavens asking for Taylor Swift, won’t we, lads?”

“Daily Mail, Dess, let’s get you away from these jolly jackboots and down to the newsroom on the double-quick. The people have a right to know what kind of person is going to represent them! Now, be honest, mate, don’t you think the first UK ambassador to another world ought to be a bit more, I don’t know, English?”

Today was fired. Today was well and truly sacked. Today could, in point of fact, fuck all the way off.

ultratenor girl group called Glagol Jsem and the Death of All That Came Before, singing what would become the first interstellar smash single, “Maybe We’ll Just Stay in Tonight Instead of Doing the Whole Intergalactic Civil War Thing, Wouldn’t That Be Nice?”

The Sentience Wars began and ended at a public bus stop.

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.

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.

A wormhole was a tear in the universe where space and time went to get well and truly hammered.

Life is beautiful and life is stupid.

The giant panda eats bamboo. The wormhole eats regret.

Thankfully, the Sex Pistols weren’t really much for apples and pears anyway and never noticed anything amiss.

“I promise you, Oort,” said the roadrunner with soothing protectiveness, “in terms of audiovisual equipment, anything you have down here, we can do better up there, and . . . well, everything else, too. It’s not your fault. No one expects more from a species that still uses electric kettles.”

The question has never been: Can you build cities? Ants do that. The question has never been: Are you capable of considering your own existence and getting kind of depressed about it? Any animal in captivity does that. The question has never been: Can you use tools? Crows do that. Otters do that. Apes do that. Good Lord, everybody does that. The question has never been: Can you perform complex problem solving? Dogs do that. The question has never been: Can you experience love? Nobody doesn’t. The question has never been: Can you use language? Parrots and dolphins and cuttlefish do that. The question has never even been: Do you understand object permanence, can you recognize yourself in the mirror, do you bury your dead, do you bond emotionally with your young? Elephants do all those things, and some humans definitely don’t. The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other reason than that it rocks?

Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have soul?

Life is beautiful and life is stupid.

Once your cute wee antibodies get a load of Yoompian encephalitis, they’ll start working like the rent’s due tonight. You know how your nose gets all snotty and your throat swells up when you have the flu? Well, turns out, as long as you’re carbon-based and keep your brain on the inside, the body’s natural immune response to this is to produce a kind of linguistic acid reflux that blows out the bits of your brain that insist on having to conjugate and decline and punctuate things before it can understand them like cheap subwoofers.

It’s like Goguenar’s Fourth General Unkillable Fact says: ‘Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience. All things, from evolution to municipal sanitation to marriage to the Big Bang to diplomacy to the distribution of shops in urban centers, trend toward the most convenient outcome for the greatest number of lazy bastards, because the inconvenient stuff ends up alone without any friends and a foot growing out of their head and who has the time?’ ”

“This is amazing,” Dess whispered. “Much less invasive than Heathrow customs, anyway.”

People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they’re all monsters.

The Keshet made a face like he’d just eaten kale for the first time

“Not okay! That is not okay! I agreed to spaceships and aliens and the possible end of life on Earth. I did not agree to tolerate talking cats. This is too much. It’s too mad. It’s out of genre. Undo it immediately!”

Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down. You didn’t get it, I didn’t think you understood, you can’t sing a dirge to the reaper, he’s already heard them all. You gotta slaughter him with joy and a beat like the best of all possible shags, and because somehow, somehow, my nan’s cartoons always had it right and the Care Bear Stare is the most powerful force in the world, and I wanted to shine and you wanted to scream, and we just failed, we failed at both and neither because of me.”

‘Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between the stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all. Well, it isn’t, really, it isn’t at all, and believing and achieving is just something sportscasters say, but what are you gonna do, not die? Try it. I’ll wait.’ ”

Quoth the Raven: to be or not to be that is the question whether I am the master of my fate in form how like an angel in apprehension how to strive to seek to find and not to yield and though I could not stop for Death O love there is no other life than here burning bright in the forest of the night calling for our fiddlers three . . . “I’m still working on the bridge.”

It was the planetary equivalent of the girl next door with the nice personality whose face you instantly forget when you move away to college, destined from birth to have a house with beige carpeting, 2.5 moons, and a casual home business selling scented candles to people who hate scented candles. Or at least it was, before the zombie apocalypse.

While love and peace may come to exist between wildly disparate members of different kingdoms, orders, and phyla, very few are willing to meet up with a walking, talking syphilis infection for coffee, even the best coffee in the universe, unless it’s in a public place close to their own flat with lots of friends around and easy exits.

Justice takes so long that by the time you get it, it’s gone off and smells like an old corpse. Forget about justice. Just knock back a big, stiff drink and move to a new town with fewer pronks living in it.

bartender unhappy with his choices in life but even less happy with anyone else’s,

A cow goes moo; a sheep goes baa; a celebrity correspondent goes who are you wearing?

“Darling!” hummed a thick, sopping voice behind him. Not one voice—dozens, a hundred, maybe, in perfect, simultaneous, harmonious diction. It oozed expensive vowels, oligarchical consonants, the poshest of diphthongs. It dripped with sincerity and wisdom. It dripped its sincerity and wisdom all over the floor and got a bit on the cold cuts platter. “Don’t you just look marvelous.”

The carpet of the id doesn’t match the drapes of the superego, if you know what we mean.

No one warmed up to a perfectly professional musician, not even other musicians. They wanted you to be a little more real, a little more raw, a little more broken than they were, so they could feel magnanimous about booking you, buying your shit, promoting you, fucking you. So they could feel a little more human by osmosis. It was an equation Decibel had learned on Day One of Life with the Zeros. Pain becomes playful, playful becomes pretty, pretty becomes pleasure, pleasure becomes profit, profit becomes safety, another day not working at Mr. Five Star, another day further from invisibility. He laughed like the fate of his planet was a pickup line at a pub.

We have always believed that one of the hallmarks of sentience is the ability to look down upon others.

You’ve probably never heard of them, Mr. Sapiens Sapiens, but we shall try our hardest not to hold it against you.