Space Opera (Space Opera, #1)

by Catherynne M. Valente

Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was born into a family so overprotective that he felt compelled to invent the atomic bomb.

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.

Many solutions to this conundrum of mid-list musical misery have been tried: a comeback solo album, a reunion tour, licensing one’s former incandescent hits for mid-priced car commercials, a solid redemption arc on a reality television program, a shocking memoir, giving up on dignity and taking a run at Eurovision, a quieter but steady career in children’s film sound tracks, focusing on one’s family, charity work, a crippling heroin addiction, acting, a sex scandal, public alcoholism, producing, or sudden violent death.

“Of course we’re sentient!” protested the newly minted CEO of Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Holdings in Tokyo. “Look around! We’ve done so much! We’ve had . . . Kant! And Einstein! And Descartes! And . . . and Kurosawa and the Internet and Nekobasu and Mr. Rogers and game shows where you don’t even win anything except happiness! We’ve been to the moon! We saved the California condor. You and I are talking, back and forth! You can’t do that with a turtle or a jellyfish or a washing machine. How can you doubt we’re sentient? I donate to charity, you know.” Please don’t make a scene, sir. It’s not personal. You’ve got to order off the kiddie menu until you can sit still in your big-boy chair. The galaxy nearly roasted itself to ashes over the question of which species were and were not sentient. The ruins still smoke. The widows still weep. And quite frankly, Mr. Rogers notwithstanding, you’re a mess. I mean, honestly. You just made the argument for the survival of your species and you didn’t even mention a single female, except, presumably, half the condors. 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...

Humans are not particularly good at music. Oh, you’re all right, I suppose. You have some deeply basic understanding of rhythm and melody, but so do dolphins, darling. I hate to break it to you, but, just as an example, without thinking too much about it, the Vulna of Jadro Nebula use their entire homeworld as an instrument. You blow into the northern magnetic pole, as I understand it. Anyway, it’s not just about a good beat, it’s what you do with it. Showmanship. Theater. Flash. The Trillion Kingdoms of Yüz won three cycles ago with an upbeat little earworm called “Love Means Forgiving the Sins of Our Colonial Expansion Phase,” and when the bass dropped, their entire proletariat became a comet. So, you see, coming in second-to-last may be too much to hope for a planet that still uses Auto-Tune.

“Is that really it?” Dess interrupted halfway through. “We just sing better than one other beastie and we get to live?” “Yes. Does it seem barbaric to you? Sixty-seven percent of your population used that word.” “No, it makes sense to me. It’s perfect.” “Why?” Decibel shrugged. “Life is stupid and beautiful that way.”

Glagol Jsem and the Death of All That Came Before sang in perfect bone-shattering five-thousand-part harmony, with the combined voices of their entire genetic lines, and they wept the rosy pink electricity generated by five thousand weaponized agony-ducts, and they performed the traditional Alunizar interdimensional two-step, which no foreigner had ever been allowed to witness before that moment in the black library, a dance halfway between Bollywood and Sea World, lit only by the bioluminescent fire of their tears and the transported moonlight of poor, far-off, still-smoldering Aluno Prime. At the climax of the dance there was a brilliant iridescent spiderweb of exploding light, and Glagol Jsem phased into a dimension where the whole notion of sentience had never gotten past committee, wriggled with delight, made a salacious gesture in the general direction she’d come from, and never came back. They won by a single point.

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?

Well, even that is not quite enough. 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?

Oort used to find it endearing and even enviable—Decibel Jones always lived in the moment; Omar Calișkan always lived in an uncertain future. Mira, he supposed, had always lived in her own head and allowed others to visit once in a while. With advance notice. And extensive decontamination protocols.

Pallulle revolves around an ultracool blue dwarf star that humans have designated TRAPPIST-1. The Smaragdi, however, call their pale, minimalist sun Lagom, a word that means, in their exceedingly specific language: “a spouse who habitually withholds affection but comes through with a squeeze when you really need them and always pays the bills on time.” Pallulle itself means: “the parent who gives and gives, but it is never enough for their ungrateful children, who will probably never amount to anything, anyway.”

Controversially, the twenty-second Metagalactic Grand Prix was held in Dirty Ruutu, the Smaragdi answer to Prague—once the capital of a great empire, torn apart by war, religion, vanished industry, and tourists who know in their hearts that it’s not wrong to get so phenomenally plastered that you punch a police horse because everyone knows horses vote Tory, just so long as you do it while ignoring some of the most sublime architecture in the universe.

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.

“It’s always all about you, somehow. Even when you’re apologizing. It’s kind of impressive.”

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.