Space Opera (Space Opera, #1)

by Catherynne M. Valente

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.