“What if you did?”
Fire
You know I will rise like a phoenix
But you’re my flame.
—“Rise Like a Phoenix,” Conchita Wurst
21.
Hello from Mars
Litost is a neutral planet in the dragonfly-colored dust cloud formation we call the Pillars of Creation and everyone else calls a bit of an unsightly mess, almost seven thousand light-years from Earth and almost seven and a half light-years from its nearest drunken, hostile, politically conservative neighbor. This was a lucky thing for Litost, considering the dominant species that lived there, the previous year’s winner of the Metagalactic Grand Prix, the Klavaret.
Litost is the kind of world a child would design if that child had never been harmed by the world in even the smallest way and wanted to be a rainbow when it grew up and only ever read books about unicorns, wildflowers, and everything working out very nicely, not only in the end, but in the beginning and the middle, too. It has two small white suns, three pink moons, several lavender oceans with the same sugar content as Earth’s oceans have salt, a single huge continent full of rich green antidepressant grasses watered by refreshing diamond showers, healing rivers, and forests where no one can ever get too lost, on account of the night-light lichen. While this continent is home to a number of gentle variations on the basic bear-cow-fish-bird playset living in peaceful symbiotic harmony, Litost’s crowning evolutionary achievement is the Klavaret, a species of large, intellectually gifted patches of seafaring pastel flowers, something of a three-way hybrid of roses, tulips, and doilies. They have all the natural defenses of a pillow in a tiger enclosure. At least twice, the planet escaped being overrun by the aforementioned neighbors after the invaders grew exhausted with having to explain, slowly, patiently, and using large, friendly diagrams, charts, and illustrations, the concept of war to a field of flowers, giving up halfway through a run of supplementary comic books starring Sebastian, the Conflict Marshmallow.
The Yurtmak call Litost proof that God hates us and wants us to suffer.
The existence of the Klavaret was discovered by the Voorpret just after the species on the other side of the new wormhole decided turnabout was fair play, followed the rude parade of colonial ships crashing their sector of space, and started pouring through to points unknown. The parasitic viral life-forms picked up the radio waves from a telenovela that was wildly popular on Litost in those days, Everyone Gets Enough Love. The most famous Klavaret rock group of all time, Suns n’ Roses, won the fourth Metagalactic Grand Prix, on the homeworld of the Alunizar, who dominated the Grand Prix in the early years, much to the annoyance of everyone else. In fact, that winning streak, combined with their overwhelming cultural and military hegemony, proved so irritating to the rest of the galaxy that it has become something of a beloved tradition to vote them down into the lower ranks every single year until they cry. The Klavaret won resoundingly that year, singing in their traditional method: vibrating their stamens at the precise frequency of empathy, allowing the audience to hear one another’s favorite childhood lullabies, thousands upon thousands of them, at which point Suns n’ Roses broke down, mashed up, and remixed that noise into a truly sick beat.
Last year, they finally managed to snatch the crown again with their dance craze “Let’s Talk About Our Feelings So No One Has to Hurt Inside.” It would have been a unanimous verdict, except for the Yurtmak, who vomited on their ballot and then put it in the box with a huge, razor-toothed grin.
Litost is also home to what was once an unassuming market town of no particular strategic or cultural importance called Vlimeux, where the final battle screamed itself mute and the war finally ended. Vlimeux rests on the tip of a heart-shaped peninsula kissed by the carbonated lilac Ocean of Unconditional Acceptance. It looks like anywhere else. It has no memorials, no statues, no museums or weekend historical reenactments to commemorate the final annihilation of the old world and the painful, strangling, blue-faced birth of the new one.
But it does have a fantastic concert venue.
The Cake in the Rain made planetfall in the seas just offshore the brand-new, paid-nearly-in-full-we-promise coliseum the Klavaret built for this year’s Grand Prix and named the Stage of Life. Massive slabs of chamomile-crystalline herbstone the color of watermelon-flavored smoke formed a state-of-the-art rock arena approximately the size of the Isle of Man, crowded with towering subwoofer topiaries, shaded by hypno-kelp lighting rigs, mined with hidden gouts and hoses for fire, water, and vaporized hallucinogen effects, gravity geysers, weather sinks in case a song required a Pallullian winter to really pop, holographic floats, and an army of tough, proud stamen-mics ready to take a beating and without so much as a whimper of feedback.
The first two human beings to set foot on another world stepped out of the jelly-hatch and into the warm, ever-so-slightly joy-colored light of Litost’s twin suns, which the Klavaret refer to collectively as Our Mums.
The second their feet touched the talcum sand of the alien beach (not actually silicate, but a very pleasant strain of powdered MDMA), a searing bolt of laser fire sliced through the ground in front of them and the top of Decibel Jones’s left shoe, scorching both as black as bad feelings.
A little lacy giggle vibrated through the fresh sea air. Up the strand, a large patch of pastel flowers twisted up into a topiary with a .74-caliber Utorak pumice pistol tangled in its vines. The Klavaret maiden waggled a few briars at them and called out in a cheerful, bubbly soprano voice:
“Sorry! I’m just ever so clumsy!” Behind her, a large, striped camera bobbed and darted in the air, disappearing and reappearing as rapidly as any paparazzi flash bomb.
Oort St. Ultraviolet, well-respected man about town, was almost completely certain that camera had a tail.
“Pure butterflyfingers, that’s me!” trilled the sentient rosebush. “See you onstage!”
“That fucking shrubbery just tried to kill us!” shouted Decibel Jones. “That can’t be allowed!”
The lovely Esca stepped lightly down the gangplank of her ship and stretched in the sunlight, which turned her feathers into the colors of Earth’s sky. She put her wings round the band members who once sold jars of their breath at their merch table and enthused:
“Allowed? Oh, we encourage it! Rule 20, darlings! Welcome to the Grand Prix!”
22.
Tell Her I Send My Regards
The thirtieth Metagalactic Grand Prix was held on Otozh, a gravitationally down-for-anything mirror ball of a world just close enough to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy to make popping down to the event horizon for a carton of relativity a snap without having to constantly worry about whether your front garden is about to become one with the singularity.
It was the year everything changed.
This flashy hot spot with commanding views of the mind-jellying infinite raw reality beyond the accretion disk is homeworld to the Utorak, a race of, to get it out of the way quickly, blinged-out Easter Island statues with faces like busted kachina dolls, bodies like rejected Stonehenge designs, and a sense of humor like a rock dropped down a dry well. They live a little longer than a human, stand a little taller than a human, and could brutally pulverize a human by accidentally brushing against the shoulder of one on the tube platform.
Otozh is the most absurdly, flamboyantly, unrealistically mineral-rich planet a geologist could write down in her dream journal. Its seas are liquid gold and platinum, its mountains so stuffed with gemstones that volcanic eruptions are anticipated by tourists like piñatas at a billionaire’s birthday party, and any random bucket of dirt would keep a human tech manufacturer in rare earths for a decade. Over the millennia, everyone and their overbearing mother has tried to invade and loot the Utorak’s ridiculous dragon’s hoard of a world, so, unsurprisingly, they are a rather defensive, anxious, socially awkward people who have elevated military strategy well beyond art, philosophy, or science and well into an autonomic bodily process.
An Utorak is physiologically incapable of sitting down to breakfast without making sure he has his bacon at a decisive disadvantage and his children arranged around him in a classic tortoise formation.
However, since they really did have such an obnoxious run of surprise gold rushes to beat off, almost all of that vigorous Utorak strategic metabolism is devoted to defensive action. They just never got a chance to get out there, sow their war-oats, and get down to thrashing anyone else. They were too busy trying to keep the neighbors from stealing their ocean. Until the Sentience Wars, that is, at which point the Utorak discovered that, while going on the offensive was just about as much fun as you could have with a standard-issue dark-matter rifle, and certainly added vast quantities of treasured memories to their strategic scrapbooks, you felt really awful afterward. The rush was nothing like defeating a species of invasive horror-snails who thought they could nick your nickel while you were doing the shopping. Somehow, when you attacked first, you were left with the distinct and uncomfortable sense that you might be a bad person.
Over the enraged indignation of their allies, Igneous Lagom Opt, the Grand Volcanic Commander of the Unified Forces of the Utorak Formation, took her base and went home after four months. For this, she received every honor the Unified Forces could bestow, a few new ones they’d had lying about waiting for a special occasion, and, when no one could think of anything else but still felt too grateful to quit while they were ahead, threw the Alluvial Prize for Chemistry, the Golden Stalactite for Best Actress in a Dramatic Performance, and the Dull Chisel Award for First Novel at her as well. Everyone felt a great deal more relaxed pottering about at home with the spring-cleaning, fortifying their local star systems, priming orbital defense platforms, and suction-mining the gravity well of their beloved supermassive black hole than they had ever done using Voorpret ships for target practice.
Of course, none of the other powers were about to let the heavy-lifters clock off early. The Ursulas tried to crop-dust Otozh with various hypnotic gases to make the Utorak more willing to listen to reason (first attempt), aggressively belligerent in their own right (second attempt), or immune to regret and/or other inconvenient moral considerations (eleventh and final attempt). The only lasting result of all this emotional vaporware was the invention of psychotherapy among the Utorak. While the galaxy burned itself stupid all around them, the mental health arts experienced their Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, and Technological Singularity all rolled into one extremely comfortable couch in the wilds of Otozh. The capital city, Stratum Talaka, remains a psychiatric boomtown to this day. As the saying goes: if you can listen there, you can listen anywhere.
The Utorak won the ninth Grand Prix with an industrial trip-hop sea shanty called “You Bombarded My Heart with Overwhelming Air Superiority,” as sung by the deliriously handsome boy band Win Condition Alpha, with a surprise cameo on backup vocals, none other than the famous Igneous Lagom Opt. Second place went to the machine intelligences known as the 321 for their precision-tuned, eighty-nine-minute, neo-gangsta math-rock anthem “This Program Has Encountered an Error and Must Shut Down,” coded, compiled, and submitted by the Entity Known as Monad.
Presumably, the plan to rig the thirtieth Grand Prix was set in motion shortly after Opt and Monad met at the after-party. Retirement bored the Grand Volcanic Commander nearly to dust, and the Entity Known as Monad found it profoundly illogical that the 321 had never won the Grand Prix, despite mathematically determining the perfect song every single year.
The scheme would not find its feet, however, until the third member of their conspiracy appeared on the scene: Aukafall Avatar 0, hard-core trashfolk acid-ska crooner of the Lummutis, a new species discovered by a Sziv algae cloud that had drifted off its shipping lane. Unlike that of the Yurtmak, or, indeed, of humanity itself, the sentience of the Lummutis was never in doubt, and they’d been welcomed into the galactic family with no conditions attached, bypassing all the upsetting drama that Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros are currently heir to. They were the biological equivalent of the girl in school who everyone wanted to hate because she had it all—looks, smarts, athletic ability, a stable home life, all the latest fashions—but no one could because she was just so fundamentally bloody nice, and anyway, all she wanted to do with her natural advantages was sit in the corner and draw pictures of unicorns.
No one knew what a Lummuti actually looked like. On their Grand Prix entry forms, under Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, And So On, You Know the Drill, they put: Decline to state. In the years after their discovery, the most popular after-dinner party game involved retiring to the library with brandy, cigars, and a new theory on the taxonomical classification of the Lummutis. The only facts they had ever confirmed about themselves were that they lived under the surface of their planet, had no desire to leave but were perfectly prepared to prevent others from landing if the need arose, reproduced via parthenogenesis, and were not, in fact, larger than a breadbox. As a culture, they had long ago packed up the sorts of internecine conflicts, plagues, economic booms and busts, and privations that fueled the history of most planets and devoted themselves entirely to visual art and technology, but only as far as technology allowed them to improve their art. The Lummutis never traveled anywhere, nor has anyone else dared to make planetfall. Nevertheless, there’s no such thing as a good party without one.
The only part of a Lummuti you can actually get your hands on is a small, extremely shiny metallic object about the size, weight, and color of a guava, flat on one side, rounded on the other, entirely giving the impression of a novelty paperweight.
It is not a paperweight.
Each one of these can project a three-dimensional, hyperrealistic interactive virtual avatar of a Lummuti anywhere within a kilometer or so of itself. It was this handy gadget that allowed the Esca to project itself all over the place on the day of their quiet invasion. Branding them as rebooted Pet Rocks had been the Keshet’s stroke of marketing genius, and the Lummutis graciously loaned their tech to the cause.
These avatars are utterly unique, astonishingly inventive, gorgeous as all get-out. Aukafall Avatar 0 appeared on the occasion of the thirtieth Metagalactic Grand Prix as a kind of furry spoonbill stork with long, soft puppy ears, three eyes, a tail like a bridal train, and all the colors of a Mardi Gras that had finally stopped holding back. The Lummutis had spent approximately half a second back in their Stone Age making icons that looked like realistic versions of themselves and sped right through to fantasyland. Upon first contact with the Sziv, they asked only that their planet remain undisturbed and that the perplexed magenta algae-mind fill a cargo hold with Lummo stones and carry them anywhere they thought was a bit lively. Everyone who was anyone decided they had to have one if they were to live and breathe another day, and soon enough, the Lummutis had quietly spread to every civilized world, not to colonize or spy or even see the sights, but simply to run up their score.
The Lummutis are, at all times and without exception, logged in to the most massive multiplayer game in the history of the galaxy. They keep the rules to themselves so as not to end up suffering the humiliation of foreigners and newbies topping the leaderboards, but occasionally, at some particularly passionate turn in the conversation, display of skill, especially clever pun, romantic entanglement, or bar fight, a Lummuti avatar will grin and say: Fifty points. One hundred points. A thousand points plus optional power-up. They got a massive bonus if they could convince someone to carry their Lummo stone to a new location, but beyond that, they kept mum. As they hadn’t had a war in a thousand years, never even bothered to land on their own moon, and points in a game no one else played were their only concern and ambition, the Lummutis were determined to be real stand-up fellows and no threat to anyone.
In retrospect, it was inevitable. The distribution of Galactic Resources was too important. They’d been terrifically lucky, everyone agreed, to let a bit of pop music decide their share this long. Eventually, someone would’ve tried
to fix the game in their own favor. It just so happened to be Igneous Lagom Opt, Monad, and Aukafall Avatar 0 who got around to it first.
It was a ridiculously simple plan. If the whole sociopolitical-economic apparatus of the known galaxy was determined by Grand Prix ranking, then, obviously, if someone didn’t show, everyone else moved up a notch. Otozh had been paying in more minerals than it got out in agricultural time-shares for years, and the 321 were sick and tired of fixing everyone’s computers just because they were raw computer code themselves. This was, if you looked at it a certain way, an issue of planetary defense.
Aukafall just wanted the points.
Since no one was expecting anything but a weekend of glitter-rock debauchery, the Entity Known as Monad powered down the privacy walls and Igneous Lagom Opt and Aukafall Avatar 0 walked right into the Sziv lagoon, where the supergroup Us was getting its beauty sleep. They decanted the gooey pink algae into a couple of spent liquor bottles, corked them, and stuck the lot in Opt’s basement until the Grand Prix was over. The Lummutis came in fifty-first out of fifty-two with Aukafall belting out “First Person Suitor” to the cheap seats. Technically, the Sziv came in last, since they hadn’t sung a note, though they appealed the decision immediately. More than a century later, reparations are still tied up in court, which is unsurprising given that Goguenar Gorecannon’s Fifth General Unkillable Fact is carved in fiery letters over the forbidding door to the galaxy’s Maximum Overcourt on Sagrada: 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.
When the whole plot was uncovered due to the Entity Known as Monad bragging to the Stratum Talaka municipal mainframe about it, and, very shortly afterward, by the Sziv breaking out of the basement in a wave of fuchsia fury and bringing down all the wrath of the Grand Prix Oversight Committee upon them, the conspirators merely shrugged and said, “Well, you know, we might have killed them. Don’t know what you’re so cross about. They can go without carbon for a year, don’t make such a fuss.”