by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
After a day and a half of hiding in their tiny double room while Drathur brought her snacks, Anno allowed herself to be lured out to the recreation area by her overly enthusiastic five-year-olds. To hear them chatter about it, you’d have thought it was a whole amusement park. There’s simply something very special about novel toys and games when you’re that young.
Anno wasn’t surprised to find the holo-board games antiquated and kind of shabby. She recognized some of the games from her own school days. They weren’t so much classics as cheaply produced commodities that seemed to congregate in the backs of classrooms or lobbies and waiting rooms. Anywhere that adults are hoping to keep kids quiet and out of the way for a while. There was even one game Anno had used to play with Am-lei and Jeko a fair amount. Perhaps she’d give it a whirl with her kids sometime during the coming days.
The exercise equipment was similarly utilitarian: just a few flux-gravity chambers — small rooms, like a cross between a large shower stall and a person-sized hamster ball, with a gravity controller installed, so one can go inside and run tiny circles or do jumping jacks or just float around and relax even. The kits thought they were the best invention ever. Clearly, their little minds were going to be completely blown by anti-grav portions of the playgrounds on Crossroads Station if they were impressed by a few exercise chambers aimed at adults.
Personally, Anno thought swimming in the lake near their house on New Heffe was a lot more fun, but she still took a turn in one of the flux-gravity chambers, if only for sentimentality’s sake. Floating in zero gee wasn’t something she’d done in years. There weren’t a lot of anti-gravity chambers set up on the planet’s surface, but they were something that had been common on Crossroads Station during her childhood. Sure, the station itself was a spinning wheel, so it always had simulated gravity caused by its centripetal motion, and most spaceships came equipped with artificial gravity. But still, every playground on Crossroads Station had variable gravity sections, just for fun. Also, putting on a spacesuit and going for a nice floaty spacewalk would always be a common recreational activity for inhabitants of a space station.
It was good the kits were getting to experience zero gee. Anno wouldn’t have wanted them to miss out on such a fundamental experience from her own early life.
As she floated in the flux-chamber with Darso literally bouncing off the walls all around her, doing flips and twists and somersaults, Anno felt a knot of tension in her lower back, just at the base of her tail, loosen that she hadn’t even realized was there. It must have settled into place over the years and had become so much a part of her that she didn’t even feel the pain from it anymore. But feeling the tension loosen… it made her feel bright and free. She remembered her back feeling that way, back when she was younger and played in anti-grav chambers all the time.
Anno left the flux chamber with her tail swishing happily. Darso ran off to join Mei and Loi at one of the holo-board games, and Anno joined Drathur at one of the tables by the giant viewing window, looking out at the stars.
“They don’t look like they’re moving,” Drathur said to her, not taking his eyes from the view. “I always forget that. You watch enough holo dramas, and you forget that it’s just a special effect, the way the stars stream past as the ships fly.”
“The stars,” Anno said, realizing what he was talking about. “Yes, I remember being surprised by that when I flew here — to New Heffe — the first time.”
“They’re too far away to see them moving.”
“Very far away,” Anno agreed. And Crossroads Station was, relatively speaking, at one of the closest stars to New Heffe, orbiting a nice yellow star with a nice array of gas giants and smaller (but still uninhabitable) planets around it. Also, a nice asteroid belt. It was strange to Anno now that her homeworld wasn’t a world at all, just a metal tube bent into a ring. There was something crazy about all the people in the universe — this whole interstellar society — that they’d thought it was a good idea to build long-term homes and raise families in solar systems that didn’t even have a single life-sustaining world.
At least with the Heffens, their choice made sense — they’d been fleeing a world that betrayed them, swallowed by fire. But humans? Those furless primates who’d founded Crossroads Station were insane. And the same went for the reptilian S’rellick, fish-like Lintar, and every other species in this galaxy that had set up space stations in the void, having decided that colonizing the stars made more sense than staying home on good solid ground. Or in a nice, good ocean, as the case might be.
“Beautiful though,” Drathur continued, clearly enamored with the view.
Anno had been avoiding looking right at it — focusing on her husband’s face instead; the green in his eyes made her think of the forest on the far side of the lake near their house. His red fur had taken on a sandier tone, peppered with the occasional white hair, especially along the sides of his muzzle, that hadn’t been there a few years ago. The change made him look older, but also more distinguished. If anything, he was more handsome now than when she’d first met him. She didn’t think that was a bias caused by her love for him.
Drathur looked away from the stars outside the window and saw his wife looking at him. His muzzle broke into a tentative smile, enjoying her attention, but then he took her paw and said, “You should look at them. Really look at them. We can’t see the stars like this at home. They’re not as bright. You can’t see as many.”
Anno’s ears flicked nervously. She hadn’t really looked at the stars yet. Yes, she’d glanced at them, but she hadn’t really looked at them.
The stars were the one thing she’d really missed about living in the sky. She’d spent hours as a child hiding out in various nooks and crannies of Crossroads Station, pressed right up against whichever window she could find that was unattended. Anywhere she could feel alone with the stars. She had counted them. She had named them. She’d made up her own constellations. For a while, she’d pretended they were even more siblings — each bright point yet another younger sibling of yet another different species, just waiting for the day she’d meet them. She was so embarrassed about the silliness of that story, she’d never told anyone. Not Am-lei. Not Drathur.
Anno’s childhood had messed her up so badly, she was afraid to look at the stars…
Anno swallowed, flattened her ears, and turned her eyes toward the window.
The bright points of light shone as steadily as ever. They’d never left her; she’d simply stopped looking at them. She’d left them and focused on things closer to her eyes — the chaos and changeable noise of her own single, flitting life. Yet with everything in her life that had changed, the stars remained constant. They’d been constant for generations, for epochs, since before the existence of life itself.
And they’d be the same after Anno was gone.
There was something deeply comforting about that. Anno might not know if her mother or siblings would even speak to her when she got to Crossroads Station, but she could let her gaze drift along the patterns and edges of the constellations she’d imagined for herself, counting off the stars that composed them in a chanting litany under her breath that grounded her — had always grounded her — almost the way the swaying of the grasses on New Heffe grounded her now when she was home.
The stars were her home too.
Continue on to Chapter 6…