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.
The intra-solar-system ferry flew between Crossroads Station and New Jupiter every couple of hours. A whole network of cloud ports sailed around New Jupiter in quasi-permanent locations relative to the constantly shifting and roiling weather. Some of the storms had been ongoing for centuries, since long before humans had established Crossroads Station in this solar system. The cloud port that the ferry docked with — allowing passengers to get off before it returned to the station — sailed along a rift between a dark orange ripple and a pale yellow gash in the patterning of New Jupiter’s swirling clouds.
The basic rule of thumb with cloud surfing on New Jupiter was that the darker the clouds, the more dense and dangerous. Also, of course, the better chance of encountering fascinating native life forms floating along beside you. Some of the cloud ports on New Jupiter were situated beside deep, dark maroon ripples, offering the most gorgeous and highly sought-after surfing experiences. Also the most difficult.
Anno’s family, of course, would be sticking with the pale yellow clouds, as they were all absolute beginners. Even Anno. She hadn’t been cloud surfing in years, and the last time she’d been here, she’d just been a child. She didn’t trust her experience from back then to translate into anything meaningful now. Besides, she wanted to experience this outing with her husband and children — not charge off on her own. She wanted to see their wonder, more than she wanted to marvel at the wonders herself.
Maybe someday, Anno and Drathur would come back here, when the kits were older or all grown up, and they’d try their paws at a more challenging cloudscape together. But not today.
Today the kits helped each adult pick out a surf glider to rent — the mechanized contraptions each had a pair of brightly colored triangular wings attached, and the kits had definite preferences about what colors they wanted to fly under. It was helpful that Kya had chosen to come along, as it meant each kit could fly strapped to the chest of one adult. Without Kya, Anno and Drathur would have had to take turns flying with two kits strapped on, and while that was doable, a trio would be far more awkward and less maneuverable than a pair.
Anno worried — and had been worrying all morning and the previous night — that Loi would panic and back out of this outing as well. Rationally, it would make sense. Cloud surfing is far more dangerous than a simple spacewalk around the station. If you veer off course or your jetpack misfires on a spacewalk, as long as your suit holds tight — and Anno had bought the absolute best suits possible for her kits — there’s plenty of time for a rescue team to come find you. It’s just a question of floating around in space being bored and waiting while they do.
But if you mess up while cloud surfing? There’s a whole giant planet with a massive gravity well ready to pull you down deeper and deeper, through denser and denser toxic clouds. The ticking clock on how long you have for a rescue team to come save you is much shorter, and the rescuers’ jobs when it comes to catching you will be much harder, steering through the ever more turbulent clouds as you fall towards the planet’s core.
Of course, Anno and Drathur carefully avoided saying any of that to Loi or the other kits. There was no need to scare them. Anno wouldn’t allow her family to go on this outing if it weren’t actually very safe — especially for anyone sticking to the palest yellow clouds.
Even so, Anno more than halfway expected Loi to throw a fit when it came time for them all to pull their spacesuits on again. Anno practically held her breath from the stress of the moment when she handed Loi’s barely used spacesuit over to the intense little child. But to Anno’s absolute surprise, Loi pulled the spacesuit over her other clothes with no comment nor any sign of fear at all. It was as if the terror from the other day had never even happened. Anno wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it.
Knowing that she’d have the best chance of soothing Loi if her panic did return, Anno insisted that they at least start out paired together. Mei went with Kya; Darsy with her dad.
Once the adults were all rigged up in their spacesuits with similarly spacesuit-clad children strapped to their chests and triangular wing kits attached to their backs, the whole group lined up by the semi-permeable force field that stretched across a whole long side of the cloud port, ready to jump out into the beautiful toxic gases that comprised the atmosphere of New Jupiter. This was the moment of truth. Kya jumped first, swooping into the buttercup yellow clouds; Drathur followed right behind. Anno waited an extra moment, every muscle clenched, bracing for Loi to cry out, “No, no, no, don’t jump! I want to stay inside!”
But the cry didn’t come. Anno stepped forward, her front paw landing on nothing but wisps, and then as she and her daughter somersaulted into the alien sky, the bright blue wings Loi had picked out grabbed the wind, swooping them up, lifting them on a passing thermal of warmer air. Well, not air in any breathable sense, but air in the sense of it being too thin to float in without surf wings and just clear enough to see through when the angle of the light was right.
Loi did cry out — but it was an inarticulate cry of joy, followed by whooping and finally words: “I’m flying, I’m flying!” Totally powerless and out-of-control, strapped to her mother’s chest, Loi spread her arms wide and angled them back and forth like she was steering herself through the sun beams streaming through the yellow clouds, lighting up the particulates of dust and glowing like a soft, painless fire all around.
Anno smiled and spread her arms wide too. The triangular wings affixed to her back responded to her movements, tilting as she tilted her shoulders, letting her swerve at a sharper angle, helping her to catch up with Kya and Drathur ahead. The movements came back to her so easily — steering the surf wings felt as natural as she remembered it feeling as a kit, even if she did turn more slowly with her adult weight combined with Loi’s weight (and erratic, joyful, jerky motions) strapped to her chest.
Anno couldn’t see Loi’s face with the girl strapped in front of her, but when they caught up with Kya and Drathur, she could see her two other daughters’ faces, clear through their helmets’ faceplates, grinning as wide and happy as could be.
The group swooped and swerved through the thin buttery clouds, skimming over the tops of the thicker marigold and poppy colored cumulonimbus curves below. The thicker clouds looked like scoops of orange sherbet with strawberry ripples.
Small shapes flitted between the crevasses of the cumulonimbus clouds — round bulbs of purple and blue, striped and spotted, with tentacles hanging beneath their air bladder bodies like a decorative fringe. The local wildlife — a form of gas-dwelling jellyfish. Simple, mindless creatures, much like fish, but shaped more like tiny hot air balloons. Loi giggled when she saw the first one; soon all three kits were squealing with delight, crying out one after the other over the suit radios, “There, there, I saw one over there!” as they pointed urgently at any creature they saw, urging their adults to, “Quick chase after it! I want to pet one!”
The New Jovian jellyfish moved surprisingly fast, always just jetting out of reach, no matter how fast Anno flew after them. She remembered chasing the creatures as a child herself; somehow, she’d thought she’d have better luck catching up to one with the added speed and momentum from her greater mass now. No such luck. The decreased maneuverability more than counteracted her greater speed. Nonetheless, Anno had a fantastic time chasing after every Jovian jellyfish Loi directed her towards.
It was easy to get lost in the moment, surrounded by beams of sunlight, strained through thick golden clouds, entirely focused on an azure striped jellyfish jetting away from her in a teasing zigzag line. It felt like the whole universe was just the golden glow around her and a jellyfish to chase. Occasionally, though, the illusion was broken by crossing paths with another surfer, the brightly colored triangles of their wings cutting into the view and reminding Anno that time, space, and anything outside of this perfect moment existed.
“Ooh, look at those wings!” Loi said, pointing at just such a pair of wings intruding on the view ahead. They were a complicated rainbow of colors, though mostly yellow, blue, and purple, arranged in intricate patterns — a custom job, much more personalized and expensive than the plain blue, rented wings Anno was wearing.
Anno had seen that pattern before… It looked like a stained-glass window. No, like Am-lei’s wings had at her Wing Day party, after she’d emerged from her chrysalis but before she’d had the vestigial wings ceremonially cut off. The image of her friend standing in the middle of a room, wings spread wide, and a knife wielded in Am’lei’s mother’s hand, ready to slice those wings from her body was burned into Anno’s brain. It had been a single moment, so long ago, but so extremely unique and special that something in her brain had triggered while it was happening, like hitting a record button, and the moment was seared into her memory. It would never leave her, unlike so many other moments that had come and passed since then.
“It looks like Am-lei’s wings…” Anno trailed off, peering through the swirling golden dust motes at that unique pattern, and unconsciously steering herself toward the pair of triangular wings that reminded her of her friend.
A twist in the wind caused the other flyer to turn, and the body strapped to those wings was spindly, gangly, insectile… It didn’t have to wear a spacesuit with that obsidian-like exoskeleton, just a special breathing apparatus over its face. Anno had only ever seen two aliens who looked quite like that before — Am-lei and her mother, Lee-a-lei. This was Am-lei. Anno would’ve sworn to it.
Anno had crossed star-systems, and just today crossed from one side of a solar system to the other, to be where she was, and somehow, without any coordination and an entire gas giant beneath them, she’d found herself in the exact same spot as her childhood friend.
Anno changed the settings on her suit radio to broadcast more widely than to the private channel set up for her family and said, “Am-lei! Over here!” She waved a paw; then since she knew her spacesuit covered her more thoroughly than Am-lei’s breathing apparatus, she added, “It’s me, Anno!” in case her friend didn’t recognize her.
Am-lei flew closer. After a few moments, her voice, sweet and flute-like crackled to life over the radio, “Anno? You’re here with your family?”
“That’s right,” Anno said, “just showing the kits some of the sights this week.”
Anno tilted, beginning to turn so that she and Am-lei could fly side by side, but of course, her awkwardly large turn radius meant that Am-lei did most of the work sliding into formation beside her.
“Jeko and I are here with our families too — her parents, my mom and grandma, and a couple of Wespirtech friends who are visiting Crossroads for the wedding.”
It was good and weird to hear Am-lei’s voice again. The tone had deepened a little; the timbre had richened but become less smooth. She sounded older, more like Anno remembered Lee-a-lei, her mother, sounding back when they were kids. The shift made the reality of the amount of time that had passed since they’d seen each other hit Anno all the more strongly.
Am-lei flew beside Anno for a while in silence. They were both busy looking at the jellies floating just above the darker clouds. Too busy to chat idly. Another figure appeared in the distance — large, bulbous, and gray. As they got closer, Anno realized she was looking at Jeko, dressed in a customized spacesuit that gave her room for her tree-trunk thick limbs and arm-like nose. Her triangular surf wings, like the spacesuit, were a soft, understated shade of gray. Her elephantine shape looked ungainly and unnatural flying through the clouds, unlike Am-lei who looked like she’d been built to live here.
“Jeko,” Am-lei said over the broad radio channel. “Look who I found — Anno and one of her kits.”
Jeko turned slowly while flying too, but Am-lei had no trouble changing direction to fly beside her.
“My other two kits are around here somewhere too,” Anno explained. “They’re with my husband, Drathur, and Kya — do you know about Kya? You’d remember her as Ky from when we were younger.”
“Your annoying little brother?” Am-lei asked.
“Kya’s a sister now?” Jeko echoed in her brassy, trumpeting voice. The tone of her voice hadn’t changed one bit. “Huh, I wonder if that’s why she was so annoying as a kid… Nothing fitting right, everyone else getting her wrong all the time.”
Anno’s ears tried to flick back but hit the edges of her spacesuit helmet. Jeko had always been especially empathetic and perceptive. It hadn’t occurred to Anno herself to put those facts together about Kya, but it would make a lot of sense.
Then again, Kya was a feline whatever her gender was, and she’d used to deeply believe in the weird human obsession with cats and dogs fighting… so… It also might just have been what she was going to be like as a kid no matter what. There was really no way to tell, no way to go back and pick apart the threads of a person’s life once they’re all braided together.
“Have either of you seen the sparking eel around here?” Jeko trumpeted. “My father caught a glimpse of one a bit ago, and we’ve all been looking for it.”
“Up here?” Am-lei asked. “In the yellow clouds?”
“Apparently,” Jeko answered.
“Sparking eel?” Loi chimed in, querulously. She continued in a small, tentative voice: “I’ve never seen one of those, what do they look like?”
Jeko waved her spacesuit clad trunk and said, “Like a long waving black ribbon, except with blue sparks of electricity all along its back.”
Loi chirped in excitement — ‘chirp’ was the only word to describe the sound. “We have to find it,” she insisted.
“They’re usually lower, in the orange or red clouds,” Am-lei said, tilting her wings for a dive. She swooped away so fast, and the orange cloud below — the one Anno had been treating like an impenetrable floor to this ocean of golden cirrostratus — swallowed her up, leaving plumes of disturbed marigold colored dust behind, mixed with the yellow.
“I’m going to follow her,” Jeko said, “and see if she’s right.”
Jeko tilted her wings and sailed more slowly than Am-lei had at first, but soon, her greater mass added up to greater momentum and she crashed through the smooth curve of the darker orange cumulonimbus cloud like a diver splashing into a lake. The dust cloud left behind obscured Anno’s vision briefly before mixing in beautiful swirls with the daffodil shade of the sky around her.
Anno flew on, continuing to treat the top of the orange cumulonimbus cloud like a line of caution tape — do not pass, it might as well have read. She wasn’t going to go flying down lower in the thicker, more intense clouds where the wind was more likely to overpower her. Lightning storms happened down there. It was safe enough for a practiced surfer, but that wasn’t Anno. Not today. No matter how much she wanted to throw her responsibilities and safety precautions aside and follow after them.
Maybe she’d catch up with Am-lei and Jeko when they all took a break at the lounge in the port.
For now, Anno let Loi guide her along the cracks and crevasses at the top of the cumulonimbus clouds, and she was relieved when she joined back up with Drathur and Kya.
They never did find the sparking eels. Though the kits had a lot of fun looking. And when Anno’s group went back to the port to have some lunch before taking the ferry home, they ran into Am-lei’s human grandmother, Amy, reading beside one of the windows.
Amy put her book down when Anno came up to introduce herself.
“I remember you,” the human woman said. “And even if I didn’t, Am-lei talks about you all the time.”
“She does?” Anno asked, unsure what Am-lei would have to say about her. From Amy’s expression — a primatoid smile like Iko’s, except stretched across more delicate, furless facial features — Anno suspected the stories must be positive, even flattering. But she couldn’t imagine what they’d be.
Amy invited Anno to sit and talk with her, but the kits were arguing about what they would and wouldn’t eat from the options in the port’s lounge and Anno found herself pulled away instead.
Picking lunch foods led to searching down enough napkins for a trio of messy kits which led to finding an empty table with enough seats for a group of six; then making sure the hungry kits actually ate instead of just arguing about what different kinds of jellies they’d seen.
By the time lunch wrapped up, Anno didn’t have it in her any more to seek out Amy for a chat. From what she’d seen, Am-lei and Jeko had stopped by the lounge for a quick bite too, but they’d been surrounded by their relatives and what must have been their out-of-system guests. They’d looked busy, dealing with so many people, and then they’d disappeared right back out to the clouds for more surfing — more advanced surfing — long before Anno’s kits had finished eating.
Anno would see them soon anyway, at the wedding and the reception after. Still, it had been nice to run into her friends, even if it were only for a handful of minutes before their differently busy lives took them in different directions.
Continue on to Chapter 18…