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.
Drathur researched the price of space freighter tickets to Crossroads Station, the price of lodging in quarters on the station, and all the other incidentals one would need to research for such a trip. He was better at that kind of research than Anno, and besides, she couldn’t seem to concentrate with thoughts of her childhood friends and the possibility of seeing her family again whisking through her head like a tornado. Instead, she put her work aside and played with the three kits for the rest of the afternoon, talking to them about what Crossroads Station was like when she was growing up and gently feeling out if they’d even be manageable on such a trip.
Loi loved the idea of flying in a spaceship. Mei wanted to know what kind of different foods they’d get to try on a space station. And Darso was mostly concerned with keeping up with his sisters — anything they said they were excited about, he claimed to be twice as excited.
By the time Anno had put the kits to bed, she was exhausted. But also, certain she’d be taking her family to Crossroads Station if they could afford it.
Not only did she want to see Am-lei and Jeko standing together, proboscis and trunk intertwined lovingly as they said their vows, she wanted to see her kits explore the world that had been the only world she’d known at their age. She wanted to see their little, red-furred faces as they looked at the night sky all around them — no longer indicative of night, but simply of the size of the universe that little specks of life like Heffens lived inside of. The great black void that holds space stations and planets alike — but it feels so much more present and viscerally real through the windows of a space station than far up above the wide stretch of a planet’s horizon.
But Anno knew how expensive space freighter flights could be — it had taken all her savings to relocate herself to New Heffe and live in a place with grass and dirt beneath her paws. So, she was ready to have the dancing visions in her head crushed when Drathur came to her, ready to talk realities.
“How much?” Anno asked, cutting to the chase.
“Adding it all together? Flights there and back, plus housing, plus extra for food while we’re traveling — I’d say fifty thousand credits.”
Anno’s heart sank. “Each?” she asked in a small, hopeless voice.
“Oh, goodness, no. That’s for all five of us.”
Anno’s eyes widened. “Really?” She was too numb from the shock for her heart to jump. She couldn’t believe it was that cheap, especially this last minute. She repeated, “Really?”
“Yes,” he said, very matter-of-factly. “That even includes spending a day surfing the gas clouds of New Jupiter.”
Anno hadn’t surfed the gas clouds of New Jupiter since… primary school graduation, shortly before Am-lei left Crossroads Station to study physics at Wespirtech. They’d worn themselves out on the rolling, rumply orange creamsicle clouds, and then they’d lain on the cold metal floor all night, right outside the docking berth of the ship that would take Am-lei away to her new adventure, talking and baring their souls. Jeko had surfed with them, but she wasn’t the night owl that either Am-lei or Anno had been. So she’d skipped the soul-baring session.
Come morning, Am-lei had departed, a swiveling airlock door closing behind her, and Anno hadn’t rested again until she’d done the same, taking her own ride on a freighter ship to New Heffe. They’d gone in different directions, and while messages bounced between the stars had kept them tenuously connected for a while, the messages had grown sparser and sparser. Anno always suspected Am-lei had been secretly mad at her. Everyone else had been. All her siblings, her mom, the whole xeno-native enclave had seemed to turn against her when she’d started speaking out against the myrmecoidal matrons who ran the cult and had convinced her mother to birth a series of children, each of a different species, because of some insane belief that it would pull the universe together.
Even using the word “cult” in her own mind today, years and light-years away, still made Anno flinch. It was a hot-button word. The kind of word that can get you kicked out of your own family.
And yet, Am-lei wasn’t part of that family. Am-lei was a friend. Maybe, just because everyone else had turned against Anno didn’t mean Am-lei had too.
Maybe Am-lei really wanted Anno at her wedding.
“I need to talk to Am-lei,” Anno said. “Before we decide. I need to reach out to her… make sure…” She couldn’t finish the sentence right, because the right words to end it were, “she really wants me.” Instead, Anno said, “Make sure it’s really a good idea.”
Drathur nodded. He was supportive, but not the kind of spouse who could see into her mind and read the thoughts she was too afraid to say. Am-lei had been that kind of friend. And that made it extra scary to reach out to her — what if that connection was gone? What if it had only ever been something Anno had imagined? A way that she had rewritten her past, long after it was over?
Or worse, what if the connection was real and still there, and Am-lei saw right into Anno’s heart and then rejected her anyway?
Anno had been rejected a lot before. So much that she’d given up on her past and just made a new life for herself. She wasn’t sure she could take another rejection from that past.
But…
It was Am-lei.
And Anno had to know. So, she sent a message — a simple text-only message — out into the universe, to bounce from one satellite relay to the next deep space communications hub to the next until it finally arrived at Crossroads Station. Anno had no idea what time it would be on Crossroads Station right now. Unlike a planet, a space station only has one time. However, it does have different shifts, so even if Anno looked up the time, it wouldn’t tell her what kind of sleep schedule Am-lei kept these days. It wouldn’t tell her how busy her friend was. It wouldn’t tell her how long she would have to wait for a response.
The message Anno sent read simply, “I got your invitation! Gratz! We’re trying to figure out if we can make it.” Simple. As simple as she could manage. No room for her insecurities and hopes to shine through.
Then she waited. Drathur tried to distract Anno with a vid-serial they’d been watching — a high drama thing with lots of relationships pushed to the edge of breaking. Anno liked how it contrasted with her cozy life. Sometimes, it reminded her of what it had been like living in a big family full of big, clashing personalities. Except all of these personalities — no matter how reminiscent of her own family they might be — were all fictional and safely embedded inside a holo-display where they couldn’t come out and hurt her.
Anno had trouble concentrating on the show, and the moment a message from Am-lei popped up on her wrist computer, she paused the holo-display, focused entirely now on the plain words in a standard font:
“Really? That’s great! Jeko and I would love to see you.”
Anno read the words over and over, trying to figure out if there were some trick or trap to them. When her siblings interacted there were always passive-aggressive jibes, sometimes outright lies, hidden in words that seemed straightforward. But Am-lei had never been like that.
And even if she were: how can you misinterpret, “I would love to see you”?
Anno shuddered, realizing she could think of several ways. But she didn’t want to overthink this. She wanted to see her friends, declaring their love for each other, in the home she hadn’t seen in years.
After some thought, Anno sent back a response asking, “Is there anything else we should know for figuring out our plans?”
In spite of the light-years between them, the length of time between Anno’s question and Am-lei’s answer had more to do with whether the insectoid alien was paying attention when the message arrived and chose to answer right away than with the limitations of physical space. With her physics degree from Wespirtech, Am-lei could have explained how interstellar communication traveled so quickly these days, but Anno had never bothered with studying it.
Fortunately, for Anno’s nerves, the next answer came back quickly, reassuring her even further that her friend was serious about wanting to see her, wanting her to come to the wedding.
Drathur read over Anno’s shoulder as she absorbed the big block of text from her friend. It read:
“We’re doing the ceremony in the arboretum, and it’ll be a traditional human ceremony. I know that’s weird, because neither of us is human. But my mom (she says ‘hi’ by the way!) thought Grandma would love it, and Jeko doesn’t feel very connected to her people’s traditions and from what research I’ve been able to do, Lepidopterans don’t have anything like weddings. They don’t really do the pair-bonding love-thing at all. So, hey, we live on a human station, why not do one of the human styles of a wedding? Other than that, there’s not much to know.”
“That sounds low-key,” Drathur observed.
When Anno looked up from staring intently at the block of text on her wrist computer, she saw a touch of bewilderment in Drathur’s eyes. “Did I ever tell you about Am-lei’s family?” she asked.
“I’m not sure…”
“I must have, but there’s no reason it would’ve stuck. She’s the one whose mother was rescued from a crashed vessel as a baby and raised by a human. Amy — that’s Am-lei’s grandma — didn’t know anything about Lepidopterans, and from what I’ve heard nearly had a heart attack when Lee-a-lei — that’s Am-lei’s mom — went into a chrysalis and metamorphosed from a chubby little green caterpillar into a long-legged, colorful-winged butterfly.”
Anno remembered that change vividly herself, not for Lee-a-lei, of course. But for Am-lei. It had been strange losing her friend for a month, only to have her friend return in an entirely different form. She’d had to get used to looking at faceted disco-ball eyes and a long curling proboscis when she talked to her friend, instead of black eye spots and stubby, wriggling mouth parts. The transition had been even weirder for Am-lei herself. She hadn’t been able to eat solid food anymore, only liquids, and of course, the first thing she’d done was throw a big party where her mother and grandmother helped her cut off her big, colorful, beautiful but awkward wings.
“Didn’t Amy research the species of her adopted kid?” Drathur asked skeptically.
“She tried to,” Anno said. “But Lepidopterans still live only on their original homeworld, and they’re very private. Secretive even. Lee-a-lei was an adult before she and Amy even figured out the name of her species.”
“Wow,” Drathur said. “That must have been weird for her.”
“It must’ve been,” Anno agreed.
Between them hung the unspoken but shared knowledge that Anno’s own childhood had featured a similar lack. Her mother, busy with more than a dozen children of different species, had done a woeful job teaching Anno and her siblings about their heritages. Since they’d lived on a space station with a significant population of Heffen refugees, Anno hadn’t fared too badly. She’d been able to pick up the basics of her people’s culture. Some of her younger siblings, though, never met more than one other member of their own species during their whole childhoods.
The Xeno-Native Enclave had very strict rules, enforced by the myrmecoidal matrons who ran it. Mothers couldn’t choose the species of their children; they couldn’t have more than one child of a particular species; and they couldn’t have children of their own species. Each potential mother when she joined the Xeno-Native Enclave was expected to donate genetic material, meaning their species could be included in the myrmecoidal matrons’ gene banks and thus other mothers in the enclave could have children of that species.
Thus Anno would have never existed if it weren’t for two broken young women, swept into the myrmecoidal matrons’ weird cult — her mother, a koala-like Woaoo named Clori, and at least one Heffen who had donated her genetic material and became a mother herself, but not to a Heffen child.
Anno remembered several Heffen mothers who’d lived in the enclave. When she’d been little, her mother had tried to get her to treat them like aunts. Anno had refused. She’d always felt coldly toward the Heffen mothers; she didn’t understand why until she was older. Actually, she wasn’t entirely sure that she hadn’t invented her reason as a backwards explanation… maybe one of them had refused to give her candy when she was too young to remember, and her child-brain had just latched onto the feeling of resentment and never let go. Maybe the real reason was something stupid and petty that only made sense in the brain of a toddler.
But as Anno had gotten older, she’d come up with a real reason to despise the Heffen women who’d joined the Xeno-Native Enclave as adults, rather than by being children born into it: if none of them had joined, then no Heffen children could have been born into and raised in that weird, twisted environment.
Sometimes Anno hated her own mother. Sometimes she couldn’t.
Clori was a sweet woman who’d done the best she could with her brood of thirteen children of different species. But can any single mother properly care for thirteen children of entirely different species?
Anno didn’t think so.
Anno thought raising a litter of three Heffen pups who looked just like mini-Annos was hard enough. And at least, she had a deep understanding of what to expect from each of her children, because while each was unique, each was also a great deal like her.
Anno was nothing like Clori. At least, that’s what she told herself when she let the anger and resentment simmer up. Then she tried to remind herself of her mothers’ sweetness to her… when her mother had had time for her. And mostly, she just tried to let the memories flow away and forget about the years of her childhood on Crossroads Station.
“So…” Drathur prompted, gently drawing Anno out of her own mind and the deep well of thoughts and feelings in there. “Does this mean we’re going?”
Drathur had wanted to visit Crossroads Station for some time. He’d never been there, and he wanted to see the place where his beloved constant companion had grown up. The places and people who had formed her. But he’d never pushed. He’d let Anno take the lead because he didn’t want to force her to do something painful.
But now…
Well…
It was Am-lei, and yeah, Anno had to go.
“I guess we are,” Anno said.
Drathur grinned really big. His long, wolfish muzzle could split into a grin unlike any other, and Anno loved seeing it.
“I love planning trips,” he said.
“I know.” Anno patted his paw with hers. “I’m glad, because I kind of just don’t want to think about it.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “I’ll figure out everything, and all you and the kits have to do is come along.”
Continue on to Chapter 3…