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 space freighter’s recreation room was packed with passengers as the ship approached the solar system containing Crossroads Station. Anno had managed to claim one of the tables and three chairs for her family. She had Darso on her lap; Mei was on Drathur’s lap; and Loi was treating their third chair like a climbing structure, getting on Anno’s last nerve. Anno just hoped the rambunctious kit’s antics weren’t bothering any of the other passengers packed around the broad viewing windows.
The stars had been pretty while the freighter traveled through the darkness of deep space — brighter and sharper than they ever looked from the surface of a planet — but the view inside a solar system was utterly stunning.
The freighter made a point of flying past all four gas giants in the system, even though that involved a meandering, indirect path through the solar system. A space freighter isn’t a cruise ship, and none of the passengers had been promised a luxury liner’s view as part of the cost of their ticket. The freighter could have saved time flying straight to the station to drop off its cargo, including passengers. But no, it sailed slowly past the gas giants, giving everyone time to take in the rippling layers of swirling clouds in different colors.
Anno suspected whoever was piloting the freighter simply enjoyed the view themself and decided to be kind to their passengers.
The first two gas giants were both rich, royal, beautiful shades of purple with clouds far too corrosive and noxious for any vaguely familiar forms of life to bother visiting them. The third was strangely monochromatic — all shades of gray, starkly beautiful, but eerie and oddly unwelcoming. Then came New Jupiter with its creamsicle shades of orange.
“That’s where we’re going to go cloud-surfing?” Loi asked, leaning so far forward on the chair she’d turned backward that it almost tipped over.
“That’s right,” Drathur said. Then doubting himself, as he’d never actually been to this solar system before, he added, “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Anno agreed. “I went there many times as a kid.” She stared at the ripples and swirls of warm, inviting orange the shade of a summer sunset if it congealed into a ball and rolled off into the sky to become its own world. She wanted to soak it up into her eyes. She’d missed this sight. “Well, maybe not many times,” she amended, thinking of the pawful of happy days she’d spent there. “But several. Once with my whole family — that was chaos, with so many of us. But then three or four times with Am-lei, a couple of those Jeko was with us too.”
“They’re the ones getting married?” Darso asked in a piping voice, far too high-pitched for how close his muzzle was to Anno’s ear.
“Yes,” Anno said, realizing she’d neglected to include figurines of Am-lei and Jeko’s species among the travel gifts for her kits.
“They were on the wedding invitation,” Mei said wisely. “Dancing together. They both had long noses, but one of them was as skinny as noodles and the other one was like tree trunks!”
Anno laughed in spite of herself at the image of her childhood friends being composed of noodles and tree trunks rather than their usual obsidian black exoskeleton and wrinkly gray skin. “That’s right, sort of,” she admitted. “You’ll get to see them for real soon.”
Darso turned his face away from the window and buried his muzzle against Anno’s chest.
“Are you okay?” she asked, looking down at the boy child trying to burrow into her jacket.
Darso didn’t answer, but he shook his head.
“You’re scared?” Anno asked.
A tiny nod, half buried in her jacket.
Anno squeezed her son in a tight hug. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “You’re with me and your dad and your sisters, and we’re all gonna be okay. I know it’s scary going somewhere new—“ Anno tried to ignore the glances she was getting from other passengers who were apparently distracted from watching New Jupiter slide by outside the viewing window by a quietly delivered speech given to her kit. They were welcome to be annoyed by her parenting if they wanted to be, but it wouldn’t change that her kit was scared and it was her job to comfort him. “—but it’s also exciting, right? Think about all the little figurines you got this week and how much more exciting it’ll be to meet actual people like them.”
Darso shuddered, seemingly not very comforted, but then Mei climbed off her dad’s lap and came over to take her brother’s paw. “Like T’zu and T’zori,” she said. “They’re fun right?”
Darso peeked his muzzle out from where he’d been hiding it against Anno’s chest. He nodded solemnly.
T’zu and T’zori were s’rellick teens who’d played a lot of holo-board games with the kits during the last week. The reptilian teens had actually gotten along with Mei, Loi, and Darso well enough that they’d bothered with exchanging contact information so they could stay in touch after Anno’s family disembarked at Crossroads Station.
T’zu and T’zori would be continuing on to a different destination with their mentor. S’rellick children didn’t have parents in the same way as Heffens or other more culturally similar species. Unless of course, you were talking about Anno’s little sister, T’reska, or any other s’rellick who’d been born into the cult of xeno-nativity. Usually, s’rellick eggs were laid in a hatching cave, raised in giant groups in a brooding cave, and then acquired mentors once they were teens, deemed finally worthy of an individual adult’s attention.
T’reska had been horrified when Anno, helpful big sister that she was, had told her about what her childhood would have been like if she were a normal s’rellick. Clori had been furious with Anno for upsetting her delicate, sensitive, little sister. Anno had been furious with Clori for not doing her job properly as T’reska’s mother and teaching the reptilian girl about her own people.
It was the kind of stand-off that had happened often during the tail end of Anno’s teenage years. Everyone angry. Everyone dissatisfied. Those memories of conflict and pain made it hard for Anno to see all the way back to the happier memories from when she’d been younger — they functioned like mud spatters on a pane of glass, skewing and distorting everything on the other side, everything that had come before.
Anno squeezed Darso, still nestled against her chest, closer to her with one arm, and then with the other one, she gestured for Mei to climb into her lap as well. With two five-year-olds crowding and giggling on her knees, she could barely see past their triangular ears and fuzzy heads to the view in the window, but their warmth and weight and swishing tails made the crowding worth it.
As was true more and more often, the moment didn’t last long. Loi swapped from her chair to her father’s lap, and then Mei scrambled to claim the suddenly empty chair, leaving Darso alone on Anno’s lap again. Those cuddly moments were precious and so, so very fleeting. Most of the time, Anno’s five-year-olds were simply too busy to be cuddled and coddled and treasured like the infants they’d once been. So, she grasped the moments when she could. She hoped these precious moments would never become obscured like the similar moments of warmth between her and Clori from her own childhood had become.
But she was terrified they would be. Anno was her mother’s daughter — no matter how different her species or her philosophies, she’d been raised by Clori. She could feel Clori’s attitudes inside her sometimes, coloring how she looked at the world and how she interacted with her kits. She hoped they never ran away from her the way she’d run away from her own mom. But how could she expect better? Even if she believed she was doing better than her mother had done, surely Clori had believed she was doing the best job she could manage… and look how that had turned out.
A woman who rejects her own mother has no right to expect her children won’t do the same to her.
Or does she?
Anno didn’t know. But she worried. And she treasured the moments she had with her kits like they were precious chips of diamond, draining away through an hourglass, each one glittering and cutting her as it passed through the narrow neck of now and into the well of memories below.
The moment of now crashed into the specter of yesterday as a bright, oblong smear of light in the viewing window expanded enough for Anno to recognize it: concentric metal rings with spokes between them, spinning eternally in the darkness, reflecting the sun’s light just enough to gleam a soft shade of silver. This had been Anno’s home for eighteen years — Crossroads Station. She’d seen the station from the inside, but every child raised there knew what it looked like from the outside. Pictures of it hung on walls in their classrooms. Information displays in common areas showed its shape in cross-section in the form of interactive maps, labeling the different regions and lighting up with fastest routes if you asked how to get somewhere.
Every night when Anno went to sleep, she was back on Crossroads Station, because even after eight years, her subconscious brain hadn’t caught up. It still thought she lived there. Even when her own children showed up in her dreams, sometimes her brain got muddled and thought Mei, Loi, and Darso were simply more younger siblings. More children of Clori.
Crossroads Station didn’t just live in the darkness of space; it lived in the darkness behind Anno’s closed eyes.
Just looking at it felt like going home, and for all the pent-up worries and concerns plaguing her… she still felt her shoulders relax, her tail begin to swish, and her ears perk forward at the sight of her old home. It made her feel safe in a way that she wasn’t entirely comfortable with — she’d fought so hard to get away; it shouldn’t feel this right to be coming back.
But it did.
As the space freighter approached Crossroads Station, its spinning wheels grew in the window; its own windows became visible, rectangular patches of brightness and darkness speckling the metal curves of the wheels.
All three of the kits were leaned forward now, getting their little noses as close to the viewing window as they could.
“We’re going to be inside there?” Darso asked, breathless yet still more capable of words than either of his sisters for once. The girls were too focused, tails swishing too quickly and eyes shining too brightly, for them to even notice any words being said inside the room they were actually in. They only had eyes for the space station ahead of them.
“Yes,” Anno answered her son. “That’s Crossroads Station where I grew up. We’ll be staying in rented quarters on the inner ring.”
“Will it have good windows there?” Loi asked, eyes still transfixed on the window and tail swishing wildly. Yet somehow, she’d wrested enough of her attention away from the shining, glittering, spinning wheels of Crossroads Station to ask questions about it. The important questions.
“No,” Drathur answered, saving Anno from having to say the disappointing word. All three kits’ ears and tails drooped as he said it. “Quarters with windows are much more expensive, and it seemed more important to stay longer than to sleep in a room with windows.”
Loi grumbled something unintelligible under her breath. She had a way of resorting to nonsense words when she was frustrated. Anno hadn’t been able to figure out if the nonsense words were just random syllables mushed together or if she was dealing with a budding linguist on her paws, designing an entire made-up language to complain about her parents in.
The space station drew closer and closer, until a single curve of the outer ring filled the entire window. Crossroads Station was close enough now for the passengers aboard the freighter to see out their viewing window and through the windows across the space between, into the docking ring. Inside the docking ring, aliens of all different sorts went about their days, moving crates of cargo, talking together, eating, doing all the things that make up life on a space station.
Then the freighter ship turned, pointing its nose at the station so it could dock, and the view shifted back to star-studded blackness and the side of another docked vessel, all metal and boxy.
The crowd of passengers who’d been watching as the gas giants passed by began to disperse, heading back to their own rooms, either to sleep or pack their things for deboarding or maybe even to go to the galley for a meal. Not everyone was getting off here, only about half of the passengers. And everyone was on different schedules aboard the freighter. Space was weird that way. Sure, it was what Anno had grown up with, but she’d gotten used to the enforced day-night cycles of an actual planet.
Living on space stations — or spaceships — was like living in perpetual twilight, just enough light to see and function, but not quite enough light to tell if it were dawn or dusk. It all depended on context — an individual’s sleep or work schedule; the shift they were on; perhaps even how long their species’ sleep cycles lasted.
Of course, literally, there was plenty of light on the freighter and on Crossroads Station — no one was bumping around in dim rooms, unable to see — but the brightness of the light didn’t carry any chronological connotations. It was practical. That was all.
Anno already missed the brightness of noon, the golden thickness of late afternoon, and the exciting potential of dusk. She liked living on a world where the quality of the light outside her window meant something. It made her feel anchored and safe.
Thinking about the inconstancy and relativity of time on a space station made Anno feel, once again, like she was falling down a hole, back into her childhood, back into when she didn’t have any control over her own life.
Anno and Drathur stayed in their seats until the room quieted down, until it was only the two of them, holding paws across the small table by the window and their kits hurriedly playing with all the toys they expected to miss soon.
“You’d think this was the vacation,” Drathur said, “from the way the kits have taken to it.”
“Yeah,” Anno agreed. “It’s funny, but it’s nice that they’ve liked it here. I hope they like the station too.”
“They will,” Drathur assured her. But he didn’t know. He’d never been there. He only knew what she’d told him or what he’d read about. And Anno worried that she’d remembered it all wrong or explained it badly, and Crossroads Station would be a dreadfully boring or horribly stressful place for her family.
Anno worried that she’d dragged them all here, on a week-long flight across multiple star systems, for nothing at all.
“Have you heard from Clori or any of your siblings yet?” Drathur asked.
Anno could hear in his tone that he’d really, really tried not to ask that question — he’d probably been putting it off for hours, but now they were docked. Their luggage was already all packed up inside their rooms, ready for them to deboard. It was time for her to check her messages. Even if she didn’t want to.
A quick glance at her wrist computer showed Anno that there was a brief message from Am-lei — she and Jeko wanted to get together sometime in the next few days — but nothing else. No answers from her mother or any of her siblings, even though she had twelve of them. Well, twelve she knew about. Anno was pretty sure her mother had truly stopped having children a few years before they’d parted ways, while Anno was still a teen. But with a woman who’d chosen to have thirteen kids? Who knows. That kind of behavior is unexplainable, at least as far as Anno could tell, except through madness. And a mad woman is an unpredictable woman.
At some level, Anno wouldn’t be surprised to find a whole string of new siblings, marking off the years she’d been gone, and a new baby to boot in her mother’s arms. She didn’t like that idea. It made her feel… replaced? Like maybe, by leaving, she’d spurred her mother back into having more children.
Anno’s ears flattened, and she felt her shoulders hunching in spite of herself.
“So, that’s a no?” Drathur asked. “I mean, I think that’s what your body language is telling me, right? You’d be more upset if it were something worse than simply no response?”
Anno nodded. “That’s right. No response.”
“They probably haven’t seen your message yet. We didn’t send it all that long ago.” Drathur squeezed Anno’s paws.
Anno wasn’t sure his interpretation was right, but she liked it better than the idea that her family was purposely not responding to her, purposefully trying to reject her. So, she tried to believe him.
“Come on, kits,” Anno said, pulling her paws away and getting up from the table. “It’s time for you to see Crossroads Station from the inside.” She wasn’t ready, but she wouldn’t ever be. It was better to get this transition over with.
All three kits cheered.
Continue on to Chapter 8…