Love and Rockets Read online

  “I know that.”

  “I will love you until you do.”

  “And I you.”

  GATEWAY NIGHT

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  When you work as an ER nurse on a station at a skip node, where the Four Known Races touch the edges of each other’s lives, and sometimes more than touch, you never know what you’ll encounter on a festival night.

  The first time I saw Kata Station, it was from the viewdeck of a node skipper, and it looked like a gleaming dark jewel. I was fresh off the home planet—had never skipped before—and even though I’d emped travelers a few times, I had never had the full sense surround, where I was seeing/thinking/living/feeling such a strange stretch of time. We dropped out of the node, a creamy green-streaked tunnel that lasted hours or a heartbeat, into light-pricked darkness. The nearest sun was only a little larger than the other stars. We were in a sea of darkness, and then, as we shot across no one’s land toward the station, I saw the bubble on top gleam with reflected starshine. It was station night in the park, I found out later.

  The Four Known Races each had their own quadrant of the station, sprawling collections of different-shaped structures, more like a scatter of seafoam than anything ordered and quartered, all topped with the park, which everyone shared. Each quadrant of parkland was landscaped like a favorite spot on one of the worlds its race came from.

  As we closed on the station, I saw that one quadrant of park glowed faintly here and there, and another looked paler than the others.

  Docks for skippers and in-system supply and tourist ships were at the outer edges of the station. Our skipper headed toward one of the docks in the Human Quadrant. I stayed on the viewdeck all the way to the dock, watching through the shield with five children and one indulgent grandparent. All the other passengers were seasoned travelers who couldn’t be bothered to watch a station approach, but I had never seen anything more beautiful and terrifying, except the last sight of my home planet as I turned my back on it. Small minds, limited ambitions, I had thought, as its blue and white disk winked into nothing. And, I thought, home.

  When we docked, I felt my heart drop. I gripped the edge of a chair as the sounds and shiver of the skipper connecting to the dock thunked through the ship. I was about to step into a new world, a place I would call home from now on. My old life and all its frustrations were behind me.

  Six months later, I thought I knew my way around Kata. I had my nursing job in the Human Quadrant of the hospital, where I spent most of my waking hours. I had a tiny sleeping and storage compartment in the honeycomb of low-rent dwellings in the station’s underside. I spent my days off in the park, watching the other races and their replicated environments.

  The Oerian, plant-animal hybrids, had the part of the park that lit up at night. They used small, colorful winged flyers as mobile components of their life cycle, and some phosphoresced in darkness; their glittering clouds illuminated the feathery leaves on their parent plants during station night. It always smelled delicious in the Oerian quadrant.

  The paler quadrant of the park was the desert the Hallen preferred. The Hallen looked like big eight-legged lizards, only they were much more colorful than the lizards I had grown up with—no need for camouflage, I guess, and they rated each other on how colorful they were, so there was a lot of cosmetic coloring going on. All lizards on my home planet, Frillium, were poisonous, so I didn’t feel relaxed around the Hallen.

  The Human park had forest in some of it and a lake surrounded by tame plants in the rest. I didn’t recognize any of the human plants. They were too green to suit me.

  The Shurixit section had caves and crannies, sculpted rock, with a river wandering through it, the water green and smelling of copper. Forest grew on some of their cliffs, the trees bent-trunked as though they had knees and elbows, their leaves frilly and mobile.

  I was very lonely.

  Back home, the whole community gathered every sevennight to sing and share a potluck meal. I could sit in that circle and stare at my neighbors’ faces and think, I don’t like him. I don’t like her, either. I remember all the times that boy called me a freak because I said aloud I’m not happy here. I wish he’d choke on his words.

  I didn’t really like any of them as individuals, but in aggregate, when we were singing, all our voices united in words and melody, I felt safe and at home.

  I hadn’t found any groups to belong to at Kata Station. The other nurses in the Human Quadrant of the hospital were guardedly friendly, when they weren’t exhausted. I had met one of the Shurixit nurses, and we shared lunches at SpiceFire, a multispecies restaurant a corridor over from the hospital. Because of the explosive way Human-Shurixit chemistry interacted, we wore filters when we went where we might encounter each other. She asked me as many questions about my home planet as I asked her about hers, though I thought my answers disappointed her or upset her—it was hard to tell. Of the other three Known Races, Shurixit looked most like Humans, though the ones I met smelled strange, like heat and apples and lightning, and their faces didn’t move the way ours did, or mean any of the same things.

  Live Shurixit had two arms and two legs each, torsos a little longer and snakier than ours, heads and faces somewhat like ours, despite the patterned fur in multiple colors, and they were about our size. When the Shurixit died the first death, their bodies went through metamorphosis and entered another sort of life. I didn’t know much about that yet, because the dead mostly stayed in the private areas of the Shurixit Quadrant. It was one of those things you weren’t supposed to ask about.

  That night, traffic was picking up in the ER. I took my lunch break at station midnight. I worked in the ER that served humans. Shurixit, Oeria, and Hallen all got treated in the same hospital, but in different places; our building was like the station in miniature, four quadrants with mixing along the edges. Not a lot of crossover on who treated whom; some doctors and nurses studied other races, but most found their own kind easiest to learn about and treat.

  For my midnight lunch, I went to the hospital cafeteria, a big pale yellow room with a lot of small chrome tables and chairs bolted to the textured floor just in case there were gravity shifts. The walls were masked by live plants, which made the air smell better than most of the other rooms in the hospital.The servers had dark marks on their cheeks, arches flanked by dots, a glyph I didn’t recognize, but there was a lot of that going around on Kata Station—graffiti in a lot of different alphabets/syllabaries, some of them only visible to people who saw in infrared.

  I asked the server handing out flatbread, Tilla, what the marks meant.

  “Ye gods and little sailfins, Fassi. Don’t you know it’s Gateway Night?”

  “Enlighten me, Tilla.” I had learned pretty quickly on Kata that my ideas about normal didn’t match many other people’s. Frillium was what other people called a single-node planet—no amenities for any race but humans, and precious little contact with anyone offplanet. Not many humans wanted to come there, and most who came didn’t care to leave. They came there to get away from everything else.

  Those of us born on Frillium had heard of greater pathways and other planets, and we had media access through the local node to a lot of entertainment and information the systemweb carried, but it all seemed like stories to me until I ventured out into the greater worlds.

  My parents and their siblings told me to stop watching that webstuff and settle down and see how good the world was, but I didn’t listen. My favorite story show when I was a child was about people who worked in a big hospital where the Four Known Races mingled. When I first came to Kata, I thought I would be living that kind of story show, but no. Still, it was different from home, and I learned how limited I had been.

  Tilla told me, “Gateway Night is the consensus holiday, the only one shared by all Known Races. It celebrates us discovering each other. If you go to the Oeria quadrant tonight, they’ll have free ria wine for everybody, and the Shurixit will give free bodymarks, and the Hal
len give out bottles of scents favored by the other races.”

  “What do humans do?” I asked.

  “Anybody who comes in here gets a free dessert of their choosing—guess I should have mentioned that to you—and other businesses offer other things. It’s a good night to cruise the shopping strips. Everybody should have some kind of giveaway, and the clubs don’t ask for a cover charge tonight, and everybody parties. If you go to the public parts of the other quadrants, it’s like that, too, in their languages and cultures.”

  “Wah,” I said. “Too bad I’m still on shift another four hours.”

  “Gateway Night lasts through tomorrow until station midnight,” she said. She smiled. “Want a dessert?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Gateway Night had started at midnight, when I went for lunch. I saw the first effects after I got back to work. It started with blissed humans poisoned by too much ria wine, and that was simple to treat, if messy.

  I had seen what happened to humans who took out their filters and interacted with Shurixit before, but never so many at a time, and never so extreme. One man who bore Shurixit bodymarks everywhere was lost in a haze of pleasure that had twisted him tight. He moaned without stopping, and reached for invisible things. The doctor gave him a relaxant, and a soberer that brought him out of his state, but his last sound was sadness as he straightened into a more human posture and finally drifted to sleep.

  People came in with embedded Hallen scales that had to be removed. I didn’t ask questions.

  People came in with allergic reactions to a lot of different things, and most of these reactions I didn’t recognize. Dr. Shalabi, who I was shadowing on this shift, had a lot of experience with Gateway Night, and I learned lots watching how she treated everything from dehydration to blue skin to swellings on various body parts I hadn’t thought could get any bigger.

  The dead Shurixit came in about half an hour before I went off shift. His skin was medium brown, like mine. He moved stiffly inside his Human overwrap, and walked as though he wasn’t sure of the bounce shoes he wore.

  Everybody else was busy, so I went to greet him. “I’m sorry, sir. Are you lost?” I asked, because even though dead Shurixit are hairless and sometimes their skins take on the same colors as ours, they don’t look very human. This one was about my height—average for Human females, a little tall for Shurixit—and wore Human clothes, including a cap pulled low that shadowed his face, hid his ear frills, and concealed the three colored caste gems embedded in his forehead.

  “I’m looking for my thala,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what that is. Could they maybe help you at the Shurixit ER?”

  He touched my arm above my glove. I was wearing only the usual all-purpose nasal and mouth filters and gloves, because I hadn’t expected to encounter anything that required full-body filters at work.

  It was my first skin-to-skin contact with any Shurixit. Like others before me, I fell in love instantly. His eyes were an enchanting color, red with amber glints around the diamond-shaped pupils. He had a faint stippling of darker color across his nose and cheeks, I saw, as I leaned closer. I wanted to touch every streak and dot. I wanted to taste them. I wanted to offer my flesh to him to eat. I could imagine nothing finer than having him accept my gift of self.

  “My thala,” he repeated, and his voice sounded to me the way velvet felt, soft, deep, inviting a second stroke, a third. “That is my sister soul, nalla. I scent she has come in here.”

  “I am sorry, exalted one,” I said, feeling my regret like a sour taste all through me. I so wished I could help him; I wanted to do anything that would make him happy. His pain was mine. He had called me nalla, underling, one of the few Shurixit words I knew, and that hurt me. I loved him, and I didn’t want him to think of me in that way, but I had to accept it, because he was perfect. “I haven’t seen a sister soul,” I said. “I don’t even know what one looks like.”

  “Useless nalla.” He stalked past me. I couldn’t help following, all my desires tied up in wishing he would touch or notice me again. I wanted to give him everything I owned.

  One of the security bots emerged from its niche and said, “Apologies, honored sir, but you must not come in here.”

  The Shurixit brushed past it. When Shurixit die the first death, they lose all their hair and some of their body processes; they do not need to breathe with lungs except to speak or smell things, and they turn stony and strong and lose their silken mobility. The first dead usually follow treaty procedure and stay away from humans unless muffled in filters. We all depend on the treaties to save us from each other. The first dead are so strong it’s hard to make them do anything they don’t want to. But the hospital security bots can handle a lot of strength and force.

  “Sir,” said the bot, and three more emerged from nearby niches. They surrounded him. “Respectfully, we ask—”

  His beautiful eyes gazed left and right, and he turned in a slow circle. He looked at me again, and his stance shifted from akimbo to upright. His triangular nostrils flared, and his chest shifted with breath. I saw the reverse chemistry hit him—slower from Human to Shurixit than the other direction, but inevitable. He had touched me, skin to skin, and some transfer had taken place, and now, he knew me.

  He wanted me.

  “Fassi,” said Dr. Shalabi from behind me.

  It was hard for me to shift my gaze away from the Shurixit, but I looked toward Dr. Shalabi.

  “He touched you?” she said. “Or you touched him?”

  “He touched me,” I said.

  She grasped my arm and pressed an infuser against it, thumbed the plunger. I felt the cold as the antivenom moved into my veins. A moment later, the unnatural love I felt for the Shruixit turned to nausea. I went to the supply wall, tapped for a vomit bag, and used it.

  The Shurixit, with his surround of security bots, came toward me. Now I could look at him clearly, my eyes unclouded by love. It was as close to a Shurixit first dead as I had been, aside from his first touch. I wasn’t in love with his features anymore, but he was interesting. His pupils were wide now, making the red, gold-flecked irises almost vanish into the circle of black surrounding them. The mobile lips that could elongate into a short tube or compact into plump, pleated bands that resembled human lips were a warm color that still invited touch, they looked so soft. His intense regard made heat rise in my face.

  I turned away and slid my used vomit bag into the recycle slot.

  “Give me you,” said the Shurixit.

  “Sir, excuse us,” said the first security bot, “but you do not belong here, and in fact, you have violated several treaty provisions already. Excuse us, we mean you no harm, but we must escort you out.” They hustled him away. He beat on their carapaces and tried to snap their mesh-skinned arms, but they were strong enough to stand up to him. He was hissing in Shurixit as the door shut behind him, and he stared back at me through the pressure glass. His cap had fallen off in the scuffle; one of the bots carried it. His head was smooth and brown, and his caste jewels were half-green, half-purple. I hadn’t learned enough about caste jewels to know what that meant. My Shurixit nurse friend only had one caste jewel. It was red.

  “You okay?” Dr. Shalabi asked me.

  “Better,” I said. I shuddered and pulled my pale blue nurse uniform jacket closer, as though I could warm myself with it, though I didn’t really feel cold.

  “Sorry about the Shurixit trauma, Fassi. It happens to most of us sooner or later. Get over it. We have a lot of work to do.” The doctor gestured toward the treatment beds, which hosted more people who had figured out ways to mess themselves up on free party favors.

  The shift was ultra busy until I got off, and I was totally exhausted. I didn’t even notice the extra shadow that had lodged under the collar of my nurse’s jacket until I went into the fresher to shower before heading home. That was when the shadow slipped out from under my collar and twisted in the air, a pale, dark, fluttering thing
that light should have been able to chase away.

  “Ye gods,” I muttered. I had seen many strange things already today; a random loose shadow wasn’t much compared to that. Still, it was annoying. I flapped my jacket at it, trying to drive it away. People talked about station ghosts and hitchhikers, little lifeforms that had attached themselves to one or another of the Four Known Races and arrived here by stealth. Kata Station was supposed to have excellent sanitation capabilities, but bugs got in anyway. There was always some kind of life figuring out a new way to adapt.

  The shadow danced in front of me, and then darted toward my face. I held up my hands to block it, but it shot between my fingers and into my mouth and nose.

  The next thing I knew, Dr. Shalabi was shaking me. “What happened, Fassi?” she asked.

  “Shadow,” I tried to say, but what came out of my mouth were several strange clicks and the word “Kista,” which I didn’t know.

  “I hate Gateway Night,” she said. “I’m supposed to be off now. Can you get up?”

  I tried to roll over and push myself to my feet. I’d lost all coordination. My arms and legs flapped and flopped, but not in any direction I told them to go.

  Dr. Shalabi sighed, scanned me with her diagnostick, clicked her tongue, and left the fresher. While she was gone, I stared up at the ceiling, where gentle light glowed in spirals, and then I looked toward the mirror wall and the sideshowers. I realized 1. I could move my head and focus my eyes. 2. I was naked. 3. I had bodymarks on my left leg, glyphs I couldn’t read. They made dark red shapes against the brown of my thigh. I thought back to the shift I had just worked, and all those humans who had come in with bodymarks from the Shurixit celebration of Gateway Night. Dr. Shalabi had muttered over them, translating for me. They had said, “The Grace of Gates,” or “Welcome Intruders,” or “Welcome Strangers,” or “Meet in Fear and Wonder.” None of them had looked like this one.