Planets Read online

  Planets

  by Hannah Blume (as Alicorn)

  This story is a sequel to Rings.

  * * *

  The bride looked exquisite, covered wrist to throat and scalp to ankle in white all aswirl with glittering beads and satin stitch. The color she’d put the bridesmaids in, robin’s-egg blue, was possibly the only color of the rainbow that wouldn’t flatter Shula. Celia wondered from the audience if that was why Amrika had chosen it, so as not to be outshone by her prettier sister. Shula was taking it with good enough grace, both the color and the fact that the wedding dress code, in deference to conservative ancestors, called for her to abide by modesty standards she typically held in contempt. Hidden was Shula’s glorious singularity-black hair, most of her flawless dusky skin. She smiled, though, watching her unwittingly adoptive older sister mince down the aisle toward her fiancé.

  Celia, from the third row on Amrika’s side, looked at the smiling man in his perfectly fitted navy suit - was it technically a suit? It was an outfit on good terms with the idea of suits - and Celia wondered what he was like. Amrika joined him, and Celia wondered what she was like. Celia barely knew Amrika, and attended her wedding as Shula’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell plus one, because she and Shula were themselves engaged to be married in a couple of years and presented to Shula’s family as best friends. Once Celia had finished college they’d probably either stop talking to the Alis entirely or see what happened if Shula told them she was gay. Once Celia had her degree they’d have no reason to loiter on Earth.

  A degree she would never use but clung to anyway. Her attendance was perfect.

  Celia wondered what these people were like, how they were to each other. How they had decided to get married. How much they knew about each other. It was probably not like how it had been for Celia, who was proposed to on her eighteenth birthday with a magic ring that turned out to grant immortality and embroil her in an alien succession intrigue at the elbow of her space-princess changeling girlfriend. Probably the Alis knew the groom’s family, or they met at the mosque, or they met online, or they’d been in a class together at school, and then -

  Celia wasn’t sure what came after “and then”. She just knew it was probably not like her own engagement.

  The ceremony dragged on and significant parts of it were in Arabic. Celia people-watched, mind wandering, scalp itching under the scarf she was wearing to be polite. There were two other bridesmaids besides Shula; Celia thought one of them, mid-teens and brown and plain, might be the groom’s sister, and the other she understood to be an old friend of Amrika’s. The friend wasn’t Yemeni, she was some sort of East Asian, and she had a moon-round face peeking out of her turquoise scarf and looked deliriously happy. Probably Amrika’s friend knew the groom and had a good reason to be happy. The groomsmen she didn’t know at all; Amrika didn’t have a brother to supply (and Shula’s brothers all lived in space and had never met Shula’s adoptive family). Probably friends of the groom. They were about his age, plausibly Muslim. Well, for all Celia knew the Asian friend was Muslim too. Celia might be the only non-Muslim in the whole building.

  Did Shula count? She was an atheist, in terms of what she believed about the world, but she’d been brought up culturally Muslim, but that was only after being raised for twelve years by a part-alien father and human mother of Catholic sympathies. Celia hadn’t thought to wonder before just now how you could be Catholic in space. Didn’t you need a priest? Periodic updates from the Vatican? Maybe they had kidnapped a priest and Celia had just never happened to hear about it.

  Shula had offered to bring her for visits to the plakti world a couple of times since they’d gone for their surprise engagement party. Celia hadn’t wanted to go and Shula hadn’t pushed back on that. Celia let Shula visit the dark flame-lit planet under its dead star without Celia along, and Celia would take that weekend and do homework, or sleep late and watch TV and dance to music Shula didn’t like, or go into town for a coffee and a cinnamon bun all by herself.

  Shula went about four times a year, and she’d started visiting her home planet the summer before twelfth grade, and now they were sophomores in college. So Celia had had ten weekends to herself. Otherwise her life was: school attended around Shula, the apartment she shared with Shula, nights in or nights out with Shula, dinners and parties and sex and talking about getting a dog with Shula.

  Even at moments like this one, with Shula focused on her bridesmaid responsibilities and not even looking in Celia’s direction, Celia was here because of Shula, and couldn’t stop thinking about Shula.

  Eventually the ceremony ended. Conservative relatives meant there was no dancing. Celia understood it to be a compromise that the men and women attendees were in the same room at all (how did heterosexuals get married under those conditions?). But there was a reception after the vows were exchanged, people Celia didn’t know milling around asking her how she knew the couple. “I’m Amrika’s sister’s friend,” she said over and over to cousins and co-workers and the imam. “I’m Celia, I’m Amrika’s sister’s friend.”

  She didn’t know why Shula persisted in pretending to this family that she was their mildly observant Muslim daughter who lived with a “friend”. Maybe she’d actually gotten attached to them in the time she spent re-maturing in their household. Maybe there was a rule. Shula was pretty careful about her planet’s rules for how princesses were supposed to conduct themselves on Earth.

  Celia drifted through the throng. She wound up near Amrika’s friend the bridesmaid. “Hi,” Celia said.

  “Hi! I noticed you before, it’s very mono-ethnic here except me and you, isn’t it?” said the bridesmaid. “Is that weird for you?”

  “Not all that weird,” said Celia. “I’m Celia, Shula’s friend.”

  “I’m Jenny. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Yeah, you too. How do you know Amrika?”

  “School! We had a whole bunch of us all really tight, since middle school, but there was some major drama, twelfth grade, it was me and Amrika versus the other three… how do you know Shula?”

  “Also school. Just us, we were always - best friends.”

  “Best friends or best friends, huh?”

  “- excuse me?”

  “I’m Episcopalian, you can say.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Celia, skin tightening in a cold shiver all the way up her back because she didn’t know why Shula was maintaining her cover with her Earth family but Shula was absolutely doing that and Celia had to back her up.

  “You ping my gaydar really hard,” Jenny said in a loud whisper.

  “I really don’t think this is the place.” Was Jenny drunk? How did one get drunk at a Muslim wedding? There wasn’t a drop to be had anywhere in a two block radius. Maybe she was just this kind of person. What kind of person did Amrika make friends with? Celia didn’t know. She drew away from Jenny, looking for Shula. Shula wouldn’t be angry with Celia about it if she witnessed all subsequent Jenny-originating unreasonableness and knew Celia had tried her best.

  Jenny followed her. “Hey, where are you going?”

  Celia couldn’t see Shula anywhere, she wasn’t tall enough to pick out and the crowd was too thick to spot another robin’s-egg blue outfit and take a gamble on that being Shula instead of the groom’s sister. “Bathroom,” she said instead.

  “Oh yeah, I need to touch up my eyes, I think I was crying a little, weddings, am I right?”

  “Yeah,” said Celia noncommittally, trying to lose her in a knot of electricians who worked for the Ali family business.

  Jenny was undeterred. “How’d you convince Mr. and Mrs. Ali to let you be Shula’s plus one?”

  “I don’t know, Shula handled that, I wasn’t privy to the conversation.” Maybe the bathroo
m would be single occupancy and she could wait Jenny out inside.

  No such luck. Jenny followed her into the roomful of stalls and got to work on her eye makeup. Celia didn’t actually have to pee. Was Jenny paying enough attention to be listening for that? Maybe she’d figure Celia just had to change a pad or something. This would be Celia’s alibi if Jenny blundered even further into inappropriate questions territory and asked. Celia rummaged in her purse to make appropriate background sounds and willed her to go away.

  Jenny did not go away. “Amrika knows, I think,” she said.

  Well, that stopped Celia cold with her hand between her driver’s license and her bottle of Benadryl. “Pardon?” she squeaked.

  “I think Amrika knows about you and Shula! She’s never said, but it’s sort of in how she talks about you? And she could’ve convinced her mom and dad to let you come to the wedding, so that’d explain it, right?”

  “Um,” Celia tried to say, since that was noncommittal, but nothing came out. “I don’t think I understand, perhaps we could talk about something else, do you like hockey,” she tried to say, but it didn’t happen. She settled for letting herself out of the stall, ready to try another fleeing tactic.

  The door swung open and Celia saw Shula’s face framed in robin’s-egg blue hijab and wished the Earth would open up under her feet.

  “Celia, Jenny, hi,” said Shula, all smiles, a dark edge in her voice, and Celia thought about how she could change her teeth to gleaming fangs. “Celia, I’m about ready to go home.”

  “I, okay,” said Celia, clutching her purse. “Okay. Did you already say goodbye to, uh, your family?”

  “No, I’ll do that on the way out. I wanted to find you first,” said Shula. And she couldn’t hold out her hand for Celia to take, in front of Jenny, because Jenny only thought she knew something, and would be much more credible if she added I saw them holding hands -

  Celia went along as though pulled anyway, sticking as close to Shula as she could without touching her while the wedding guests flowed around them. Shula bade goodbye to a grandmother, a great-aunt, a cousin, another cousin -

  Amrika and her new husband were by the exit. Amrika caught Shula in a hug. “Going home already?”

  “It’s a few hours in the car to get back to school!” said Shula “I don’t want to be here till too late. It was a gorgeous wedding, thank you for letting me be in it, Amrika.”

  “Of course, I wasn’t gonna leave you out, baby sister,” said Amrika. “I’d wanted longer to catch up with you - and Celia - though -”

  “Well, maybe another time,” Shula said.

  “Celia, I don’t think I have your phone number,” said Amrika.

  “Um - do I have a pen -” Celia rummaged in her purse, feeling Shula’s presence behind her, tall and warm like a pillar of flame, watching the back of her neck. Celia found a golf pencil and a drugstore receipt (she checked the front of it, hurried; the most incriminating purchase was three bags of Hershey kisses, no lube or anything) and wrote her phone number on the back. “There - text first, I’m in class a lot -”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Amrika, “thanks! It was so good to see you both! Have a good drive!”

  They weren’t driving, of course. Shula’s servants Lyne and Cait were going to assume Shula and Celia’s forms and make the trip while Shula teleported them to their off-campus apartment; why drive for hours when you could have shapeshifting space aliens do it for you, still have all the stuff you kept in your car at the other end, and spend the time you saved at home with your fiancée?

  Once they were out of the building Shula drew Celia behind the catering van in the parking lot. Celia closed her eyes; around her, the air pressure changed, the smells of asphalt and greenery on the wind were replaced with their apartment’s hum of the air conditioning carrying scents from the fruit bowl piled high with pomegranates and peaches and a plakti fruit Celia was supposed to call “blue persimmons” to anyone who asked what they were. Shula’s presence was constant through the shift, standing right by Celia’s side, close and spicy-scented. She stepped in closer once they were in the privacy of their home.

  “What were you doing with Jenny in the bathroom?” Shula asked in Celia’s ear. Shula’s fingers reached for Celia’s hairline, pulled the scarf off and freed Celia’s yellow hair to tumble in its braid down between her shoulderblades. There was a swushing noise that suggested Shula was taking her scarf off too.

  Celia kept her eyes closed. “She followed me. I was trying to get rid of her.”

  “It didn’t look like you tried very hard.”

  Deep breath. Fruit from space, fruit from Earth, gingery Shula-smell, the vanilla candle on the table, the last batch of roses Shula bought her every Sunday smelling red and cottony from the vase on the table - “I didn’t want to make a scene. She was saying she knew about us, she said I pinged her gaydar.”

  “A girl comes up to you and says you ping her gaydar and two minutes later you and her are alone in the bathroom, Celia?”

  “- I know that sounds bad, but. Nothing happened. I didn’t even like her. She was obnoxious and - and intrusive and -”

  “You should have come to me.”

  “I tried, I didn’t see you.”

  “I saw you, and you’re shorter than I am, so you must not have been looking very hard.”

  “Shula, nothing happened - but she thinks Amrika knows about you and me, she thinks -”

  “So you’re saying a girl who knows you’re taken came up to you at a party and said you ping her gaydar - honestly, that isn’t even a line, it’s not even a bad line, and you - not two minutes later -”

  “Nothing happened, I went straight into a stall, she was fixing her makeup she said, and then you came in.”

  “Don’t interrupt me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know you didn’t have time to cheat on me, but that wasn’t okay. Don’t let it happen again.” Shula leaned away from Celia, took a half-step back to sit at the breakfast bar. She picked up a pomegranate, hefted it idly. “Did you have a nice time, other than that part with Jenny?”

  “It was okay,” Celia said. “Pity there wasn’t any dancing.”

  “Well, we couldn’t have danced even if there had been, not you and me. We can dance now, if you like.” She set down the pomegranate and slid off the barstool. She took Celia into her arms, and Celia swayed with her, leaning her head on Shula’s shoulder. That hadn’t been so bad. She needed to stop panicking every time Shula was annoyed, it wasn’t reasonable to expect Shula to never be annoyed with her, not when they were going to be together for hundreds of years.

  They danced. Shula’s laptop was open on the kitchen table; she swayed Celia over to it and touched a couple keys to put on music. It was bright, chirpy stuff that was queued up, with lyrics in Japanese and mangled English, hilariously wrong for the pace of dance they were doing; Celia laughed first, then Shula, and they giggled through the first verse and a half of the song with their faces buried in each other’s necks till Shula pulled Celia along into a spinning fast improvisation of steps. “I forgot I had this on yesterday,” Shula said, “I picked it while I was cooking the chicken last night, I think you were out getting cream?”

  “Mushrooms, we had cream but we forgot mushrooms,” Celia said.

  “Right, mushrooms. That was a good recipe.”

  “Is there any left?”

  “Nah, I let Lyne have it.” Lyne and Cait shared an apartment in the same building and Celia had never been in there, though Shula was frequently in and out talking to them about this and that. Perhaps they didn’t cook. They could teleport back to the plakti world for food if necessary. Was it a status symbol to eat food your princess cooked?

  Celia didn’t ask. “Oh well, we can make it again.”

  “Any time you like, my love.” Shula kissed Celia’s neck as she dipped her with the last note of the song. Celia shivered. Shula did it again, maybe holding her up off the floor at this angle so easily wi
th shapeshifting affecting her muscles, Celia wasn’t sure how - there were teeth now, mm -

  “I’ve been thinking,” Shula said, “apropos of Amrika’s wedding, what with our wedding being on the horizon, that we maybe need condoms.”

  “…Condoms?” said Celia, trying to figure out what Shula had actually said instead.

  “Well, you don’t want to get pregnant now, do you? And it seems like a bad idea all around to approach the attempt cold, as it were, in a couple years.”

  Celia was empty of responses. She hung where Shula held her, staring up into her fiancée’s face blankly.

  “I guess you could just go on birth control but I don’t know about all that fucking with your hormones,” Shula amended.

  “I don’t know that I - I mean, it’s years off, our wedding -”

  “Honestly, Celia, be practical, I’ve never used the parts before. I might shapeshift them wrong the first forty times and that leaves aside how effectively I’ll be able to use them. You’re looking at a hell of a honeymoon if we don’t get some dry runs out of the way now, it’s really important to have an heir on the way pretty quick after. My parents waited but no one was concerned they might not be able to. Once a month will probably do the trick.”

  “Um, you could, practice by yourself, and we could get a turkey baster when the time comes -”

  “Celia.”

  “- yeah?”

  “I am engaged to the beautiful love of my life. We have this whole apartment to ourselves. I am not going to sort through the Internet’s pathetic selection of lesbian porn without any naked men participating so that I can then grow a dick and masturbate in the bathroom alone like a teenage boy. I’m not expecting it to be a particularly enjoyable experience or I would have tried it when I was thirteen. I need you there to help me out.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides, the success rates for turkey basters aren’t great, I hear.” Shula kissed her neck again, and finally pulled her out of the dip onto her feet. “Doesn’t sound like you want to wait and go to a Planned Parenthood for something more elaborate so condoms it is. It’s my turn to go to the store since you got the mushrooms, I’ll just get out of this silly dress and into street clothes and then I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Don’t you change, I want to take you out of your dress myself.”