Rings Read online

  “Not here, obviously we’d have to go somewhere else. Please. I love you, you have no idea, I love you, I love you -”

  “Shula -”

  “Please. Let me put this on you and pretend it’s a symbol of our friendship or something to anyone who asks and I don’t expect to walk you down any aisles anytime soon, but -”

  “Shula, I can’t, we’re eighteen.”

  “My parents were eighteen,” Shula said.

  “I’m going to go to college, what if -?”

  “That’s supposed to make me stop wanting to marry you?” asked Shula, smiling a little.

  “We haven’t even finished high school. There’s a year left. I can’t be engaged in high school.”

  Shula pursed her lips. “You’re positive?”

  “I’m really sorry - and I want, I want to stay together, honest, but it’s just too -”

  Shula took a deep breath.

  And got up and sat down across from Celia on the other side of the picnic table, just like she had been before, and put the ring back on her own hand -

  - and took three minutes of memory.

  Stress evaporated from Celia instantly. She smiled. She reached for her fork, took another bite of cake.

  “Sorry, what were you saying?” Celia asked.

  “I think,” Shula said, “we should put all the food away so we can snuggle on the picnic blanket without ants stealing our dessert. Yeah?”

  Celia giggled. “Yeah.” She snuck another bite of cake and then put its lid back on and put it back in the basket and flopped quite happily onto her girlfriend.

  Okay. Time to try something different. Snuggles. Hair-petting.

  “What if I didn’t take a gap year?” Shula asked.

  “Mm?”

  “And we went to the same school.”

  “That’d be nice,” Celia yawned. “Heh, maybe we could room together.”

  “Living in sin,” commented Shula.

  “Thought you were a secret atheist.”

  “Yeah, I am, it’s just an expression.”

  “Sure. Living in sin, getting degrees in whatever. It’d be great.”

  “What if I don’t want to live in sin?”

  “Are you kidding? You’re the one who keeps griping about all the places with beds being too supervised to sin in.”

  “No, silly,” Shula kissed her, “I mean what if I wanna marry you.”

  “What, you want to elope to, what’s the nearest state that has it legal? Before we even go to college?”

  “I might wanna get engaged,” Shula murmured.

  “For real?”

  “Or,” Shula said, “you know what -”

  She took the ring off her finger.

  “Call it a promise ring,” said Shula.

  “Awww,” said Celia. “It breaks up the set though, all your matching rings.”

  “No it doesn’t. Unless you’re planning to quit holding my hand.” Shula elbowed her.

  “Ha. Okay, fine.” Celia presented her hand.

  Shula slipped it onto her ring finger. “Mine,” she said, kissing that knuckle and then Celia’s forehead. “Promise.”

  “Promise,” agreed Celia, giggling, and she tugged Shula closer for a kiss on the lips.

  Shula kissed her, and, behind Celia’s back, brought her hands together to twist a different ring around, three hundred sixty degrees. While Celia’s eyes were still closed -

  - the Earth dissolved around them.

  * * *

  “Ms. Lister,” said Cait.

  “Mm?”

  “Your daughter has arrived. You may see her -”

  “- just like that I can - what happened - is she all right? -”

  “- on a number of conditions.”

  “…Conditions.”

  “The Princess requires that everything go smoothly for a certain critical period of time. You may see your daughter if you do not alarm her, nor allude to your having been here for the last several months. If you do either of those things she will not remember the experience, but you will not see her again soon.”

  “I knew, I knew I was missing time -”

  “Very little of it. You have not been wiped since the first several days of your time here.”

  “I knew something was up. Is Celia okay?”

  “She is unharmed.”

  “Biologically,” snarled Maureen.

  “She is biologically unharmed,” conceded Cait.

  “Fuck you all alien things!”

  “I cannot bring you to your daughter in this temperament.”

  “I’ll bet you can’t.” Maureen breathed deep, once, twice, counted to ten. Twenty, thirty. “What am I supposed to tell her if I can’t tell her you’ve been keeping me here?”

  “You may - not immediately, but at the appointed time in some hours - describe yourself as voluntarily present to attend her engagement party. If you would prefer not to attend her engagement party you are of course free to miss it.”

  “Her engagement p- what the hell is going on with this place?”

  “I believe you will find your access to information much less restricted if you comply with the Princess’s requirements.”

  Maureen’s teeth ground together.

  “You have time to consider your reply.”

  “How long?”

  “I do not know exactly. I am required elsewhere, but will return when your answer is called for.”

  And Cait left the room and locked her in.

  * * *

  It actually took Celia half a minute to notice.

  Shula was distracting, and they were all alone, and the promise ring thing was sweet, and Shula was kissing her -

  So Celia didn’t notice right away that they were no longer under the sun, on a picnic blanket.

  But eventually she came up for air, and the air tasted strange, so she opened her eyes, and the light wasn’t sunny and the sky wasn’t blue.

  “Shula?” mouthed Celia.

  “It’s okay,” Shula said. “It’s okay, you’re fine, I won’t let anything hurt you. It’s okay, sweetie.”

  “What - happened? Where are we?” asked Celia, not liking how high and pathetic her voice sounded. I’m cracking up, I’m cracking up just like Dad -

  “It’s okay. Sweetie, sweetie.” Shula hugged her and Celia leaned on her, hard, because Shula was the only familiar thing in this starless firelit midnight. Shula was calm and Celia wanted to copy her.

  “Where are we?” asked Celia again, softly.

  “It’s complicated. Will you let me start at the beginning?” Shula was raking her fingers through Celia’s hair, snugging Celia’s head tight to her shoulder. “It’ll make more sense that way.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll start from the beginning, Celia, okay?” Fingernails on scalp. The air smelled like eggs and campfire and dry mineral dust but Shula smelled like ginger, just like always, it was just Shula, her Shula.

  Celia nodded.

  “My mom and dad aren’t my biological parents,” Shula said. “They think they are - they’re exactly who you always thought, so is Amrika - but I’m from here. This is a different planet.”

  “How are we breathing?” asked Celia, and then she felt like an idiot and pushed her face harder into Shula’s shoulder.

  “There’s plenty of oxygen,” soothed Shula. “It’s completely safe. My natural mother’s from Earth originally, and she’s lived here for hundreds of years.”

  Celia hiccuped, trying not to freak out worse than she already had. “H-hundreds?”

  “Yeah. People live a long time, here.” Shula kissed the top of Celia’s head. “I’m so glad I can finally tell you - I couldn’t before but now I can. …I’m mostly human, to be clear. My mother’s all human, my paternal grandfather was all human, so on like that. How are you doing…? I can slow down.”

  “I’m… Keep going.” Shula’s hand was still carding through Celia’s hair and Celia concentrated
as hard as she could on that, not on the sudden teleportation, not on her girlfriend claiming to be from another planet, not the people being hundreds of years old thing.

  “Okay. I’m… actually older than you. Please don’t be creeped. I don’t think I feel older than eighteen, if that makes sense, because I’ve never been treated as older than eighteen in my life. But I’m actually more like, uh, thirty. I lived here for about twelve years -”

  “Earth years?”

  “Yeah, I’m translating, it’s fewer local years. I lived here for about twelve years, and was about as mature as you’d expect a twelve-year-old to be, and then I de-aged and went to live with Mom and Dad, the ones you’ve met.”

  “But - why?”

  Shula took a deep breath. Celia mimicked her. Deep breaths were supposed to be calming.

  “Well,” said Shula, “…you know, I practiced, I rehearsed explaining this, and it’s still really hard. Can you be patient with me even if it sounds strange?”

  “I - yeah.” It was still Shula.

  “Okay. I’m gonna sort of - zoom in from the big picture. When a planet has life on it for long enough it starts accumulating magic. We don’t know exactly how long this takes - our history doesn’t stretch that far back and we haven’t found that many planets that have any magic sticking to them.”

  “Okay…”

  “The native intelligent species on this planet - I’m not sure you could pronounce it. I should have translated it to English ahead of time. I’m making a total hash of this, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s, um, it’s all right.”

  “Call them plakti, it’s close enough. So, plakti developed on a planet that already had magic stuck to it. An old planet. With an old star. The star’s a black hole now, by the way, it’s not night, it’s just always like this. It’s safe, we just orbit it normally.”

  “Does - does Earth have magic?”

  “If it does, it’s not much.”

  “Okay. Plakti, old planet, dead star.”

  “When the plakti first evolved the star was still alive, but yeah. Growing up on this planet gives particular kinds of magic - the important one for this story is shapeshifting. It turns out that if you are really dumb about how you use shapeshifting, you can forget how to get back to your normal shape, and then you can’t have kids.”

  “Um.”

  “I know, I know, I didn’t want to spring this on you or do it so soon, but there’s - there’s stuff, I’ll get there.”

  Celia nodded numbly.

  “There are no pure plakti left who can have kids. There are hundreds of millions of plakti, but no new ones. They noticed this was going on just in time to find one who hadn’t done any shapeshifting, a few thousand years ago. But there was only one of him.”

  “Was - he your great-grandfather - or something?”

  “Yes. They found another planet, Earth, with people on it, and he very very carefully shapeshifted to look like a human, and he placed himself in a human family and grew up there and married a human and took her back here and they had kids. And I’m glossing over a few years of history lessons but it wound up that he got made king of the plakti.”

  “Are you saying you’re an alien princess.”

  “Yeah. I am,” said Shula.

  Celia sat up, away from Shula, slowly. She looked around. There were no visible stars in the sky, no moon. They were on some kind of stone platform, on a cushy plush rectangle, surrounded by torches; more fires dotted the landscape below, it looked like they were on top of a hill or a tower.

  “Is this your castle?”

  “This is my estate. I don’t get the proper castle yet. Mother and Father are still alive.”

  It would be rude to ask how long they were going to live, probably. “So you had to go live with your mom and dad, and grow up all over again on Earth, and… find… me.”

  “Yes.” Shula had a hopeful look on her face, thrown into soft shadow by the flickering torches. “Exactly.”

  “We’re… we’re both girls. We can’t have kids.”

  “I spent long enough here first to have plakti magic, and I’m mostly human, which lets me cheat a little on the combining shapeshifting and having kids thing - probably - if it doesn’t work there’s a kind of a problem but we can figure something out. I can’t claim it’d be the most pleasant thing ever, but it’d probably work.”

  “You’d turn into a guy.”

  “For maybe thirty seconds, below the waist, yeah. I really didn’t want to spring this on you but if I fucked up any of the,” she waved a hand, “traditions and protocols, before I managed to get you here, with a ring on your finger -”

  “When you said you wanted to get married -”

  “I meant it.”

  “When you said promise ring -”

  “I was kind of reaching, there.”

  “…if you fucked up a tradition or protocol then…?”

  “Then,” said Shula, “my little brothers and sisters start a civil war.”

  * * *

  David sat bolt upright.

  Celia was gone.

  …Safe, or not safe? If he went and told Joe that Celia was missing -

  Well, that would depend on whether they found her. If it turned out she was at the movies or the pool or the mall - for that matter, if it turned out that she was playing video games on the couch right beyond that door - then, no, not safe, because it would be false and more significant than whether or not he’d talked to Maureen in the past several months (he had not).

  If Celia was missing -

  - then how did David know it?

  He’d been asleep. He hadn’t seen her disappear.

  And Joe hadn’t seen him sleeping. If Joe thought -

  David got up and paced.

  He opened his door: no Celia on the couch, no Celia in the kitchen, no Celia occupying the bathroom. She was, at least, not home.

  Note on the table: Gone on a picnic with Shula. Home for dinner.

  That gave him a time frame. He could wait until it was reasonably dinnertime, then go tell Joe - not that Celia was gone, necessarily, but that she had said she’d be home for dinner, and was not.

  …He decided to call her first, just in case. Picked her out from the contact list with shaky hands.

  Voicemail. Joe would think she’d just let it run out of battery. David knew better and couldn’t say how and if he tried to explain in a hospital to a psychiatrist then -

  He tried calling Shula. He didn’t know what he’d say to her, but he knew she wouldn’t answer, anyway -

  Voicemail. He let the phone fall from his fingers.

  He sat at the kitchen table and stared at the microwave clock, waiting for dinner.

  * * *

  “I need,” said Shula, “one more thing from you, and then everything will be calmed down and I will make it all up to you.”

  “Wh-what do you need?”

  “I need to have an engagement party, I need you to be at it, I need you to swear up and down to everyone there that we are going to get married and have babies and you couldn’t be happier,” said Shula. “…Saying we’re going to have exactly one baby is also fine, it doesn’t have to be lots, I have seven siblings not counting Amrika but that’s because it took a while for the Catholicism to wear off Mother.”

  “The Catholicism -”

  “She was a convert in the era of conquistadors. Mariche native Venezuelan. Got religion, lots of it, married Father back on Earth and got whisked off to be queen of the plakti. I’m being glib, though, the Catholics didn’t have that prominent of an opinion on birth control back when there wasn’t any. She just likes kids.”

  “And they left you with Muslims?” blinked Celia.

  “The less shapeshifting I had to do to look like Mom and Dad, the better, and the comfier my second childhood, the better, so they left me with rich brown people I kind of resembled in a First World country who were being decent parents to a first daughter. This was before 9/11, they didn’t
know I’d have that kind of trouble. But we’re getting off the subject - the party - please say you’ll be at the party. I have to show you to Mother and Father and the other heirs - presumptive? They may or may not be technically presumptive under the English meaning. Anyway, the less presumptive they feel after meeting you, the better.”

  “I don’t know how to act around - kings and queens and princes and princesses -”

  “Sweetie.” Shula wrapped her arms around her and squeezed her. “I’ve been a princess all along and you impress the hell out of me. We’ll put you in a pretty dress - no heels, promise - and you don’t have to step away from me for even a moment the entire time. Just smile and lean on me and wear the ring. It’s so important. Not just to me.”

  “Why would they start a war…?”

  “Usual monarchy reasons. They want the big chair. They were hoping I’d go to Earth and strike out. I had a deadline. If I didn’t come back with everything sewn up by then, next eldest - my brother Meer - got a shot.”

  “You’re… thirty, right?”

  “…Yes? Please don’t dwell on that, I’m not some -”

  “It’s not that, it’s just. Your real parents are hundreds of years old, aren’t they? Why did they wait so long to have children? You’re the oldest.”

  “They needed rings for us,” Shula said, taking Celia’s hand and tapping the ruby. “They got mine fairly early on, but they wanted to have us close enough together that I’d meet all my little siblings before I went off to Earth, so they waited. The ones I’m wearing aren’t as scarce. What you’ve got on now is an immortality ring.”

  “A -”

  “Plakti,” said Shula, “don’t age.”

  “They live forever? That’s why there are still some after they messed up with shapeshifting…?”

  “Yes. But they can still die in accidents - or sometimes they just get suicidal. But this is much less frequent than human accidents - because shapeshifting can make a person really tough - and less frequent than human suicides - because we’ve got better ways of dealing with that, too. A small handful of plakti die over the course of entire human generations.”