Rings Page 4

  “What does that have to do with the rings, aren’t the rings magic…?”

  “The rings are magic, but unlike some magic they need a source. We only get new rings when a plakti decides to take their immortality and sell it.”

  Celia just stared, completely lost.

  “They don’t die right away, if they do that. They have a good few hundred years left, and it means that if they get themselves killed in some disastrous accident - falling into the black hole, say - then their immortality doesn’t go to waste. The plakti know that they can’t just coast forever, not without any new plakti and even very slow attrition. That’s what the royal family is for. We’re new people.”

  “If your parents are immortal then why do they need heirs?” wondered Celia.

  “They’re sharing a ring,” Shula said. “They’ve got a while longer - long enough for every last one of my siblings to run out their own deadline trying to bring back a new king or queen, if it comes down to it, you’re not going to be queen next month. Nobody’s allowed to be in charge forever, and royalty avoids the obvious shapeshifting-buster dangers more than an average plakti. So instead of having four kids and giving each one an extra ring for a future spouse there’s eight kids and I’m sharing mine with you. It’ll more than halve your aging rate - you don’t ramp up to full speed right away when you take it off. We can swap it back and forth.”

  Celia looked at the ring. “You’re giving up immortality?”

  “In the long run everyone’s going to. The plakti are slowly replacing themselves with collateral descendants of the royal family, see? Instead of getting picked off a few at a time slightly slower and just as inevitably and the entire planet eventually being empty. I’m taking centuries of being queen - and not starting a war - and getting to have you - over maybe surviving the war and dying alone with an empty title, somewhat later, having never been to Earth. And I’m giving half of it to you.”

  “Never been to - is it hard to travel, am I ever going to see -”

  “Oh no sweetie we can go back,” soothed Shula, stroking her hair again. “Travel’s easy. But if I hadn’t been making a full-fledged go at the crown they wouldn’t want me hanging around humans in case I changed my mind. We can visit whenever we want, but, say, my little brother Meer can’t go until I’m solidly on the throne.”

  “Oh.”

  “You have no idea how good it feels to have all this crap off my chest,” Shula exhaled. “I love you so much and I could barely tell you anything.”

  “It… sounds hard.”

  “But let’s go get you dolled up for our party. You’ll be gorgeous. I know what you like, I have a few options prepped in your size. Come on.”

  Shula tugged on her hand.

  Celia followed helplessly down a flight of stairs lit by flames dancing in grooves in the walls.

  * * *

  It was five forty-five. It wasn’t really dinnertime yet. David only had one opportunity to sound genuinely like he was worried because Celia wasn’t back within the described time of her note rather than madly fretting for other reasons. Six-thirty at least. Seven would be better.

  There was a knock at the door.

  David opened it, and it was the person who’d been pretending to be Maureen.

  “Hello, David,” it said.

  He just looked at it.

  “Celia’s having a party,” it said. “I think she’d like it if you were there.”

  Stare.

  “I can bring you. Are you up to it?”

  Celia was there and this was not Maureen but Maureen was also there and everyone thought he was insane and they were right but he didn’t think he was insane just… this… once…

  “Yeah,” he said.

  He probably couldn’t do anything but Celia was there -

  * * *

  The dresses were lovely. Celia was having a hard time picking. It didn’t help that she kept wondering if she should be doing something other than selecting a pretty princess dress for her impromptu engagement party. Panicking? Fainting? Pinching herself? Checking herself into a mental hospital and stammering her way through a family history, because there were probably loads of psychiatrists familiar with the most recent diagnostic and statistical manual on another freaking planet. Even Dad never thought he was literally on another planet.

  Shula was flitting around behind her, occasionally issuing instructions to someone just outside the door who Celia hadn’t gotten a good look at, occasionally commenting - nervously? Rapidly, anyway - on the wardrobe or other incidentals. “Normally we’d have servants helping but you haven’t met them and I want you to be comfortable. The shoes that go with this one are not the friendliest - no heels, but no real arch support either. It depends if you want to dance, whether that matters, I guess. Do you want to dance?”

  “I don’t know how -”

  “It would be the kind of slow-dancing that’s just swaying back and forth at most but we can skip it. Oh, here - thank you, Cait - here, Celia, put this on, any finger, this is a ring with the most common plakti language in it, so you don’t have to try to learn it the long way around. There might also be Spanish and some other local languages spoken but it should be mostly this one. We can get you more rings but it might be hard to find a Spanish one quickly.”

  Celia let Shula put the ring on her right ring finger. Shula switched languages. Celia understood her absolutely seamlessly. It was bewildering, everything was bewildering.

  “The neckline on that one won’t do with the bra you’ve got on, if you pick it I’ve got a different one to go with, this sort of thing is why I wanted to measure you myself when you were looking at dresses for your cousin’s wedding, remember - you’ll probably want one of the ones from here anyway, you’ve been on a budget -”

  Eventually Celia picked the sleeveless cornflower-blue thing with the tiers of petal skirt. She let Shula flutter around her putting her in ridiculously nice underthings - they’d changed in front of each other before, going swimming, in gym class.

  It didn’t occur to her to wonder until after Shula was zipping up the back of the dress and kissing her neck to wonder whether the ridiculous niceness of the underthings was supposed to be relevant, later. It was an engagement party, not a wedding, but - Shula probably had waited until Celia was eighteen for some reason. Was she expecting…?

  Probably not. Probably it was just part of the princessly upscaleness of the entire ensemble. The dress went with ankle boots in the same color. Celia put those on herself; Shula was shucking her own clothes and pulling a dress of her own from the depths of the wardrobe, screamingly scarlet lace and backless.

  “Pearls or diamonds?” Shula asked, smirking, snapping Celia out of staring dry-mouthed at the way Shula’s hair spilled between her shoulderblades and flame-red tatting.

  “Uh?” If Celia wanted to make the niceness of anybody’s underthings relevant, later, Shula would probably be amenable, they’d talked in embarrassed fits and starts and surreptitiously swapped pointers to library books because high school health class told them nothing. Amenable might be an understatement and this was Shula’s own palace-estate-thing so there was no supervision that couldn’t be shooed, probably -

  “Your earrings won’t match your dress,” Shula explained. “I have pearls and diamonds in that color, which do you prefer? You could maybe pull off turquoise but it’s not a perfect match, I’d want to add a scarf… amethyst for contrast?”

  “…Pearls. The rings don’t match either, though.”

  “Gold and ruby are sort of culturally neutral. Like wearing glasses on Earth, you know? But there’s time to change dresses if you only just wondered about that?”

  “Oh. No, it’s fine. Pearls.”

  On went pearls. Earrings, a hair ornament she didn’t have a word for, and one strand of teardrops around the neck. Shula herself went with gemless gold - lots of it. She looked like some kind of fire goddess and Celia wanted to kiss her. So she did.

  Panicking
and fainting and worrying she was having her first psychotic break could wait.

  * * *

  David went very docilely with the thing that looked like Maureen. He called it “Maureen”, and got in the car with it, and let it drive him to a parking garage in a random part of town, and pretended not to notice that it was doing magic when the lights flickered off in the elevator and they traveled to another planet.

  They thought he was crazy, and he was, in fact, absolutely, also, crazy, but he’d taken his meds and he was trying his absolute hardest to separate fiction from fact from fortune-telling, because they had his kid.

  David followed the thing out of the little room that was pretending to be the elevator on the other end. He didn’t remark on the fire-based lighting or the smell of the air. He followed the thing and let it loan him a suit. He put on the suit. He followed the thing some more.

  “You may have noticed it’s not an ordinary party,” said the thing.

  They thought he was crazier than he was. “Huh?” he blinked. Let the thing think he walked around thinking that everywhere looked like a Hell-themed amusement park every day of his life. Or let it think he thought this was a hotel ballroom, whatever.

  “…Never mind. Just remember that this is very important to Celia, all right? Be happy for her.”

  He nodded. He attempted to paste on a smile. Oh, this was fantastic time for an icepick of a headache.

  The thing that looked like Maureen led him into a huge hall.

  David started looking for his daughter.

  * * *

  Fire danced in bowls of colored glass marbles and burned in ropes that reached from arch to arch under the high ceiling. Fire twisted in alcoves along every wall and smoldered under glass panels in the floor. It was sun-bright, windowless, artfully designed, warm.

  There were people. They were not human. While Shula was brushing out Celia’s hair she’d remarked that it was very fashionable for non-royal plakti to look mostly human, but gauche verging on illegal for them to complete the illusion without strict orders to go undercover. Many of them just had completely black eyes and could otherwise have passed for ordinary in any city on Earth, but Celia saw green skin, fox tails, bat wings, antlers, elf ears.

  There were also some who bore no marks at all.

  Celia and Shula paused at the top of the stairs, and Shula pointed out her brothers and sisters. “Not that I expect you to remember all their names today.” They would be easy to forget, too, all monosyllables, introduced rapid-fire. And their mother and father: “King Juan Luis, Queen Elena. Fall back on ‘your majesty’ if you forget.” And aunts and uncles with one or two or three or more “greats”, who had never gone to Earth and so had kept their rings; these she did not trouble to name.

  “You don’t have to talk much if you’re nervous,” Shula reminded her, “you don’t have to go away from me, it’ll be all right.” And they descended the stairs.

  “Will they be expecting me to be a girl,” Celia murmured. It wasn’t quite a question.

  “Mother and Father know. My personal servants know. Everyone else might be surprised. I can do the talking.”

  “…Okay.”

  “I hope you don’t mind but I invited your parents. They should be around here somewhere.”

  “…What? They’re here? They can’t - they don’t -” What they couldn’t or didn’t Celia wasn’t sure.

  “It’s your engagement party and they’re your parents, I knew you wouldn’t want them to miss it. If your dad reacts badly to your being gay you’ll be completely safe here, we’ll protect you - and besides, you have somewhere else besides his place to go, now, what’s mine is yours,” soothed Shula.

  That didn’t stop Celia’s heart from trying to escape her ribcage when they set foot on the floor of the hall and one of the siblings glided up to them.

  “Hello again, Kess!” he said to Shula. The ring didn’t translate “kess” for Celia; she couldn’t tell why. “This is… irregular.”

  “It’s Shula,” said Shula with a smile full of teeth.

  “Is that her name?”

  “Mine. I spent long enough earning it. She,” and Shula put a protective arm over Celia’s shoulders, “is Celia. My fiancée. Celia, this one is my brother Meer. Oldest after me.”

  “…Hi,” squeaked Celia. She was talking to a prince. She’d been talking to a princess every day for a rather long time, but that was Shula, she knew Shula, and she did not know Shula’s little brother Meer.

  “Hello,” said Meer, and he collected Celia’s hand to go for the knuckle-kiss, but when Celia flinched Shula practically hissed and he transitioned into a handshake. “Are you quite all right?” he asked.

  Celia was not quite all right but if she didn’t act quite all right she’d start a war and disappoint Shula and “I’m fine.”

  “Is that so?” Meer wondered.

  “She said she’s fine, Meer,” said Shula. “How have you been? I’ve had only intermittent reports through Lyne.”

  “Oh, it’s been as always.”

  “Lyne?” asked Celia.

  “One of my servants. She looked out for me in the early years when I was on Earth, posed as the nanny for me and Amrika and relayed messages as necessary until I could get away with wearing all my rings all the time,” Shula said, stroking Celia’s arm.

  “But not very frequent messages,” murmured Meer. “We hadn’t, for example, heard of your affection for sterile relationships.”

  “Do you think I can’t figure it out, or do you hope I can’t?” asked Shula. “Eighteen years on Earth didn’t unteach me to change shape.” She bared her teeth at him and for just a moment they were sharp, gleaming fangs.

  “Wishful thinking. You’ll introduce delay, perhaps irrecoverable amounts of it - and cause unrest -”

  “No one’s going to find that their most urgent task is fomenting unrest about my engagement’s gamete quota unless someone tells them so, Meer,” said Shula.

  “You might be surprised. You’ve been away.”

  “I trust Lyne’s reports.”

  “Lyne’s focus has always been on you, not on the broader situation.”

  “Perhaps I should talk to Mother and Father, who Lyne has also been known to focus on now and again,” said Shula with a smile made of ice. “Excuse us.”

  Celia was ushered along by the arm over her shoulders; she looked back at Meer, who had procured a glass of something from somewhere and lifted it in a sort of toast. Celia shuddered and faced front as Shula drew her towards the king and queen.

  They weren’t wearing crowns, just rich elaborate outfits and perfectly human shapes. They looked like they might be sixty, but not older; the king appeared classically Spanish, his bride nut-brown with vaguely unplaceable features that made sense for someone who’d been born hundreds of years ago to a tribe since gone extinct. Celia could see the resemblance to her girlfriend. Fiancée. Shula hadn’t told her to bow or curtsey and the arm over her shoulder wasn’t cuing her to do so now, so Celia just smiled tentatively.

  “You must be Celia,” said the king.

  “Yes your majesty.”

  “And K- excuse me, Shula - Shula convinced you to marry her without attempting to tempt you with the princess bit, the magic, the chance to explore another planet…?”

  I’d so much rather Shula didn’t come with those things Celia didn’t say. She smiled a little wider, hoped she didn’t look manic, and held up the hand with the immortality ring. This must have been the right thing to do because Shula kissed her temple, squeezed her shoulder.

  “Mm-hm. And the part about heirs…?”

  What an intrusive question. Celia hadn’t even begun to really think about raising magic alien royalty on a starless planet and then cuckooing them to somebody else’s family until they brought home somebody just like her. “Shula said she could figure that part out!” she said, too high, too strained.

  “So you’re not, ah, exclusively partial to girls?”

&
nbsp; Oh god Celia didn’t want this man for a father-in-law she’d been expecting Shula to come out to predictably upset Muslims and cut them off good riddance not a damned royal space conquistador - “Ah, well -”

  “It’s a small price to pay,” Shula said. “But Father, Mother, it’s so good to see you both in person again, it’s been too long.” She let Celia go long enough to hug each of her parents.

  “I see my dad,” Celia breathed.

  “Oh - okay, go say hi,” said Shula. “Come right back after, I don’t want you getting lost, sweetie.”

  Celia nodded automatically and made for her dad as quickly as her dress and the crowd permitted.

  David turned out to be standing near Maureen, who collected Celia into a hug. “Celia! Oh, you must be so excited,” she said.

  Celia hugged back without thinking about it. “I’m - it’s a lot to take in - did somebody tell you -?”

  “I’ve been filled in. I was skeptical, but, well.” Maureen gestured around them.

  “Are you doing okay, Dad?” Celia asked David, who hadn’t spoken.

  He opened his mouth, closed it, repeated, swallowed. “I’m fine,” he eventually said. “You never mentioned you were…”

  Celia set her jaw. Not even traveling to another planet would make her life less perpetually about - “Well, I am.”

  “I wish you’d said,” said David, looking with vague distress at the various nonhuman people milling around and availing themselves of hors d’oeuvres.

  “Well. Now you know.”

  “…I need to lie down,” David said abruptly. “Celia, you, you probably know the place, obviously Maureen just got here and,” he ran his hand through his thinning hair, took a deep breath, “but you can probably show me somewhere I can lie down, awful headache -”

  “Oh - sure - we passed some empty rooms on our way,” blinked Celia. “Uh, what’s hers is mine, I’m sure you can -”

  “I,” began Maureen.

  “Hm?” said Celia.

  “Never mind.”

  “This way, Dad, up the stairs.”