What gets you about the enormous Space Station is the design. It’s built by and for the thousands of different alien species—yes, I know, we’re not supposed to call them aliens, we’re the real aliens, blah, blah—that shamble, flit, and ooze all around you. Your mind reels just trying to understand the size of what you’re looking at, let alone the underlying geometry. It’s enough to give you a mild case of gibbering madness.
It’s full of optical illusions, like things that look ten kilometers away and then hit you on the head, and sudden shifts in the fractal dimension of the floor so chasms appear and you fall into them until you stop at the null-gravity point between levels and bob gently up and down until they send something to bring you back up.
The third time I did this amusing falling-into-the-ground trick, the drone that came to get me was more advanced than the previous two, who’d been like toy helicopters with large mechanical claws and not much in the way of personalities.
“Excuse me, Earth sophont Ana María Ábalos Herrera?” it asked as it pulled me out of the hole with a gently pulsing blue field that extended from its dodecahedron-shaped body.
“Ana María is fine, or just Ana.”
“Ana, splendid. I’m hospitality-drone #31237-2391, but my Earth friends call me Jan.” The ring of lights that floated around its top section blinked in a friendly sequence.
“Nice to meet you, Jan. Tell me, does everybody make such a fool of themselves on their first day on the Station?”
“Yes, they do.” It made a little sideways hover that could have been a shrug.
“Huh, I was kind of hoping for a ‘you haven’t made a fool of yourself, oh lovely Ana from Earth.’ ”
The drone mimed a backing-up motion. “You haven’t made a fool of your—”
“That’s fine, I was mostly kidding.”
“I know. It’s okay, nobody is really prepared for the Aeon. I hope you don’t mind if I make a suggestion?”
It’s hard to say no when you’re being held aloft by a polite drone, fifty meters above the nearest floor-level of The Aeon Space Station for Diplomacy, Proxies, Calibration, Conferences & Suites.
“Sure, Jan, suggest away.”
“You look like you could do with a spell at Liz’s Tea House.”
“Wait, you mean that somewhere in this—sorry—alien hellhole,” I gestured at the enormous Station all around us, “there’s a place called ‘Liz’s Tea House’? Is it some sort of trick, do you get there and it’s a giant trash compactor with, you know, the worms, and stuff?”
Jan’s fields changed to a warm violet hue, which—if I remembered the pamphlets I’d read—meant genuine amusement. “No, Ana, it’s a house where they sell tea. Owned by a fellow Earth sophont of yours named Liz.”
“Yes, please.”
“It might make you feel better if you close your eyes until we get there. I need to negotiate a rather complicated five-dimensional geodesic among the local gravity, pressure, and radiation gradients. It might be upsetting to your digestive system.”
So I did.
After a much-too-fast and swervy journey, Jan put me down outside of a non-insanely shaped building, with right angles and everything. A large neon sign floated over it flashing “LIZ’S TEA HOUSE,” over and over, alternating between Earth Standard and the Galactic Three dialect that was in common use on the station.
There was a small ceramic gnome on each side of the wooden doors, which were white with little hand-painted purple flowers.
I exchanged contact information with Jan—“just in case I fall into a hole again”—and walked through the doors. The inside was also done in white wood plus flowers, with various small areas separated from each other by low walls. There were booths and tables, some set up to look out over the station through large picture windows made out of actual glass. Other booths used the pillars and walls inside the tea room to block out the view to the outside. There was a counter with a glass dome, with cookies underneath it, and a shelf with about four dozen ceramic cat figures, including at least ten of those chubby ones that sit up and wave you in with their paw.
There were Humans inside, with the outward-facing booths occupied by those who had that long-haul spacer look, and the inward ones by people who looked as lost and bewildered as me.
Some other species were represented as well—Centaurians, Greex, and a few others I didn’t recognize, including one that looked like two-meter tall sentient broccoli. They were all sipping tea and eating cookies.
I took a seat in an intermediate area, where I could keep an eye on the outside world without feeling too overwhelmed by it.
A tall, thin human woman dressed in a bright-red apron came to my table. Her name tag read ‘Liz.’
“Just got in from Earth?” she asked in Earth Standard.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Don’t worry, it gets easier. Would you like a pot of tea?”
I pulled myself up, eyes a little too wide. “Sorry, do you mean actual Earth tea?”
She gave a small, polite laugh. “Yes, dear. We have, black, green, pu-er, oolong, mate—”
“Oolong, please.”
“I’ll be right with you.”
I glanced out the windows while I waited. A small hegemonizing swarm was dismantling a spaceship parked at a nearby dock and converting it into a set of animatronic figures. The occupants of the spaceship didn’t seem happy about this and were jetpacking around the swarm, trying to contain it with silver-colored nets. The first two animatronics had come online and were holding comically large musical instruments and swaying side to side, presumably in time to some music I couldn’t hear from this side of the glass.
An Earth cat—a tabby—came up and rubbed his head on my hand so I’d pet him. I did.
“Here you go, love.” Liz set down a delicate ceramic tea-pot, also white with purple flowers, a small cup and saucer in the same pattern, and a smaller dish with three cookies. “I see my George has made friends already. He’s a good judge of character.”
I poured myself a cup with shaky hands and tried a sip. “Wow, this is real tea. Earth tea!”
“Of course. I told you,” said Liz with a small smile.
“I’m sorry, I just expected it to be awful and you’d tell me something about how there was a machine, and it made the opposite of whatever you ordered…” I started giggling and couldn’t stop.
“No dear, it’s tea. Are you all right?”
“Not really. I just finished a trip that was twenty real-years but eight months subjective from Earth, going up the Quito elevator then packed like cattle in a shuttle to the L1 point around the Sun, and a long-sleep in the ice-cubicles out to Centauri, then a needleship here and they don’t let you sleep at all for three weeks subjective because the wormholes would fry your brain, so they pump you full of drugs and strap you to an acceleration couch and play species-appropriate media,” I stopped to slurp some more tea, ”and in my case, it was the entire run of I Love Lucy which is actually pretty great but it’s imprinted on the back of my retinas now and I just got off and there’s all this,” I took a breath and gestured a little too wildly out the windows, “and you’re the first human I’ve seen or spoken to in four months and it’s a bit much.”
“I understand. Drink your tea, I’ll be back to check on you.”
The tea was delicious and the cookies were lemony and freshly baked. I found that I could look out the windows for short periods and my brain would register the view as bizarre rather than stark-raving-insane.
The nice lady came back as I was admiring the tea-set and said, “It’s important to have beautiful things, especially for tea—it helps ground you, don’t you think?”
“So you’re Liz?” I asked her.
“Eliška, actually, but everybody calls me Liz.”
“I’m Ana. Where’s your name from?”
“Have you heard of the Czech Republic, Ana? It was a country in Europe. My family is from a small, very old town there called Krumlov.”
I took a sip from my cup. “Did they sell tea there as well?”
“Yes, my great-great-grandmother had a tea house down by the Vltava River. Locals and travelers would come in and choose a tea, and just sit and sip and watch the river flow past. It got passed down among the women in my family. This tea set comes from Krumlov.”
“It’s gorgeous.” It was—the porcelain was so thin it was translucent, and the patterns had been painted with exquisite detail yet dignified simplicity.
“Thank you, dear. Where are you headed?”
“I have a job set up with the Great Globe Star Corporation. They trade cultural artifacts and media on a circuit of planets in the galaxy’s third arm. Many of the planets have humans living on them, so they needed a native Earth Standard speaker who also knew Galactic Dialects Two, Three, and Thirteen to handle negotiations.”
She looked impressed. “My, do you speak all those languages?”
I smiled, just a bit. “Yes. I have a linguistics degree with a specialization in arbitration. I’m supposed to meet one of Great Globe Star’s representatives, but I don’t know their name or address or how to find out, and my network implants don’t work on the station and I’m not sure what to do.” I let my head slump forward onto the table.
She held out her hand and said, “Give me your wrist, please.”
I did. Her interface lit up next to mine and beep-booped for a second. An HUD appeared in the top left of my vision with thirty-seven urgent messages from a Vrax Ordainer Free-Spin the Third, Exalted Representative G.G.S.C. In Charge of Onboarding Lower-Level-Species Novice Employees, Aeon Division.
“What did you do?” I exclaimed, delighted to have something work the way it was supposed to.
“Your system was set to the wrong band. Happens to everybody when they first get here from Earth.”
“Thank you, thank you!” I grasped Liz’s hand and squeezed.
She squeezed back with a smile. “You’ll also find a map of the station, an FAQ that explains interspecies etiquette, and a dating app which I hear is all the rage with young people out on their own among the star lanes.”
I pinged Vrax—he seemed both overjoyed to hear from me and indignant I hadn’t answered him before. We arranged to meet at one of the docks, about three-hundred kilometers spinward from the Tea House, or three minutes by magnetic slingshot.
I was sorry to leave my new friend so soon, but I’d come all this way to see the Galaxy, not hang around drinking tea—as good as it was. I did give Liz a much longer hug than I usually give to people who sell me tea and promised to look her up the next time I was on station.
I said goodbye to George, the cat, then left for my first shipboard assignment clutching a small white and purple napkin that Liz had wrapped around my leftover cookie and an extra one “for the road.”
Eighteen months later, I hopped down from the floating platform my crewmates had chartered. I gave them a wave and sent a few dirty puns over our private channel. They did the pan-species equivalent of a catcall and the platform sped off to other, less wholesome parts of the station.
The Tea House looked the same as the first time I’d seen it and it also didn’t. It’s like when you go back to your childhood house and it looks smaller and less impressive. The Tea House hadn’t changed. I had.
I walked in and sat down at one of the booths by the big windows looking out over the station.
Liz came to greet me, looking genuinely happy to see me. “Hi, welcome!”
I smiled back, wondering if she knew who I was. “Remember me? I came here my first day on the station . . .”
“Of course I do, Ana, it’s nice to see you seem to be thriving.” She paused for a second as if searching her organic or augmented memory. “Oolong?”
“Aw, you remember!”
“Of course, dear. I’ll be right back.”
George came up to say hi, so I scratched him under his chin and behind his ears. I gazed out the window as I waited, remembering how my first time I’d been shell-shocked by the existence of so many different species and the spaces built to hold them. I’d been through a lot since then, wasn’t as naive or Earth-basic. I could stare outward and enjoy the show.
A city-sized space-whale was floating in the middle of the enormous volume and telepathically singing a medley of songs popular in the Galaxy forty years ago. A group of sentient clouds had formed a ring around the whale, spelling out song requests in Galactic Two. Some of my fellow Humans had printed a dozen World War I airplanes and were having a sky battle around and through the cloud-beings. One of the planes shot down another one and it crashed on the whale’s back with an explosion. A trio of large insects flew down to the wreck to set up a localized time-loop so the explosion happened over and over again and then sold tickets to view it up close. I recorded a holo-loop of the whole thing.
Liz had been talking with a striking female-looking person—not Human, but close enough—tall, with dark skin and long, shiny hair. She excused herself from her companion and picked up a tray with tea and cookies, walked over to my table, and set them out before me. “Is it okay if I visit with you a bit?”
“Sure, that would be great. Who’s that interesting hominid you were talking to?”
She sat down and gave me a little smile. “That’s Sun-Blue-Carbon, she’s … a friend. What have you been up to?”
“I don’t know if you remember that I had a job with the G.G.S.C.? That was a good way to get my feet wet, but sooooo boring. Endless meetings, negotiations, and trade-fairs. The pointlessness of it finally got to me.”
“What did you do?”
“I met a new crew on a rec-station. The captain was from Earth and the first mate was a hot half-cat lady. They were privateers and offered me a life of adventure.”
Liz gave me a quizzical look. “Privateers, so, pirates?”
“Well, that depends—we were mercenaries, licensed to fight a bird-run space empire. We only struck military targets, but if you asked the people we hit they’d probably call us pirates. I was in charge of comms, so I didn’t see that much action, but I did get to participate in an actual space dogfight—with lasers and targeting computers and everything.” I mimed shooting a shipboard arms-rig. I might have made a pew pew sound.
“Did you win?”
I grinned. “I’m sitting here drinking tea, aren’t I?”
“Are you still with them?”
“Nah, there was too much drama when the captain’s three sons portaled in, so I jumped ship at an orbital that looked like fun. Cool place with a luxury-gay-space-communism vibe, but they let their AIs run their lives too much for my taste.”
Liz looked behind her. “Excuse me, dear, I have to go to calm down some unruly Humans at the back.” She stood up.
Jan, the bot, had pinged me with a “Hello, lovely Ana from Earth. I see you’re back on the Station, let me know if you’re free to get together later this evening.” I chuckled to myself and sent it the space-whale holo I’d recorded.
When Liz returned, she asked, “How did you end up back here at the station?”
“Turns out there’s a lot of work available if you speak three Earth- and seven space-languages and are willing to travel anywhere they ask you to. I’ve been working my way around the third arm of the galaxy, and I finally found a gig that would bring me to the Aeon, so here I am!” I spread my arms wide to encompass Liz, the Tea House, and the Station.
Liz gave me a warm smile. “Well, I’m glad you made time to come see me.”
“Are you kidding? This is the second decent pot of tea I’ve had since shipping up from Earth!” I took a sip. “How do you source it, anyway?”
“Many people pass by here on their way to and from Earth, and I have a standing offer for anybody who brings me a package of tea leaves. One second, dear,” she said, getting up to greet some newcomers.
A long way off, near the mid-point of this volume of the station, a large glacier had taken up residence. It looked about a kilometer high and ten long. I upped the magnification on the tech-eyes I’d had installed on a med-ship I’d helped ‘liberate’ with the pirate crew and could make out lots of sophonts, mostly bipeds and some with tentacles, sliding down the ice slopes on sleds made out of recycled food containers. Looked like fun.
As Liz came back I gestured out the windows, “Don’t you ever get tired of the same view all the time? It’s such a big Galaxy, don’t you want to go out and see it for yourself?”
“I’m very happy here, dear. It never stays the same and I have lovely friends like you drop by to tell me all about their adventures.”
I did not understand how she was content just sitting in this corner of the station day in and day out but dropped it in favor of a topic closer to my interests.
“Who’s that?” I pointed at a large, squarish male sitting at one of the stools at the counter, staring at a physical screen on the wall.
“I don’t know, he doesn’t talk much, he just comes in, orders black tea and asks me to put on his show, then sits there watching it.”
“What show?”
“A soap opera. Moon something.”
“You mean a space soap opera. That’s the thing about being in outer space, everything is a space-whatever.”
She gave me an amused look. “Yes dear, a ‘space soap opera’.”
“Big, strong, sensitive type, huh?” I stood up and went to sit by the large man.
He didn’t look at me.
“Hey,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“Whatchawatchin’?” I asked, which is really hard to pull off in Galactic Three.
No answer. I turned around to make a face at Liz like “what’s his problem?” She smiled and shrugged.
Then, before I could continue my masterful seduction, a commotion broke out in the booths near the entrance. A group of five Earthers—the same ones Liz had shushed a while back and from the look of them recent graduates out for a grand tour of the galaxy before heading back to Earth and lives of wealth, privilege, and boredom—were berating some Fx’fxians, yelling, “This is an Earth bar! Not a freak-show!” and other equally clever phrases. Also, it’s a tea house, not a bar.
Fx’fxians look like a mix between a tarantula and a Gila-monster only backward and in heels but are the sweetest sophonts you could hope to meet. They’re all manners and graces and also genetically unable to count past fifteen so they’re really easy to take for all their space credits in games involving twenty-sided dice. I like them.
The group in the tea house were apologetic, repeating “We are sorry to offend you, people of Earth,” in Galactic Five—which of course the Earth bros hadn’t bothered to learn—and making their standard “I mean no harm” gesture which involves a lot of waving and snapping of their oversized front-pincers. Things looked like they might get ugly.
I poked my new friend in the shoulder and said, “Watch this.”
I reached into my back pocket and took out a small, shiny cylinder, about fifteen centimeters long, and touched the five nubs on its side in a practiced sequence. There was a shimmer as the cylinder opened a pocket dimension, and stocks, barrels, sights, and other weapon-related things popped out, unfolding and snapping onto each other until I held an amusingly large space-gun with the letters BFSG in embossed print on its side.
“Hey, geniuses, eyes here!” I yelled in Earth Standard. “Apologize to the nice Fx’fxians, then pay your bill, collect your crap, and leave.”
The biggest, toughest, dumbest, trust-fundiest looking one turned around and was about to say something super profound to me, I bet, when small, red dots appeared on his and his friends’ foreheads, chests, and groins.
The frat boys looked at each other and you could hear the gulp in their throats from across the tea room.
They shuffled out in a hurry. I turned to the silent soap opera fan with a big grin.
He reached over and pushed the nubs on my BFSG—which was blocking his view of the screen—in the secret sequence that only I should know. It collapsed in on itself with a loud whoomph. He turned back to his show.
I sat down to watch. George jumped up on the counter and watched with us. We both agreed it was pretty good.
I never did get the stranger’s name.
After a few years traveling the space-lanes, I’d lost track of the times I’d come to the Tea House.
I was sitting at my favorite booth. The place had been full when I’d arrived, so Liz hadn’t had time to come hang out with me for the first hour or so. That was fine with me; I liked to just sit and sip my tea and watch the river of beings stream past the big picture windows.
“All right, Ana, I finally have a minute to catch up,” she said with a smile, sitting down across from me. “How are you doing?”
“I’m okay, I guess. I’m just tired, you know? The space-life starts to lose its shine after the first hundred-thousand parsecs.”
“Yes, I know, dear.”
“Can I tell you about my latest bullshit ‘adventure’? I was hired to translate for and—let’s be honest—babysit a whole delegation of first-time-off-planet Earthers from some church who’d been invited by a group of nice extraterrestrials to visit their planet for a ‘cultural exchange’ or something equally boring. I jumped at the chance to make some easy money on a six-month cakewalk.”
“So?”
“Well, it turns out the nice extraterrestrials had this book on their spaceship, and it contained—in plain Galactic Twenty-Three-B—nothing but recipes with ‘Human’ as the main ingredient.”
“Oh, my.”
“And what was most insulting, as a linguist, was that they just kept it out in the open as if nobody from Earth could ever read it. The word for ‘Human’ was even the same as in Galactic Two and Seven. I mean, come on!” I waved my teacup in the air to show how annoying it was.
“So did they get sent to jail?”
“No, it turns out it’s not illegal to try to eat another sophont race. It is a civil offense to offer an interplanetary cultural exchange under false pretenses. We got a space-lawyer and he won the church group a settlement. They got to keep the alien’s spaceship as a payoff.”
“Sounds like a good lawyer.”
“Space-lawyer. Yeah, he’s the best. The church group took off in their new spaceship to do missionary work. They asked me to come but I couldn’t stomach spending any more time with them and their song-circles, plus they’ll probably get eaten by somebody in the end anyway. It was such a dumb way to spend six months. The past couple of years have been like that, you know?” I took a loud bite of my cookie.
“I know. I had the same feeling before I bought the Tea House.” She passed me a napkin. “You have some crumbs on your face, dear.”
“Sometimes I think I should just pack it in and go back to Earth, but what would I even do there? I almost wish I’d never come up in the first place!” I swept out my arms for effect, and the effect was that I bumped the teapot that I’d left close to the edge of the table and it fell to the floor, smashing into hundreds of pieces of white porcelain, some with delicate little hand-painted purple flowers.
George, who had been sitting at my feet, let out a loud, uncatlike screech and jumped away.
“Oh crap, I’m so sorry!”
Liz got up. “It’s okay, dear. Don’t worry.” She started to walk to the back where she kept the cleaning supplies.
“But, but . . . your teapots! You told me, the first time I came here, that you brought them up from your great-great-grandmother’s tea house, all the way from Earth.”
“Ana, darling,” she stopped and looked at me, “do you really think I brought the hundred-and-twenty full tea sets we keep in the storage room from Earth?”
“But you said . . .”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “It was your first time here, you were tired, you were overwhelmed, you looked like you needed something to make you feel at home and connected to your birth planet. And you reminded me of me when I first got to the Station—you still do. So, I fibbed.”
“Where do you get them?”
“I have a micro-fab in the backroom. It takes about three minutes to print a new set.”
“And the little flowers? Does the fab do that, too?”
“Oh, no, those I paint myself.”
I looked out the window. A hundred impossible things were happening all around the station at the same time. It was amazing, but also a lot and also just another day at the Aeon.
I sighed and asked in a small voice, “Can I help you paint the flowers on the set you make to replace the one I broke?”
“Of course, dear. You still have crumbs on your face, by the way.” She handed me another napkin.
It took me two whole station-days to learn how to do it right—I’m a linguist, not an artist—and then paint each little flower. I stayed in a small utility room above the main space while I was finishing the job.
After the set was done, I kept finding things to do around the tea house. Liz taught me how to bake cookies, brew tea, and serve both with a smile. I ran the fab and the robovac and was in charge of getting rid of obnoxious customers, though she didn’t let me use my BFSG on any but the most annoying ones.
Liz’s girlfriend, Sun-Blue-Carbon, was around a lot, and between them and George, I was never really alone. After closing time, we’d sit around, drink stronger liquids than tea, play board games, and laugh about the day’s oddest clients. Liz and I would compete to see who could tell the wildest space adventure stories. Some of them were even true.
At the end of the evening, I would crawl up to my tiny room and look out the even tinier window at the shifting landscape around the tea house. Sometimes I read or sketched, or wrote long rambling letters that I never sent back home.
Earth-home I mean.
This was my space-home.
“Remember, Ana María,” she always called me by my two names when she was stressed, “keep the tea house at one Earth-G of gravity—nine point eight meters per second squared—and always pointing in the same direction. This lets our clients pour the tea the same as they would on Earth. And also that way we don’t need to weld the furniture to the floor.”
“I know—” I started to say.
“Set the temperature at twenty-one degrees Celsius,” she powered on, “humidity at thirty percent and the air pressure at eleven hundred millibars—a little high but it feels good if you’ve just come in from a time on a ship or station with low pressure.”
“I know all this, Liz, you’ve drilled me on it three times just today, and it’s on that little piece of paper you stuck to the refrigerator with the cat magnets.”
“I like cats.”
“So do I.” I reached down and picked up George, who’d wrapped himself around my legs as a way of saying goodbye.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll do fine and will find as much joy running this place as I have.”
“I will. Don’t worry, I won’t burn the place down too much, it’ll be here when you get back. Also, you’re not leaving, you’re just going on a honeymoon with your gorgeous new wife and the cutest kitty in all known space.”
I scritched George under his chin and, just to be sure, asked him, “Who’s the cutest kitty in all of known space?” He answered with a satisfied purr.
“Remember to pay the oxygen company, dear, so we don’t have a repeat of that embarrassing asphyxiation incident.”
“It was just one guy, and he already looked pretty sick when he came in. And they managed to resuscitate him. He was so happy to be breathing again, he’s a regular now—in fact, that’s him sitting in the back sharing an apple pie with that shoggoth.”
“Also, don’t get too creative,” she continued. “Pie is fine, but I don’t want to come back and find this place turned into a combination sushi, pierogi, and waffle restaurant.”
“No promises.” I grinned and hugged her.
“One last thing, remember when I told you about how I didn’t bring the tea sets from Earth and they are all fabbed?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, I didn’t tell you the whole truth. I did bring one full tea set, my great-great-grandmother’s, in fact. It’s in the hypercube-safe at the back of the pantry. There’s an address written next to it, of an odd human-looking woman who claims she used to be a spaceship. Tea sets are very important to her people, apparently. She’s offered to buy it for an outrageous amount, more than the whole Tea House is worth. If you ever need to, you can sell the tea set.”
“Thanks, but we’ll be fine. I’m paying Jan, the drone, to bring me any sad-looking Humans it finds, so we’ll never run out of fresh customers. Your granny’s tea set will be waiting for you when you get back.”
Liz is the only person in a fifty-thousand light-year radius that I let pat my cheek. She did. “I love you. Take care, Ana.”
She took George from my arms, turned around, and walked into the pneumatic tube that had telescoped down from somewhere above the level’s cloud layer. It whooshed her off to the space-yacht her wife, Sun-Blue-Carbon—I was still not used to thinking of the two of them as a married couple—had chartered for a quick, three months subjective—but thirty-year real-time—tour of the known galaxy.
I walked back toward the Tea House. It was going to be a long three decades, and it’s not easy running a small business, no matter where you are in the Galaxy or who you’ve bribed, but I knew the Tea House would always have a quiet booth and a pot of tea to offer people when they stumbled off their first needleship from Earth.
I took a minute to appreciate the text Liz had added to our neon sign—“LIZ & ANA’S SPACE TEA HOUSE”—sidestepped a localized black hole that had opened up in front of our facade, and walked back in through the white door with its hand-painted purple flowers.
I’d have to see about getting a cat.
