by Lyn Gala
Max groaned as a smaller cramp rolled through him. Two more small tentacles slipped free of the cramped space up next to the alien head. Now that the largest tentacle was free, apparently the kid would go back to causing normal cramps. Normal. Max needed his head examined if he thought any of this was normal. He probably did need a good examination and a short commitment to a nice place in the country for a “rest.”
“Offspring outside is a nanny. Offspring inside is surrogate,” Max explained in the simplest terms possible.
“Query. Surrogate?”
“This.” Max pointed to his belly and then he pointed to the bright image of the largest of the three children. “This is surrogacy. Your genetic offspring inside my body. Surrogate.”
Rick’s tentacles quivered and then drew up closer to his body. “Query. Correlation nanny and surrogate?”
“No correlation,” Max answered. If anything, he would think that a nanny wouldn’t want to be a surrogate because she would want to a connection with her child. But what the hell did Max know? Dark laughter bubbled up when he considered his last Facebook fight with this father. His father was ranting about some new court decision which had made abortion easier, and Max had told him that neither of them got to have an opinion on the matter until they got pregnant. That logic had gone in an unexpected direction now.
Rick's tentacles drew up even farther. The smallest ones were like little balls of tentacle with tiny fingers undulating madly. Max was fairly sure that meant he had an unhappy tentacle monster on his hands. Too fucking bad. If Max was unhappy, he wanted to share his general state of misery, and Rick was the available victim.
He couldn’t even go grab a beer and complain with his friends. His friends. That would be a fun conversation. Hey guys, guess what? I got knocked up by a tentacle monster! Yeah, that would go over great. Only about half of Max's friends even knew he was gay. Now he was gay and pregnant. Not cool.
Suddenly all of his guilt over turning Rick's medical exam into a sexual encounter vanished. If Rick could run around shoving his offspring into other people, Max could be a pervert who turned a medical exam into a kinky fantasy that made him reconsider his position on tentacles. He was okay with that. He was just not okay with sex leading to pregnancy. That was something straight people had to deal with, not him.
“Query. Surrogate for compensation?” Rick's tentacles were still all little balls of unhappy wiggly fingers.
“Well clearly I am,” Max said dryly. This would inspire wild porn if anyone on Earth found out. “I can't say I'm happy. How soon are they going to come out?”
Rick hesitated. “Query. Remove offspring?”
Hope blossomed. “You can remove the offspring?”
Rick stared at him.
With a frustrated sigh, Max rephrased his question. “Query. Can you remove offspring?”
“Yes.”
That was rather literal. Max felt like he was having a conversation with his ninth grade English teacher who refused to let anyone use the bathroom unless they said, may I instead of can I.
“Query. Will you remove offspring?”
For several minutes, Rick did not answer. That was Max's first indication that something was wrong. Usually, Rick enjoyed conversations, even when he did not understand what Max was saying. He was a laid-back guy that way. Max frowned. Wait. Rick wasn't laid-back. He was overprotective. The fucker had been keeping track of Max because Max was pregnant with his children. Max had a moment where his brain reassembled itself, and when it was done, he liked Rick a little bit less.
“Answer. I can,” Rick finally said.
He could, but he wasn't offering to. Max was not a stupid man, and he had made a few connections.
He sat up. “Query. Can offspring come out?”
Rick turned to the hatch that Max associated with medical equipment. “Answer. Yes. No damage to Max.” Rick had retreated to a formality and simplicity in language that the translator could handle. No temporary failures and whale song or belches. Just simple, cold fact.
“Query. Damage to children?” Max asked.
Rick turned and he held a silver and blue tennis racket looking thing with one tentacle. Rick walked over to the active scanner image and used a tentacle to poke right in the middle of the figure of the tiny gymnast octopus currently trying to do somersaults in Max's gut.
“Likely to survive. Might not.” That included a number of whistle sounds the translator missed.
“Query. Will the other two survive?” Max had a horrible feeling in his gut.
“Clarification. Smaller two offspring...” The translator failed again, but Max was a bright guy. He got what Rick was trying to say.
Max hated the way he felt, and he didn't want aliens in his gut, but he didn’t want those lives gone because a fucking computer had mistranslated nanny and Rick hadn’t kept his tentacles to himself. Max gripped the edge of the med bay bed so hard that his forearms trembled. He assumed Rick felt equally bad because most of his tentacles were still drawn up tight. The whole of his walking tentacle was visible in its pale fleshy color. A hint of the orange-red showed on one side. Max looked at that rather than at the silver instrument.
After a painfully long silence, Rick asked, “Query. Remove all I offspring now?”
Max opened his mouth, but words didn't come out. He wanted to say he’d never been pregnant. He didn't want to be the cause of Rick's triplets dying. But he wanted them alive somewhere else, which was impossible, because they were in him.
Max's brain started spinning in a circle. His brain and Rick's oldest child were equally fond of spinning and turning in spaces that were far too small for that. Rick inched closer with that silver instrument, and Max scooted backwards without making a conscious choice.
“I can't do this,” Max said softly.
“Understood. Removal of children is optimal.” Despite his words, Rick's tentacles were still balled up and his finger tentacles waved like leaves in a high wind. Correction, in a hurricane.
When Rick reached out a tentacle, Max slid off the far side of the table. “No. I mean I can't do this now. I can't make this decision now.” Max couldn’t explain what was going on in his head. Hell, even if he’d had another English speaker around, he still wouldn't have the words. It would take a team of psychiatrists to drag anything coherent out of his brain. So instead, Max turned and fled from the room. His last view of the medical scanner was of the largest offspring, slipping two more tentacles free.
Instead of going back to his quarters, Max headed for a hatch that led into a network of crawl spaces that crisscrossed the spaces between decks. He had found it early in his explorations, and he liked the privacy. Rick was large, and Max hoped he couldn’t fit into the narrow passage. As an octopusish alien, he could probably squeeze himself into impossible shapes, but right now Max wanted the illusion that he could escape.
He climbed the peg ladder into the shaft and ignored the possibility that Rick could reach him or use the ship scanners to find him. The military was far too frugal to install internal sensors with the ability to track individuals, and Max hoped aliens had the same streak of cheap.
When he reached the first junction, he scooted around and let his legs dangle over the edge. The other possibility was that this was some sort of venting system and Max was exposing himself to alien radiation, but he didn’t worry about that too much now. If this were dangerous, Rick would have stopped him.
Fuck.
Max had started to think of Rick as a friend, a lonely alien bachelor whose mate had taken off with the kids. He had liked Rick. Really liked him. Max was an idiot. Officially.
He leaned against the side of the shaft and rested his hand over the area where he kept getting cramps. “It was you the whole time. You think you’re Kohei Uchimura in there, don’t you?” Max asked. “Well he had an Olympic mat for his routine. You need to stop your tumbling practice in my gut, you little monster,” Max said as he rubbed his side. “Your dad is going to hav
e his tentacles full with you.”
Max frowned. If Rick was the dad, where was the mom? Maybe he was being too Earth-centric in his thinking, but he assumed complex creatures needed sexual reproduction. Asexual reproduction was nature's form of cloning which would not allow adaptation. At least that's what Max had learned in his biology courses in school, not that his biology teachers had a whole lot of experience with tentacle monsters. So maybe he should stop assuming he understood anything. Clearly he didn't understand the word nanny.
Another cramp hit, but it was a small one that Max would have dismissed as gas a few hours ago. Hell, he had been dismissing the random pains as gas. “Will your siblings get this active or are you the pushy one?” Max’s mother always talked about how much easier her second pregnancy had been because Max had turned and stretched and rammed his head into her cervix and given her false labor pains and generally made her life a living nightmare.
Max didn’t think he should pay for anything he had done pre-birth, but she still sometimes brought it up when she was annoyed with him. “Don’t you even start,” she’d say. “You’ve been giving me grief since you were six months in the womb and you started head-butting my cervix.”
Max wondered if he would see her again. As a realist, he knew that four years was a long time. And now that Max knew Rick wanted him as a surrogate, it wasn’t likely this job would last that long. So his dream of getting a ticket home was just that... a dream. He would provide Rick with three offspring and then Rick would drop him off on the next planet.
He wondered if he would rate a social worker the second time around. Honestly, he needed the help because he got himself in trouble when left on his own.
“I don’t blame you for this,” he told all three offspring as he rubbed his stomach, “but this situation sucks. And I can’t blame your father. He’s a pretty decent guy, and he loves the hell out of you three. He hangs over me like an umbrella every time I do anything physical.” Weirdly, a jab of jealousy stabbed him.
“I should be the adult and go talk to him.” Instead Max sat in the shaft and stared at nothing. He couldn’t gather the energy for anything else.
Chapter Eight
After an hour of staring at a computer that kept screeching for attention when Max didn’t answer translation questions, Max gave up and headed for the swimming room. Rick had been so insistent that swimming was healthy. That should have been some sort of sign, but no. Max had assumed that Rick wanted to be helpful.
Helpful like shoving his baby-making tentacle up Max’s ass. Max wasn’t particularly body-conscious, but as he stripped out of his clothes, he ran a hand over his stomach. He felt the slight bulge where Kohei was hiding. “If you hadn’t tried to do somersaults, who knows how long it would have taken me to figure this out.” Too damn long.
Max slipped into the water, shivering at the cold before swimming toward the tiny water circulation islands where the water was warmer. Max was still swimming an hour or so later when Rick slipped into the room and hovered near the door. If Max had been mature, he would’ve swam over and had an adult conversation with the tentacle monster who had knocked him up. He would. However, he felt like sulking.
Rick slid forward, strangely graceful on his single central leg. At the edge of the pool, he stopped, and one tentacle spasmed. “Query,” Rick said, and then the translator failed, emitting a series of whale songs and whistles that Max would not have even recognized as a language before leaving Earth.
They needed to have this conversation, whether Max wanted it or not. At least Rick was polite enough to keep a distance. Max caught the edge of one of the islands and propped his elbows on it so he could watch Rick. “Translation matrix fail.”
“Query....” For a second time the translator failed.
Max had to take control of the conversation or Rick might break his translator with all the untranslatable phrases. Max assumed the big dork was trying to talk about feelings. And normally Max was in favor of that. He avoided embracing the stereotype of repressed military man who killed himself by drinking his emotions. He’d seen friends do that after leaving combat.
But right now Max couldn’t handle getting in touch with his emotions, in part because he didn't know what he was feeling. Maybe women imagined themselves pregnant—he’d never asked. But he hadn’t. He’d had fantasies about winning the lottery, and nightmares about getting shot down behind enemy lines and surviving long enough to get captured. He’d mentally rehearsed pickup lines and wondered what it would feel like if his little brother died. That last one was sort of shitty, but in his defense, Pete was a pain in his ass. Generally, these sorts of morbid thoughts led to some intense discomfort, followed by immense gratitude that he didn't have to deal with them.
He’d even developed elaborate murder plots for his ex-boyfriend—he-who-shall-not-be-named. The little troll deserved a good killing, but Max valued his freedom too much, and maybe there was a little nagging thought of the immorality of murder holding him back as well. Just a little one.
However, he had never indulged in a pregnancy fantasy—not in a dream or a nightmare. Not unless he counted the nightmares after watching Alien for the first time, but Max hoped that didn’t count. Rick seemed confident that being a surrogate wouldn’t harm Max, and the social worker would have stopped him from signing up for a suicide job. Hopefully. Shit. Now Max’s imagination was circling an unhappy place.
“Query. Will being the surrogate harm my health?” Max asked.
Rick's tentacles quivered and then drew up. “Provide discomfort.... Stretching of skin... and muscles. Well within tolerances.” A few descriptions in the middle failed to make it through the translator, but Max got the general idea. Being pregnant wouldn’t kill him. Max was surprised the kids were able to survive because intestines seemed like an inhospitable place to grow. Rick slid forward and gave another long string of untranslatable words; the translator caught “offspring” and “remove.”
If Max’s kids were in some woman who was considering abortion, he would feel something, too. Of course he would avoid getting someone pregnant if he didn’t speak the same language, and being gay, that was a bit of a moot point. Gay couples had to jump through more hoops to get kids. Only hets produced sentient life by accident.
“I will be surrogate in return for compensation,” Max said. Rick’s tentacles uncurled and two waved. He had one hell of a bad poker face. Or poker extremities, anyway.
“Query. Time given for surrogate in return for compensation?”
Oh Lord. Here they went again with time. Max had no idea how Heetayu’s computer could translate years and Rick’s couldn’t. Hell, when he did an audio search for “seconds,” he got television broadcasts where people said, “Wait a second” or “Do you want seconds?” Minutes and hours had been equally unhelpful. He frowned. Wait. The ground had been counting down to a Patriot missile launch. The mission had been to keep the ships away from the populated areas until the SAM system was in place.
Max did a fast breaststroke toward the edge of the pool, and Rick retreated damn fast for an octopus with one leg. He even got a couple of his longer tentacles involved, but Max ignored him. He grabbed clothes on the way past, and dried himself with them as he ran bare assed naked toward the translation room.
Rick probably had another name for the computer cubby, but Max had taken the space over for his translation work, and Rick hadn’t cared.
“Computer,” Max said as he slapped his wet hand down on the identification screen. “Search Earth broadcasts for phrase ‘T-minus.’” Max struggled into his pants. The fabric clung to his wet skin, and Max shook his leg to get it to slide into the pants. He then had to hop as he switched feet.
The computer speaker immediately broadcast the audio Max remembered. He’d been in his jet, focused on the ship in front of him. If the Patriot missile had taken him down, he wouldn’t have cared as long as it had destroyed the aliens. The memory of that helpless rage swelled up as he listened to the re
cording of the controller’s voice. “T-minus forty-five... forty-four... forty-three... forty-two...” The voice got to twenty-three before Max said, “Stop!” The countdown had been somewhere around eight or ten when Max had lost consciousness.
And the whole damn alien invasion had been nothing more than a police chase. How many people had died from battle debris falling to the ground? Max wondered whether his own plane or that Patriot missile had fallen to Earth and killed even more. Max’s stomach cramped as Kohei did something unfortunately athletic.
“Right, right. No upsetting the babies.” Max rubbed his side and sat on the stool. Maybe Kohei had the ability to sense emotion through some chemical in Max’s body. It would help if he understood alien biology, but at this point, Max would settle for sorting out the time issue. The dock computer system and Rick’s computers were not great at sharing information. Yet the raw transmissions from the government’s fly-by of Earth were all available. Politics must be involved. But he couldn’t worry about that right now.
A squelch announced Rick’s arrival. Any time he got his walking tentacle wet, it made unfortunate noises on the padded floor. Max ignored it because the one question they each wanted answered required the computer to sort out time markers.
“Computer, mark the sequence of numbers.”
“Marked.”
“The speaker is counting down seconds. Use the time intervals between T-minus forty-five and T-minus fifteen to define thirty seconds.” Max pulled the damn shirt over his head.
Maybe it was Max’s imagination, but the computer took more time than appropriate, as if it was frustrated with Max’s questionable translation skills. “Thirty seconds, confirm. Require secondary confirmation.”
“Use the length of time between T-minus forty and T-minus ten.”
Again, the computer paused. Whenever they had attempted to define time, this was where the computer called him an idiot because his first time interval didn’t match his second. This time the computer said, “Deviation within acceptable boundaries. External source required for confirmation.”