by Lyn Gala
He pressed his palm against the screen as Rick and Kohei pushed through the crowd and walked up the long aisle. Aliens were wandering out now, and Rick moved faster. Max prayed for each second the video continued, for each moment he could bask in Rick’s presence. He was beautiful, flowing past aliens and gliding over a bench to avoid a milling group of gossipers who hadn’t moved out of his way. He was strong and so damn smart. He didn’t need to have boned leg tentacles or a neck to be perfect.
Max pressed his body against the screen, and a vibration ran through the metal. Half afraid of some security measure, Max stepped back. The wall then slid up like a garage door so the camera image of the hearing was projected on the ceiling. Max could see into the courtroom and see Rick charging at him, tentacles waving and his tool hat flopping as it started to slide backward.
Still too stunned to move, Max was knocked backward onto the bench and tentacles were all over him. All over.
“Hey, kids in the room,” Max said. They had agreed that naughty touching would not happen in front of the children, and Rick was violating that in spectacular fashion. For a second, Rick froze. The tip of a tentacle pressed against Max’s hole, and most of Rick’s tentacles were under Max’s clothing. With a breathy raspberry that came very close to a sigh, Rick withdrew most of his tentacles. He did leave one under Max’s shirt curled around his nipple and a few around Max’s waist, but that was almost not inappropriate.
Kohei blew raspberries and stood where Max’s cell joined the courtroom. “What happened? Did we win?” Max asked.
Rick bellowed. “Query. Win what?” There were so many things Max wanted to win. His freedom would be high on the list, as would a guarantee that his family would keep their ship.
Kohei answered before Max could figure out which question to ask first. “Max Father, this was evidentiary hearing. There was no winning. But now the authorities have questions on evidence of husbanding.”
All the air went out of Max’s lungs and his thoughts scattered. Rick tightened his tentacles, and Max managed a weak, “That wasn’t a trial?”
Both Kohei and Rick stared at him.
“Query,” Max added belatedly.
Kohei blew bubbles.
Rick was a little more sympathetic. “If authorities accuse you of wrong doing, a judgment or liability takes many, many months. On Earth television, trials move slow. They keep going and going and going.” Rick and his love of commercials.
“This looked like a courtroom. I thought...” Max closed his eyes.
“Max Father, I am sorries for not explaining,” Kohei said now that he had finished laughing at Max. “Rational creatures cannot judge so fast.”
“Sentient and rational are not the same.” Max noticed that neither of them disagreed with him. “So, did the hearing go our way?”
“Authority believes Max is not moron species. Navigation program is not sold,” Rick said. More and more aliens were leaving the courtroom... or evidentiary hearing room.
“Where’s Dee?” Max asked.
“Other room. Same hearing.” Kohei gestured toward the side Max couldn’t see from his current position.
“We should go find her.”
Dee hadn’t known that Carrington was using her. If the universe was just, Carrington was going to have to pay a fine or at the very least, look like an idiot. Bitch. Max realized both his family members were watching him. Rick was motionless, and Kohei was rotating in confusion. Max stood, or at least he tried to. Rick was heavy. He lifted Rick an inch and then they collapsed back down onto the bunk.
Rick untangled his tentacles.
Max tried to find the words that would allow him to explain why he worried about Dee. From their point of view, it didn’t make sense, but he didn’t want his family to blame her for any of this mess. “She warned me and tried to get me out before the guards showed up.”
“How would leaving Carrington’s ship have made improved evidence?” Kohei asked.
Well, shit. Kohei had a valid point. Max was in the middle of a con, so whether the authorities caught him there or later, it didn’t matter. Eventually they would have found him outside the ship, with or without Dee’s warning. Hiding wouldn’t have improved their legal position, but Max had an instinct to run for home. Max stood and tightened his hold on Rick's tentacle. “Let’s go see if she is all right.”
Rick didn’t say anything, but he did start toward the main room. His tentacles didn’t even curl much. Most of the aliens had left now. Bundy and his entourage hovered near the exit, but everyone else had gone. The judge came off the table once Max stepped into the main room.
The judge shouted. “We will discuss questions of husbanding.” The high-tone cut through Max’s head.
“I need to check on Dee,” Max said firmly.
“I’m here.” Dee came out of the cell that was opposite the exit. A few of the aliens around Bundy turned toward them, but then Bundy left and his entourage followed. Dee walked over, stopping several feet away. “I’m fine.”
The judge came striding up the aisle with a rolling gait similar to a human. Funny, but the two-legged walk looked strange after months of watching Rick and the kids glide about on their walking tentacles. The judge trumpeted. “I require clarification.” And here the rest of the universe complained about Rick’s people being too loud. Pot and kettle. Pot and high-pitched, annoying kettle.
“About husbanding. Right. Okay, ask away.” Maybe relief was making Max a little punch-drunk because that was not the way to address a judge, not even an alien one. The Chosen judge pushed his lips forward so that his line of nostrils all opened into teardrop shapes. After a second, the face relaxed again.
“I require clarification of human social structure. Are humans required of groups?”
The business translator made language a lot clearer, but the judge had a stilted, wrong quality to his language, even with the improved translation.
Max answered. “Humans do require some sort of social connections. Sometimes they live in isolation, but usually they will have one person they pair bond with or one family member. People who live completely isolated usually end up odd.”
Dee snorted. “They end up insane,” she corrected him. “It damages their brains.” She tapped the side of her head. Given that Dee had been the one abandoned on the planet, Max had avoided saying that. Dee shook her head. “I should have been able to follow his math on those weapons modifications. I have the same background. But I couldn’t. But that’s not evidence that Max didn’t do the work. We were both working on a translation interface, but Max got ten times farther than I did in the same amount of time. And the longer I was alone, the worse my productivity got.”
The judge studied Dee and Max. “Both humans were isolated.”
“No,” Dee said. She smiled at Max before she gave Rick a fond look. “Max had a husband and children. He is a lucky man.”
Max pulled Rick closer. “I am.”
“Gregariousness can include species not human?” the judge asked. “Odd.”
“Humans are odd,” Kohei oh-so-helpfully added. The judge ignored him.
“Why did you not seek gregarious group?” the judge asked Dee.
“Because no one would talk to me,” she said. “I tried to get to know a few of the people who lived in the same area, but they ignored me.”
Max remembered how much it had hurt when he had thought Rick’s friendship wasn’t real. The sense of loss and the loneliness had nearly eaten him alive. A day of that had nearly broken him. She’d been alone the whole time. “God, Dee, I’m so sorry.”
She shrugged. “It’s not like you abandoned me. Hell, I walked away from you to take the job with Carrington because I believed all that shit about Hidden ones being parasites. The last I checked, parasites don’t risk coming to court to defend their families. Rick, I’m sorry I listened to these assholes.”
Rick loosened his hold of Max’s arm enough to rotate.
Dee continued while Rick was st
ill rotating back and forth. “I should turn in my POC card. I mean, I know what it’s like to have people judge me because of the color of my skin, and I go making assumptions about other people because of where they have their eyes. I am a horrible human being.”
Max hated the disgust he heard in her voice. She was a damn good pilot and a good person. Some of the guys from the unit—Max wouldn’t want to spend time with them. But Dee was kind and quiet and she would laugh with people without laughing at them. “I probably would have believed what people told me if the translator had worked well enough for my social worker to say anything other than Rick’s people were loud and unpopular,” Max told her. But he didn’t want to go further into the topic of discrimination in front of a judge. This might not have been a trial, but important rulings still had to get made.
He turned to the judge. “Can I sell the navigation program or not?” Maybe his con had backfired a bit, but he still wanted to make enough profit to get upgrades for the ship. He was going to have to do a lot of security audits and new weapon designs to get the credits they needed if he couldn’t sell Rick’s programming.
They could go back to Hidden planet and sell it under the official terms of the sanction agreement, but Max was vindictive enough that he didn’t want these people to get access to the technology unless they were willing to pay a fair price. Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face was a valid hobby on Earth, one that Max endorsed.
“We must discuss husbanding with Ugly one.” The judge turned and walked back toward the table in the center of the room. Asshole. Kohei followed the judge, and Rick tugged at Max to do the same. Maybe the evidentiary hearing wasn’t over. Max took a deep breath. If his ability to make a living depended on the alien understanding of husbanding, he knew one thing. He wouldn’t deny Rick. Maybe they had never stood in front of an altar in a church, but in Max’s heart, they were married. Nothing would change that.
And if this asshole called Rick ugly again, Max would take it out on the judge’s legs, and since he had kneecaps, Max knew exactly where to kick him.
Chapter Twenty-One
The judge got up onto his table again, but this time it didn’t rotate. He considered the small group of them. Dee stood slightly to one side, but Kohei was so close that Max could only tell the tentacle tips apart because Kohei’s had far more beige and green and Rick had more red.
“What definition do you give for husbanding?” the judge asked.
Max smiled at Rick. “Mating. Pair bonding. Sharing sameness for the rest of our lives.”
Rick’s tentacles shivered.
“How many individuals are inside husbanding?”
“As the only female here,” Dee said, “I should point out that marriage doesn’t always involve husbands. You’re leaving out wives.”
The judge turned toward her. “Define wife.”
“The female equivalent of husband,” Dee said. “A wife is a female who is in a marriage. A husband is a male who is in a marriage.”
“Define female,” the judge said. Dee opened her mouth, but Max quickly jumped in.
“Careful,” Max warned. “That word will lead you down a rabbit trail, and somewhere along the way, you’re going to decide that you don’t know what female means, and I say this as a male who carried and gave birth to three children.”
She grimaced. “Yikes. You have a point.” She turned to the judge. “But I can say that I call myself a female, so I am one. If I join a marriage, then I would be a wife, not a husband.”
The judge tapped something on his wrist translator. “How many individuals are inside marriaging?”
“Two,” Max said. Yeah, there were polygamists, but that was another rabbit trail he was not going down.
“Define length and termination of marriaging.”
Max wanted to say that marriage was forever, but being in the military meant he had seen entirely too many marriages fail. Trying to maintain a relationship when one partner kept getting deployed wasn’t easy. “Most humans hope that marriage will last forever, but honestly, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes people change and after a time, they find that they don’t fit together anymore. Then they get a divorce.”
The judge tapped on his wrist translator again. “Is ‘fit’ a reference to tentacles and intestines?” he asked.
Dee snorted.
“No!” Max blurted. Oh god. Obviously the rest of the universe knew how Hidden ones reproduced, but that was not a topic he ever wanted to discuss. Nope. He might enjoy tentacle sex, but he did not enjoy talking about it. “No, it’s more about having compatible goals. Sometimes people decide they want different things.”
“And sometimes,” Dee added, “people live together for their entire lives. They raise children and grandchildren. They love each other until the end of their lives, and when one dies, the other never recovers and they live a half-life.”
That was specific.
“My grandparents,” she added.
“My parents have been married for forty years. That will probably be them.” Max focused on the judge again. “That’s the goal of most humans—to have a marriage that will last forever.” Max tightened his hold on Rick’s tentacle. Maybe Rick understood the gesture because he leaned closer and wrapped a tentacle around Max’s arm. God, Max didn’t even know how long Hidden ones lived. He selfishly hoped it was a very long time. He couldn’t bear the pain of losing Rick, not even if that meant Rick had to lose him.
Completely oblivious to the emotional moment, the judge had the gall to continue the official hearing. “The translation matrix translates marriaging to a non-economic term. Clarify the economics of marriaging.”
“What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health,” Max said. “Those are some of the vows we take when we marry.”
More tapping on the translator. Max had the feeling that he was being asked to create a legal definition—one that all humans would have to live up to. These people made judgments—like humans were morons—and then they blithely assumed every conclusion they reached was right. As far as Max was concerned, that made them morons. The judge looked up. “Clarify, time of vows between you and Ugly one.”
“Okay, no!” Max held up a finger of warning, which was the same gesture his mother had used every time Max had traipsed mud over her floors. “You do not get to insult him by calling him ugly.”
The judge raised his head on that awkwardly long neck. “Ugly one is official designation, not insult.”
“Well it’s pretty fucking insulting.”
Rick blurbled a quiet, “Max,” but Max ignored that.
“They are called the Hidden ones. If my people get up here... No, when they get up here because they will work together and get their asses into space now that they know the rest of the universe is flying over their heads. So, when they get here, they might choose to call you Big Nostril aliens or Freaky Lip aliens or even Ugly ones.” The judge’s nostrils all tightened to slits. “But they will at least call you that in private. They won’t walk up to your face and say it.”
“Preach it,” Dee said quietly.
The judge stared at Max for a long time before he glanced at Rick and Kohei, who was pressed close to his father’s side. Then he looked back at Max. “Official hearing requires official nomenclature,” the judge said. “I shall designate the Ugly one ‘Rick’ to avoid insulting. Clarify time of vows between you and Rick.”
Since Max was not going to win the fight over what the universe called Rick’s species, he focused on the question. “To have vows, we needed witnesses, so we never officially had vows.”
“Clarify the not using small Ugly on—”
“Ah!” Max held up a finger and spoke loud enough to stop the judge from finishing his thought. “Those are my children. If you call them ugly, I will be unreasonable.”
Rick tightened his hold over Max’s arm. That was a fairly strong suggestion that Max was on the edge of the local versi
on of a contempt of court charge, but he was not going to let this guy insult his kids.
“I am ignorant of the designations for the small—” The judge thrust his lips out without finishing his sentence. Max still knew exactly what he was thinking.
“This is Kohei,” Max said before the judge could say something that Max would not forgive. “Back at the ship, James and Xander are waiting for us to return.”
The judge drew his lips back in. “Clarify the not using Kohei, James and Xander as witnesses for official vows.”
“They were short one judge for a wedding,” Dee said.
The judge turned toward Dee. “Clarify function of judge.”
Max took that one. “A judge is an official of public or government organizations.”
“Or you could have a minister marry you,” Dee added. “But without a judge or a minister, a marriage isn’t legal. And before you ask, a minister is an official of the church, which is a system of beliefs.”
The judge swiveled his head from Max to Dee and back again .He leaned back on his table. “Clarify. Humans have officials of beliefs. Affirmative or negative?”
Since the judge was turned toward Max, he answered. “We do. I mean, humans in general do. My family isn’t terribly religious, but religion is pretty common.” Max closed his mouth when the judge’s head tilted. He had no idea what that gesture meant, but he knew that people took religion seriously, and the judge’s whole species once believed they were chosen by God. So silence was the best strategy here.
“Designated Rick, do you recognize the validity of Unbalanced one’s marriage?”
Max blinked. Unbalanced? Max hoped they were talking about human walking and not psychology. He also suspected that hope was in vain. Rick had warned him that he was making himself look like a psycho.
“I do,” Rick said. “I am husband to Max and he is husband to me.”
“Husbanding can be terminated. Then Rick has circumscribed laws regulating sale of—” The judge stopped. No doubt he was wondering how unbalanced Max might get if he said ugly again. If these guys ever picked up American television broadcasts and saw old episodes of Dexter or pretty much any true crime documentary, they were going to shoot down human ships the second they appeared in the more populated parts of space.
