Anywhere but here

by Jerry Oltion

  The father swung his legs around to the only patch of bare floor left and slowly stood, leaning hard on his mate. He was wobbly, but he made it, standing there with the side of his head all covered with dried blood. Then he saw the little one holding its right tentacle protectively with its left, and he bent down and spoke softly to it.

  The mother answered for it, and the little one held out its tentacle. There was a big purple spot about halfway up, and when the father gently touched it, the little one cried out in pain.

  "Can you break one of those?" Trent asked.

  "I wouldn't think so," Donna said, "but something's sure wrong with it." What to do about it was even less obvious. Trent got on the radio with the doctor again, and the doctor advised bringing the father and the young one into town for him to look at. It took a while to get that across to the alien family, but they pantomimed the father and the child climbing into the pickup and driving off several times until the aliens finally got it. The father clearly didn't like that idea, and Trent couldn't blame him. He didn't know Trent and Donna from Adam, and he wasn't about to abandon all his animals and possessions, nor leave his wife and the other two kids with them while he ran off to town—though the doctor said with a head wound like his, that's exactly what he should do. The father pantomimed that he was okay, that he would take it easy for a few days and he would be fine. But he couldn't very well say that about his child.

  At last they settled on a solution: Katata, the mother, would take the injured child and the baby to town with Trent and Donna, while the father and his oldest son would stay with the animals and start their farm right where they landed. That had probably been his intent in coming down where he did: to be close enough to town that he could take things in to market, but far enough away that the land wouldn't already be claimed yet. He'd succeeded in that. In fact, if it hadn't been for the hard landing, he'd have succeeded at everything he'd set out to do. Trent had to give the guy his grudging respect. It was one thing to seal up a truck and head into the great unknown for a job hunt, but to do it in a rusty water tank, with all your family and all your possessions, one way—that took guts. And desperation. Trent couldn't imagine what conditions on this alien's home planet must be like if this looked like a good idea to him. 7

  He got a bit of an idea on the drive. He had originally thought that Katata and the children could ride in the camper, but Katata took one look at the tiny table and bench seats and all the cabinets overhead and shook her head "Ti." Even when Trent tried to explain that the cabinets were latched tight and nothing would fly open, she just pointed to the front seat and said, "Katata bok gaba." He couldn't very well insist that they ride in back when she obviously wanted to ride in front, so Donna squeezed in a little closer to him than usual, the child with the injured tentacle, Talana, sat next to Donna, and Katata held the baby, Dixit, on her lap.

  And while they drove, Katata told them what life was like on her home planet, Bekat. They started out with no words in common besides "ti" and "bakbak" and "gatsa," but it was amazing what she could convey through pantomime, and with each concept Trent and Donna understood, she taught them a word to go with it so she wouldn't have to pantomime it again.

  Apparently a spaceship had fallen out of the sky on Bekat about a hundred days ago. The astronauts—humans, if Trent understood the pointing at him and at the starry sky—had given the secret of the hyperdrive to the aliens, who had immediately begun blinking out on interstellar jumps of their own. Those who could build a spaceship without getting it stolen first, anyway. There was either a war going on, or the place was nothing but bandits and guerrillas fighting over the last dregs of civilization, Trent couldn't figure out for sure which, but if he understood Katata right, everybody who could get out was doing so. Problem was, the army—or the bandits—knew that, and were actively hunting down and killing anybody who tried to leave.

  "That's nuts," Trent said when he finally understood the situation. "If people want to move out, let

  'em go."

  "So says the guy from the United States," Donna said.

  "Yeah, well, at least our government only shoots at us on the way back." Donna got a thoughtful look on her face.

  "What?" he asked her.

  "I wonder if it's a racial thing? Or religious. Maybe the people in power don't want the other guys to get a leg up somewhere else."

  That was possible. Humans certainly acted that way if you gave them the chance. Right after Allen dropped the hy-perdrive plans on Earth, people had been afraid that the first nation to get a colony started would nuke the rest of the world to prevent anyone else from getting away. Those fears had been well grounded, too. Several countries had actually started throwing bombs before the Galactic Federation put a stop to it. There was no reason to assume that aliens would be any more civilized. Were Katata and her family refugees? The stuff they had brought with them certainly didn't look like the sort of belongings a rich family would take with them to the stars. They were obviously farmers, and not terrifically well-off ones at that. Just the sort of folks who, among humans, anyway, always wound up doing the grunt work while the fat cats skimmed off any profit they might make. Trent wondered how they would fare on Onnescu. There wasn't much government here to speak of, certainly no immigration police or any of that, but things would change. They would have to. Onnescu was probably one of the fastest growing population centers in the galaxy at the moment. It was the closest planet to Earth, one of the most Earthlike yet discovered, it didn't have any intelligent natives living on it, and the people who had already moved here actually wanted more people to join them. Their goal, or so they said in their flyer, was to start a new society using all the best ideas from Earths history, and build a second Earth without all the environmental problems and social problems of the first one. An admirable goal, Trent thought, and probably much more difficult to realize than the colonists expected, but even if they fell short of the entire picture, they could still wind up with something a hell of a lot better than back home.

  He wondered if they had counted on immigration from beyond Earth. Not that it should matter, but he bet it would to some people. Even so, Katata and her family probably stood a better chance here than on a planet where people tried to kill you for getting out. By the time the notion of racial purity raised its ugly head here, they would already be locals.

  Their biggest problem was going to be the slime. The whole right side of Trent's pickup cab was dripping with the stuff. Every time he hit a bump, the aliens would lurch against the door or the dashboard—or against Donna—and every time they did, they left a fresh smudge of goo. Donna was starting to look like a Jell-O wrestler on her right side, and Trent was beginning to wonder if they would ever get the stuff out of the seat. Katata and her kids didn't even seem to notice that they were doing it, which meant it was probably a normal thing for them and not just a reaction to stress, and if that was the case, then they were going to have a hard time dealing with humans. Trent didn't mind getting his pickup slimed for a good cause, but he doubted if people would put up with it on a regular basis. Maybe they could keep a tarp handy. If Trent had been thinking quicker, he could have done that here. But even that was probably more than most people would be willing to do. Just went to show, there were always complications no matter where you went.

  Trent kept all the lights on while he drove. They rolled through a hundred-yard circle of near-daylight, making good time when they found a smooth stretch and slowing to get through the rocky parts. Trent radioed ahead and asked if there was a road already cut through the Greenwall, and Greg talked them toward the closest of three that he knew of. It was a couple of miles out of their way, but it was worth the detour; once they found the notch in the trees and forded the stream, they picked up a track they could follow all the way to Bigtown. It wasn't much at first, but it was better than nothing, and the closer they got to town, the more well defined it became. It had even been smoothed out in places. Even so, it was well after midni
ght local time when they saw their first house lights. The outlying homesteads were spread quite a ways apart, but they drew closer together as Trent kept driving, until eventually the pickup was rolling down a wide city street with houses on either side. The street wasn't paved, but it was straight and relatively smooth, except for the mudholes, which grew more and more common closer to the center of town. Trent grinned as he powered through them, throwing big sheets of mud out to the sides and up over the hood. Katata and her children squealed in alarm the first time it happened, but Talana's squeal changed its pitch the second time, and Katata's echoed her child's the time after. Pretty soon everyone was doing it, and then Donna taught them how to shout "Woo-hoo!" The center of town was all shops, bars, restaurants, and hotels. Some of them were wooden frame buildings like any others back home, but others were made of rough-hewn logs like old homestead cabins, and one was made of round river rock cemented together like an old Scottish castle. There was a log bridge over the river itself, and more businesses beyond. A few trees stood here and there, especially near the river, but Trent saw more stumps than live ones.

  It was hard to believe that this was all less than five months old. Trent had heard how frontier towns had grown up practically overnight in the American West, but he had never really understood the magnitude of what people could do when they put some serious effort into it. These people clearly didn't want to live in a rural backwater; they wanted a town. They just didn't want it to be on Earth. Some of the inhabitants were out and about. People waved and called out to them from the doorways of bars as they rolled past, and Trent slowed down so he wouldn't splash mud all over them. The streets downtown were churned to a froth by all the traffic, to the point where Trent wondered if he was going to get through the muck with only three drive wheels, but the pickup wallowed through it in fine form, and a few blocks past the river they rose up onto drier ground again. Greg talked them in to the hospital—a squat log building on a side street about six blocks north of the center of town. The exterior looked like a dude ranch bunkhouse, but lights blazed from its windows, and big blue signs pointed to the emergency entrance. Trent parked close to the doors and set the brake.

  "The ambulance arrives," he said, opening his door and stepping down to the ground. He went around to the other side and helped Katata and her children down, wiping his hands on his pantlegs when he was done, then he reached up for Donna, but she took one look at the slimy seat and scooted out the driver's side. It was hardly worth the effort. Her entire right side was already wet with the aliens' slime, her white T-shirt practically transparent from her shoulder to the middle of her chest except where streaks of orange sap from the bushes Trent had cut by the stream had stained it. It was clear that she wasn't wearing a bra.

  A tall, gangly Asian guy met them at the door. "I'm Doctor Chen," he said in heavily accented English. He wasn't dressed like a doctor—his blue jeans, red flannel shirt, and hiking boots made him look more like a logger or a construction worker—but he had a stethoscope draped around his neck and a little fanny pack with a red cross on it.

  Trent made the introductions. "I'm Trent. This is Donna, Katata, Talana, and Dixit. Talana's the one with the hurt . . . whatever."

  Dr. Chen looked apprehensively at the aliens. It was hard to tell what the aliens thought of him. If they were scared, they didn't show it, but they didn't say anything, either. They just stood there, Katata holding the baby in one tentacle and draping the other over Talana's shoulder.

  "Come inside, and we have see," Chen said.

  The building might have had a log exterior, but the inside was clean and bright, with smooth white walls and a tile floor. The emergency room took up at least a third of its space, and there was a hallway leading to several smaller rooms beyond it. The emergency room had two exam tables with crinkly paper sheets covering the cushions, and curtains on rails that could be pulled around them for privacy, just like in any other hospital.

  An Asian woman dressed in drab green scrubs ran some kind of high-tech instrument on the far end of the room. She looked up when she saw people entering, did a theatrical double-take, then waved

  "hello" and went back to her work.

  "Please sit patient on table," Dr. Chen said. When Katata didn't respond, he motioned setting Talana down, and she did. He reached out and gingerly touched the alien child's slimy right tentacle at the bruised spot just above where it was cradling it with its left. Talana shivered under his touch, but whether it was from pain or from the idea of being prodded by a curious alien was hard to say.

  "Where does it hurt?" Chen asked.

  Katata spoke to the child, and the child responded by pointing with the tip of its uninjured tentacle. Both tentacles were maybe three inches thick at the shoulder and tapered to about the size of a person's little finger at the tip. The injury was about two-thirds of the way down the right one, where it was maybe an inch thick.

  Chen brushed his fingers gently along Talana's skin. Ta-lana quivered again, then winced when he got to the injury. Trent wondered what the doctor could do for what was essentially a snake with a broken back, how he could even tell what was wrong, but Dr. Chen acted like he knew what he was doing. He reached for Talana's other tentacle and felt the same spot there, squeezing fairly hard to feel the underlying structure. "There are bones," he said. "Like vertebrae." He flexed the uninjured tentacle in an arc, then tightened it into a loop about eight inches in diameter, getting a feel for how it normally moved. Then he put his hand inside the loop and said, "Squeeze." He clenched the fingers of his other hand to show what he wanted.

  Talana tightened the tentacle around his hand, the slimy skin sliding noiselessly, like a velvet rope being drawn into a knot. The knot slid down the length of the tentacle a few inches until it was narrow enough for a good grip, then Talana squeezed.

  Chen nodded appreciatively. "Very good. Strong. Harder, please." He flexed his free fingers again, and Talana obliged.

  "Ah! Okay, stop now. Stop!" He tugged his hand free and shook it, and Talana jerked the tentacle back as if it had touched something hot.

  "Toca," the child said.

  "You okay," Chen replied. "You do just what I ask." He took the other tentacle and draped the end of it over the same hand. "Now do again."

  Talana tried to wrap the tentacle around his hand, but the end of it slid less than halfway around before Talana cried out in pain and stopped.

  "Okay," Chen said, lowering his hand. "No need to try again." He turned toward the woman across the room and said something to her in what sounded like Chinese, of which the only word Trent could understand was "X-ray."

  She looked up from her equipment and replied in Chinese, then came around her workbench and wheeled the mobile x-ray unit away from its parking spot against the wall. It looked like the bottom half of a refrigerator with a computer keyboard and monitor set at an angle on top, with a hinged arm holding an oblong plastic emitter overhead. Trent looked at the arm, then at the arms of the woman pushing the unit toward the alien child. Both were built on pretty much the same principle, which made him wonder if an alien x-ray machine would have a flexible arm.

  Dr. Chen took a wide black film tray from the machine's cabinet and set it on a cart beside the exam table, then draped Talana's injured tentacle across the flat surface near one end of the tray. He covered the rest of the tray with a heavy metal plate, apparently to keep the entire piece of film beneath it from being exposed at once, then positioned the business end of the x-ray machine over the tentacle while the technician worked at the keyboard to set up the shot.

  "Okay, everyone but patient go into other room," he said when they were ready. Trent and Donna moved away, but Katata didn't.

  "You too," Chen said, waving her after Trent and Donna, but she said "Ti" and stayed put.

  "That means 'No,'" Donna told him.

  "I assume." He thought it over, obviously wondering how he was going to get the idea of minimizing exposure across to a worried alien mother,
then he said, "Okay. Take baby. Let mother stay." He gently lifted Dixit from Katata's tentacles and handed the baby to Donna, who made a face, but she took it from him and held it against her already-slimy side. Dixit wrapped its tentacle around her waist and rested its head against her right breast. Katata looked at Donna and her baby, then at Talana, then at the x-ray machine.

  "It's all right," Donna said. "We'll be just over there." She pointed down the hallway toward the patient rooms.

  Katata clearly didn't understand what was going on, but she stayed by her injured child while Trent and Donna moved away with the baby. They paused at the door and watched as the doctor handed her a lead apron and showed her how to put it around herself, then did the same for Talana and himself. The technician put on her own apron, then turned to make sure Trent and Donna were clear. She said something in Chinese, waving them on out of the room.

  "Nothin' like a language barrier to add to the excitement," Trent said as they dutifully walked down the hallway. He peered into the dark rooms as they passed. The two on the left were typical patient rooms, with beds and curtains and even televisions bolted to the walls at the end of the beds. "They've got TV here?" he asked incredulously.

  "Probably just for showing videos," Donna said.

  "Oh. Yeah, that makes sense."

  The rooms on the other side of the hallway were offices. The one in back was lit, so they went in and sat in the chairs there, careful not to slime anything. The alien baby looked around at the desk and the shelves of books and the piles of papers on the desk, then reached out for one of the papers. Its tentacle was fast; it had the paper before Donna could stop it.