Earth Fathers Are Weird

by Lyn Gala

  Fuck. If Max tried to do the one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi thing again, he would screw it up and they’d be back at square zero. He rubbed his stomach. Thirty seconds. He needed something that would correlate to thirty seconds. He smiled. “Check the entertainment broadcasts. They are interrupted by persuasive and informational transmissions. Traditionally, those interrupting transmissions are either thirty or sixty seconds.”

  “Confirm correlation between persuasive and informational transmissions and commercials,” the computer asked.

  “High correlation,” Max said. The computer began running through commercials so quickly that Max could barely recognize a few famous jingles played at supersonic speeds. Then the computer went silent. “Unit one second confirmed,” the computer said. Max almost wept with joy. He pushed the emotions aside and focused on using that one unit to explain time units in English. Sixty seconds in a minute. Sixty minutes in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. Three hundred and sixty five and a quarter days in a year. One-twelfth of a year in a month. Max stopped there. If he needed to count time in decades, he was throwing himself out an airlock. Just as soon as he found one.

  The computer tried to restart a number of time-related questions regarding human lifespan and development, but Max slapped his hand on the master control to shut it down in the middle of a word. Then he turned around to face Rick.

  “Query. Remaining time for surrogacy of offspring.”

  Rick inched closer. “Clarify. Minimum time of survival, optimal time of survival, required time for compensation or average time based on biological precedent?”

  That was an excellent question. Well Max had never done a job half-assed in his life, at least not after that one summer when he’d been stupid enough to think that a lawn-mowing job in the heat was a good idea. “Optimal time of survival,” Max said.

  Rick relaxed so much that he shrank a couple of inches as his central tentacle sagged. This time when Rick gave his whale song, the translator offered, “Six and three quarter months.”

  Max rubbed his stomach. “Query. Will all offspring come out at once?” It sure seemed like Kohei was more developed than his siblings.

  Rick rotated clockwise a half turn. “If large offspring must pass smaller offspring, then smaller offspring are pushed out.”

  That meant that they might appear at different times. Max was still a little worried about what happened when the offspring were large enough to create a blockage, but for now, he would assume that if Rick’s species went around shoving eggs up other creature’s asses they knew how to do it without causing harm.

  “Query.” Rick said slowly. The translator might use a constant speed, but the belch Rick used for that word was cartoonish in length. “Surrogate for compensation?”

  “Yes,” Max said. “Surrogate for compensation. I should make you drive me home afterward.”

  “Clarify. Home.”

  Max almost cried. Some sadistic part of him wanted to confuse Rick by defining it as the place Max would never see again. It would be like the liar’s paradox during a Star Trek episode. One of the crew, either Spock or Kirk, had told an android that Mudd could only tell lies. Mudd then announced, “I am lying.” Max wondered if it would send Rick into the same sort of tailspin if Max told him to take Max home and then defined home as a place he would never see. However, the more logical part of him knew that Rick had never meant to lie to Max or even confuse him. In his alien, octopussy way, he’d been as honest as he could.

  “It’s a place where a person belongs,” Max said. He didn’t know if that would translate, but clearly Rick had understood some part of it.

  Rick rushed to say, “Agreed. I will return you to Central Trading City Nineteen-Sector Twelve.”

  Max blinked. Rick’s offer was perverse. Well-intentioned, but no less painful for all his altruism. At least Max knew there would be computers he could use and a central government organized enough to send out social workers for randomly kidnapped members of pre-space flight civilizations. “Okay.” Max stared at Rick, not sure what to say after that. For the first time since he came on the ship, he felt like an employee or maybe a junior officer trapped in a room with a general.

  Rick did another quarter turn. “Query. Correlation humans and willingness to surrogate for compensation.”

  Max leaned against the computer. The sloping chairs weren’t comfortable, but he didn’t want to stand as if Rick were a superior officer. Nope. He wasn’t. He was Max’s boss... and the father of the children Max was carrying. Max was so going to need boatloads of therapy. Big old super freighters full of the stuff. And booze. Lots of booze. “It’s not common, but some human females cannot carry their own young, so others will carry the child for them.”

  “Query. Surrogate for compensation?”

  “Some of them, yes.”

  “Query. Correlate surrogate and female?”

  Max almost laughed. Until two hours ago, he would have said there was a one hundred percent correlation, but apparently not. “Human females carry offspring. Human males do not.”

  “Query. Max male or female?”

  Max sighed. “Don’t emasculate me anymore than you already have. I’m a male.” Max figured the translator would miss most of that, and he didn’t want the translator to serve up all of Max’s feelings on a silver platter. Sometimes Max needed to complain out loud without running the risk of pissing off his boss. On the good side, he couldn’t exactly get fired.

  “Query,” Max asked. “Do all offspring of your species grow in animals of other species?”

  “Yes. Carrying offspring is biologically wearying.”

  That was a properly logical answer. Max was surprised Vulcans hadn’t come up with the solution, although that would have made the Star Trek universe weirdly kinky. Max wasn’t sure the 1960s had been ready for that. And if Rick’s two younger kids took after their big brother in the athletics department, wearying would be a bit of an understatement.

  “Clarify. Regret translation matrix failure,” Rick said.

  Regret. That was the one emotion Max had managed to get the translation computer to understand. When something broke, the response was regret. If something tasted bad, it created regret. If an alien accidentally knocked up a male of another species without warning, apparently that was regret as well.

  “It’s fine,” Max said, even though it wasn’t.

  Rick inched closer, and a tentacle brushed against Max’s arm. “Regret causing of distress. Max is pleasant and interesting male individual.”

  It was still the nicest apology Max had gotten in a while.

  Chapter Nine

  Max floated in the pool. Since he had convinced Rick to raise the temperature a few degrees, it was much more comfortable. And as a bonus, certain body parts no longer had to suffer embarrassing shrinkage.

  The door opened, and Max tilted his head to watch Rick slide into the room. A cramp struck, and Max rubbed the huge lump above his hip bone. Kohei had grown a lot in the last five months, and now his brother was large enough to create a second lump. Weirdly, Max looked sorta pregnant. He also looked a little like a cartoon snake that had swallowed a bird and the shape of the bird was still visible through his stomach. Sometimes the Kohei lump even moved. And pain had become a constant companion.

  Considering that these two had already caused more discomfort than basic training, Max was surprised by how much he worried about them. Even Rick admitted that they were growing faster than anticipated and they would likely come out early. Rick slid his hat off and set it aside. One good splash fight and Rick had decided to avoid exposing his tools to that sort of soaking.

  Rick swam closer. He was so graceful in the water with his undulating tentacles, and Max was even getting used to the weird and random eye placement. “Query. How is your health?”

  “It kind of sucks.” Max rubbed his protruding Kohei bulge. The cramps had passed too-much-bad-Mexican-food and entered into holy-crap-I think-I-might-need-to-visit-the-hos
pital territory. At this point, Max had some unpleasant thoughts about those chest bursting aliens that showed up in so many science fiction B-movies he had watched as a kid. The 80s had been obsessed with things bursting out of bodies. A whole generation of children had been traumatized by fake blood and cheesy aliens.

  “Offspring arrive soon.” Rick started swimming around Max in lazy circles. Max closed his eyes and floated. Rick had started this weird ritual about a month ago, and it reminded him a little of those videos where fish swam around and around to disturb the sand into fancy patterns to attract a mate. Considering Rick’s species had used non-sentient species to carry their young in the past, it was probably some sort of instinct to make sure the host surrogate didn’t eat the children.

  Host surrogate. Max still had trouble wrapping his head around the idea. It would be like his mother deciding that carrying children was too much hassle and having the family dog do it for her. Max might not tell Rick, but he understood why other aliens had a problem with Rick’s species and their weird reproductive habits. That division between Rick’s people and others had to be pretty deep too. When Max had tried to get the name of Rick’s species, he had only been able to call his own people, “People.” But when Max had asked what others called them, all the tentacles had curled up like an octopus on a hot griddle.

  “I'm concerned about how the offspring plan on arriving,” Max said. He’d been avoiding that question ever since Rick made the big announcement, but Max needed to put on his big boy pants and face the truth.

  “Translation matrix failure. Query. Clarify.”

  The translator was so much better after months of work, but they would still run into trouble in the weirdest spots. “Query,” Max said. “Will offspring damage me?” Rick had reassured him a number of times, but considering how large the children lumps were getting, Max needed to hear it again.

  “No damage. Discomfort. Max good, safe, male surrogate.” Rick was cute in his attempt to say the right words, even when he didn’t understand them. However, Max’s complaints about his masculinity inspired Rick to reaffirm Max’s gender on a semi-regular basis.

  Max rubbed his stomach. If this was discomfort, Max did not want to see what Rick would define as pain. If he ever got home to earth, he needed to buy his mother the biggest box of chocolates he could find. Having a living, squirming being inside his guts was not a comfortable feeling. And right now Max felt guilty about every time he’d kicked her bladder.

  “Query. Does Max feel damaged?” Tentacles brushed across Max’s stomach.

  Max twisted and flailed in the water, and that woke Kohei, who immediately started writhing in his guts. For a half second, Max thought he would go under the water, but then tentacles curled around him, pulling him tight up against Rick’s body. Surprise made Max gasp. Rick was warm, far warmer than Max had expected, given that his tentacles ran on the cool side. “Query. I remove you from the water?”

  “No. I’m fine. You startled me.” Max tried to pull away, but Rick held on. Max had an ex-boyfriend or two who had gotten pretty handsy, but nothing prepared him to deal with dozens of tentacles all wrapping around him at once.

  “Query. Clarify startled.”

  “You moved too quickly or touched me unexpectedly, and my muscles reacted before I made a decision to react.”

  “Query. Correlation startle with fight. Correlation startle with flee.”

  Max snorted. Of course that’s where Rick’s big brain went first. He was all worried that Max’s instincts would make him hide when the pain of childbirth kicked in. Max had survived a basic training accident where his main parachute hadn’t fully deployed. The backup had worked as designed, but the extra time in freefall and an unanticipated wind had blown him into a wooded area where he’d impaled his leg on a broken tree limb. If he had survived that, he wouldn’t get illogical about a baby octopus crawling out his ass.

  “I won’t flee. ‘Startle’ doesn’t correlate with either. And if I were going to run when I hurt, I would already be racing out of the room. I feel like someone has taken a large rock and hit me in the stomach several times.”

  Several of Rick's tentacles shriveled up into unhappy little balls. “The water is nutrient rich. I have overfed offspring.”

  Max peeled the remaining few tentacles from his arms and pushed away. Part of him didn’t want to because Rick was deliciously warm and squishy. He was like a big bean bag, a hot water bottle, and a body pillow had a kinky threesome. The fact that Max enjoyed his comfort was the biggest reason to avoid it. He couldn’t afford to rely emotionally on Rick. “So that's why you always encouraged me to go swimming. These nutrients aren't anything gross, are they?” Max hoped he wasn't swimming in the alien version of mother's milk.

  “Query. Clarify gross.” Rick withdrew his tentacles and allowed Max to swim free, but he kept pace with him and swam close enough to be within tentacle reach.

  There were so many ways that Max could’ve answered. However, he chose to go with the definition that concerned him the most. “Clarification. Gross: relating to the bodily fluids of another. Occasionally, relating to one's own bodily fluids if they are fluids that one would rather have on the inside of one's body.”

  Max could remember once or twice when he had been particularly gross. As a young man, most of those cases involved alcohol not alien impregnation. Of course the leg impaling incident had also been a little gross. Both blood and urine had been involved, and the medic’s attempt to reassure him by explaining how peeing was natural had traumatized him more. Having someone compare him to a gazelle that peed itself when getting chased by a lion had not restored his dignity.

  Rick's tentacles slowly uncurled. “Water is not gross.”

  “Well that's good. So now I just have to worry that your child appears to be trying to crawl out of my bellybutton.”

  “Clarify bellybutton.”

  Max touched his own stomach where his outie bellybutton was on display, since he had so far failed to explain bathing suit in adequate terms. It was also possible that Rick understood what a bathing suit was, but simply thought it was stupid. Either way, Max had grown used to skinny-dipping. “This is a bellybutton.”

  Rick brushed a tentacle across Max's stomach. “Bellybutton lacks internal channel to intestinal tract.”

  “I know.”

  “Query. Offspring cannot appear through bellybutton.”

  Max sighed. “Answer. Exaggeration in order to emphasize an argument.” Max was getting frighteningly good at these verbal games. He felt like he should earn a merit badge in annoying alien linguistics.

  “Query. What argument are you making?”

  “Answer. Offspring cause pain.”

  A flurry of air bubbles came out from under Rick’s mantle of tentacles. Either that was an alien sigh, or farting was how Rick expressed frustration. Who knew? After the bubbles stopped, Rick said, “I regret offspring cause pain.”

  “Thank you, and I accept your apology, but I still hurt.”

  Rick used his largest tentacle to stroke the Kohei bump. “Offspring arrive soon.”

  Max frowned. Rick didn’t make mistakes conjugating his verbs anymore, not unless he was trying to talk about things that might have been but weren’t. Rick and his computer both sucked at translating might haves. No doubt a linguist could’ve drawn some deep, meaningful conclusions from that. However, Rick’s verb implied that more than one kid might come out. Kohei was ready. Given the way Max's stomach had formed unnatural bulges, the second child might be ready even if he was smaller, but Max had yet to see anything from the third child. Thing One and Thing Two made visible bumps that caused localized cramping, but Thing Three was still too small to do either. “Query. Number of offspring that will arrive soon.”

  “Query. Clarify soon.” Maybe Max was imagining it, but that seemed like an evasive answer. Max groaned as another cramp hit him. If soon wasn't within the next few hours, or at the very least the next few days, Max might give himself a c
esarean.

  “Query. When will first offspring arrive?” Max asked.

  “Zero to six hours.”

  Relief slapped Max right across the pregnant stomach. “Oh thank God. Query. Will other offspring appear within zero to six hours?”

  “Unknown.” Strangely, Rick's tentacles now drew up tightly.

  Max frowned. “Query. Should other offspring appear?”

  Rick swam backward, taking him farther away from Max. “I dislike ambiguity of the term ‘should’.”

  “Okay, now you're playing word games with me. So why don't you ignore your personal feelings about the English language and tell me what will happen if other offspring appear soon.”

  Rick took up his circling sentry duty again. “I am unable to predict future.”

  “Define probabilities,” Max challenged him.

  “Probability.” After saying that word, Rick fell silent. No way had the computer mistranslated it. The damn thing adored using that word to test Max’s understanding of technology. It would show him a picture of a ship approaching a space station or an asteroid or a planet and then ask for probable outcomes. Max had learned that the computer had a diverse and disturbingly creative algorithms for ways a pilot could crash his ship. After a time, Rick answered. “Second offspring will appear soon after first. Development has been more rapid than anticipated.”

  The tension in his tentacles suggested that Rick didn’t like the answer. “Query. Do offspring usually appear one at a time?”

  “Yes.”

  Max waited. Rick was uncomfortable talking about reproduction, and Max had learned that patience worked better than verbal sparring. Rick might play dumb, but he knew how to misinterpret questions and get the conversation off track. He was a master at it. After another long pause, Rick continued. “First offspring appears days or weeks first. It helps to care for other offspring, or in the case of nutrient shortage, cannibalizes other offspring.”