Earth Fathers, chapter 3 (Patreon)

So sorry.  I got so into the story that misnumbered my chapters and I posted this as chapter four when it's chapter three. Clearly, I can't count. Sorry.

  

Heetayu led Max through a series of ever smaller lanes. If Max had to guess, he would say they were leaving the official government and military landing sites, passing through the major commercial ones, and heading toward the sort of area where crime would lurk in the edges of society.

Of course that was assuming this world had criminals who thought as humans did. Max decided that was a safe assumption because this area did not have as many resources allotted to it, not in terms of computer interfaces or in lighting. And fewer aliens walked the lanes. Those who did were larger. The two and three foot aliens had vanished. Heetayu stopped in front of a particularly large ship. Hopefully the aliens inside wouldn’t be too big because Max did not want to deal with two year olds that could outweigh him.

“Giver of compensation here,” Heetayu said. Max started second guessing himself.

“Question. Describe giver of compensation,” Max asked.

“Loud.” Heetayu stopped there, so either he was a particularly polite alien or the translation matrix really was not up to the job. Max wondered if the aliens had a communication system set up that would allow him to do the translation matrix work as a side hustle. If he had to survive four years of bad translations, he was going to shoot someone. So fixing the translation matrix was a mission-critical priority. He wasn’t sure what alien law enforcement looked like, but he knew he sure as hell didn’t want to find out.

Of course shooting someone required him finding a weapon, but he was resourceful. If MacGyver could make a harpoon gun out of a telescope and mothballs, he could improvise something.

Heetayu touched a short pedestal and the top glowed amber. After several seconds, a hologram of alien letters appeared above the plinth. Heetayu spoke quickly, but the translator only caught a few words. Compensation. Nanny. Human. The hologram vanished, and then Max and Heetayu were left standing outside the closed ship. Since Heetayu didn’t seem interested in leaving, Max assumed that meant the employer was coming out to meet them.

“I want to thank you for helping me,” Max told his alien tour guide-slash-social worker.

The alien’s head came down again. “Translation matrix failure.”

Max rolled his eyes. “Of course it did.” Since he couldn’t communicate anything important, he fell silent—a condition that was definitely not natural to him. He might talk slow, but he rarely stopped. Even alone, he could keep up a nice monologue, but talking to someone who couldn’t understand felt a touch awkward.

The ship gave a thunk and the door rose. The alien who appeared fell into the tentacles camp. He had a minty green skin that seemed to be the fashionable color among all the best aliens, but the undersides of his tentacles had little tentacles of their own where an earth octopus would have suckers. And the underside of the alien was a mixture of light green and rust-red that reminded Max a little of a copperhead. Hopefully the vivid colors didn’t mean his new employer was venomous.

He had a thick central tentacle he seemed to use to move, and above a waistline bristling with tentacles, he had a bulbous head. Weirdly, his eyes were under the head near where a human’s neck would be and right above his tentacles. Max wondered if it would taste like calamari, and he then wondered if he would go to hell for thinking that. And that’s when it occurred to him one of the aliens could be telepathic. That would match his luck lately.

When the alien stopped, it blasted the air with a noise that crossed a whale song with an air horn. Loud. Yeah, that made a lot more sense now. At least the guy didn’t use the high tones most of the other aliens did.

“Query: purpose,” the new alien’s translator said. 

Max glanced over to his buddy, but Heetayu was still. Max spoke. “The computer said you have a job.” He had no idea if that idea communicated correctly, but the various tentacles all stilled.

“Query: Care for offspring.”

“Query: Currency,” Max returned. Maybe that was a social faux paus because both aliens went silent for a few seconds. 

Heetayu touched his translator wrist band and the new alien brought one of his tools up to one of his eyes. The two aliens tapped on their devices, and Max stood between them feeling perfectly useless. Normally that brought out the sarcasm in him, but since this was the only job he could get for decent pay, he was determined to keep his mouth shut. Eventually Heetayu touched Max’s shoulder. “Mass Human. Currency. Agreed.”

“How do I access currency?” Max asked. Heetayu blinked at him. Great. Heetayu clearly didn’t understand. Okay, he could take this one step at a time. He needed to earn money before he could access it. He turned to the new alien.

“Designation Max,” he said.

The new alien said, “Designation” and then made an obnoxiously loud burping sound.

“Yeah. I can’t make that noise. Do you mind if I designate you Rick?” Max asked. Hopefully he wasn’t jinxing himself because he didn’t play on playing Morty to any narcissists. 

“Designation Max,” the new alien said. Given the whalesong nature of the language, Max was pleasantly surprised to get a recognizable version of his name.

“Designation Max. Yes. Designation….” Max hesitated, gathered his breath, and belched as loud as he could. His sound came out nothing like the alien’s, and his mother would have been horrified at Max’s bad manners. “Query. Designation Rick?”

The tentacles all pulled back toward the center leg. “Designation Rick,” the alien agreed. “Firewalled.” He turned and undulated his way quickly up the ramp. The military term caught Max by surprise. No doubt the aliens had heard any number of pilots calling out that they had their jets firewalled and they still couldn’t keep up with the invaders. Max wondered how many of the men and women he knew were dead now and how many had gotten back to the ground safely.

Dee always pushed her damn jet too hard, even in training. She wouldn’t have bailed out, not unless she could get her jet to kamikaze right into the enemy. Zip and Piddle were solid pilots, but neither felt their birds the way truly great pilots did. Would they know when to get out? The emotion caught Max unprepared.

Heetayu touched Max’s shoulder. He was definitely more of a social worker. Max smiled. “I’m good. I guess I’d better firewall my legs, huh?” he said, mangling the term. He patted Heetayu’s thick forearm and then hurried after Rick.

The ship inside was much narrower than the military ship that had picked Max up. Rick took up the entire corridor with all his tentacles spread out. “Query. Human feel offspring not human.” Without waiting for an answer, Rick headed into his ship. 

Max followed. As the ship door closed, an unfamiliar claustrophobia gripped him, but Max focused on the task at hand, pushing his fears aside. “I think you’re asking me if my species likes the young of other species. The answer is yes. I love dog offspring. I like cat and horse and cow offspring.” Max tried to remember if he’d been around other babies. He’d had fish growing up, but considering how many of those had died, he should probably avoid mentioning that.

“Query. Dogs.”

“Another species. I have raised two dogs. I raised a cow once.” Considering that had been for the 4H, Max was not going to mention what happened to it.

Rick stopped at the junction of two corridors and slowly turned in a circle. Max really should have chosen a better name because he was getting whiplash thinking of this tentacle creature as “Rick.”

“Query. Military.”

Max stared, not sure what Rick was asking. “I need more words.” When Rick let the silence continue, Max added, “Translation matrix failure.”

Rick rotated the other way. “Human Max military.”

“Yes. I’m an Air Force captain. I fly ships,” Max agreed slowly. If this was a job interview, he wasn’t sure what sort of answer this guy wanted. Maybe he was afraid Max would lose his mind and chop his children into pieces. When Max had been on the other ship, the military-type aliens hadn’t seemed particularly violent, but Rick hadn’t parked his ship in an upscale neighborhood. Who knew what sort of military personnel he knew.

“Query. Fight.”

Max needed to minimize the chance he would lose the only high-paying job he had been offered. “I tried to fight Nish. I didn’t do well. No good fighting.”

Rick stretched upward so his eyes were on level with Max’s eyes. It meant his huge head and weird hat were pressed up against the low ceiling. Clearly he didn’t have an internal skeleton because his head flattened out. “Translation matrix fail.”

Max sighed. “I feel like I’m going to hear that phrase a lot. We’re not going to have any deep conversations, are we?”

“Translation matrix fail.”

“Yeah. I got that. It’s a good thing I can amuse myself. On the bright side, you’ve never heard any of the Star Wars stories, so I can tell that story and you’ll think I’m brilliant. At least until I get to the first trilogy, but I’ll just change it up. My personal theory is that Jar Jar Binks is a Sith. I’ll tell you that version.”

“Query. Trilogy.”

To hell with shooting someone else. Max was going to shoot himself. “Query. Offspring.” Maybe if he met the kids and figured out what he was supposed to do to keep them out of trouble, he could get his mind off how miserable he was. With any luck, the kids would be too young to speak and then the language barrier wouldn’t even matter. Max would just need to figure out how to change alien diapers.

Max frowned and studied Rick’s body shape. Unlike most aliens, he didn’t wear clothes—only a saddlelike hat that seemed to carry tools. That was pressed up against the ceiling right now. However, Max had no idea how Rick or his kids would eat or where the diaper would go. Maybe underneath where the central leg tentacle came out of the center mass. Max forced his mind away from alien poop and looked Rick in one of his many eyes. There was a large one pointed roughly at Max.

Rick said, “Query. Health.”

“Answer. Healthy.”

Rick slid a few inches closer. “Query. Health.”

“You want to check my health, don’t you? Oh, there are so many X-files episodes I’m flashing back to right now. I truly regret my addiction to television. Deeply regret.” Max knew he was being stupid, but his heart rate was still doing a jittery dance.

Rick said in a voice loud enough that it would have rattled windows if any had been around, “Query. Health. Query. Offspring.” He followed this with a huge blast of untranslated bugle sounds. That was cursing. Weird, but cursing sounded like cursing in every language known, and apparently that included alien ones.

Max nodded. “Yeah, you’re a nervous father. I get it. You don’t want me to give the kiddos smallpox. That’s reasonable.”

One of Rick’s large tentacles shot out and wrapped around Max’s wrist. “Translation matrix fubar!” he shouted, and Max might have agreed—enthusiastically agreed, even—only he had to focus on keeping his feet under him as Rick dragged him through a maze of corridors. For a creature with one tentacle leg, Rick could move.

“Hey! Wait. Slow down,” Max gasped out when they stopped in some sort of transport. His stomach lurched at the diagonal movement that didn’t match any direction he had anticipated. Rick braced his tentacles against the transport walls, and the space was so small that Max ended up pinned in a corner by two of them. The transport jerked to a halt and then the door slid up.

“Can we talk—” Max ended with a squawk when Rick rushed him down another claustrophobic corridor. They stopped next to a door, and Rick let Max go. For a half second, Max contemplated running, but first, he needed the job. Second, he didn’t know how to get out, and third, he sympathized with Rick’s frustration at their lack of communication. He didn’t approve of the grabbing and dragging, but he’d been known to do something similar with his brother when the twerp didn’t move fast enough. 

Max felt a needle-prick to his heart at the thought of Petey. He’d be at least twenty before Max would be able to get home again. Assuming Max could get home.

“Let’s talk. Communicate,” Max said hopefully. A door folded in on itself like a fifties kitchen door only the accordion folds disappeared into the top of the door. Inside was a space just as crowded as any other, only this one had a tilted table in the middle. Max’s imagination went into overdrive.

Rick blurted out a huge burped conversation, but the translator only caught three words: confirm, health, and firewalled. 

“Right. So, I guess this is where we do the whole checkup. You’d better keep your tentacles to yourself,” Max said as he eased into the room. Since Rick was ninety percent tentacle and had no other way to use instruments, he figured he didn’t have good odds on that, but a man could hope.