Earth Fathers Are Weird (Earth Fathers #1) - Lyn Gala Page 0,21
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 have 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.