Chapter Thirteen
Max followed Rick into the room they had transformed into a communal mess.
Apparently having a space dedicated to eating was a human thing, but Rick had helped fit out a small lab with extra food dispensers and tables for a proper dining room.
Dee was already sitting at a table with actual fruit that had grown on an actual tree, or what passed for a tree on this world.
They were short and scrubby and had a lot of vines.
But the fruit was good. “Are you two better this morning?” Dee asked.
Rick slid into the mess. “Query. Better in relation to what?”
“I think she means better than yesterday,” Max said.
Rick slowly rotated, various eyes sliding past Dee. “Objectively I have found no solutions to bridge over troubled waters,” Rick said, “yet happiness is Max husband and I agreed to allow each other to swim in similar but not identical waters.”
Dee had a puzzled expression, and she turned to Max. “What?”
“We decided to give each other some space. We love each other and we are still swimming in the same waters,” he translated, “but we don't have to know all of each other's business. Sometimes a little space is a healthy thing.”
“Don’t let anything fester,” Dee warned.
Rick’s tentacles screamed confusion, at least they did to Max who had learned to read all the curves and twists and twitches.
“Fester is a term for the introduction of bacteria to a wound causing damage to the tissue and resulting in a failure to heal,” Max said. Rick's tentacles turned to curly fries before he grabbed Max and poked at him rather violently.
“Where is the wound of festering?” Rick trumpeted.
Max tried to fend off a dozen tentacles at once, and he managed to intercept exactly one, leaving the other eleven to continue poking him. “She doesn't mean an actual wound,” Max said. “She's talking about problems festering if people don't talk about them.”
Rick stilled, which was good because Max might have one or two bruises already, and he would have more if Rick continued on his quest to save Max from a nonexistent festering wound.
“Lack of talk is not introduction of infection.”
“Sometimes it is,” Dee said, “metaphorically speaking.”
“What she means,” Max said, “is that people have strong emotions, and if they don't talk about those emotions, it's like introducing bacteria to the wound. Their feelings get bigger and darker and they hurt more.”
Rick’s tentacles curled. “Does Max husband require I inform him of my discontent with my home planet to avoid the festering of emotions?”
Max knew that if he said yes, Rick would tell him everything.
And a small, unkind part of him wanted to do exactly that.
After all, the secret was a pebble in his shoe.
An annoying pebble. However, that would not be fair to Rick.
“I don't have strong personal feelings attached,” he said.
“I trust you to understand what might make me feel strong emotions, and share if anything is in danger of festering.”
Dee looked at him like he was insane.
“What?” Max asked her.
“Do you even know how a marriage works?” she asked with exaggerated horror. “People get frustrated with each other. They yell. They keep secrets and try to figure out the other person's secrets. They fight. There are rules about how this is supposed to work.”
Max snorted.
“The definition you provide is less than ideal,” said Rick.
“Exactly.” Dee’s smile was wistful. “Marriage is less than ideal. It's messy and hard. Understanding that makes it easier to make it work because you don't look for everything to be pleasant.”
“My parents had a perfectly pleasant marriage for thirty years,” Max said. They fought sometimes and his father hid cigars in the garage and smoked them when his mother had a girls’ day planned, but there was something solid and warm and safe about their marriage.
Dee snorted. “Your parents were freaks of nature.”
Max smiled at his sweet husband whose tentacles were still curled in alarm.
“I plan to be another freak of nature then. Rick’s secrets are his own.
Do I want to know? Yes. There are a lot of things in this world that I would like to know, and I don’t have festering emotions about any of them.
” Max thought a change of subject was in order.
“Where are our children? I think James is planning to create an arms race, and I would like to make sure he’s on his best behavior. ”
“That one doesn’t have good behavior,” Dee said before spearing another piece of fruit with the single pronged stabby instrument of eating.
Rick trumpeted his amusement.
“He and Kohei decided to go out, and before you ask me where they went, I don’t know. Your kids have entered their adolescent years sooner than I expected. Your nice child was watching television in the pool room when I went for my morning swim.”
“Kohei is as nice as Xander.” Max felt the need to defend his eldest child, but he also had to admit that James wasn’t nice. Despite Rick's sweet genes, James had become obsessed with being a big-time arms dealer. It was a little disturbing.
“If you think Kohei is nice, you have not listened to him lately.” Dee poked her stabby instrument in Max’s direction.
“He has described in vivid detail exactly what he plans to do to the Hidden one that broke your boned tentacle.” Her expression turned thoughtful.
“Saying it that way makes it sound dirty.”
Max did not comment on that since technically what he did with Rick and his tentacles was dirty. “Kohei is upset about the accident.”
Rick trumpeted. “Accident is offspring exceeding available resources due to lack of foresight and budgeting. Hidden one who broke your boned tentacle was stupid. Stupidity is not equivalent to accident.”
Max caught a tentacle and pulled Rick closer. “Have I mentioned lately that you can be judgmental?”
“Often,” Rick said with a bellow, and he did not sound even the least bit apologetic about it.
“We should probably check the logs and see if they registered their destination.” Max had impressed on everyone the importance of leaving a clear trail any time they left the ship, but he could only hope that his children had followed the rule.
Them knowing the rules did not ensure they followed them.
Given how many times Max had snuck out after curfew or ditched class, he felt like he owed his parents the biggest apology because it was annoying when he couldn’t find his kids.
Children were annoying, even ones that matured at the rate of Hidden ones. Maybe human children would be less annoying because at least then he would have gotten a longer cute phase out of them before they turned into obstreperous little teenagers.
Max headed to the nearest computer display and ran his fingers along the controls.
Hidden one computers were difficult to use because Max didn't have enough digits to touch all of the buttons that needed to be touched at once.
He could do it, but it required effort. But Rick had reprogrammed these computers for human hands.
Max had decided that love was having a partner that reprogrammed computer interfaces to work better for human fingers even when it made it less efficient for Hidden one tentacles. That was way better than flowers.
Max found the entry easily enough. Luckily, Kohei and James had listed the same destination. James was less likely to get himself in trouble if he had his brother there to keep him from being stupid.
“What is at these coordinates?” Max asked, reading off a long string of numbers.
Had he not been looking at Rick at the exact moment, he would not have believed anyone's description of the moment. Rick’s tentacles snapped like a slinky that has been stretched straight and released.
These tentacles weren't even curly fries.
They were coiled tightly enough to be hard little balls tucked close to Rick's head.
And Rick had shrunk down to half his normal height as his walking tentacle tried to do the same.
The whole movement was so fast, so aggressive, that Max was startled out of speaking for several seconds.
Dee looked from Max to Rick and back. She sucked at reading Hidden one body language, but even she should notice something was horrifically wrong.
“Rick?” Max took two steps forward, but then he froze, not sure what was wrong, which made him equally uncertain as to how to help. Rick made a miserable honking noise.
“What is it? What's at those coordinates?” Max imagined octopus-eating monsters or quicksand or some enemy army that was massing troops on the border, not that Hidden ones had armies.
They typically couldn't cooperate with each other long enough to form them, and even their cities were typically planned and overseen by one particularly strong-willed individual.
Cooperation was not their forte. However, something terrible awaited their children, of that he was sure.
“Repeat coordinates,” Rick said, the translator stripping his voice of all emotion.
That was not good because it meant he had used a tone that Max had not yet programmed the computer to recognize.
Max had heard Rick terrified, angry, frustrated, distracted, happy, horny, borderline homicidal, exasperated, and dozens of other emotions.
But his current mood was so unfamiliar that the computer couldn’t assign any appropriate tone.
Max moved back to the computer display and read off the coordinates James and Kohei had left. “They said they were invited to show weapons designs to a Hidden one of note.” Max had no idea what that meant, but none of Rick's tentacles loosened even a millimeter.