“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 wassogoing 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 theStar Trekuniverse 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.
