The road took them up a hill, so what Max had thought was the city was only the top halves of the buildings. As the car reached the top, the whole city came into view. The whole, enormous, beautiful city. Somehow, Max hadn’t expected it to be crowded. Rick had chosen to float around the universe all alone in his ship before having children, and Max had thought Hidden ones were isolationists at heart.
The road curved and meandered down to meet the traffic that crawled across the city like ants—many following one another but others darting off in unpredictable directions that would have caused road rage on Earth. Or maybe it was only Americans who fought one another over bad driving, but there would have been more than a few bruises inflicted over the traffic pattern below. And the cars gave Max a sense of scale. The buildings were huge. All of New York City could probably be tucked into one corner.
Spires were scattered across the city in no particular pattern and set far enough apart to leave room for canals that widened to ponds and streets that were larger than any superhighway. They all tangled through the city, darting between buildings. The Hidden ones had room to drive like maniacs. There were evenlong strings of trees like one-lane forests along the edges of the city and down the center of the wider roads.
Max stared like a tourist at the Grand Canyon. He knew because when they’d visited, his father had told him to close his mouth before flies flew in. Max had the same sense of awe now. As the car descended the hill into the city proper, Max could see the flaws—the dying grass at the edge of the road, half-bare trees in the forest, trash caught in the branches—but even that was so dwarfed by the wonder of the place that he only noticed in passing.
The spires had steel supports sticking out like exoskeletons The straight supports were joined by tangled networks of steel that reminded Max of the brain-coral skeleton he’d gotten on vacation when he was twelve and his parents had taken him and his brother to the Florida keys. The similarities were reinforced by the bleached white color of whatever they used to cover the steel. Either that or they had found a way to use actual bones to build. Enormous bones. Bones that made a megalodon look like a guppy.
If Rick’s people had anything that big in their oceans, no wonder they excelled at hiding.
Vividly colored windows and balconies dripping with plant life were set between the spines with no rhyme or reason, and a few towers had streams that meandered down their exterior, turning into waterfalls when they encountered a balcony. And the colors. One tower had windows in blues and greens with an occasional flash of red or orange while another was colorful enough to make all the queers in San Francisco weep for joy.
The towers had support beams that arched out like bridges to connect to one another. When Max had seen the educational videos, he’d thought the Hidden ones supported delicate towers with cables that connected one to another to give them more strength, but now he saw that those “cables” were bridges withcars zipping across from towertip to towertip, and what had looked like impossibly delicate towers were massive structures that only appeared fragile because of their height.
Up close, the canals that meandered between buildings were stained with reflected light from the windows. Rainbows danced across the surface as the streams branched off before merging and then disappearing between buildings. They were crowded with small, round boats that sped through the canals and part of the water was partitioned off by a series of poles the way a bike lane might be set off by bollards.
In those sheltered lanes, Hidden ones swam through water that sparkled with rainbows of light reflected off a thousand windows. Hidden ones glided past on sidewalks and weaved between the trees and sometimes even used the external structures of the buildings to pull themselves up to balconies with those tentacles.
“Max father,” James said, pulling on his arm.
“Right.” Max cleared his throat. “I’m focused.” There were so many more Hidden ones than he’d expected.
James touched a button that made the car slide to a stop at the side of the road. As soon as Max put one foot out of the car, it was like that experiment where kids put soap in the middle of a dish of water with pepper scattered on the surface. Just like the pepper fled from the soap to cling to the sides of the bowl, the Hidden ones retreated to a wide circle, leaving the uneven, smooth stones of the sidewalk bare.
Considering that humans were losing their minds over aliens, Max didn’t feel like he had a right to complain about being treated like a plague victim, but he still felt a niggle of frustration.
“Outsider!” one trumpeted.
Max drew a deep breath. “We are looking for Rick, my mate and James’ egg-layer.” Max winced a little at calling Rick an egg-layer. He was one. Max knew that intimately. It felt odd calling him that as if his value was in laying eggs, but during the drive, James had said that the Hidden ones would be more helpful if they knew James came from Rick’s egg. After all, Rick was still financially responsible for his offspring.
James got out of the car and trumpeted something that didn’t translate. “Max Father is surrogate and functional older sibling,” James said. From a Hidden one point of view, that was the most accurate way to describe a human father, and it made tentacles curl even tighter. At this rate, their whole audience was going to get tentacle cramps.
“Sapient surrogate,” a Hidden one trumpeted in a tone Xander often used on James. Max guessed condescension or disbelief.
“My people respect surrogacy,” Max shouted. That caused a rumble of shock to travel through the crowd. “Where is the egg-layer of the children I carried who are still too young to financially support themselves?”
Around them, Hidden ones twirled slowly, rotating which eyes they used to study Max. Finally a Hidden one who was pale with age straightened his walking tentacle enough to look over the heads of the crowd.
“Government inquiries to go to... tower.” The computer missed the belch in the middle, but James must have understood.
“Many with gratitude,” he sang before getting in the car. The doors started to close and Max barely dove into the car before his door thunked shut.
“Slow down before you kill us or at least leave bruises.”
“Max Father move faster on stupid unbalanced tentacle pair.”
Max sometimes didn’t like his family. He loved them, but that didn’t mean he always liked them, especially when two boyswho couldn’t climb a four foot wall decided walking on two legs was ridiculous. However, Max was too busy searching for something to hold onto as he was bounced around in his seat to complain.
Humans could never live here. The sidewalks took the center section of the road and were slightly elevated. It meant cars had to pass over a walking area instead of having crosswalks where people moved into the street.
And James was driving too fast. Every time they crossed over into the sidewalk–the bumpy sidewalk with enough texture to qualify for a kiddie ride at a carnival–the car got enough air to launch Max from his seat.
“Watch out!” Max cried when James drove right onto a sidewalk without waiting for the pedestrians to clear. A few Hidden ones stopped, but the car hit a large individual. He bellowed and waved all his tentacles in what looked like it might be a rude gesture. Tentacles thrusting into loops made by other tentacles seemed like a pretty universal sign for “fuck you,” but instead of confronting James–the universe’s worst driver–the Hidden one flowed away.
Thank god the raised sidewalk meant that James had been forced to slow down enough that he hadn’t hurt anyone. If humans were on these roads, someone would have gone airborne, Dukes of Hazzard style, and a dozen Hidden ones would have their bulbous heads split open.
“Slow down,” Max ordered.
