Rick didn’t even let the door close before he returned. He swam closer and raised his tentacle with Max’s translator held firmly in his finger tentacles and water running off it.
Max sighed. “I seriously hope that’s waterproof.” He fastened it around his wrist.
“Query. Human swim, human walk, preference.”
Either the translator was improving or Max was getting better at filling in the words Rick didn’t use. “Preference walk. Swimming is enjoyment.”
Rick gave another whale blast and Max was grateful the water dulled the noise. Rick then added. “Query. Correlation swim and run.”
Max laughed. When he’d started running the outer corridors, that had upset Rick to no end. It had taken Max almost an hour to pry all Rick’s tentacles off him and explain that humans were healthier and happier if they ran. Rick pretended to understand, but every time Max ran, Rick would show up. Unless Max missed his guess, Rick considered him slightly brain damaged. At least Rick supported his swimming.
“Answer. High correlation swim and run. I enjoy both.” Max gasped when tentacles gently brushed his leg. Rick made self-control difficult. Max swam backward to get a little more distance between them.
“Humans are...” Rick ended with a belching sound. Max was pretty sure he didn’t want to know what Rick was saying. He gave another set of blasts, this time a mixture of burps and whale song. The translator only sent through “children” and “healthy.”
“That’s good. Query. Can I see them?” Max swam farther away, but Rick followed. Another brush of tentacle against ankle made Max think such dirty, dirty thoughts. He was lucky the water was cold as a bitch or his cock would’ve been impossible to control.
“Not visible. See at time to come.”
“As paranoid fathers go, you’re good. You’re good. If you have a daughter, I suspect a shotgun will feature in her future dating life.”
“Translation matrix—”
“Failure. Yeah. Shocking.” Life hated Max. But if the only way to improve communication was to go back to the damn matrix improvement project, he would have to suck it up. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do until Rick decided to go pick up his kids.
Chapter Six
Max floated in the salty pool water and stared at the ceiling. Long curving ribs and a web-work of support cables filled the dome. All the other rooms in the ship were featureless. Bunks, sinks, cabinets, wiring, and structure were all hidden behind padded doors. While practical, it made for boring rooms, even compared to the military bases where Max had been stationed. On the practical side, it would make the ship far safer if they ever lost artificial gravity.
When Max bumped into the water filtration island, he turned and swam slowly toward Rick. He floated with all his arm tentacles spread out like a starfish with his big head bobbing in the middle.
“Why have most of the ships I visited so far had the same gravity?” Max asked. He got the feeling that Rick wanted to talk. Max worked on the translation matrix by himself for hours every day, but the second he started to run laps through the outer corridors, Rick would show up. At first Max assumed Rick was confused. Actually, he still thought Rick was confused. Rick had a habit of watching with the same expression Max had when watching reruns of Twin Peaks out of order. In both cases, they knew something important was going on, but it wasn't clear what.
However, Max assumed Rick felt more than simple curiosity. Maybe he was lonely without his kids around, or maybe he was suffering an alien version of divorce or a child custody dispute. He was downright stalkerish when Max came for a swim. Max couldn’t do more than a lap or two around the center islands before Rick glided in on his single leg. Rick struck him as a lonely man. Alien. Whatever. Max sometimes wondered if the children were imaginary. Maybe Rick wanted a friend and feared rejection. Even without compensation, Max would happily hang out with Rick. He was fond of Rick and his randomly scattered eyes and his love of any story with Darth Vader.
“Most ships make gravities similar,” Rick said. The translator still had a slight awkwardness to it, and some concepts led to entire failures of vocabulary, but overall, Max was quite proud of his work on the translation program. That had been downright understandable.
“Query. Why is that? Have all the different aliens gotten together and decided to use the same gravity?” Max considered that from a pilot’s perspective.
Logistically, that would’ve been safer than navigating wildly unpredictable gravity wells when approaching another ship or station. Having a standard would prevent pilots from having to calculate the forces that gravity would apply to the ship. Otherwise, somebody would do the equivalent of driving through a laundromat’s front window. When that happened in Wichita, it was an interesting item on the news. If someone's tentacled Uncle Bob drove his spaceship through a station window, Max was fairly certain that people would die.
“No. All creatures in ships like gravity that they like.”
Max righted himself and dog paddled next to Rick’s large tentacle. “Are you telling me that all of these different aliens have similar gravity on their home planets?” That didn’t make a lot of sense. But then again, Max was quickly discovering that the universe didn't care about his personal opinion of it.
“Yes.”
Sometimes those one word answers made Max want to tie Rick’s tentacles in a knot. “Clarify. Query. Why would everyone's planet have the same gravity?”
“Many planets are many gravity different.”
“Exactly. If everyone has a different gravity on their home planet, then why are all of the ships using similar gravity?”
Rick twirled until he considered Max out of a new cluster of eyes. “Different planets have many gravity different. However. Clarify. Most who travel space have gravity similar.”
“Why?”
Rick's tentacles twitched. Max grabbed the edge of one of the water filtration islands and pulled himself half out of the water. Thank God he had taken a job with a patient alien. Even if it caused him tentacle-twitching frustration, Rick would explain a dozen different times if Max asked him to. In his whole life, Max had never been able to talk to someone the way he could to Rick, and that said something sad about Max’s love life.
“Planets of large create more gravity.” A few details came through only as untranslated belches, but Max understood the bulk of the statement.
“Yes,” Max said.
“Big planets have many metals. Elements owning large electron numbers.”
As the translator struggled with technical terms, Max realized that he needed to do a little clarification of the periodic table. That said, he did understand what Rick was talking about. Large planets would have more heavy metals and radioactive materials, more nuclear fuel, and basically more raw materials for building a spaceship. If they were playing a world building game, Max would want to start his civilization on a big planet.
“Yes, and with more of those metals, they could reach space. And then they would be here with ships that used heavy gravity. Where are the ships with heavy gravity?” Max asked.
“No. Clarify.” Rick paused, and Max could almost see the thought bubbles over Rick’s head as he struggled to find a way to explain concepts that were obvious to him, and not-so-obvious to Max. “Big planets mean difficult lifting. Ships fall back to big planets. Those ships are not in space.”