Anywhere but Here

7

He got a bit of an idea on the drive. He had originally thought that Katata and the children could ride in the camper, but Katata took one look at the tiny table and bench seats and all the cabinets overhead and shook her head “Ti.” Even when Trent tried to explain that the cabinets were latched tight and nothing would fly open, she just pointed to the front seat and said, “Katata bok gaba.” He couldn’t very well insist that they ride in back when she obviously wanted to ride in front, so Donna squeezed in a little closer to him than usual, the child with the injured tentacle, Talana, sat next to Donna, and Katata held the baby, Dixit, on her lap.

And while they drove, Katata told them what life was like on her home planet, Bekat. They started out with no words in common besides “ti” and “bakbak” and “gatsa,” but it was amazing what she could convey through pantomime, and with each concept Trent and Donna understood, she taught them a word to go with it so she wouldn’t have to pantomime it again.

Apparently a spaceship had fallen out of the sky on Bekat about a hundred days ago. The astronauts—humans, if Trent understood the pointing at him and at the starry sky—had given the secret of the hyperdrive to the aliens, who had immediately begun blinking out on interstellar jumps of their own. Those who could build a spaceship without getting it stolen first, anyway. There was either a war going on, or the place was nothing but bandits and guerrillas fighting over the last dregs of civilization, Trent couldn’t figure out for sure which, but if he understood Katata right, everybody who could get out was doing so. Problem was, the army—or the bandits—knew that, and were actively hunting down and killing anybody who tried to leave.

“That’s nuts,” Trent said when he finally understood the situation. “If people want to move out, let ’em go.”

“So says the guy from the United States,” Donna said.

“Yeah, well, at least our government only shoots at us on the way back.”

Donna got a thoughtful look on her face.

“What?” he asked her.

“I wonder if it’s a racial thing? Or religious. Maybe the people in power don’t want the other guys to get a leg up somewhere else.”

That was possible. Humans certainly acted that way if you gave them the chance. Right after Allen dropped the hy-perdrive plans on Earth, people had been afraid that the first nation to get a colony started would nuke the rest of the world to prevent anyone else from getting away. Those fears had been well grounded, too. Several countries had actually started throwing bombs before the Galactic Federation put a stop to it. There was no reason to assume that aliens would be any more civilized.

Were Katata and her family refugees? The stuff they had brought with them certainly didn’t look like the sort of belongings a rich family would take with them to the stars. They were obviously farmers, and not terrifically well-off ones at that. Just the sort of folks who, among humans, anyway, always wound up doing the grunt work while the fat cats skimmed off any profit they might make.

Trent wondered how they would fare on Onnescu. There wasn’t much government here to speak of, certainly no immigration police or any of that, but things would change. They would have to. Onnescu was probably one of the fastest growing population centers in the galaxy at the moment. It was the closest planet to Earth, one of the most Earthlike yet discovered, it didn’t have any intelligent natives living on it, and the people who had already moved here actually wanted more people to join them. Their goal, or so they said in their flyer, was to start a new society using all the best ideas from Earths history, and build a second Earth without all the environmental problems and social problems of the first one. An admirable goal, Trent thought, and probably much more difficult to realize than the colonists expected, but even if they fell short of the entire picture, they could still wind up with something a hell of a lot better than back home.

He wondered if they had counted on immigration from beyond Earth. Not that it should matter, but he bet it would to some people. Even so, Katata and her family probably stood a better chance here than on a planet where people tried to kill you for getting out. By the time the notion of racial purity raised its ugly head here, they would already be locals.

Their biggest problem was going to be the slime. The whole right side of Trent’s pickup cab was dripping with the stuff. Every time he hit a bump, the aliens would lurch against the door or the dashboard—or against Donna—and every time they did, they left a fresh smudge of goo. Donna was starting to look like a Jell-O wrestler on her right side, and Trent was beginning to wonder if they would ever get the stuff out of the seat. Katata and her kids didn’t even seem to notice that they were doing it, which meant it was probably a normal thing for them and not just a reaction to stress, and if that was the case, then they were going to have a hard time dealing with humans. Trent didn’t mind getting his pickup slimed for a good cause, but he doubted if people would put up with it on a regular basis.

Maybe they could keep a tarp handy. If Trent had been thinking quicker, he could have done that here. But even that was probably more than most people would be willing to do. Just went to show, there were always complications no matter where you went.

Trent kept all the lights on while he drove. They rolled through a hundred-yard circle of near-daylight, making good time when they found a smooth stretch and slowing to get through the rocky parts. Trent radioed ahead and asked if there was a road already cut through the Greenwall, and Greg talked them toward the closest of three that he knew of. It was a couple of miles out of their way, but it was worth the detour; once they found the notch in the trees and forded the stream, they picked up a track they could follow all the way to Bigtown. It wasn’t much at first, but it was better than nothing, and the closer they got to town, the more well defined it became. It had even been smoothed out in places.

Even so, it was well after midnight local time when they saw their first house lights. The outlying homesteads were spread quite a ways apart, but they drew closer together as Trent kept driving, until eventually the pickup was rolling down a wide city street with houses on either side. The street wasn’t paved, but it was straight and relatively smooth, except for the mudholes, which grew more and more common closer to the center of town. Trent grinned as he powered through them, throwing big sheets of mud out to the sides and up over the hood. Katata and her children squealed in alarm the first time it happened, but Talana’s squeal changed its pitch the second time, and Katata’s echoed her child’s the time after. Pretty soon everyone was doing it, and then Donna taught them how to shout “Woo-hoo!”

The center of town was all shops, bars, restaurants, and hotels. Some of them were wooden frame buildings like any others back home, but others were made of rough-hewn logs like old homestead cabins, and one was made of round river rock cemented together like an old Scottish castle. There was a log bridge over the river itself, and more businesses beyond. A few trees stood here and there, especially near the river, but Trent saw more stumps than live ones.

It was hard to believe that this was all less than five months old. Trent had heard how frontier towns had grown up practically overnight in the American West, but he had never really understood the magnitude of what people could do when they put some serious effort into it. These people clearly didn’t want to live in a rural backwater; they wanted a town. They just didn’t want it to be on Earth.

Some of the inhabitants were out and about. People waved and called out to them from the doorways of bars as they rolled past, and Trent slowed down so he wouldn’t splash mud all over them. The streets downtown were churned to a froth by all the traffic, to the point where Trent wondered if he was going to get through the muck with only three drive wheels, but the pickup wallowed through it in fine form, and a few blocks past the river they rose up onto drier ground again.

Greg talked them in to the hospital—a squat log building on a side street about six blocks north of the center of town. The exterior looked like a dude ranch bunkhouse, but lights blazed from its windows, and big blue signs pointed to the emergency entrance. Trent parked close to the doors and set the brake.

“The ambulance arrives,” he said, opening his door and stepping down to the ground. He went around to the other side and helped Katata and her children down, wiping his hands on his pantlegs when he was done, then he reached up for Donna, but she took one look at the slimy seat and scooted out the driver’s side. It was hardly worth the effort. Her entire right side was already wet with the aliens’ slime, her white T-shirt practically transparent from her shoulder to the middle of her chest except where streaks of orange sap from the bushes Trent had cut by the stream had stained it. It was clear that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

A tall, gangly Asian guy met them at the door. “I’m Doctor Chen,” he said in heavily accented English. He wasn’t dressed like a doctor—his blue jeans, red flannel shirt, and hiking boots made him look more like a logger or a construction worker—but he had a stethoscope draped around his neck and a little fanny pack with a red cross on it.

Trent made the introductions. “I’m Trent. This is Donna, Katata, Talana, and Dixit. Talana’s the one with the hurt… whatever.”

Dr. Chen looked apprehensively at the aliens. It was hard to tell what the aliens thought of him. If they were scared, they didn’t show it, but they didn’t say anything, either. They just stood there, Katata holding the baby in one tentacle and draping the other over Talana’s shoulder.

“Come inside, and we have see,” Chen said.

The building might have had a log exterior, but the inside was clean and bright, with smooth white walls and a tile floor. The emergency room took up at least a third of its space, and there was a hallway leading to several smaller rooms beyond it. The emergency room had two exam tables with crinkly paper sheets covering the cushions, and curtains on rails that could be pulled around them for privacy, just like in any other hospital.

An Asian woman dressed in drab green scrubs ran some kind of high-tech instrument on the far end of the room. She looked up when she saw people entering, did a theatrical double-take, then waved “hello” and went back to her work.

“Please sit patient on table,” Dr. Chen said. When Katata didn’t respond, he motioned setting Talana down, and she did. He reached out and gingerly touched the alien child’s slimy right tentacle at the bruised spot just above where it was cradling it with its left. Talana shivered under his touch, but whether it was from pain or from the idea of being prodded by a curious alien was hard to say.

“Where does it hurt?” Chen asked.

Katata spoke to the child, and the child responded by pointing with the tip of its uninjured tentacle. Both tentacles were maybe three inches thick at the shoulder and tapered to about the size of a person’s little finger at the tip. The injury was about two-thirds of the way down the right one, where it was maybe an inch thick.

Chen brushed his fingers gently along Talana’s skin. Ta-lana quivered again, then winced when he got to the injury. Trent wondered what the doctor could do for what was essentially a snake with a broken back, how he could even tell what was wrong, but Dr. Chen acted like he knew what he was doing. He reached for Talana’s other tentacle and felt the same spot there, squeezing fairly hard to feel the underlying structure. “There are bones,” he said. “Like vertebrae.” He flexed the uninjured tentacle in an arc, then tightened it into a loop about eight inches in diameter, getting a feel for how it normally moved. Then he put his hand inside the loop and said, “Squeeze.” He clenched the fingers of his other hand to show what he wanted.

Talana tightened the tentacle around his hand, the slimy skin sliding noiselessly, like a velvet rope being drawn into a knot. The knot slid down the length of the tentacle a few inches until it was narrow enough for a good grip, then Talana squeezed.

Chen nodded appreciatively. “Very good. Strong. Harder, please.” He flexed his free fingers again, and Talana obliged.

“Ah! Okay, stop now. Stop!” He tugged his hand free and shook it, and Talana jerked the tentacle back as if it had touched something hot.

“Toca,” the child said.

“You okay,” Chen replied. “You do just what I ask.” He took the other tentacle and draped the end of it over the same hand. “Now do again.”

Talana tried to wrap the tentacle around his hand, but the end of it slid less than halfway around before Talana cried out in pain and stopped.

“Okay,” Chen said, lowering his hand. “No need to try again.” He turned toward the woman across the room and said something to her in what sounded like Chinese, of which the only word Trent could understand was “X-ray.”

She looked up from her equipment and replied in Chinese, then came around her workbench and wheeled the mobile x-ray unit away from its parking spot against the wall. It looked like the bottom half of a refrigerator with a computer keyboard and monitor set at an angle on top, with a hinged arm holding an oblong plastic emitter overhead. Trent looked at the arm, then at the arms of the woman pushing the unit toward the alien child. Both were built on pretty much the same principle, which made him wonder if an alien x-ray machine would have a flexible arm.

Dr. Chen took a wide black film tray from the machine’s cabinet and set it on a cart beside the exam table, then draped Talana’s injured tentacle across the flat surface near one end of the tray. He covered the rest of the tray with a heavy metal plate, apparently to keep the entire piece of film beneath it from being exposed at once, then positioned the business end of the x-ray machine over the tentacle while the technician worked at the keyboard to set up the shot.

“Okay, everyone but patient go into other room,” he said when they were ready.

Trent and Donna moved away, but Katata didn’t.

“You too,” Chen said, waving her after Trent and Donna, but she said “Ti” and stayed put.

“That means ‘No,’ ” Donna told him.

“I assume.” He thought it over, obviously wondering how he was going to get the idea of minimizing exposure across to a worried alien mother, then he said, “Okay. Take baby. Let mother stay.” He gently lifted Dixit from Katata’s tentacles and handed the baby to Donna, who made a face, but she took it from him and held it against her already-slimy side. Dixit wrapped its tentacle around her waist and rested its head against her right breast. Katata looked at Donna and her baby, then at Talana, then at the x-ray machine.

“It’s all right,” Donna said. “We’ll be just over there.” She pointed down the hallway toward the patient rooms.

Katata clearly didn’t understand what was going on, but she stayed by her injured child while Trent and Donna moved away with the baby. They paused at the door and watched as the doctor handed her a lead apron and showed her how to put it around herself, then did the same for Talana and himself. The technician put on her own apron, then turned to make sure Trent and Donna were clear.

She said something in Chinese, waving them on out of the room.

“Nothin’ like a language barrier to add to the excitement,” Trent said as they dutifully walked down the hallway. He peered into the dark rooms as they passed. The two on the left were typical patient rooms, with beds and curtains and even televisions bolted to the walls at the end of the beds. “They’ve got TV here?” he asked incredulously.

“Probably just for showing videos,” Donna said.

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.”

The rooms on the other side of the hallway were offices. The one in back was lit, so they went in and sat in the chairs there, careful not to slime anything. The alien baby looked around at the desk and the shelves of books and the piles of papers on the desk, then reached out for one of the papers. Its tentacle was fast; it had the paper before Donna could stop it.

“No, no,” she said. “Ti.” She tried to wrestle the paper free, but the baby cinched its tentacle tight, crumpling the paper into a fan and holding it high out of her reach.

Trent got up to help her pry it out of the baby’s grasp, but the baby whipped its tentacle around and squealed in protest.

“Jeez, I hope that’s not somebody’s insurance form or something,” Donna said.

“I wonder if insurance would pay out here?” Trent got a grip on the baby’s shoulder, then worked his way up to the paper. Slime dripped off his fingers, but he didn’t let go until he’d rescued the paper. He wiped it dry as best he could against his shirt, then looked to see what it was, but the writing was in Chinese.

“I somehow expected things to be done in English out here,” he said. “The place was founded by an American, after all.”

Donna nodded. “You’d think. But the way the U.S. is clamping down on people leaving, I guess we’re just outnumbered.”

“So because they want everybody everywhere to think and act like Americans, they wind up with a colony that doesn’t even speak English as a first language. That’s really bright.”

Dixit kept squealing and reaching for the paper. Trent looked for a blank piece, finally pulling one out of the inkjet printer on the corner of the desk, but Dixit wasn’t interested in that paper. Only the original one would do.

“How about this one?” Trent asked, holding up a preprinted form that was at least empty of handwriting.

Dixit started to howl. Trent tried crumpling up the blank paper and tossing it from hand to hand in front of the baby’s face, and that distracted it for a moment, but not long.

Donna tried singing to it, but Trent could barely hear her over the baby’s squeals.

“Okay,” she said, standing up again. “Time to go back to Momma.”

Dixit quieted down as soon as she started moving, so they took their time walking back down the hallway. When they got to the exam room, Dr. Chen looked up and said, “Okay you come back now. Just take a minute to develop.” His assistant wheeled the x-ray machine back into its spot, then took the film plate into a back room.

Donna handed Dixit back to Katata. It was hard to tell who was the most relieved.

Everyone waited impatiently for the x-rays to be developed, Dr. Chen fussing with a tray full of equipment and with the light table while the rest of them just shifted from side to side and fidgeted. Trent’s eyes kept straying back to Donna, whose wet shirt was clinging to every curve. She might be a mess, but she looked so alive and so… so real, that he could have swept her off her feet and made love to her right there on one of the exam tables if he wasn’t afraid it would scare the aliens. She caught him looking at her and blushed, which only made him ache for her all the more.

At last the doctor’s assistant came back with a two-foot by foot-and-a-half negative and stuck it on the light table. There were four shots of Talana’s tentacle, presumably at different orientations, but they all looked pretty much the same to Trent. He had seen pictures of dinosaur skeletons with their long tails made up of short little segments of vertebrae or whatever; these x-rays looked a lot like that.

“So they do have bones,” he said softly.

“Oh yes,” Dr. Chen said. “And this one has fracture right here.” He pointed to one of the segments, maybe two inches long and half an inch wide, that had the faintest of shadows running diagonally across it. “See from side? Very clear.” Chen said, pointing to another image where Trent couldn’t spot anything unusual at all. “Not broken completely, but definitely fractured. We will need cast.”

It took some explaining to make Katata and Talana understand what he intended to do, but they must have had casts or something similar on their homeworld, because they didn’t protest when he got out the gauze and the plaster and started building one on Talana’s tentacle. He positioned it so the tentacle rested against Talana’s body more or less like an arm, and the injured bone plus two or three more on either side were immobilized. He worked fast, because the plaster set quickly. By the time he fashioned a sling and wrapped it around Talana’s neck, the cast was hard enough to give off a solid thunk when he rapped it.

“Very good,” Chen said. “Now we wait overnight and see how tentacle feels in morning. Make sure no complications before we send home. You have place to stay?”

“Yeah,” Trent said. “I mean, yeah, Donna and I do, but the camper would be pretty tight for all five of us.”

“No problem. Family can stay here tonight.”

They managed to get that across to Katata, pantomiming her and her children going into a patient room, then the sun going across the sky once, then Trent and Donna coming back in through the front doors.

“Bakbak,” Katata said when she figured out what they were talking about. Then she snaked out the tentacle that she wasn’t using to hold Dixit and grasped Trent’s hand with it, curling around his fingers and palm a couple of times and giving him a light squeeze. “Batakit,” she said.

She did the same to Donna, and Donna replied, “You’re welcome.”

“We’ll be back in the morning,” Trent said, and he and Donna let themselves out into the night while Dr. Chen showed his patients to their room.

Trent waited until he was outside to wipe his hands on his pants. Donna laughed and did the same, then they stood beside their pickup, smelling the wood smoke in the air and listening to the night sounds. Most of them were of human origin: music and laughter from the bars, and off in the distance a vehicle crunching along a street, but behind it all was the constant rush of the river and the whisper of air moving through the trees.

“Well, here we are,” Trent said.

“Not quite how we expected our first night to be, is it?” said Donna.

“Nope. But you know, it feels good. I haven’t felt this useful in ages.”

“Me neither.” Donna slid her arm around his waist and leaned her head against his chest. “Kind of puts things in perspective when you find someone in worse shape than you are, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.” Trent had never really understood why another person’s problems made your own seem less important, but they did.

“Now what?” Donna asked.

“Good question. You tired yet?”

“Not really. I’m still kind of wound up.”

“Me too. And it sounds like we’re not the only ones stayin’ up late. Want to check out the night life in Bigtown?”

“Sure. Let me get out of these messy clothes, and let’s go.”

Trent put his arms around her and gave her a long, slow kiss. “You want a hand with that?”

There was barely room for both of them in the camper, but Trent pulled the door closed behind them and made sure it latched. It was pitch dark for a second before he found the light switch and flipped it on. When he turned around, Donna was already wriggling out of her shirt. She had her arms in the air and her shirt over her head, so he reached out and cupped her breasts in his hands and said, “Guess who.”

She giggled. “Oh, Bob, how did you get in here?”

“Try again,” he said, giving her a squeeze.

“Jeff? Dennis? Gosh, there’s so many people it could be.”

“Is that so?” he said, surprised at how much some other man’s name could jolt him even when he knew she was just playing with him. He reached up and grabbed a handful of her shirt, intending to whisk it off her in a single tug, but he misjudged the angle when he pulled, and he heard it rip as it came over her head. “Oh, jeez, I’m sorry!” he said, but then he saw the look of wanton lust on her face and he whispered, “Whoa, maybe I’m not.”

She flung the shirt aside, grabbed the front of his shirt in both hands, and pulled it open. It had a snap-down front, and the first couple of snaps popped loose the way they were supposed to, but the rest of them didn’t have a chance. The sides of the shirt tore instead, leaving Donna with two handfuls of cloth and a look of total astonishment.

Her nostrils flared out, and a slow grin spread across her face. “Hang onto your hat, cowboy,” she said in a voice that was breathy and deep. “We could wind up miles from here.”

“Hang onto it, hell,” Trent said, sweeping his Stetson off his head and tossing it onto the counter beside the sink. “I’m gettin’ it out of your way. You look like you mean business.”

“Damn right I mean business.” She took another couple fistfuls of his shirt and yanked them apart, ripping it all the way up his back.

Clothes went flying. Trent had never seen Donna like this, had never felt quite so out of control himself, but he wasn’t about to stop and question it. They stripped each other bare, shredding every piece of clothing they could in the process, and had their way with each other right there on the floor of the camper. If anybody was watching the pickup, they would know for sure what was going on inside, but Trent didn’t care. Let the envious bastards watch all they wanted.

“Yee-haw,” he said in the moment of calm afterward. “That was worth coming all the way to Alpha Centauri for.”

She was snuggled up against him with her head on his chest. “You think so, do you?” she asked softly.

“I don’t know. Maybe we ought to do it again just to make sure.”

“You think we’d survive it?”

“If we didn’t, I’d die happy.”

She laughed and snuggled in closer. “I just want to hold you for a while.”

“Good enough by me.” He ran his hands lightly over her back, amazed as always how warm and soft she was. Who would have believed that somebody as gentle and feminine as her could literally rip the shirt right off his body? For that matter, he’d never been quite so fired up before, either. He wondered what had triggered it. Was it just the release of so much tension built up over the last few months, or was it something about the planet? Or maybe something about Katata and her kids? If it was some kind of alien hormone, then her kind weren’t going to have any trouble fitting in around humans at all.