Across the Spectrum (10 page)

“I know that. But the watchers think they control you
through your legends. They give you thruster trees and other things to make you
more useful. They don’t understand that the most useful tool is also the most
dangerous.”

“Your lies are outrageous. No one can make a whole people!”

“I told you we are clever, but lazy. We do not build a whole
people. We build just a few, then they make more of themselves.” He laughed
again, short and bitter. “We made you because you were a good trade. A small
effort expended, a little patience, and in the end we get a whole world.”

“Lies built on lies. Arrogance piled on arrogance!”

“The arrogance is not mine, it is the watchers’. The lies
are theirs as well. I am just a simple pilot who speaks the truth.” He stared
straight into my eyes. “Not all of my people are like the watchers. Some of us
believe it would be better if you had never been made. But now you are here;
what should be done with you?”

“We have always been here, ever since this world was new. We
should be left alone to live our lives in peace.”

“I wish that we could.”

There was a long silence then. Maqandisen turned away from
me and stared at his colored lights, and I watched the stars turn slowly
outside the glass.

We did not exchange another word until we arrived at the
glass people’s village in the sky—the village of the watchers, as Maqandisen
had called it. It floated in the sky, round as a sun hat, and hundreds of
totems and glass people’s houses were gathered around it. Just before we
entered the village, Maqandisen looked at me and said, “I did not want this
task. I do not like the watchers or the things they have made. But I am glad to
have met you.”

“Thank you. I am indebted to you for saving my life. But you
have terrible manners, even for a glass person.”

At that he just smiled sadly.

The great hunt participants from all the other clans were
there in the village of the glass people, and they greeted me as one returned
from the dead. The glass people there asked me if Maqandisen had told me any
strange tales, and I told them that he had not. I don’t know why—Maqandisen had
told me nothing but lies, why should I protect him with a lie of my own? But I
felt it was the right thing to do.

Soon after I arrived, we were all bundled into one of the
glass people’s strange houses, which carried us to their largest city. There we
held a great dance to celebrate our successful hunt and commemorate the lives
of those who had not returned. In the evening we shared tales from our
different clans, and there was much hilarity over the differences in customs
between us. The next day we said our good-byes and began the long trip back to
our homes.

When I returned to my own clan there was much rejoicing. The
people held a mighty feast in my honor, and I told the tale of my great
hunt—the tale I am telling you now—for the first time. Then I returned to my
life as an ordinary hunter.

For some years I was troubled by Maqandisen’s words. Could
he have been telling the truth? It would explain much. But in the end I
recalled Bear’s mighty roar and the powerful thrust of Raven’s wings, and I
knew in my heart that the old tales are true.

Maqandisen, like all his people, was a great liar. Never
doubt that it was Raven who made the people, and the caribou and all the other
living things, and put the sun and moons in the sky so that we could have
light. Maqandisen’s claim that his people made us was nothing more than an
arrogant boast. But sometimes there is truth to be found inside a lie.

What if the glass people believe their own lies? What if
they really do believe they made us as a tool to shape the world for them, and
someday they decide the world has been sufficiently shaped? The glass people
may emerge from their cities and seek to assert their domination over us and
all the world. We must prepare weapons and strategies against that day.

I know that some consider me insane. Others look on me as a
prophet. I am neither; I am just an old man who had a great adventure once, and
learned a lesson from it that I think is very important. When you are grown and
meet the glass people yourself, I hope you will remember my words, and then you
will tell your children and they will tell their children.

Trade fairly with the glass people. Be alert for their lies.
But watch them carefully and learn from them. They know many things we do not.
But they do not know how much
we
know. Some day I think we will surprise
them.

Now my tale is done, and the winter is just a little
shorter.

When Resnick called for submissions for
Aladdin: Master of the Lamp,
my first thought
was “Oh no.” Then it occurred to me that the original story had had a lot more
humor to it than most people realized. Immediately I thought of the efreets as
aliens, drunken aliens. Aladdin in outer space sounds like an odd concept, but
it intrigued me enough to write this story. I’ve always been very fond of it
just because of the humor.

∞ ∞ ∞

During the Great Disruption, when flux in the Space/Time
continuum scrambled the hyperspace shunts, the mercantile planets of the Mapped
Sector suffered the most, for obvious reasons, from being thrust into
isolation. One such was New Samarkand, the fourth planet of a large yellow star
out near the galactic rim. The only reason the world had ever been settled was
the fresh water ocean, cheap fuel for the fusion drives of the merchant fleet,
that covered most of its surface. Without the fleet and a steady supply of
imports, the planet’s small population soon found itself hovering on poverty’s
edge.

Mostly humans lived on New Samarkand, though small colonies
of a supposedly native race called Squeakers shared the only continent. While
the humans farmed or kept river towns alive down on the plains, the Squeakers
burrowed out warrens up in the hills and ate by gathering and hunting.
Occasionally a few would drift down to trade chunks of semi-precious stones for
grain and for parsley, an Old Earth plant that got them drunk, thanks to, or so
the only human doctor who’d ever studied the problem decided, its abnormally
high Vitamin A content. After one of these green binges, the Squeakers tended
to brag that their race, too, came from the distant stars, just as humanity
did, but no one paid much attention.

The Squeakers’ speech register included frequencies so high
that human ears couldn’t catch them, and only with great effort could a
Squeaker speak low enough to make itself understood. Since few humans cared
about what they had to say, few bothered to try. The real problem was, quite
simply, that to humans they looked like toys. No more than a meter high, they
had chubby round bodies, covered in gray or bluish-gray fur, big round heads
with two pairs of button-bright eyes, and four short arms. When they spoke,
chirping away, they tended to bounce up and down on their stubby little legs.
Their only clothing was a loin-wrap of flowered trade cloth. Few humans managed
to take them seriously, especially in those tense years when all technology
stood in danger of crumbling away, and forever.

There was, however, one man who did learn to talk with
Squeakers. In a town named China lived a widow, Rosemary Dean, with her only
child, Albert. The widow Dean was much respected, because only she could
operate and maintain the wire-spinning machinery at the local foundry, and
without wire, there would be no cables, and without cables, the last hi-tech
devices would die. For years Rosemary kept the secrets of spinning wire to
herself. She wanted to hand them down to her son, ensuring him respect and a
steady income after her death, but as Al Dean became first a pimply teenager,
then a lanky young man, she realized that much as she loved him, he was no man
to trust with an important job like the spinning of wire.

“I don’t understand you, Al,” she would say. “Your father
was a great engineer, and I can fix practically anything, but all you do is
hang around the marketplace and write poetry all day. Poetry! I mean, get real,
kid!”

“I can’t help it, Mom,” he would answer. “It’s just my
sensitive, intuitive nature.”

And she would roll her eyes starward and sigh.

About once every three months Al really would try to make
sense of the wire-spinning machinery, but every time he’d lose interest and
drift back to the marketplace. He’d always been exceptionally lucky at games of
chance—another part of his sensitive, intuitive nature, or so he liked to say.
He used his winnings from shooting craps to buy notebooks for his poems and
intoxicants for himself and his friends. Since watching him write poetry
distressed his mother, he took his sonnet sequences and verse dramas, his
laments for the lost stars and his epics of space exploration down to a table
in the corner of Dave Abraham’s tavern, which sold a resinous wine called
Bouzo.

After a long day’s scribbling, Al would often have a bottle
or two to prime himself to go home and face his mother. Usually he shared his
table with the local Squeakers, who would listen to his poems while cramming
their beaky mouths full of parsley, leaves, stems, and all. Occasionally they
would announce that Al was a terrible poet in any language, but only when they
were drunk enough for him to ignore their opinions. All the humans who came by
would shake their heads and wonder aloud where a hard-working woman like
Rosemary could possibly have gotten a wastrel son like Al. Listening to them
wonder, of course, only made him drink the more. By the end of the evening,
when the Squeakers had slimy green beaks and Al a bright red face, they usually
ended up heaped together, sound asleep, whistling or snoring, in the alley out
behind the tavern.

One hot summer morning, Al went out to the paper factory for
a new supply of notebooks. When he stopped by home before going on to the
tavern, he found his mother waiting for him. Dressed in her oily coveralls from
the machine shop, she was sitting at the kitchen table and drinking a cup of
the dark brown concoction that everyone called coffee for nostalgia’s sake.
When Al came in, she looked away and said nothing. He noticed that a blue
backpack was sitting by the door—his backpack, in fact, crammed full and
bulging.

“Uh, Mom? Something wrong?”

“Not exactly. Well, yeah, guess there is. I signed up an
apprentice this morning. To learn the wire-spinning machinery, I mean. Guess
she’ll take over some day.”

Al couldn’t speak. He had never even considered that his
mother might disinherit him. Biting her lower lip hard, Rosemary finally looked
his way.

“I hate to do this, Al, but we’ve got the colony to
consider.”

“Yeah, I know. The wire for the cables. Uh, those my
clothes, over by the door?”

“Yeah. Look, you remember your uncle, Jake, don’t you? The
one who lives downriver in Morocco? Well, I got a letter from him today. Here.”
She handed over an envelope. “He says he’ll take you in for a while, help you
get a job. It’s going to be too hard on you, staying here in China, listening
to people talk.”

Al shoved the letter into his shirt pocket and headed for
the door.

“Now you write to me, honey,” Rosemary called out. “And once
I’ve got Tanya trained, I’ll come visit. I promise.”

“Okay.” Al picked up the backpack. “Once I’m set up, I’ll
visit you, too. I’m going to make money, Mom. I’m going to get a real good job.
I really really will.”

Maybe it was just nerves, but Rosemary laughed. Al fled the
house without looking back.

Although Al had been planning on working his passage on one
of the frequent riverboats, such was his reputation that no captain would hire
him. He was going to have to earn his fare at a floating crap game, but first,
he decided, he really needed a drink. Fortunately, Dave’s Tavern was just
opening for the afternoon. When he sat down at his regular table and began
searching his pockets for small change, Dave hurried over, carrying a glass of
golden Bouzo.

“Here, kid, have one on me. Betcha need it.”

“Whatcha mean, Dave?”

“Well, what with your mother taking that apprentice and all.
Guess you’re getting spun right out of the wire business, huh?”

“Jeez, what is this? Everyone’s heard already?”

“Well, the poor woman’s been agonizing over this for days
now, and in a town this size. . .”

Al blushed scarlet, but he took the drink. He laid his
scrounged change out on the table.

“Bring me another, Dave. I got this letter to read.”

Uncle Jake’s letter turned out to be much kinder than Al
considered he deserved. Since Jake was a blacksmith, he was offering to teach
his wayward nephew the metals business from the anvil up, as it were, and then
steer him into machine repair.

“Jeez, Dave, machines run in my goddamn family, I guess.
Except for me.”

“Yeah, too bad.” Dave set a nearly-full bottle on the table.
“Here’s something for old times’ sake.”

As the day stretched itself into twilight, humans came and
went, whispering and laughing when they saw Al cradling his bottle and
stretching each drink. He was out of change, and he certainly wasn’t feeling
intuitive enough to go shoot craps. Just at nightfall, a pair of his friends
appeared, two Squeaker brothers. As they bought their first bunches of parsley,
Al saw Dave whispering to them, spreading the story of his disgrace, most
likely. When the Squeakers joined him, they brought a fresh bottle of Bouzo,
too.

“Our turn, Al.” The Squeaker known as Freet forced his voice
way down register. “We found some purple stones.”

“Hey, guys, thanks.” Al in turned squealed; he’d worked out
a falsetto voice easier for his friends to understand. “I mean, jeez. Thanks.”

They sat down and began nipping off the delicate leaves just
at the end of the fronds.