by Nagle, Pati
“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.
“You guys hear the news?” Al said. “I’m leaving town.”
“Too bad, yeah,” Iffi chirped. “We’ll come see you in your new place.”
“That’d be swell. I’m going downriver to Morocco.”
For a few minutes they sipped or nibbled in a companionable silence.
“Know what I wish?” Al said, burping a little. “I wish I could make things up to my mom. I mean, jeez, a guy’s only got one mom, doesn’t he? And another thing. This goddamn town, all of them laughing at me, saying I had it coming. I wish I could do something that’d make them all sit up and take notice, something real big that’ll make them say, she-it, we were wrong about Al Dean.”
“Fat chance,” Iffi mumbled.
“Shut up,” Freet snapped. “That’s no way to talk to a troubled friend, little brother.”
“Ah, it’s okay,” Al said. “I deserve it all, the scorn, the disdain, the mockery, the infamy, the—”
“Now you shut up! The Starborn don’t wallow. It’s undignified.”
Al poured himself another glass of Bouzo and gulped about half of it down.
“Tell me something, Freet, since we maybe won’t never see each other again and all that stuff. Are you guys really Starborn, or do you just kind of say that when you’ve chomped enough green?”
Freet slammed one pair of hands down on the table and clacked his beak hard.
“Sorry,” Al said and fast. “Didn’t mean to insult you.”
“Good! I get so bleching sick of it, you people always doubting my word.”
“Yeah, I know. I get sick of the same thing myself. It’s just that—”
Freet whistled and slammed the other pair of hands down.
“It’s just bleching this and bleching that! Always something! Always some reason to doubt my word. Well, I’m sick of it! I’m gonna show you.” Freet swung his head round Iffi’s way. “Come on, little brother. We gonna show him the slab.”
“What?” Iffi opened his beak so fast that a stalk of parsley fell onto the table. “You’re crazy! None of the Baldies are supposed to see that.”
“Don’t car
e! I’m sick and tired of nobody believing me.”
“Uh, well, hey,” Al broke in. “If it’s like taboo or something, I can pass.”
Freet ignored him and went on glaring at his brother.
“Iffi, you’re a coward.”
“Freet, you’re drunk.”
Freet bounced up, raising three fraternal fists.
“I’m brave, you’re sober!” With a wail Iffi got to his feet. “Come on, Al fella, if you dare.”
“Where we going?”
“To the hills,” Freet said. “Come on. Don’t forget your sack thing.”
Since Squeakers never move particularly fast, Al kept up fine as they trotted through the dark streets of town. After a couple of kilometers, the cool air began to clear his head, and by the time they’d left the houses far behind, he was sober enough to think of a few practicalities.
“Uh, are we going far, guys? All I’ve got to eat is a couple of candy bars.”
“No problem,” Freet said. “Plenty of ferns, this time of year.”
“And wahseebah fruits,” Iffi put in. “Lots of eating things.”
Slow or not, the Squeakers turned out to have an amazing amount of stamina. Although the terrain began climbing toward the hills, on and on they trotted along the rutted dirt road until Al began to sweat in trickles, not drops, and his head pounded as hard as his footsteps. Every time he collected his breath to ask about stopping, his friends would sing back “Not yet, not yet,” and trot on, even after the last moon had set.
For some time Al had suspected that the Squeakers’ many eyes registered a part of the spectrum beyond ordinary light, and this trip in the darkness confirmed his guess. As they called out to him or to one another, commenting on the road, looking for landmarks, or watching for animals, they consistently translated certain terms, what must have been visual adjectives in their speech, into human words such as “hot” and “cold.” He would have picked up other nuances, he supposed, if he’d had the energy left to pay closer attention. Finally, by dawn, he was so exhausted that he threw himself down in the fern banks beside the road and refused to move. Freet and Iffi debated briefly in their own speech, then sat on either side of him.
“Well, hell, you do look beat,” Freet said. He paused, looking round him, rubbing his eyes with his inner pair of hands. “Huh. Well, hell. We’ve come too far to turn back.”
“Can’t leave him now,” Iffi said. “He’d get lost for sure.”
Al realized two things at once: first, that a now-sober Freet was regretting this adventure, and second, that Iffi was right. As he looked round him in the silvery first light, Al supposed that sooner or later he’d find his way downhill to the river—if he didn’t starve to death first. All around, the hills pushed tall juts and slabs of black basalt and silvery granite through the thin soil. Out in the open areas grew a welter of blue, fuzzy succulents, while in the hollows clustered huge speckled ferns of a sort he’d never seen. In among these ground covers sprouted yellow and red flowers, all tangled by a nearly-purple vine with white explosions of leaves. As the light brightened, insects—he assumed they were insects, at least—began to buzz and chirr. In a hundred flashes of silver wings a cloud took flight, circled, then flew off toward the rising sun. Small red things with many legs scuttled among the vines; a delicate lizard glided by on membraneous wings; in the distance song broke out, the high pipings and hollow booms of animals, calling to the day.
“Pretty, this time of morning,” Iffi remarked.
“Yeah, sure is,” Al said. “Jeez, I’ve lived on this planet all my life, and here I’ve never been up here!”
For the first time, and perhaps because of this sudden discovery of an alien world, right in the middle of the view he’d always taken for granted, those ordinary old hills rising at the edge of human farmland, it occurred to Al that the Squeakers might always have been telling the simple truth, that their tiny tribes might indeed be the last survivors of a star-faring race, trapped on the planet by some earlier shift of the Space/Time flux. It could well be that they possessed tribal lore, myths, maybe, that cloaked old truths, poems that hid crucial information. There were scientists at the university in Canada, the biggest town on-planet, who were trying to decipher the currents in the flux and either predict when they might clear or discover where the missing shunts had taken themselves to. What if they could use the Squeakers’ information in some way? What if the lore was worth cold cash? And he, poor old Albert Dean, the town jerk, he who made his mother worry herself sick, was the only person in the whole damn colony who had bothered to learn how to talk to the Squeakers, really talk, that is, beyond the handful of trade words everyone needed to bargain for agates.
“Say, Freet? What’s this slab thing like?”
Freet sighed and whistled.
“Say, Al? You sure you don’t just wanna go home? We’ll take you back.”
“Ah, come on, guys! I’ve come all this way, and you promised.”
Actually, of course, they’d never promised one single thing, but Al was betting that they’d been too drunk at the time to remember that now. He won.
“Oh, okay. The Starborn never break promises. Well, the slab. Hum, let me think. It’s like a big, flat stone, set into the hillside, and it’s all covered with writing.”
“Can’t be real stone, though,” Iffi said. “It’s too shiny and uhndaro. I mean, cold.”
“Well, little brother, it’s not metal, either. Gotta be stone.”
“It’s too damn cold for that.” Iffi clacked his beak hard. “It is not stone.”
“Look, you bleching ding, it’s got to be either stone or metal.”
“No, wait, guys,” Al broke in. “It could be some kind of artificial thing, like ceramics or something, that your people brought with them when they first came here.”
“Aha!” Freet waggled all his hands in the air. “You believe us now, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do, and you know what? I’m sorry I ever doubted your word. I apologize.”
“Handsome of you. I accept.” Freet bounced up. “Come on, we got to go a little farther before the sun gets too hot.”
Traveling mostly at night, and foraging for food as they went, Al and the two Squeakers made their way deep into the hills. Although the Squeakers were used to the outdoor life, by the second day Al ached in every muscle and tendon. Their forage of ferns, fleshy succulents, and the turquoise-blue wahseebah fruits, supplemented now and then with roast lizard, gave him profound diarrhea as well. Every time he thought of begging his friends to take him home, he made himself remember the possible cold cash and reasonably certain fame that lay ahead. Of course, since no one in China, not even his own mother, was going to take his word for anything, he was going to have to bring back hard evidence that the Squeakers had stories worth hearing. Fortunately, he had notebooks with him to transcribe the writing on this mysterious slab.
Using the shreds of xenobiology that he remembered from his high school science classes, Al also pieced together more evidence that the Squeakers were Starborn. Although the plants their people had learned to gather were digestible and even nourishing to Squeakers, anything green intoxicated the two brothers to some degree, even the pale yellow horsetails, though nothing had as great an effect as human-grown parsley. Since no species was going to survive, much less develop any sort of technology, if it lived in a state of permanent drunkenness, the Squeakers must have evolved on some planet where the food chain depended on a chemical other than chlorophyll and its various relatives. If indeed a group of star-faring Squeakers had ended up stranded on this particular world, it was no wonder that their culture had degenerated so badly and so fast.
By the fourth afternoon, however, caught between his exhaustion and his intestinal turmoil, Al’s intellectual curiosity deserted him. The only question he cared about was whether he was going to die soon or later—he was hoping for soon. When Freet waked him for their night journey, all Al could do was mumble and groan.
&n
bsp; “Come on, come on, Al! You gotta get up. We’re almost there, really and truly.”
Al said something foul.
“Sure, go ahead. Just die here. We’ll have to go tell everyone you failed again. That’ll really show your mom what you’re made of, yeah, you bet.”
Al sat up, rubbing his stubbled face with both hands.
“Attaboy,” Freet said, bouncing. “Come on. Almost there.”
Al never could remember that last night’s traveling. The Squeakers kept stopping to let him rest, but even so, time passed in a blur of rock and fern, rushing streams and water reeds, of stumbling and cursing and falling down. Just as the sun was rising through a jagged break in the rock formations, Al struggled round the flank of one last hill and saw ahead a narrow valley, waist-deep in ferns. At the far end rose a dark, crumbling cliff. Low down, touching the ground, in the middle of the rise of dirt and rock shone a flame-red oval, a jewel set among crumbling fissures.
“Jeez louise!” Al said. “It’s huge.”
“You bet.” Freet paused to lace all four hands together and bow in the slab’s direction. “Need a rest, Al?”
“Nah. Not now that we’re so damn close.”
Al squeezed energy from a last reserve and trotted down the valley after the two Squeakers, who kept up a running chatter at a frequency way too high for him to hear. Yet as they all drew close he slowed, stopped, could for a long time only stare open-mouthed at the tremendous inset of red, a good three meters high by two wide.
“Jeez,” he whispered at last. “That’s no natural hunk of rock, that’s for sure. But say, guys, I don’t see any writing on it.”
“You’re nuts,” Freet said. “It’s all over the thing. See? It starts right here near the middle and spirals out.” By stretching hard Freet could just lay one finger-tip in the middle of the slab. “Look at this real big letter, painted all fancy.”
“Crap. I don’t see, but I get it. Paint, huh? What color is it?”
“It’s—” Freet stopped, thought, sucked the finger that had touched the slab as if it would inspire him. “I don’t know your word for it.”