Across the Spectrum

by Nagle, Pati

  “Bet it’s ultraviolet.”

  “Ah, okay. I’ll remember that. Ultraviolet.”

  When Al tried feeling out the letters with his fingertips, he registered nothing but a slickness over slickness. His eyes blurred with tears. So much for his evidence, so much for his certain fame and possible cold cash.

  “What’s wrong?” Iffi said.

  “I can’t see it. My eyes don’t register that color. It’s like you guys not being able to hear when someone talks real low.”

  Freet said something really foul.

  “Couldn’t agree more,” Al sighed. “Say, uh, I guess you guys can’t read, huh?”

  “Of course we can!” Freet and Iffi spoke together, but only Freet went on speaking. “We read real good, but not this old stuff. It’s way different, way old. Only the priests know what these letters say.”

  “And the priests aren’t even supposed to know I’m here, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Say, you’re not going to get into trouble over this, are you?”

  “Ah, maybe,” Freet said, shrugging in an oddly human gesture. “What are they going to do about it? Scream and yell a whole lot, sure. Priests are always screaming and yelling. It’s their job, isn’t it?”

  On the other hand, Al was certain, the priests weren’t going to be helping him translate their sacred monument, either. He stepped up close, tried shading his eyes while he peered at the slab, and looking at it sidewise, and out of focus, found not so much as a trace of a shadow or edge of a painted letter. Quite possibly this writing had been baked right in, if indeed the slab were some kind of hi-tech ceramic. Swearing under his breath he tried feeling around the edges of the thing, thinking that he might somehow peel off the top layer and bring it back to the university lab—but under the dirt the edge felt smooth, solid, and mechanically beveled.

  “Ah, crap!” he said at last. “Well, guess I might as well hang it up, huh? I—hey, what’s that?”

  The “that” in question bulged out of a crevice in the cliff face about two meters up the height of the slab, well above the Squeaker line of sight but an easy reach for lanky Al. Even though it seemed at first to be nothing more than a big clod of blackish earth, the shape was too regular to be natural. When Al probed around its perimeter, he discovered a hard sphere, crusted with the dirt of ages, and about twenty centimeters in diameter. When he worked it free, pebbles and clods rolled and scattered.

  “Never seen one of those before,” Freet said. “Is it a rock?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  Al rummaged through his backpack, found a jackknife, and began flaking off the dirt to expose a black crystalline substance underneath. Once he’d cleaned off about half the sphere, to get a better look at the material he rubbed a spot shiny on his shirt sleeve. In his hands the sphere sang aloud, a high, pure, musical note. When Iffi and Freet yelped, Al nearly dropped it.

  “Jeez, guys, what do you think this means?”

  Neither Squeaker said a thing, merely wheezed a few panicked high notes of their own. Al hesitated, then went on chipping at the crust of dirt and old plant roots. This artifact was going to be his evidence, his ticket to fame and fortune, or so he saw it. Once he’d used a spare shirt to polish the entire sphere, he held it up high in one hand.

  “Look at it, guys. Your ancestors were some kind of craftsmen, huh?”

  “You bet,” Freet said. “Wonder why it’s glowing like that?”

  Al set it down fast and backed away, yelling at the Squeakers to get clear. Too late it occurred to him that the sphere might be an alarm or warding device, something that would explode when disturbed. All three of them piled behind a nearby boulder and huddled down while the sphere sang out its alien music. Suddenly Al heard a low groan, then a grinding, snarling, scrabbling, and a moan, and the crunch of something huge moving over dirt and gravel, crushing the very ground.

  “Oh, jeezus gawd! What have we done?”

  “What’s wrong?” Freet snapped.

  “Can’t you hear—”

  “No. Hear what?” Freet bounced up and peered over the boulder. “Hey, it’s opening.”

  Al got up and looked. Even if it were the last action he ever performed before an alien monster tore him into pieces, he had to see what was happening. Rather than anything fatal, however, he found the red slab standing open, become a door huge by Squeaker standards, and revealing a cave cut into the hillside. Out in front the black sphere glowed, soaking up the sun.

  “A solar cell! Jeezus gawd! Hey, guys? I think we’ve hit something big.”

  “You’re not going in there, are you?” Iffi whined. “I bet the place is crawling with spirits. Of our ancestors, stuff like that.”

  “Blech!” Freet snarled. “To think I’ve got a coward for a brother!”

  Iffi said something that Al couldn’t translate. As the three of them walked over to the cave mouth, Al took the lead, only to pause just outside.

  “I was just thinking, guys. What if this thing shuts behind us?”

  “I better stay out here,” Iffi said. “I’ll yell if it starts moving.”

  “Huh, pretty transparent, little brother.” Freet clacked his beak a few times. “But yeah, I guess you better.”

  Al and Freet followed an obviously artificial tunnel, running flat and straight into the hillside, for some five meters, until it curved sharply into darkness. Although Al found a flashlight in his backpack, he couldn’t remember when he’d checked the batteries last. He could be certain they weren’t new, batteries being a rare commodity these days.

  “Can you see, Freet? I mean, are things ‘warm’ in here?”

  “No, there’s nothing glowing at all.”

  For a few moments they stood staring at the flashlight, as if they could telepathically read the state of its batteries.

  “Ah, hell,” Al said at last. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, huh? We can walk in the dark for a ways.”

  “Yeah. Keep one hand on the wall as we go along. That way if the tunnel branches or something, we won’t get lost.”

  Feeling their way, they went forward, rounded the curve, and heard their footsteps slap on an artificial floor. Some very smooth, very cold substance lined the tunnel, although the right-hand wall was pitted here and there in an engraved pattern which, Freet announced, had to be script. At a particularly large block of letters, they paused so that Freet could try to feel out its meaning.

  “It’s more like our kind of writing than the stuff on the slab. They must have had two kinds of script.”

  “Yeah? Well, what’s it say?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s a list of names, people’s names, I mean, far as I can tell.”

  In the dark Al could hear him whistling under his breath like a tea-kettle.

  “Hey, here’s an interesting thing,” Freet said at last. “They’re calling this place their main camp. And a temporary something—I don’t know your word for it. A place where you put stuff you’re gonna fetch later.”

  “Hey, we’ve hit pay dirt! It shows your people must have come from somewhere else, and jeez, on this ball of water, there isn’t anywhere to come from but the stars, if you get what I mean.”

  “I do, kind of. Say, Al? What ever made you think you could be a poet?”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, never mind. Sorry I brought it up.”

  As they walked on, their footsteps began to sound immensely hollow, echoing off a far-distant wall. Since for all they knew, the tunnel they were following was about to end in mid-air, Al decided to use the flashlight. The pale beam shot out into a vast cavern, its floor level with the tunnel mouth, after all, but crammed with obstacles. For a moment, seeing them in the narrow stripe of flashlight beam, Al simply couldn’t comprehend what they might be. He could distinguish only big, solid masses in irregular shapes, wrapped in some sort of coating and fitted together like a giant’s puzzle. Out of sheer nerves his wrist jerked; the beam of light jumped upward and fell on a
row of ruby-red spheres. One by one they sang out, began to glow, and filled the cavern with scarlet light. Out of the shadows, like rocks emerging on a sea-coast as the tide pulls back, rose more shapes: boxes, barrels, machines wrapped in tatters of what had once been cloth, crates, and solid cubes and bars stashed under metallic drapes.

  “Jeez louise,” Al whispered. “Look at all that stuff!”

  “Yeah,” Freet said, and as softly. “All that bleching valuable stuff.”

  “Boy, bet those scientists down in Canada are gonna flip when they see this. I mean, you do think we should go get a research team up here, don’t you?”

  Freet ignored him and walked into the cave, where he began methodically picking his way around and through the stored goods and muttering to himself under his breath. When Al realized that he was making a rough count of the number of crates and containers standing round, Al started to help, but he got bored with all the arithmetic and began poking at random. Finally, behind a big cylindrical barrel, he saw what seemed to be a tree fern, muffled up in a slippery, semi-opaque sheet. When he tried to pull the sheet off, it disintegrated, doubtless from sheer age, into a clot of shiny threads and tatters to reveal a large tree made of yellow metal. From its branches dangled red and yellow ovoids—fruits of some sort, Al supposed. Without thinking he pulled one off and tried to taste it.

  “Hey!” Freet snapped. “Careful! You could poison yourself.”

  “No problem. It’s hard as a rock. Must be glass.”

  Freet took the red ovoid and stared at it for a long, long time.

  “No, not glass,” he said, and his voice hovered on the edge of a squeak so thin that Al could barely register the sound. “It’s a ruby.”

  “Yeah? Hey, real pretty.”

  “Al, oh Al, you really do live in some other universe, don’t you? Just like your mother always says. It’s a gem as big as my fist, Al. Don’t you realize what that means, what all this stuff means?”

  “No. What?”

  “We’re rich, you blech! Rich rich rich.”

  And of course, they were.

  ∞

  “I’ve got to admit it, Al.” Rosemary paused for a sip of her iced Bouzo. “This does beat fiddling with that damn spinning machine.”

  “Jeez, Mom, I’m sure glad you think so.”

  In brocaded armchairs they were sitting on the balcony of their new mansion, which stood on a rise overlooking China and the river just beyond the town. On a lucite-topped table by her chair, Rosemary set the Bouzo down and spread out a sheet of isometric drawings, complete with exploded views, of a Squeaker water purifier found in the cave.

  “I got these from my staff just this morning,” she remarked. “This thing is wonderful, Al, centuries ahead of our own designs.”

  “Glad you like it, Mom. Jeez, I still can’t believe my luck, stumbling over that cave like that.”

  Rosemary smiled fondly, then turned in her chair to smile even more fondly at the luxurious room behind them, the parquet floors, the embroidered hangings, the leather chairs, the gleaming computer on its marble desk.

  “No, dear, it wasn’t luck. It was your sensitive, intuitive nature.”

  Monsoon Day

  Mary Anne Mohanraj

  “Monsoon Day” is my favorite because it combines cooking, eating, romance and war, all set against a Sri Lankan background—and I particularly love that it has an older female protagonist, a rarity in fiction. It was originally published as part of my novel-in-stories, Bodies in Motion, which came out from HarperCollins in 2005 and which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Colombo, 2002

  She comes home, rowing the boat with strong arms over the breakwater, jumping out to drag it up onto the shore. Mangai was once a curiosity, and beggar children gathered to laugh, to point, to stare at this strange woman in her widow’s white, this old woman who went out alone to the sea, every day, in her battered fishing boat. But familiarity breeds comfort as well as contempt, and they have long ago grown used to her, this strangeness, this madwoman. They have heard her story from their sisters and brothers, their parents, and now no one bothers to tell it. They leave her alone, for the most part. They let her fish.

  Most days she trades much of her catch. She wakes up long before dawn, goes out for cold hours in the boat that she has learned to care for, to watch over. Comes back with enough fish to trade for her other small necessities. Rice and lentils. Her goat gives her milk; her chicken lays an occasional egg. It is not much, but she is not as hungry as she used to be, these days. Once the fish are gone, she sleeps away the afternoon. In the evening she walks on the beach; she sits on a particularly large rock; she watches the waves coming in, going out. Since the servant woman died, two years ago, she has lived alone.

  Some days are different; this is one of those days. It is monsoon season; the rain has been coming down hard for weeks, working its way through her not quite sealed roof, sending quiet trickles down the walls of hardened clay. There are days in the monsoon season when lentils and rice are no longer enough, when the insistence of memory overwhelms her. Those days, she stands on a teetering stool to reach the highest shelf; she pulls out her hoard of spices, from dust-brown fenugreek to crimson saffron threads. The rain stopped for a few hours this morning, but now it starts coming down again. She walks through it to the village center, her white sari plastered to her slight frame. There she trades smoked fish for rich coconut milk, ghee, fresh vegetables. The other women look at each other, and then tell their daughters: “Mangai Aunty is cooking. Go. Watch.” As Mangai slowly walks home, limping, the girls trail behind her, eventually gathering under the spreading banyan tree that guards the door to her small house. The monsoon rain is pouring down, slamming hard into the ground, and the children jump as they go, squishing mud between their toes. Mangai walks blindly, eyes unfocused, nose deep in the scent of fresh mango rising from the full string bag she carries. Her arms should be aching, but on days like this, she doesn’t notice.

  She enters the clean kitchen, clears a space on the table. She takes her large knife in hand, sharpens it carefully on a stone. The girls have crept up to the sides of the house now that she is safely inside; they peer in through cracks, over windowsills. She waits until they are settled before she begins to cook. It is another part of the unspoken bargain that brings her harmony with her neighbors; the bargain has kept her safe with them for decades; she is not about to break it now.

  Mangai starts slowly, but then catches the angle, the rhythm of it, and moves faster. She puts down the sharpening stone, places three onions on the table. Cuts off the top and bottom of each. Cuts them in half, lengthwise. Peels the skins off, being sure to get each bit of brown. It is not a day for being careless, for being just good enough. When she is satisfied, she rinses them in cold water, and then begins to slice them. Her eyes tear up. It is part of the price she pays for this indulgence. Paper-thin slices, from a hand swift and skilled with long practice. She has been cooking since she was eight? Ten? At least sixty years now. Her mother would come and pinch the extra flesh on her arm, hard, when she did not slice thinly enough. Punishing her for two sins at once—for being too clumsy, too fat. Probably for being too dark as well, though Mangai truly could do nothing about that. If her mother had lived to see her now, perhaps she would have at least conceded that Mangai is no longer fat. She has become a rail-thin woman: wiry and strong from the hours on the ocean, slender from endless meals of rice and lentils. Two cups of each will sustain her in a normal day.

  She slices each half-onion, holding it firmly, keeping its shape—then turns it ninety degrees and dices it crosswise. For this first dish, she needs a small dice, pieces that are less than a quarter the size of her thumb. When the onions are finished, she slides them into one of her large Teflon pots. Her brother in America, Sundar, has tried to send her money; she refuses it, over and over. But one Christmas, he and his wife, Sushila, sent her a beautiful set of Teflon
-coated pots and pans. Those, she kept. She imagined Sushila in the store, choosing each pot with her delicate hands; Mangai found that she couldn’t bear to send them back. And besides—she loves the way the food slides right out of the pan, the fact that she can just rinse it and be done. She has no interest in the gadgets they send as well; one corner of the kitchen holds cardboard boxes full of unused kitchen toys: lemon zesters, garlic presses. Mangai sent back a television recently; she doesn’t know what her brother was thinking. These days, it would only bring news of the fighting in Trincomalee, in Colombo. Young men dying, and now women too. Mangai suspects Sundar has sent money to the guerrillas. He has tried over and over to convince her to join him in America, but this is her home, and she is old. Sundar worries endlessly over her, and the war. Mangai sees no purpose in dwelling on what she cannot help. But the Teflon—that, she likes.

  She sautées the onions in ghee, adding black mustard seed, cumin seed. She chops three tomatoes while she waits, chops them small and juicy. When the onions are golden, she adds a teaspoon of raw red chili powder. As it cooks, the smoke rises and makes her cough. That’s her cue to add the tomatoes, a few tablespoons of vinegar, a little sugar, and a mix of dry-roasted spices, dark and fiercely aromatic. As the tomatoes cook down she quickly peels and chops three large potatoes; this first dish is a potato curry, because that takes longest to cook. Into the pot. She stirs hard, turning up the rich blend of onion and spice, coating every piece of potato. She lowers the heat on the gas range (another gift; she remembers cooking over an open fire), covers the dish, and turns back to the cutting board.

  One of the tricks to cooking a feast is to think about the timing of it as you plan the dishes. If you are making hoppers, soft pancakes with high, crispy sides, then it is important to remember that they are best eaten entirely fresh—that you will have to make them one by one and serve them to your guests. So you can’t expect to have ten or twenty minutes before the meal in which to make an array of sambols and chutneys. You must make those in advance, or do without. Certain flavors go together, but so do certain timings. If the timing is off, the entire meal may be ruined.