Across the Spectrum (11 page)

“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 care! 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.

“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.”

“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.