Parsley, Space, Rosemary, and Time

Katharine Kerr

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, insuring him respect and a steady income after her death, but as Al Dean became first a pimply teen-ager, 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.

“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 stabs 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 scutted 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 occured 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 high-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 occured 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.”

Copyright © 1992 Katharine Kerr

Originally published in Aladdin, ed. Mike Resnick

DAW 1991