Across the Spectrum (12 page)

“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” 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.