Across the Spectrum by Pati Nagle, editors Deborah J. Ross

believe their own lies? What if
they really do believe they made us as a tool to shape the world for them, and
someday they decide the world has been sufficiently shaped? The glass people
may emerge from their cities and seek to assert their domination over us and
all the world. We must prepare weapons and strategies against that day.
    I know that some consider me insane. Others look on me as a
prophet. I am neither; I am just an old man who had a great adventure once, and
learned a lesson from it that I think is very important. When you are grown and
meet the glass people yourself, I hope you will remember my words, and then you
will tell your children and they will tell their children.
    Trade fairly with the glass people. Be alert for their lies.
But watch them carefully and learn from them. They know many things we do not.
But they do not know how much we know. Some day I think we will surprise
them.
    Now my tale is done, and the winter is just a little
shorter.

Parsley, Space, Rosemary, and Time
Katharine Kerr
    When Resnick called for submissions for Aladdin: Master of the Lamp, my first thought
was “Oh no.” Then it occurred to me that the original story had had a lot more
humor to it than most people realized. Immediately I thought of the efreets as
aliens, drunken aliens. Aladdin in outer space sounds like an odd concept, but
it intrigued me enough to write this story. I’ve always been very fond of it
just because of the humor.
    ∞ ∞ ∞
    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