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

Rosemary kept the secrets of spinning wire to
herself. She wanted to hand them down to her son, ensuring him respect and a
steady income after her death, but as Al Dean became first a pimply teenager,
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