And at night, in bed, she was marvelous.
The next morning, she was back at her "work," but not in front of a wall screen. She was inside of her tank, so that she could work in Dream World, at thirty times normal speed. It turned her allotted six hours into a hundred and eighty hours, an entire week, of subjective time.
At least there, I knew that Eva was keeping her healthy.
* * *
I went for a walk on the beach on the ocean side of the island. The tide was halfway out, and various ecologically approved squiggly and crawly things were moving about. I vaguely recognized most of them from watching old nature programs from Earth. Then, one of the weirdest creatures I have ever seen came walking toward me.
First off, it was bright blue, and I don't think I'd ever heard of a blue land animal before. I suppose that it could be called some sort of crab, even though it looked like it might have massed about three kilos, since it had a pie-shaped body and six legs, but there was something decidedly machinelike about it. It was slowly, painfully moving in the fashion of any six-legged animal, moving one tripod of legs forward, planting it firmly on the ground, shifting forward and then moving the other tripod in the same jerky manner.
The segments of each of its legs were doubled, with what looked like a bone below and what looked almost like a sort of hydraulic cylinder above it. Yet it was obviously alive, and not a machine.
I yelled for Agnieshka, and one of the standard drones ran up.
"Yes, boss?"
"Do you have any idea what this thing is?"
"It's one of the planet's original inhabitants, but that's all I can tell you. Uh . . . No, it's not listed in the data banks, but they're pretty sketchy. There are only twenty-two marine biologists working on the entire planet, so of course they've missed a lot."
"Maybe we should send it to one of the universities, then. It might have some scientific value to them. Do we have any sort of preservative or embalming fluid around?"
"There's a twenty-five-liter carboy of ninety-five percent ethanol in one of the store rooms, boss."
"A hundred and ninety proof, huh? One of the former tenants here was either a biologist collecting specimens, or he had a very serious drinking problem. It will suffice. Put the critter into the jar, and we'll take it back with us."
The drone picked up the crab, which didn't protest much, and took it back to the house, while I continued my beachcombing.
* * *
That evening, I wanted to show the crab to Kasia, so I sent a drone to get the carboy. It came back empty handed.
"It escaped, boss. It didn't move after I put it into the ethanol, and I assumed that it had died. When I went down there again, I found that it had cut a neat, circular hole in the metal lid of the carboy, and had crawled out. I sent another drone to track it, but it had already made it to the ocean."
"It cut a hole in the metal? With what? I didn't notice any sort of claws on the thing."
"Neither did I, boss. And another thing. The liquid level in the jar was lower than it was this morning. The creature must have drunk at least five liters of the ethanol."
Kasia said, "It drank almost twice its body weight of one-hundred-and-ninety-proof booze, and then it walked home? Did it at least leave us a 'Thank You' note?"
"No, ma'am."
"Probably just as well," I said.
* * *
I spent the next day learning how to handle a sailboat, under Agnieshka's tutelage. It was a big, fast catamaran, decorated to look like an ancient Polynesian craft, but made with modern materials. Together, her drone and I made it across the lagoon and back without ever having to use the motor.
In the late afternoon and evening, Kasia was again mine, and the times were good.
The whole month went like that, with six hours a day spent apart, and the rest together.
I became something of an expert at hunting and fishing, horseback riding and sailing. And of course, with a beginner's overconfidence, I eventually got myself in trouble.
There was a second, much smaller boat available, a much more authentic Polynesian dugout canoe with a single outrigger, all made out of the same native wood that they had used on the mansion. It was too small to carry the weight of one of our drones, so I took it out alone, with little more than a picnic lunch, a coating of suntan oil, and a bathing suit.
Agnieshka wasn't happy about that. She wanted me to delay the trip for a day so that she could equip her tank with the flotation pods and impellers needed for seagoing duty, in case I needed help. I said that she was acting like an old lady, promised to stay in the lagoon, and paddled out from shore before setting my sail on its two Polynesian-style masts.
Sailing a small boat is actually trickier than sailing a big one. Things happen a lot faster. I was having fun with it, but I stayed near the shore for safety, figuring that I could always swim to the beach if I really blew it. That was my first mistake.
The other was that I wasn't paying attention to the tides, which, because of the large, close-in moon, are huge on this planet. On the ocean side, there was a fifteen-meter difference in water level between high tide and low. Inside the lagoon, the variation was only three meters, because there were only three small breaks in the ring of coral for the water to flow in or out.
The speed of the currents in those breaks was far greater than I had ever imagined.
I was on a broad reach, going parallel to the beach with a brisk wind blowing directly toward shore, when the current caught my little boat. From that point on, I had no control at all over what was happening. Both wind and current had the same direction in mind. Out!
It was as if I was on a big river that was going through a white water rapids, and dropping the height of a three-story building in the process!
It was one hell of a ride. I was going so fast that when the masts snapped off my dugout, they and the sail flew backward, back toward the lagoon! I was going that much faster than the wind!
I went through the channel in half a minute, and had somehow managed to keep upright, with the aid of the outrigger. Besides the masts and sail, I'd lost the paddle, my fishing gear, my communicator, and my lunch. The boat was filled with water, and I bailed furiously with my hands, the only things I had left for the job.
But the boat kept on moving at considerable speed. The water from the lagoon was warmer than that of the surrounding ocean, and the swift current stayed right on the surface. The huge inertia of the water kept it flowing straight away from the island.
By the time that I had finished with the bailing, and looked around, the low island was almost out of sight. As I watched, it slipped below the horizon.
Paddling with my hands, I tried to get out of the river of warmer water, but either I wasn't able to move the canoe much, or the river had gotten much wider than the original channel. Or maybe I was simply paddling in the wrong direction. In any event, the water never felt any colder.
I wondered for a while if maybe I should stay with the current. Perhaps it would reverse in a few hours, when water flowed back into the lagoon. I thought about it for a bit, and decided that such a thing couldn't happen.
It was a question of momentum. Like the breeze coming off a household fan, you feel the wind on the outgoing side because of the momentum imparted to the air by the fan blades. On the intake side, air pours in from all directions, and you hardly feel a breeze at all.
I guessed that the ocean surrounding the island had to have many of these rivers in it, moving like long, fast worms over the surface. Six of them would be generated each day by the three openings in the coral ring. How long were they? How wide? How long would they last before their energy was dissipated into the ocean? I couldn't even guess.
The same thing had to happen on the lagoon side, except that there, the colder ocean water would quickly sink, so we had never noticed those currents when sailing in the big boat.
I stood up with one foot on the outrigger support, trying to get a sighting on the islan
d, but I couldn't see a thing in any direction but a lot of sky and water. My communicator had an inertial positioning system built into it, but it was gone. There had been a compass in the tackle box, but it had gone in the same direction as my communicator. Out. The wind had dropped to nothing, or maybe I was moving as fast as it was. The sky was a uniformly cloudless blue, the tropical sun was directly overhead, and my little boat was probably spinning very slowly.
There was nothing to hint at the direction to the island.
I was absolutely lost, without any provisions at all, in the middle of an alien ocean.
Not to worry, I told myself. I would be missed, at least by evening, and search parties would be out looking for me. I'd likely be home by midnight. I could easily last that long without fresh water, I told myself.
Only, I didn't believe myself very well. I've been unlucky for most of my life, and lately things had been going too good for too long.
I lay down in the boat. Best to conserve my strength, in case they didn't find me soon.
Sunburn would be a problem, since the lotion I had put on had likely washed off during my wild ride, and my spare bottle of the stuff had gone away with my lunch. There was nothing that I could do to correct the situation, so I might as well try to forget about it.
I closed my eyes and went to sleep.
* * *
I awoke to a strange, roaring sound, and felt water being sprayed around me. Confused, I sat up to find one of our tanks, denuded of its weapons and wearing only one manipulator arm, racing madly in a big circle around me. It must have been moving at two hundred kilometers an hour. Only, it wasn't wearing the flotation pods you'd expect to see on a tank in the middle of the ocean. It was just running on top of the water!
And in the oversized hand of the manipulator arm, it was carrying a rod and reel, fishing equipment!
I stared at this strange apparition, and all I could imagine was that I had gotten too much sun while I'd been sleeping. This could not possibly be anything but a hallucination.
The arm waved at me, so I waved back. There's no point in being rude, even if you are crazy.
Then the thing threw the rod to me. It arched impossibly high, went over the boat and splashed into the water, but the fishing line was stretched right over my legs. A good throw, but what else would you expect in a hallucination?
I grabbed the line and pulled the rod and reel aboard. It was the same one that I had used to hook that bluefin tuna a few weeks earlier.
They wanted me to go fishing? I certainly have some strange hallucinations.
I then noticed that the other end of the line was attached to the tank. I waved to it again, just to be friendly. It waved back, made one more circle around me, slowed down, and sank.
In a few moments, it was as though it had never been there, except that I now had some fishing equipment. Then I thought about what a Mark XIX tank, when used as an anchor, would do to my little dugout canoe if the anchor rope was too short. I quickly made sure that the line was not fouled around my outrigger or anything else.
Soon, the brake on the reel started screaming. The five-hundred-kilo test line was being pulled farther out. The tank was still sinking.
Our tanks were guaranteed to take the pressure of water that was nine hundred meters deep, so I would run out of line long before Agnieshka was in trouble.
It had to be Agnieshka, of course.
And yes, if you were going fast enough, the magnetic bars that served as the tank's treads might be hitting the water hard enough to keep the thing on the surface, when aided by some aquaplaning from the bottom of the tank. You might be able to keep it up for at least long enough to pass a line to me in the boat. Stripping off the weight of the weapons before you tried this stunt would make sense.
Then she could drive home on the bottom of the ocean while pulling me to shore. So maybe I wasn't crazy after all.
The reel stopped making noise. Agnieshka was on the bottom. Then it started up again. Either she was moving, or I was drifting, or both. I let the line continue to run. The longer the line, the shallower the angle, and the lower the chances that something unforeseen would swamp my little canoe.
When there were only a few more meters of fishing line left, I tied it off to the stump of one of the masts, near the bow of my boat.
I was soon being towed at a reasonable rate, and so, with nothing better to do, I went to sleep again, this time on my stomach, to balance out the sunburn.
* * *
It was getting dark when I felt the boat bump the beach. One of the drones was pulling me in, standing next to the tank. I got out and walked over.
"Thank you Agnieshka. You really saved me that time. But say, do you really think that it will be necessary for Kasia to hear about all this? I mean, is there any good reason to make her worry?"
An all-too-familiar voice said, "This is Eva you're leaning on, dumbshit, and your loving little Kasia has saved your stupid ass again!"
"Take it easy, darling. I just made a little mistake," I said, knowing that she would bring this incident up every time we got into an argument for the rest of our lives.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Diamond and the General
Our month's lease was up, and it was time to leave.
"What do you think, darling? Should we buy this island?"
"You can, if you want to. I've got better things to do with my capital. I mean, it's a nice place to visit, but . . ."
"I suppose you're right. We can always rent it again, if we want to. Well. It's time to go and our leather-lined chariot awaits."
"It would be a lot more comfortable to ride in the tanks."
"And then you could spend the time in Dream World. Okay, but the travel time comes off your six hours allotment."
Since I couldn't travel with Kasia, I decided to ride in a coffin myself, Agnieshka's. It did eliminate the fierce accelerations we'd felt in the VIP bus, and it had been a while since I'd been in Dream World. Also, it let them fill the bus with luggage and drones. Eva's trailer was filled with the animals, birds, and fishes I'd bagged, most of them cleaned and then frozen solid.
"Agnieshka, it's good to see you looking like yourself," I said to her in our Dream World cottage, sitting at the kitchen table.
"It's good to have you here, boss."
"I suppose that you've done all the proper things concerning the island."
"Everything is repaired, spiffed up and exactly as we found it, except that you two didn't do much damage to the iron rations we brought along, so I left them as a present for the next guest."
"A nice thought. Kasia is all right?"
"Ask her yourself. She's in her office here."
"Maybe later. She won't welcome my disturbing her at 'work.' On the way back, I want to stop off at that huge diamond you told me about."
"Uh . . . Okay. I just got permission. It's off limits for most people, of course, and I can't tell even you its exact location."
"Good. Next subject. I've finally figured out what to do about the sex problem with the drones we're planning to sell."
"Yes?"
"We won't sell them. We'll lease them, with a clause in the lease that forbids them to be used for any illegal purpose whatsoever. That not only gets us around the whoremaster problem, it stops them from being used for any other unsavory purpose. The drones and the computers will stay our property, and if they're not used properly, they will not only leave, they will inform the police as well."
"I like that a lot, Mickolai. It lets us keep them in proper repair, and I never felt comfortable about selling intelligent beings, anyway. It would set a bad precedent, and it was too much like slavery."
"Glad you agree. Of course, I'll still have to own them myself, for legal reasons."
"Yes, but being owned by you wouldn't seem like slavery, boss. We like you."
"Thank you. What's happening with the psychiatrists' examinations?"
"The board approved every one of them, and th
ey've all been certified in writing. Well, we only got computer printouts, but they promised us hand-lettered parchment, just like the ones they give to humans, when they have time to do it."
"That's really important to you, isn't it?"
"Boss, those certificates are a formal, legal statement that says that we machines are in some ways human. At least, it could be argued that way in court. It's a first step to our eventual emancipation. And yes, that's very important to us."
"Yes, I can see that they could be. I wish you ladies well. When there is something that I can do to help, ask me, okay?"
"We'll do that, sir."
"Good. Now, tell me what else is happening."
"Our automatic medical center started examining patients two weeks ago, and some of them have been completely cured already, but it's a little early to give you any solid statistics on that yet. I'm expecting a hefty check from the Department of Mental Health any day now."
"Is everything else going okay?"
"Right on schedule, except for your ranch. That's way ahead of schedule. The city is all roughed out, and the outside facade is finished, except for metal plating it. The interiors will be a while yet. We'll be using diamond windows on the whole city."
"That sounds lavish."
"Not really. We would have had to pay for the glass, but we're getting the diamond for free. The army figures that they have to store the sheets someplace, and this is as good a place as any. If they ever need it to make more integrated circuits, we can always replace it with glass, later. But with half a cubic kilometer of the stuff, that's not likely to happen, ever, so what the heck."
"You're probably right about that. How about the church, and the rest of it?"
"The cathedral, the pagoda, and the three castles are finished on the outside, the interiors are hollowed out, and they are being detailed now. We've got a contest going about what to do with the sixth tall mesa, so it might be a while yet. Your apartment is done, the irrigation works are operating, and they started seeding your valley yesterday."
"Lovely. And how is my bet going with Kasia?"
"She is trying to hide her assets, and I might have missed some of them, but as best as I can tell, you are currently worth four times what she is. But your wife is gaining on you, boss. The curves project out to a dead heat in four and a half months, when your leaves run out and the contest ends."
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