The Fata Morgana

by Leo A. Frankowski

  While I was looking over the ship, Roxanna and the servants were scrounging through the piles of stuff that had originally been on board. There was an awful lot of it, so much so that it was hard to see how we could have gotten it all packed into just the one boat. Roxanna had found the kitchenware, and was much taken by it.

  "My lord! I had heard tales of your wealth, but the seeing of it confounds me! You ate with utensils of solid silver?"

  "We used those for eating, but they're not silver. Silver tarnishes. That stuff is all stainless steel. It's harder and tougher than silver, and less expensive, too."

  "But there is so much of it, and all for just you two men?"

  "Well, first place off, while you people get along just fine with one only single spoon each, a formal place setting in my country wants two forks, two spoons and a dinner knife, plus a steak knife if we're digesting big slabs of meat, which is many times. Then too, please, we started out with more that fifty people in boat, but most them got tired of sailing beside an ocean after a few months. I think Adam said that we had a table service for eighty with us," I said.

  "How could that many people fit onto one boat?"

  "It was pretty nicely crowded. Then, too, in my country, people don't have so much living space as you do here. Wealthy people live in houses that are ten times smaller than your apartment."

  "Could . . . could we take some of this back with us, my lord?"

  "Certainly. Take whatever it pleases you want. Just remember that half of it belongs to equal partner Adam," I said.

  "Well, we wouldn't need half of it, but perhaps a service for ten?"

  "Fine. Don't forget some plates, bowls, cups, and some sort of thing. All around here it's someplace. And let's make up a likely similar set to send for the Adam and Pelitier sisters."

  It took me two hours to find what I was looking for. Adam's coin collection. It was half mine now, and I needed the money. There were two iron safes that each had a key lock with the keys still in them. Apparently, Adam had been less worried about someone robbing him than he was about losing the keys. The silver was all loose in one hefty strongbox that I couldn't begin to lift. The box was fireproof, and squeezed in on one side was a Manila envelope filled with passports, wallets, identification, and insurance papers. It was a good spot for all that currently useless stuff, and I left it in there. The gold was packed with each piece in a separate little plastic pouch to protect the finish of the beautiful coins, and then ten to fifty pouches, depending on the denomination, to the sturdy canvas bag. I took two bags of the gold, one for Adam and one for myself, and used four of the bags to hold a few fistfuls each of old silver quarters. Heavy stuff, it was all that I wanted to carry. I locked the chests and put the keys in my pouch, my present outfit not having any pockets.

  Roxanna and the servants had the tableware sorted out by then, and had put some kitchen utensils in with them, which was fine by me. They were all ogling and talking about everything, even the plastic garbage bags that everything had been wrapped in. A minor case of culture shock, I suppose.

  I did some scrounging myself, and in the course of things came upon the mirror-fronted medicine cabinet that had been on the wall of the boat's head. The face that looked back at me was ghastly. I'd never tried to grow a beard before, and now I knew why. It was scraggly and thin, and had twice as many hairs on the right side as on the left. The mustache was almost as bad, and I promptly resolved to get rid of the thing, local fashions or no local fashions. A few more minutes were required to find my shaving kit, and with the medicine chest under my arm, I rejoined the group.

  As I put my reavings along with theirs, Felicia looked at the medicine chest and screamed. Soon, they were all crowding around the mirror, mumbling about what an incredible piece of magic it was. I was the longest time getting them calmed down, trying in my poor Westronese to explain that it was only a simple device, with nothing unholy about it. They eventually relaxed, but they never believed that it wasn't magic. In their eyes, I had become a mighty sorcerer.

  "Well, you never look down on bowl of water? You never see face looked back?" I asked Roxanna.

  "Yes, of course, but then water is magic, too."

  I shook my head and went back to scrounging. The local beds were narrow, hard, and lumpy, so when I came across one of the big, queen-sized air mattresses that married couples had used early in the trip, and a sleeping bag to fit it, I put the bag and mattress into the "take it home" pile. I thought a bit, and put a second set of bedding in Adam's pile, since big people have even more trouble getting comfortable that us ordinary critters. Then I went back a third time and brought over enough air mattresses for our hosts and both sets of servants. They were people, too, no matter what the local mores said.

  I found a sewing kit, and threw it in with Roxanna's booty, along with a few pounds of tea for myself.

  "You'll especially want to throw away the thread, from what Adam tells me about your clothmaking abilities here, but you might find the scissors, needles, and thimbles useful," I said.

  "Yes. Thank you, my lord, but why would you want scissors with a sewing kit?" She said, "But no matter, they will be very useful. But more to the point is that smaller boat."

  The inflatable life raft was there, and still fully inflated, but I think perhaps that Roxanna didn't recognize it as being a boat. She was gesturing towards the yacht's twenty-foot-long tender.

  "The Concrete Canoe. Yes, what about it?"

  "I was going to suggest that it could be put to good use as a fishing boat, my lord. I saw no nets among your equipage, but there were many hooks, lines, and such," she said.

  "I don't know as how I would like to be a full-time fisherman."

  "No, of course not you, my lord. But a crew could be easily hired. It could be very profitable, as well as providing both your household and your friend's with the freshest of fish."

  "Okay, if you wish. Would you see about hiring some suitable men?"

  "Certainly, I would contact them, and select the best, my lord, but as to my actually paying their wages . . ."

  "You can't, because you are just about out of money," I said, handing her one of the sacks of old silver quarters. "You should have said something about that sooner, but here. Take this and figure out how much more I owe you."

  She spilled some of them into the palm of her hand and turned pale. "It . . . it is too much," she stammered. "This is a hundred times, more than that, more than I have earned for my hosting of you!"

  "That much, eh? Well, keep it anyway." What I'd given her couldn't have been more than fifty dollars in quarters. I wasn't sure what the old silver ones were worth, but certainly I hadn't given her much more than the price of a good meal for two at a nice restaurant. Adam had definitely been right about metals being worth a lot here! I left Roxanna staring speechless at the money and went to scrounge up some food.

  Everyone had gone to Communion except me, so we had skipped breakfast. The munchies were hitting pretty hard, so I broke out some food, the sort that didn't need cooking. Corned beef, Spam, Pringles and bean dip, some warm Cokes and some Snickers bars for dessert. Everybody loved everything, even the Spam.

  On board, our usual "glassware" was plastic, but I'd found an unopened case of champagne glasses that had probably been saved for some celebration. These surprised them more than anything else. They'd heard of glass, but they'd never seen it before. I used the glasses to serve the Coke in.

  We ate our fill, and I had Felicia take the leavings and an extra can of Spam to the guards. I was wondering where we should throw the trash when Roxanna carefully collected up all the tin cans and such and gave them to the cook for washing and preservation. Metal was that scarce here. I imagine that some craftsman will someday end up making something useful out of them.

  It was well past noon before we were finally ready to leave. I gave two pouches of silver and one of gold to Felicia's husband Jacques, and told the three male servants to take them to Adam along with his sh
are of the housewares, air mattresses, some instant coffee, sugar and a jar of Cremora. These people didn't drink anything with caffeine in it, and Adam used to need a few gallons of coffee a day to keep himself going. The men were to tell him that I would be dropping by tomorrow morning. The servants and Roxanna were astounded at my trust in the men, but I wasn't really worried. I mean, it was only a few hundred bucks worth, so what the heck.

  Roxanna felt otherwise. She took the money back from Jacques, opened each of Adam's pouches and carefully counted out the contents, recording the amount, before returning the money to him.

  "It is not polite to lead a good man into temptation, my lord," she said.

  I tipped the guards a quarter each, thanking them for guarding my property so well, and telling them that I wanted them to keep up the good work. The truth was that mostly I just wanted to see the expressions on their faces. It was worth it, even with the one who couldn't believe that a coin so large could actually be made of solid silver!

  Roxanna scolded me about it on the way home. I'd given each of them a half a year's pay!

  I laughed at her, and gave each of our servant women four of the quarters, telling each them to give half of the money to her husband. It was fun. I hadn't exactly been poor in America, but here I was rich!

  FIFTEEN

  "Sorry to be so long reporting back to you sir, but Lord Felix's people have managed to damage our listening equipment an average of three times a day since I installed it for them," Aldrich Skybolt said. "Since our illustrious nobility wouldn't admit to being able to tighten a loose wire, even if they did know how, they've been keeping me busy."

  "Easy, my young friend. If they didn't think they needed us, they wouldn't support us, and we'd all have to go out and get honest jobs," the warlock chuckled.

  "If you can call this business honest. Really, sir, we're snooping on three honest widows and a pair of shipwrecked yachtsmen. It's dishonorable, it's illegal, and it's a waste of time."

  "It's also necessary. We have some very serious problems on this little island of ours, problems that we can't solve on our own. Maybe, just maybe, these Yanks will have what we need to survive. The duke needs to know how far he can trust our new guests, and we need to know what the duke's up to. I only wish we had a better way to keep an eye on the good archbishop's boys and girls."

  "Yes, some of those monks think that it is more important to maintain our version of Christianity than it is to keep our people alive."

  "All too true, my boy. As to our eavesdropping, there can't have been much to report yet. Our visitors can hardly be out of their sick beds yet."

  "True enough, sir. In the course of keeping the duke's microphones working, I've managed to read everything his snoops have written down, and what they've learned isn't much more than that our guests aren't anything more than what they seem."

  * * *

  * * *

  The next day, I shaved before breakfast. Roxanna was shocked.

  "I saw your face that way when first you came here, my lord. I thought at the time that you must have been badly burned. You did this to yourself deliberately?"

  I said that I had, that it was the custom of most men in my culture to shave regularly, and that I couldn't grow a decent beard in any case. Roxanna shook her her head but said nothing.

  I took Felicia along so I wouldn't get lost and set out for Adam's place. I found him with some wooden poles lashed together to form a tripod, with a thin string hanging down, supporting a series of heavy weights. Apparently he was doing some tests on the strength of materials.

  "Hi, boss. You look better without the beard, but I think I'll keep mine. Thanks for the money and the coffee. Both have already come in handy. Besides squaring up with the girls, I've bought me a sedan chair, only it's more like a chaise longue. That and I hired six guys to carry me around in it. Mostly, I want to get down and check out the boat."

  Six men was about right, Adam's size being what it is.

  "I've already been down there, of course. She's not in bad shape, all things considered. The hole in the bottom is about a foot and a half across, and the deck is cracked up a bit, but if you stored some cement on board, we should have her in shape in a month or two."

  "No sweat. We had six bags, and each was wrapped up separately. We got everything else we'll need, too, if not too much is missing."

  "Adam, I don't think that anything at all has been stolen. All the electronic stuff is gone, and so are all the books and maps and such, but I think that they did it just for safekeeping. I mean, if they were going to steal, they would have taken the gold, don't you think?"

  "You're probably right, but then, different cultures do things different. Anyway, we don't really need any of the electronics. It's handy stuff, but we could sail out of here without it. And in a pinch, we could even do without the maps. I mean, if we just sail east, we'll come to the American coast, eventually."

  "You're so eager to leave? I had the feeling that you were thinking about getting domestic on this weird little island," I said.

  "You know, maybe I am. The girls here are so different from the ones back in America. I don't know quite how to put it, but it's like they're real women. The girls back home spend all their time playing games with your head, or trying to, anyway, since most of them don't have the brains to know that any man with a positive IQ can see right through it. They want to be respected, they say, and they want you to treat them like an equal. But if you try to do just that, to make like they're one of the guys, they get all pissed off 'cause they say you're talking vulgar in front of them. They say they want to be respected for their minds, but not one in a hundred has ever done anything to make her mind worth respecting. I mean, if they've read anything since they left school, it wasn't any more challenging than a teenage romance. They say they want to talk with you, but what they really mean is that they want to talk at you. Then they don't have anything better to talk about than what the other mindless broads had to say at work. Give them a chance, and they will recite to you, verbatim, every single word that every silly twit muttered from her first coffee break to her rush for the door at quitting time. And they'll get mad if you don't act interested in every stupid word of it!"

  "Most women are not that bad, Adam. There are a lot of sensible, intelligent women in the States."

  "Yeah, maybe a few. But by the time they get their heads squared away, odds are that their bodies have gone to shit. It's all the fault of the lousy training they get at home and in school. They all grow up believing every word of what those dykes who run the National Organization of Women tell them."

  "Well, I know that most of their leaders have admitted to being lesbians, but that doesn't make all of them sick that way," I said.

  "Yeah? Well, I figure that if every libber in the United States was laid end to end, they'd all be a lot happier. Anyway, they've got the women of our country believing that they have to be both men and women. Trying a stunt like that, they just naturally do a piss-poor job of it and end up being neither."

  "I've sometimes felt a little that way. Personally, I think that a lot of the fault rests with the news media."

  "By media, you mean television, since most of them never read a newspaper beyond the comics and their horoscope. And yeah, TV news has a lot to answer for, when it comes to wrecking the whole damn country. One person gets a bad headache tablet and they hype it up until they have every twit in the country afraid to take an aspirin. Some kid eats a bad hamburger in Oregon, and they get a hundred million housewives to pass up the ground beef in the supermarkets. Do they ever think about what they're doing to the whole drug business? Or the thousands of people who depend on it for their livelihood? About how many cattlemen went belly-up because they couldn't get half of what they expected for their stock? But even so, it isn't all the media's fault. They're just out there trying to sell advertising time. It's the silly twits who believe every word of it who cause the real damage. These modern women lack perspective, they la
ck the discrimination to see the difference between a random incident and a real threat. Hell, they've even tried to make `discrimination' a dirty word!"

  "Come on, Adam. There are as many male twits as there are female ones."

  "I don't believe that. For one thing, men have bigger brains than women, about twenty-five percent bigger. Women average nineteen billion brain cells up against our twenty-four billion. The male American is far more likely to take a rational view of things than the female. Women feel perfectly free to emote about things rather than considering them intellectually, whereas a man would be properly embarrassed if he let most of his emotions hang out in public. And this difference is not entirely caused by culture and environment. I tell you it's right in the wiring, and in the genes that programed that wiring. An intelligent man and an intelligent woman can take exactly the same input data, process it, and come to the same conclusion, yet I swear to God that their brains each took a separate path getting there."

  "On that one, you're right, Adam. PET scans of brain energy consumption during problem solving show different patterns in men than in women. But that doesn't mean that one way is necessarily better than the other."

  "I always knew it. And I'm not saying that the women of the world are playing with half a deck. What I'm saying is that us men are using a poker deck and all the girls back there are using tarot cards."

  I shook my head. "I take it that you find the fine ladies here to be an improvement over the ones you left behind."

  "Yeah, they are, somehow. It's like they know they're women, and they know that's nothing to be ashamed of. They don't try to be what they're not, and they don't try to make you into something that you're not, either. They know that men are different from women, and that there's nothing wrong with that difference. That men and women can and should complement each other, in the mathematical sense of the term. Like nuts and bolts that work together, with neither being the most important, and with each being pretty much useless without the other."