The Fata Morgana

by Leo A. Frankowski

  "So which one are you going to marry, and can I be your best man?"

  "Hey, there's no hurry, boss. Marriage here is more of a contract for having children. Until we're ready for that, there's no point to it. Anyway, maybe we ought to make it a double wedding. That was a real keeper you brought by here a few days ago."

  "You too, huh? I've got a gardener who's trying to get me to marry his boss."

  "Well, like I said, there's no big hurry. Maybe I'll really settle down here, but before I do there are a few hundred questions I got about this place. And if I don't like some of the answers that they give me, well, I'd feel a lot better if The Brick Royal was ready to sail at a minute's notice."

  I said that I had questions of my own, and we spent an hour updating each other on what we'd learned. He just nodded when I explained the testing they put their kids through, and the forced marriages and all. He'd suspected something of the sort.

  For his part, he had found at least six strange vegetable products that had to be unique to this weird little island.

  "There's this `hemp' they grow which produces a fiber that I swear is stronger than Kevlar! Do you realize that they can't even cut the thread they use? They have to burn it through, and they do the same with the cloth they make! When the time comes to harvest their hemp, they have to pull it up by the roots. Then they just throw it into a tank, wet it down, and wait until it rots. What's left over is made into rope and cloth!

  "They make their shoes out of leather that's generally made from the hide of a whale, but the soles are covered with this rubbery substance they get from another plant. It's as thin as paint, yet it lasts for over a year, usually. Then they just give the bottoms another coat and they're good till next Christmas!

  "I think that they must have more and better medicinal plants than we do. We was both cut up pretty bad, but we healed up quick, with no infections and darn little scarring. And they tell me that these casts are coming off in a week. Can you beat that? A month and a half to heal five compound fractures, and me pushing forty-six from the wrong side?

  "All of their dyes are vegetable, and they got as many bright colors as we do. What's more, those colors don't fade! They last hundreds of years, just like the cloth they're used on.

  "The walls of all these rooms are plastered with something they get from a gourd plant, grind up and mix with water. There are some preservatives that I haven't checked out yet, but have you looked at the paper they use? It's not really paper! It's the leaf of a plant that grows without the usual veins in it. They just harvest it, press it flat while it's drying, and use it. It even turns white by itself as it dries."

  I said, "So it's like you were saying the other day, they do have a technology, but a very different technology than ours."

  "Right. And there's a bloody huge fortune to be made from both sides by getting them together. We could do these people here a world of good by setting up a trading company."

  "For which we need the boat. Incidentally, with your permission, partner, I've already taken the first small step toward our commercial empire here. Roxanna wanted to hire some fishermen and put The Concrete Canoe to work as a fishing boat. We never really used it much, and we've still got the inflatable life raft, so I told her to go ahead. That okay by you?"

  "Sure, and I'm way ahead of you, boss. I had some fishnet makers in earlier today, and got them started on a two-mile-long drift net, something these people never heard of. Did I mention that this hemp of theirs doesn't rot, either? Whatever that stuff is, it sure ain't cellulose!"

  "Drift nets? Isn't there some kind of international agreement restricting their use?"

  "Who cares? The duke here never signed any international agreements, so where does some foreign country get off, telling him how to fish? And even if he had, do you think somebody's going to catch us using them? Hell, boss, they haven't even found this whole damn floating island yet!"

  "Yeah, Adam, and why haven't they? I think that bothers me more than anything else."

  "Me too. But for now, let's get the girls to pack a picnic lunch and go down to the boat."

  SIXTEEN

  We made quite a procession, what with Adam and his six bearers, both of his lady friends, who were dying to see the ship, all of his servants except his three gardeners, plus Felicia and me. It was past noon when we got there, and within minutes Roxanna showed up with four fishermen in tow. We broke out the lunch we'd carried with us and augmented it from our ship's stores.

  After some time spent on exclamations about the strange and wondrous things we'd brought (like paper plates and catsup in plastic bottles), the subject of conversation got around to the remuneration that Adam and I owed to the island's people for rescuing us and saving all of our property. It seems that local custom was for us to decide such things, rather than for them to present us with an exaggerated bill for us to argue over, as it would have been done in the outside world.

  Our three ladies were of the opinion that each of the three-hundred-odd workers who had each spent two days lugging in our equipment, all the supplies, and the boat itself should each receive the equivalent of two cents worth of silver. This ridiculously low fee embarrassed us Americans. I mean, we're not the kind of people who hire scab labor. After some haggling with our womenfolk, we settled on a quarter to each man and woman. The guards at the door were each to get the same, with some of them already having been paid. The shire reeve was to get twice that, and various other officials, including the lady doctor who had patched us up, got up to a whole dollar.

  Indoor real estate rented cheap in the Western Islands. Eight silver quarters rented us the warehouse for the next two years. We didn't argue about that, since landlords generally get more than they deserve.

  When the ladies worked their way up to the duke, the tables were suddenly turned, and while we were trying to hold them back, they were trying to give away the store. The duke, they felt, should get one third of our gold, and the archbishop and the warlock one sixth each! Plus the same distribution in silver. This was something like a hundred thousand dollars, cash money American! And in a place where a quarter dollar fed a family for a year! The ladies simply felt that since we had it, the patriotic thing to do was to give it to the government.

  I tell you, the IRS would have loved these women.

  I couldn't see why we should volunteer to give them anything. Who ever heard of voluntarily giving money to the government? Governments always went in and stole whatever they wanted anyway. The only thing that ever slowed them down was the fact that they wanted you to be alive and productive so they could rob you again next year. If we started out being that generous, it would only whet their appetites. Look what happened when Montezuma sent whole baskets full of gold to Cortés, eh? And I should give real money to the bastards who run the local religion racket? No way, baby!

  Adam, on the other hand, felt that a little cumshaw was a good idea, sort of like donating to the Policeman's Benevolent Fund. "Hey, it's good politics," he said.

  We argued for more than an hour. In the end, we decided on two pounds of gold and four of silver for the duke, and half that for each of the other two high- muckety-mucks.

  Even then, I insisted that Adam give all the money to the church, while I took care of the warlock. We went along with a suggestion from the ladies and threw in some other gifts in addition to the money. Some dinnerware and glasses, a few air mattresses, some food and drink, and a few dozen of the felt- tip pens that Roxanna was particularly taken with.

  During all this time the servants just sat around, ignored, and astounded by the conversation. Nobody worked by the hour, so the general feeling was that their time wasn't worth very much.

  "Okay," I said at last, throwing Roxanna the keys to the strongboxes. "You girls make up the lists as to who gets what, and count or weigh it all out. Adam and I have to get busy with the boat."

  Before we could get into what should be repaired and how, there was the matter of the four fishermen and The Co
ncrete Canoe.

  It was a canoe to the extent of being pointed at both ends, but that was about it. In general proportions, it was more like a tubby whaleboat, or a fat lifeboat. Twenty feet long, it was seven feet wide and five high. It had an easily set up aluminum mast and was sloop-rigged with Dacron sails. It also had a small diesel inboard motor, and it was this motor that gave the fishermen trouble.

  The sails were no problem, although they said that they would have preferred a gaff-rigged mainsail to the Bermuda rig we had. While the sail stays we used were new to them, they soon understood what they were for without any difficulty. They had never seen anything like a retractable centerboard, but once it was explained to them, they loved the idea. They adapted to what we had with surprising rapidity, especially considering that the local boats were more like kayaks than anything else I was familiar with, and we were told that the frames had more whale bone in them than wood. In fact, many of the things that I had taken for wood turned out to be bone with a sort of glued on cloth covering, to improve the tensile strength.

  You see, locally, wood was incredibly expensive. Every single possible square foot on the island was in use for agriculture, and even so they were just barely able to keep people fed. To grow a single log, they had to take a fair-sized piece of farmland out of production for many years. Thus, a lightweight, cloth-covered frame made a lot of sense. When they needed more workspace for nets, equipment, and so on, they used two kayaks lashed together into a catamaran.

  The fishing nets Adam had ordered wouldn't be ready for a few weeks, but our modern rods and reels would work for the time being. The fishermen were at first awestruck at being trusted with something as fabulously valuable as our fishing reels obviously were to them. Metals of any kind were extremely valuable on the Western Isles. I suppose that it was like giving a group of American carpenters a bunch of solid diamond hammers and telling them to go to work.

  On finding out how weak (by their standards) our fishing lines were, they were soon talking about replacing them with the local product, for fear of losing a valuable hook or spinner. Nonetheless, they picked up on casting and reeling in pretty quickly. Actually, they were a very intelligent bunch of guys, a lot sharper than the sort of workers that you likely would have hired off the street in downtown Bay City.

  Their reaction to the auxiliary diesel engine was less impressive. An hour's discussion on the theory and practice of internal combustion engines went right over their heads. We fired it up for a few seconds, the most we dared on dry land, without water in the cooling jacket, and they just got scared. Finally, Adam and I were reduced to teaching them by rote the names of the parts, had them chant through a litany on how you started a small diesel engine, and let it go at that.

  Personally, I doubted if they would ever actually use the engine, no matter how far away from the island they were when they got becalmed. They'd been sailing all their lives without the safety of a backup engine, and anyway, there were always the oars.

  It was late in the afternoon when we got all the men (including the guards) together and hauled The Concrete Canoe out to the water. It was quite a job, without machinery, or even rollers, and we barely had the manpower available to do it. Much later, it struck me as curious that none of the men, including Adam and me, ever even suggested that the women there should lend a hand, and that none of the six ladies present, even the servants, thought to volunteer.

  The fishermen sailed around Avalon Bay for a while, until we could see that they were competent seamen who had the feel of The Concrete Canoe. We waved good-bye to them so they could get in a few hours of deepwater fishing before nightfall.

  * * *

  It was getting dark by the time Adam and I had settled on our work schedules for repairing the ship. We would use the bearers he'd hired as laborers, since otherwise they'd spend the time just standing around anyway.

  We probably wouldn't need more men until we were ready to launch her, since more would be just that much harder to supervise. But come launch time, we'd need as many men to put her back as it took to haul her out, three hundred, at least. All of which meant that sneaking out "between two days" was out of the question, even if we wanted to.

  At about the same time that we had things settled, the ladies had their task done and the fishermen were coming back as well. They had been lucky, and had brought back two dozen large Pacific salmon and a freshly killed bottle-nosed dolphin.

  Roxanna was delighted with this first proof of her business acumen, but I was taken aback at the thought of deliberately killing a dolphin. In fact, I was about to raise a stink about it when Adam called me over to him in English.

  "Dammit, we can't let them go on killing dolphins," I said in a stage whisper.

  "And dammit, boss, you can't go blowing your top every time you run into a local custom that you don't approve of. We are strangers here in a strange land. These people have gone way out of their way to be nice to us, but they can change their minds about us any time they feel like it. If they want to eat large sea mammals like whales and dolphins, it's their business and not yours," Adam said, his nose inches from mine.

  "But you're talking about some very intelligent animals! It isn't right to eat them!"

  "What makes you think that those critters are so smart? They don't act smart. Whales would just bask around on the surface while those old-time whalers rowed up and speared them dead by the hundreds, and that's got to be acting about as stupid as you can get," he shouted.

  "Those `critters' have got huge brains," I yelled. We were both shouting in English, and the ladies, servants, and workers were staring at us, but what the heck. I had my dander up.

  "Proves nothing. Maybe they need huge brains to control their huge bodies. Then again, monotremes all have abnormally large brains, and they're all dumber than your average empty beer can. They say that they don't have REM sleep, and the brains that they have aren't organized very well. Well, maybe cetaceans don't have REM sleep, either. Nobody's ever tried to find out, you know. Maybe they don't sleep at all, what with having to live under water and breathe at the surface or something. The fact is that we don't know. What we do know is that our dolphin was stupid enough to bite down on an unbaited hook, and that it was dead before we ever saw it," he said.

  "Making a mistake doesn't prove stupidity. There is a definite correlation between brain size and intelligence, and eating an intelligent animal is wrong."

  "Bullshit. A pig is a very intelligent animal, probably smarter than a dog and much smarter than any cat. Yet I've seen you order pork five nights a week and bacon every morning. Anyway, where do you get off telling another people what they should or should not eat? Hell, some of your countrymen eat monkey brains! And as for that fish juice you're so fond of, hell, I got sick when they told me how they make it!"

  "Now that takes the cake! A Polack criticizing somebody else's eating habits! You people eat duck's blood soup with prunes in it, for God's sake, and I've read the ingredients on a package of kishka!"

  I could see Roxanna wondering if she should intervene, and then deciding that she was afraid to.

  Adam said, "It is flat ignorant to read the ingredients label on anybody's kind of sausage, stupid, and tchanina is the Food of the Gods! All of which goes to prove that if the islanders want to eat dead cetaceans, it's their damn business!"

  "Well, I'm not going to eat any!"

  "Done!" Adam switched to Westronese, and was suddenly speaking quietly and politely. "Lady Roxanna, we've just decided. He would prefer not to eat any of the dolphin, so don't fix him any of it."

  I smiled and nodded to her in affirmation.

  Astounded to see us agreeing, when she had been expecting us to get violent, Roxanna meekly nodded yes.

  "Glad that's settled," I said.

  "Good. Now you get to invite my whole crowd over for the night, 'cause it's getting too dark for us to take a two-hour walk home."

  "Oh. All right. Roxanna, please make arrangements so that o
ur guests here can spend the night with us."

  She nodded yes again, and sent three servants scurrying off somewhere to do something.

  SEVENTEEN

  I said, "Adam, I'm sorry I called you a Polack."

  "Why should you be sorry about that? I mean, it's what us Polacks all call each other."

  "I know that, but I'm not one of your people. You know. One Black Man can call another one a Nigger, but that doesn't mean that anybody else can get away with it."

  "Well, niger is Latin for black, and it means nothing but the color, or rather the lack of one. To the ancient Romans, who spoke Latin, black didn't have the connotations of evil that it has for Northern Europeans. The Romans themselves were not the least bit racist. I mean, they'd enslave you no matter what color your skin was.

  "Usually, when you want to say something that might offend somebody, it's safer to say it in a foreign language. If you're embarrassed about saying the Anglo-Saxon word `shit,' it's generally okay to say `defecate,' which is `shit' from the Latin. Or to a baby, most mothers say `kaka,' which was `shit' in ancient Greek. Ditto with `piss' and `urinate.' So when `Black' is a polite enough word, `Niger' or `Nigger' really shouldn't be considered derogatory when said by anybody."

  "Well, they certainly seem to think it's derogatory, and if you have any doubts, just go yell it for a while in some of the darker areas of Detroit," I said. "I wouldn't shout `Nigger,' and I shouldn't have shouted `Polack.' "

  "But it's not like that. Polack means `man' in Polish. Or maybe it means `a gentleman of Polish persuasion.' Why should I get offended if you should take the trouble to speak my ancestral language? Now, I could see a Polish girl maybe getting ticked at being called a Polack, since properly, she's a Polka."