"When the ice age ended, the sea level rose and our volcanoes became a collection of islands. Now they didn't float away because they were stuck quite firmly to the continental shelf, and there they sat for the next forty-nine thousand years or so.
"In time they were discovered by people. It happened quite early, we think. While we have no records of the first landings, there are written records on this island that go back to 2754 B.C., and since they used to have five times our current land area, there were about as many people then as now. The old histories make fascinating reading. You might have that lady friend of yours check out some of our early books from the library, when your reading skills pick up, that is.
"For the most part, due to their remote location, the Western Isles were spared the invasions and empires that have wracked Europe from the earliest times. We have tended to be a fairly peaceful people, at least compared to the other European nations. Oh, we've had our wars, rebellions, and assassinations, but they were fewer in number and lower in ferocity than the average.
"Also, we were the first nation in the world to become Christians. You've heard of the apostle, Doubting Thomas? Well, about in the middle of the first century he came to our islands, and converted us from paganism without much fuss and bother at all. St. Thomas became our first bishop, and the church he founded has been the only one here ever since.
"I gather from your expression that you're not very religious, but you have to realize that Christianity is a powerful force hereabouts, and has been for almost two thousand years. Aside from our unique geology, it's been the dominant molding force both for the culture and technology of the islands."
"Christianity is responsible for your low level of technology?" I said.
"No, mate. It has been responsible for the high level of our technology. We both know that on the mainland, there has always been a tension between science and religion. It's not that way here, the current political differences between me and the archbishop notwithstanding.
"Think about the stories that you've heard concerning Doubting Thomas. He wouldn't believe that Christ had arisen, even after he had personally seen Him himself. He insisted on positive proof, putting his fingers into Christ's nail holes, and his arm into the spear wound in Christ's side.
"Can you understand that such an attitude was just what was needed to foster the scientific method? St. Thomas always insisted that one should always examine everything for one's self, and never trust to dogma or unsubstantiated folk tales. As a result, there has been a formal scientific organization here for over eighteen hundred years. The whole scientific revolution started here fifteen hundred years before it caught hold in Europe."
"And you are the current head of this scientific organization?" I asked.
"Right. The Wizards. Oh, the titles and all are a bit archaic, but that's to be expected with so old an organization. We've been carrying on our scientific researches for almost two millennia."
"Then why are you so far behind the rest of the world?" I said.
"First off, we're not as backward as we might appear to be. True, our clothing styles haven't changed much in the last five hundred years, but that's because of some of our high technology, not because of any lack of imagination on our part. When any article of apparel can be expected to last several hundred years, there is very little incentive to make much new clothing. We have no group of garment manufacturers here eager to increase their sales by making last year's fashions obsolete. What little new clothing we need to make is done as a hobby by the women here. They like to compete with each other on their embroidery, but if they changed the basic styles, everything they inherited from their grandmothers would be obsolete. A change in style would make them poorer, not richer.
"Then too, as you well know, in certain fields, horticulture, for example, and the study of ocean currents and weather patterns, we're considerably ahead of the rest of you.
"But for the rest, there are several obvious reasons why we're presently behind. You know that we have always been in a really dismal state when it comes to raw materials. We have no ores, no fossil fuels, and almost no minerals at all. Furthermore, there are damn few of us. There are only about twelve thousand people on all of the islands together, compared to upwards of six billion of you in the outside world.
"You can't expect us to stay ahead of the rest when we're outnumbered by a half million to one!"
TWENTY
"But we're getting sidetracked, and you asked for a history lesson," the Australian warlock said.
"So, for a thousand years after the coming of St. Thomas, the Western Isles prospered. While we avoided most of the invasions that plagued Europe, and managed to beat off three major Viking attacks, we did stay in touch to a certain extent. The Romans never got around to invading us, but we did enjoy a lively trade with them until the Germans took over the western half of Roman Empire. Luckily for us, the Germans never were much good with boats, so we stayed free. Still, there was a certain commerce going on in goods, and pilgrims, and ideas."
"Then why didn't your islands show up on the maps that the ancient Romans made?" I asked.
"I suppose that they did. The curious thing is that not one single authentic ancient Roman map managed to survive into the modern world. We have Ptolemy's text on how to draw a map properly, but none of his maps themselves. The only thing approaching them, outside of our libraries here, of course, are some highly distorted medieval copies. The Western Isles show up on them, of course. On the famous tenth-century Beatus map, they are clearly shown right where they are supposed to be, south of England and west of France. Your modern scholars have decided that they must represent Scotland, of all things, though what Scotland is doing as a separate island and south of England is left unexplained."
I resettled myself in the hard, straight-backed, armless chair and said, "So they were taken for granted at the time, and later passed off as a myth when they weren't there any more."
"Precisely. There were even a few tourists back then, going both ways. King Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon, was born not two miles from here, and despite what your history books will tell you, St. Patrick was born here a mile in the other direction. It was our church that baptized Ireland and parts of Scotland, not the Church of Rome. In fact, the Irish did not join the Romans until the time of Henry the Eighth. When he made the Church of England split from Rome, the Irish joined the Roman Catholic Church, mostly as a political protest. But I'm digressing again.
"So a vast mass of bubbly glass was stuck to the French continental shelf, and I'll leave it to you to think about the stresses involved. Glass, of course, is slightly soluble in water, and glass under stress is degraded faster than unstressed glass. In the winter of 1099, when everyone else in Europe was looking eastward at the First Crusade, a storm of monumental proportions swept in off the Atlantic Ocean, and broke the Western Islands free of the ocean bottom. The earthquakes were devastating, and there was hardly a building left standing. The entire city of Ys was completely lost. Some four thousand of our people died in a single night, most of our winter's stores of food were destroyed, and our standing crops were ruined. If the duke's library hadn't been kept in a mountain cave, our records would have been lost as well, but we thank God for small favors.
"As soon as the storm had blown itself out, our duke ordered every ship to be launched, to go to the mainland and beg for aid. This in itself turned out to be no easy feat, for to the wonderment of all, the very level of the sea had gone down six yards, and this was no mere freak tide. Indeed, as far as anyone could tell, there were no longer any tides at all! Our land area had increased considerably. But despite all the strangeness, some eighty ships were launched. Of these, only two returned, after great hardship and long voyaging, for when our ships got back to where the islands should have been, our islands were gone entirely! The Western Islands had floated off with the Gulf Stream, and we stayed on that great merry-go-round for seven hundred and fifty years."
I sa
id, "I'm amazed that in all that time you didn't snag yourself on some seashore or seamount."
"Well, we did, and fairly often at first, until we had the ocean currents thoroughly mapped. Once, we were hung up on the west coast of Ireland for three years. But the action of sea and tide eventually broke us free, which made us glad. You see, there were some very nice advantages to being adrift in the Gulf Stream, and the biggest of these was the weather. With a bit of coaxing, it was possible to spend the winters in the warm, southern latitudes, and the summers in the cool north. We found that we could easily get two and three crops a year from our fields.
"Excuse me," I said, "But how do you go about `coaxing' something as massive as these islands are, without any machines to speak of?"
"There are ways. You can drop an anchor at one end of them and cause the rest to spin around. You can put down cloth sea anchors—rather like parachutes—into a lower ocean current, and pull yourself a bit in that direction. The currents below are not always the same as those above, you see. We've even used huge kites, on occasion. But no more of these digressions, or the tale will never come to an end.
"Another advantage to floating free was that our travels took us as far south as South America, along what would one day be known as the Spanish Main, and past Central America as well. There were still forests on our islands then, and we could still build fair-sized ships. With them, we could bring back still more timber. We still had a fair stock of metal tools to work with then, as well. We traded with the natives as much as we could, and picked up from them many interesting plants and animals, but no tobacco, more's the pity. Most of our dyes and medicines were acquired during this period, and of course, we've been improving on them ever since. We'd developed the rules of simple genetics in the third century, you see. Oh, nothing like the recombinant DNA work that has been going on in the last few years outside, but a few thousand years of careful selection and breeding can work wonders.
"Also, we found that by restricting our contacts with the outside world, being at sea was healthier for our people. You see, by 1250, we had worked out the germ theory of disease, and it was obvious to us that if deadly germs couldn't get to us, they couldn't kill us. Bacteria and such must have hosts to live on, and our population was small enough that, eventually, most diseases died out. It wasn't until much later that we discovered what a horrible trap this was that we had fallen into! But more about that later."
I said, "But how did you keep yourselves hidden?"
"Why, we didn't even try to! Lots of people saw us. The legends of Ireland are full of sightings of our islands, and many a mariner and fisherman has gone home with tales to tell about us. The simple truth was that nobody believed them. There was no way for any of those people to substantiate what they saw. We were moving around, you see, and anytime anyone went out to find us again, we simply weren't there any more! People even went so far as to invent an optical illusion to explain what people who saw us thought they saw, the Fata Morgana."
"But the Atlantic Ocean is one of the most heavily traveled bodies of water in the world! Eventually, enough consistent sightings would convince people that you really existed," I said.
"So what? It is not as though we were actually trying to hide, after all. As long as no one sent an invasion fleet out after us, we really didn't care what the world thought about us. We merely wanted the world to leave us alone. Until around 1850, that is. Then it was that we realized the biological trap that we'd fallen into. You see, we'd picked up some shipwrecked sailors, and one of them had smallpox. It cost us a third of our population, even though we learned the accepted methods of treating it from one of the other castaways, who had been a ship's doctor. We simply had no immunity against the disease, nor, as it turned out, for any of the thousand other ills that mankind is heir to.
"Do you realize that from the time I first came here, in 1943, until a month ago, I was not sick a single day? Oh, it's been very nice, I suppose, though one generally doesn't notice being healthy. Also, look at me carefully. How old do I seem to be?"
"Well, sir, when I first came in, I pegged you at about sixty, but I guess you must be a bit older than that, from what you say," I said.
"I'm much older than that. I was thirty-six when I crash-landed here. I wasn't regular aircrew at all, you see. I was in charge of aircraft electronics at my base, and when a radio operator got sick, and I got a chance to see something of the actual war, I jumped at it. Treet, you are looking at a ninety-two-year-old man. Clean, healthy living and the lack of disease can do wonders for you. The immune system takes a lot of one's vital energy to run, but mine hasn't had much work to do at all. But if I were to go back to Australia now, I likely wouldn't last the month out. Every disease that I hadn't gotten before would jump on me all at once, and that would be the end of me.
"So, as I was saying, in 1852, the wise men of the islands realized that we could no longer risk being discovered by the outside world. They held a major public debate about what to do about the situation, and the grand council decided to leave for a less populated part of the world's oceans. Together, we managed to steer the islands from the Gulf Stream south to the similar current in the South Atlantic. From there, it was south of the Cape of Good Hope, through the Roaring Forties, which by all accounts deserve their name, south of Australia and then north into the fairer climes of the South Pacific. It was a rough trip, but we made it, and it served us well for almost a hundred and fifty years.
"But no more. Now you blighters have satellites flying up there at all hours of the day and night. If one of your military spy satellites was to gam in on us, the show would be over, though we've managed to stay out of what they would call `sensitive' areas. Worse yet, we're big enough for your geosynchronous weather satellites to see, if anybody would believe what they were looking at. As it is, our best guess is that when they do see us, they put it down as some sort of an electronic glitch, and ignore it. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the situation can't go on forever. Some power or other is going to spot us, and with peaceful intentions or otherwise, they will likely invade us. And for the medical reasons I've mentioned, not many of us will survive it."
"So now you need a way to keep your island hidden from satellite surveillance," I said.
"That would solve one of our problems, but not the other one."
We were interrupted as a young woman came in wearing an abbreviated version of the warlock's robes. All of the other women's costumes I'd seen on the island had floor-length skirts, even when the bodice was cut as low as possible. This outfit exposed nothing below the neck, but the loose black smock ended just below the serving girl's crotch.
"Always been a leg man, myself, and my mother always said that a woman should never expose both ends at the same time," the warlock said.
When I agreed that it would be a shame to cover up such attractive legs, the warlock nodded in agreement, and the young woman winked at me. I'd been impressed with the warlock's status before, but a man's having so much power that he could actually get the ladies to dress in a fashion that pleased him, well, it was a thing that was beyond all experience!
It was a moment before I noticed what those lovely legs had carried in for our afternoon snack. Besides the weak, flat beer that the islanders made, I was surprised to find a large plate of sushi!
"We weren't the only plane to crash here during the war," he explained. "A Jap patrol plane pulled the same stunt, and one of their gunners turned out to be a pretty good cook."
"You were saying that you had yet another problem," I said.
"Right. You see, we're sinking. Over the centuries, water has been slowly working its way into the tiny gas bubbles that keep the place afloat. We've been able to compensate for this reduction in buoyancy by hollowing out all of the mountains above the water level, and by sinking shafts below it, again to reduce our weight, but as one of your songs has it, we've `gone about as far as we can go.' And the coral buildup on the underside hasn't helped things a bit!"
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"Just how fast is it going down?"
"We've sunk a foot in the last six years. In twelve more years, a major storm might be able to flood out some of our lower galleries, and that would bring on a total disaster. Do you see the spot we're in? We can't leave and we dare not stay!"
"It can't be that bad. I don't know much about medical things, but I'm a hell of an engineer. Why don't you simply go down below the islands and scrape off the coral and the waterlogged featherrock?"
"The islands draw more than half a mile, that's why, and there's a little problem with breathing down there!"
"Going all the way down to the bottom might be a problem, but there has to be a lot of excess weight within a few hundred feet of the surface. Ever heard of a SCUBA rig?"
"There have been a few scattered references to such a thing on the radio, but they weren't very clear," he admitted.
"SCUBA. Self contained underwater breathing apparatus. We have two of them with us, along with a compressor to pump up the tanks. You are welcome to them, and we'd be happy to teach some of your people how to use the things."
"Marvelous! Can we start tomorrow?"
"No reason why not. Also, while I'm not sure of all of your needs, there might be a lot of other things that we can help out with."
"That's the spirit, mate! Now then, before you go, could you explain to me some of this equipment you had on your boat?"
The Fata Morgana Page 14