The Fata Morgana

by Leo A. Frankowski

  As the men went to the door with cases of beer and wine, I said, "A cold shaft, my lord? What's that all about?"

  "It's a place where it's cold. You haven't done much exploring around here, have you? I'll have to see that they're covered on the tour we'll arrange for you. In the meantime, haven't you wondered why it's always cool and pleasant here, even though we're at sea level and near the equator? It's because of a system that was built in the first century after the islands started floating. You see, while the water at the surface of the ocean is often quite warm, if you go a few hundred feet down, it's as cold as it can get without freezing. Our ancestors dug tunnels down to below that level, and arranged a series of check valves to keep the cold water flowing no matter which way the relative currents around the islands were going. There are a number of large, shallow ponds of cold water within the bowels of the islands. Air currents are forced over these ponds, and then circulate through all of our living spaces, keeping the temperature pleasant. The shafts that bring these air currents up are naturally much cooler than the rest of the structure, and are useful for chilling things that are better cold."

  "That's quite a system," Adam said. "But you're cooling down the air and then moving it up. That requires external power. How are you doing it?"

  "The water is raised by the ramming force of the winds and water currents around us. In general, we are moving with the ocean currents, of course, but wind and chance make for some slight differentials. The water taken in isn't warmed very much, so its density isn't very different going up or going down. Only friction has to be paid for, and that's kept small by the large size of the tunnels.

  "As to the air currents, well, on the ocean there's generally a wind about, and there are tunnels all about the islands with shutters on them that let air in, but not out. To get back out, the air must flow over the cool ponds before it can come out through someone's house. This cools only the leeward half of the islands, of course, but we see to it that the islands turn fairly often. The stone they're made of has a lot of thermal mass, so being without cooling for a day or two isn't noticed. We have to be in a dead calm for a week before it gets uncomfortable around here, and that's a very rare event. Come visit my office and I'll show you a diagram of the system."

  "I'd like that," Adam said. "We're going to need those diagrams when we give the bottom of the island a good scrape job."

  "There's another thing that's bothering me," I said. "I can see how they could dig tunnels down to below sea level, so long as there wasn't any water in them. But how did they mine their way through to the ocean without drowning the workers?"

  "They used gunpowder to blast their way out. We've had gunpowder here since the fourth century. How else do you think that a bunch of peaceful farmers and scholars could have beaten off three major Viking raids?" the Australian warlock said.

  "I'm surprised that I never heard of any legends of such a battle."

  "That's simple enough. We don't write songs about killing people, and the Vikings didn't live long enough to sing about it!"

  After the meal, it was decided that the smaller cans of Budweiser were cool enough to drink, and the party settled back for a while. I figured that this would be a good time to do something about the stupid arsenal that Adam had hidden aboard.

  Excusing myself, I climbed up into the boat, and used a ten-foot ladder to get from the hull wall up to the keel. I found the screwdriver and the screw that Adam had talked about. I had only used a squib once before, but I knew that despite the fact that they were powered by an explosive charge, one going off really isn't much of an explosion. It's more like a fast, strong push, and they are not all that noisy when they are used properly. This was one of Adam's engineering jobs, so I wasn't worried about bothering anyone in the least. I cleared the encapsulating plastic from the screw, inserted the driver and gave it the clockwise twist that would energize the squibs.

  The resulting explosion blew two large footlockers sideways out from the keel, taking the ladder and me with it out into the hold. I bounced off the now- vertical upper deck, slid down the ladder, and sat down hard. Both lockers broke open on the way down, spewing weapons, ammunition, and various instruments of death and destruction all over everything in sight, including me.

  I spent a few moments wondering if both my legs were broken before everyone started crowding into the hull of the ship. So much for secrecy. The warlock was the first one to get to me.

  "Are you all right? Try wiggling your toes," he said as he removed rifles and boxes of ammo from my battered body.

  "I seem to be all right, my lord. More damage to my pride than anything else."

  "Good. I'd hate to lose you. What are all these guns for?"

  "They were Adam's idea. I didn't know about them until today. He was worried that we might run into some rough characters on the high seas, and, well, better safe than sorry, you know? But now, since we are in civilized company, we thought that it might be best if we just hid them somewhere, so as not to give you the wrong impression of us."

  "I see," he said, pulling the case from a shotgun. "This is quite a beauty! Chrome plated?"

  "Stainless steel. They all are. Please understand that all of these weapons are legal back where we come from. There are no machine guns or heavy explosives."

  "Right. Well, if you were just going to store them somewhere, how about if I took care of that for you? We could put them in the duke's arsenal with the rest of the weapons."

  "The duke's arsenal?"

  "Yes. It's mostly just a bunch of interesting antiques, but all of the machine guns and ammunition from my old B-17 and the Jap plane are there as well. We haven't had any need for such things here, of course, but waste not, want not, you know."

  "My lord, we would be delighted if you would take these embarrassing things away and store them properly."

  As the warlock's men were hauling the arsenal away, I went over to talk to Adam.

  "The one time you really screw up an engineering job, and it has to be with a truckload of guns in front of the number two man on the whole island! Damn you, Adam!"

  "Yeah, well, your timing could have been a bit better, you know. Why did you have to do it when everybody was here?"

  "We agreed that I should do it during lunch."

  "That was before we knew who else would be here eating with us. You should have thought it out better. Anyway, it's all worked out just fine. The guns are gone, and maybe we can make the duke a gift of them. I mean, if he keeps an arsenal, he must like guns. Most guys do, you know," Adam said.

  "All right. So why did your squibs overreact?"

  "I'd sized them to lift the cases straight up, boss. I forgot that with the boat sideways, no lifting was necessary, and the resultant extra energy had to go someplace. In your lap, as it turned out."

  "Grumble."

  Some time later, the warlock was getting ready to leave.

  "My lord," I said. "One thing you might want to do is to start writing up a wish list, things that you would like us to buy for you once we get to the mainland. And you might suggest to the archbishop that he write up such a list as well."

  "A clever thought, that. If he gets his mind going on what he wants you to bring back, he might forget that he was against your going in the first place! Oh, yes. What did you want done with all of your electronic equipment that is up in my chambers? Shall I have my people bring it down here to you?"

  "Adam and I have talked that over, my lord, and we've decided to give you everything that is not essential to running the ship. Perhaps I could come up there tomorrow, and we could sort through it together."

  "Uh, Treet? Tomorrow is not a good day. They're taking my casts off tomorrow, and somebody is going to have to take the boys swimming," Adam said.

  "Nor is tomorrow a good day for me," the warlock said. "I expect that I'll spend the day closeted with the duke, discussing your proposal. But there's no hurry. It'll be months before you sail."

  Despite my new brui
ses, I got home feeling that it had been a profitable day. We were well launched on what I felt sure was to be the most profitable and worthwhile business venture of my life, and it was certain to be the most interesting. At dinner, Adam and the ladies were equally enthused. Roxanna was intent on learning English, with the hope that the duke would give her permission to join us on the voyage to South America. Maria and Agnes soon joined in with her plans, and the meal turned itself into an impromptu language lesson. It was late when we turned in. After Roxanna's rejection of my methods of proposal that morning, I was afraid that I would have to go back to sleeping alone.

  Luck was still with me, though, and Roxanna had returned to being her loving self.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  After breakfast, I went down to the warehouse and found four of the warlock's apprentices waiting for their first swim with a SCUBA rig. Some of them might have been waiting there for an hour, but ten minutes went by before the last two straggled in.

  It wasn't as though these were slovenly or recalcitrant students. They were all enthusiastic and eager to learn. They were being as prompt as they had ever been, for anybody or anything. It was simply that there was no such thing as a clock or watch on the entire island. They couldn't get there on time because they didn't have the slightest idea of what time it was!

  I had never realized just how important timepieces were, but these people regularly wasted about two hours of working time a day just waiting around for everybody else to get there. That's a tremendous amount of waste. Consider. Two hours per capita, twelve thousand people, and two hundred fifty working days a year. If one assumes an average hourly rate of only ten dollars an hour, that comes to sixty million dollars a year, flushed down the toilet for no good reason at all.

  Wrist watches. Our first cargo back had to contain at least a thousand wrist watches.

  Because of the sharpness of both the coral and the underlying featherrock, it was customary for these people to swim fully clothed, even to wearing thin socks and gloves. Their swimsuits looked like long winter underwear, but they were made of the same incredible fiber that all their other clothes were made of. That is to say, they were not only coral proof, and featherrock proof, but they were probably bulletproof as well.

  We gathered up the SCUBA equipment, as well as the snorkeling stuff, and headed for Avalon Bay. On arrival, I discovered that the air tanks were empty. As a safety measure, Adam must have drained them after the last time we used them, back in the Caribbean Sea.

  I decided that some snorkeling practice should be held first. I was starting them out with the snorkeling rigs to get them used to flippers and face masks, and to being under water, I said. They loved it.

  They'd been swimming all their lives, but without goggles or a face mask, you can't see anything down there but a fuzzy blur. Water has about the same index of refraction as the cornea of your eye, and with no air gap in front of it, your eye's optics simply don't work properly.

  Now the boys were in a beautiful new world, filled with strange things that they had always been near, but had never seen before.

  There was much to see. The structure of the island went entirely under the bay, such that the average depth was about thirty feet. While I'm no marine biologist, I'm sure that I saw both Atlantic and Pacific varieties of fishes there. The Bay of Avalon was as rich with sea life as any coral reef I'd ever seen on television, and it was totally unpolluted. Magnificent!

  Unfortunately, this marvelous coral structure was just what was sinking the islands, and threatening to kill everything, including the coral itself. After all, if the island did sink, the coral and most of its attendant sea life would be at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, where it couldn't live any more than I could. Yet clearing the lagoon out down to the featherrock seemed like a crime.

  In the end, I resolved to start chipping at the edge of the island, where the rock cliffs dropped sheer down into the nothingness that was below. And in truth, it would be much easier, per pound, to simply break loose the coral and waterlogged rock, and let them fall to the ocean bottom, than to have to put what we'd loosened on some sort of raft and haul that raft off to the edge of the lagoon for dumping.

  It made me feel much better to have a sound, engineering reason for doing what I wanted to do in the first place. There was plenty of other weight elsewhere to get rid of, and maybe someday I could get the warlock down here and convince him that the bay should be set aside as a nature preserve. Maybe.

  At lunch time, as we had arranged, Roxanna had a meal set up for us on the small beach by the bay. As we ate, she talked to the boys about the advantages of learning English, and it turned out that half of them already had at least a smattering of the language. By the end of the meal, it was decreed that all instruction would henceforth be given in my native language rather than theirs.

  The old saw about not going swimming for an hour after eating, because of the danger of stomach cramps, is nothing but a stupid old wives' tale. In the first place, unless you've eaten something that has given you ptomaine poisoning, there's no particular reason for newly eaten food to cause cramping. Nor is there anything about being in the water that can cause them. Severe stomach cramps are a rare malady. And even if you do get the cramps while you are in the water, there is no reason for them to be any more dangerous there than on dry land. Stomach cramps don't interfere with your breathing, after all, or with the use of your arms. You can keep on swimming with your face above the water even if your knees are up around your chin.

  We went back into the water right after eating, went to the mouth of the bay, and started work on the edge of the ocean proper. Adam had arranged for some four-foot lengths of reinforcing rod to be ground to a point at one end for use as picks and pry bars. Still using only snorkel rigs, we each had one of these tied with a two yard cord to our waists, and as a safety measure, I had each of us wearing a safety line that went back up to the rocks on shore.

  It was pretty easy to tell what needed removing and what should remain. If it was coral, break it off and let it sink. If it was rock and it didn't put out a spray of bubbles when you poked it, get rid of it. If it floated to the surface after you broke it loose, you did it wrong, stupid, and don't do it again!

  We didn't accomplish much that first afternoon, but we did work out the basic techniques needed for the job. Picking and chipping didn't work well under water, but prying did. We resolved to get some longer and stronger bars made up soon. Also, a lot of time was wasted going up and down, so we rigged some weighted lines down to the work area. It was easier to pull yourself up and down than to swim the whole way.

  By midafternoon, the light down there was getting bad, and we knocked off. We were exhausted, anyway. When you haven't been swimming in months, seven hours in the water takes a lot out of you, especially if you are working your way, very gently, into middle age.

  I invited the group over to Roxanna's place for tomorrow's breakfast, mostly to insure that we wouldn't have to wait for the stragglers before starting the next morning. I also asked them to bring along another eight of their friends. Since we had a dozen snorkel rigs, plus the masks and fins from the SCUBA rigs, there was no reason for not putting them all to work.

  I had been thinking of them as boys since I was over forty and they averaged about twenty. "Young men" would have been a better term.

  Watching them leave, I felt a lot of admiration for them. I've worked with many groups of men in my life, most of the time as their leader. For the last ten years, most of my subordinates have been very competent people, degreed engineers and skilled tradesmen, mostly. But I swear that I have never worked with an entire group of people before who were all as exceptionally intelligent, outstandingly eager, unflaggingly hardworking, and uniformly lighthearted as these young men all were. I tell you, it was like working with a totally different kind of humanity, a better kind.

  I've heard that the Japanese average about ten points higher on IQ tests than white Americans. It is difficult t
o write an accurate interracial or cross-cultural test, but if the data are true, I suspect that it might be because, for a thousand years, a Japanese Samurai was morally required to immediately decapitate any commoner who didn't "act in the manner expected." Since the Japanese had an extremely complicated code of behavior, it must have taken a fairly intelligent person to always know just what "the manner expected" was, in any given situation. I think perhaps that the Japanese were not only selecting for people who were well mannered, but also for those who were intelligent, or at least smart enough so as to have been able to learn all the rules.

  The policy of reducing the population by selectively sterilizing the less successful members of their society must have done the same thing for the people of the Western Isles, only much more so, since it was systematic. I can't say that I approve of the method, but I can certainly admire the results.

  * * *

  Adam was walking the next day, albeit a bit unsteadily. We figured that swimming was just the exercise he needed, so he took the eight new kids into Avalon Bay in the morning while I had the old- timers chipping and prying coral. His crew joined mine in the afternoon, and I let him run the show from then on.

  I had to get the genset up and running as well as the diesel engine that powered the SCUBA tank compressor. It took me the better part of two hours to partially disassemble both rigs, and to repair the damage caused by the dunking they got when the boat was sinking. Then I was over an hour figuring out a way to get diesel fuel from the big tanks built into the boat, which was on its side, to the small tanks on the small engines.

  Once I had the diesel engines producing both pneumatic and electrical power, I started filling the SCUBA tanks. Then I put the batteries Adam's men had extracted from The Brick Royal to charging, since we had exhausted them in trying to bail her out during the storm. Scrounging around, I found some of our electric lights and set them up, ready to switch on, come dark.