The Fata Morgana

by Leo A. Frankowski

  Or perhaps I should say, we thought we knew where we were. The Western Islands drifted around one of the loneliest areas in all of the oceans, not too far from the equator and a few thousand miles west of South America. Get a globe, find the place where the manufacturer has chosen to put his company logo, and you're likely to be near the spot where the Western Isles are.

  Not that we had a globe. We had a strange, hand-drawn chart. The Westronese did not use degrees North and South for latitude, or East and West for longitude. They used hours west of a reference point (the original location of the islands off the coast of France), for longitude. If noon at your present location happened eleven and a half hours later than noon happened at the original location of the Western Isles, then your longitude was eleven and a half hours.

  The distance from the North Pole to the South Pole was divided into twelve latitude hours, which were just a tiny bit shorter than the hours of longitude. This difference in length was due to the way that the spin of the Earth bulges the equator and flattens out the Earth at the poles, changing it from a perfect sphere into an oblate spheroid. Theirs was as rational a system as any, I suppose, except for the way that their fixed reference point no longer existed.

  In medieval fashion, the world map that we were given had East at the top, at zero hours, and Europe at the bottom. What wasn't medieval was that the rest of the world was now charted out in between.

  The North Pole was stretched out to a vertical line on the left, while the South Pole was another line to the right. Their arrangement greatly distorted the areas around the poles, but then the Westronese never went near the Arctic or the Antarctic, so to them it didn't matter. Theirs was a very pragmatic technology, with little foundation in the way of theoretical science. For the tropical waters that they were interested in, their maps were more than adequate.

  Their system put the latitude numbers across the top of the sheet, going from zero to twelve hours, left to right, and the longitude, going from zero to twenty-four, top to bottom. Which, I suppose, seemed normal enough to them. To us, it was turned sideways. Furthermore, it was written in Westronese, and the spelling and phonic value of the letters in Westronese are at least as random as they are in English.

  Another peculiarity of the map, to our eyes, anyway, was that the land masses were almost blank, while the oceans were thoroughly charted. The notations on ocean currents were particularly extensive. Still, we knew vaguely where we were, and once we turned the map sideways, the coastlines of North and South America were easily recognizable.

  When we started doing the math to translate the Westronese system into something that we could think in, we discovered that we did not have a single writing instrument aboard. Not a pen, not a pencil, not a piece of burned stick. Not an auspicious beginning.

  "Well, we left in an awful hurry," Adam said. "I just wonder what else we forgot to remember."

  Still, we were engineers, and nobody gets good with machinery without having a good sense of visualization. We sat down and worked it out in our heads. After a few hours, we both actually managed to come up with the same answers.

  "About twenty-two hundred miles west of the Galapagos Islands, and about three hundred north of the Equator," I said.

  "Yeah. That puts us just about due south of San Diego," Adam said, "but I don't think that we should try for it. It's too far away. Actually, the islands of French Polynesia are our closest landfall, but we're in the Equatorial Counter Current, and getting there might be rough."

  "Not to mention the problems of hitting a small island in a big ocean. I don't have that much faith in our navigation. The same argument holds for trying for the Galapagos Islands."

  "Nah, I could do it. I can come to within a couple of minutes of the right latitude easy enough with the sextant, and then we could just drive along that line of latitude until we got there. You can watch for land birds, too, and the skies above an island are supposed to look greener than those above the ocean."

  "You've got to be pulling my leg. You don't know a land bird from a penguin, and the only green thing I'm likely to see will be your throat if the weather gets rough."

  "You have very little faith, Treet."

  "I have none at all, as you've often noted. No, we have to make for the nearest large body of dirt we can find, namely the coast of Mexico, and our course is due northeast. That keeps everything easy."

  "Or as easy as a twenty-three hundred mile long trip in an open boat is likely to be."

  I said, "At our best speed, say maybe three miles an hour in this tubby boat with its little sails, we might be able to do that in a month or so. We've got all of five weeks worth of supplies aboard, so what's to worry about? Have faith, my friend. Trust in God."

  Adam was looking for something that he could throw at me, something that we could afford to lose. He couldn't find anything in that category, and eventually he gave up on it.

  A little before noon by my watch, I handed Adam his sextant, and we went through the drill of shooting a noon sighting.

  After twenty minutes of fiddling with the ancient contraption, and another hour of doing arithmetic in our heads, we decided that our latitude seemed to be about right, from what we remembered of what the sun should be doing at this time of the year. We could check it with greater accuracy at night, assuming that we could find the North Star.

  The big problem was with the longitude. After much mental juggling with numbers, we came to the annoying conclusion that either we had been given a longitude reading that was four hundred seventy-one miles off, or that my wristwatch was wrong by twenty-seven minutes, or that our math was screwed up something fierce. We both did the math all over again, and we both came up with the same bad answer.

  "Screw it!" I finally said. "It doesn't really matter where we actually are! Knowing precisely where we are won't change our actual arrival time one bit. If we just keep going northeast, we'll hit land eventually."

  "Yeah, but will we still both be reasonably alive when we hit it?"

  "If we're going to die, do you really want to know about it in advance?"

  "Yes, actually, I certainly do. I, at least, have a soul, and it would be nice to have the time to get it in order," Adam said.

  Adam seemed to prefer conning the boat, and since it didn't make much difference to me, I let him do it. I was content to trim the jib, bail the bilge, and break out stores as required. I took over and manned the tiller when Adam got sleepy, but that didn't happen in the first three days. Neither of us could sleep for the first seventy-two hours, what with the way a small boat bounces around on the Pacific ocean.

  Even when the weather is nice.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  "There are some dark clouds there on the horizon," I said.

  "I saw 'em. More important is the fact that they are to windward. Not that we can do anything about it. Everything that can be tied down already is, and we can take the mast down in a few minutes if we have to. So take the Chinaman's advice, and relax."

  "Right. You know, Adam, I've been thinking about something you said once on the island, about how it didn't matter if you called something magic or technology. I think you were wrong."

  "Three days in the sun is getting to your brain. You should put your hat on."

  "I don't need one. Unlike certain others, I still have all my hair. I meant what I said. Technology is something that you understand, or at least something that you could understand if you wanted to spend the time studying it. Magic is something that is inherently not understandable, but works on rules of its own. It is a phony alternative to the laws of physics."

  "If you want to define your terms that way, fine. I can't see where it makes any difference. We form concepts as a first step in comprehending the varied universe around us. Names are merely the arbitrary labels we put on those concepts, handles that make for easy carrying. As long as we agree on which concept is attached to which label, we can communicate with each other. It doesn't matter if the label is pink or blu
e."

  "But it does make a difference. A big one. All the horse shit going around about politically correct speech is happening because the annoying people pushing it believe in magic."

  "Bullshit."

  "I'm serious. One of the big rules of magic is that anything may be substituted for its symbol. If you want to manipulate something or someone, you make or get a symbol for that thing or person, and then you manipulate the symbol. You'll find the same rule in European Witchcraft, African Voodoo, and even in the various forms of American Indian, India Indian, and Oriental magic."

  "So? All that proves is that crazy people think alike. Or, if you want to state it in a politically correct fashion, it undeniably substantiates the postulation that certain mental aberrations tend to be predominately species specific rather than being substantially culturally engendered. Not that that's a particularly politically correct thought. The people biggest on political correctness are the schoolteachers who want politicians to pay them to make the world bright, beautiful, and suitably respectful of schoolteachers and politicians. Therefore, people of all flavors have to be amenable to education, indoctrination, and persuasion. Strange ideas like inherited intelligence and innate ability must therefore be condemned as basically wrong, if not downright evil."

  "You figured all that out for yourself, eh? That might be why certain feeders from the public trough push political correctness, but not why it is there in the first place," I said.

  Adam moved us a half point farther off the wind, and said, "Personally, I think that political correctness has a lot to do with the art of memorizing meaningless or at least inane phrases so as to keep your lungs and vocal cords in operation while your disengaged brain tries to think its way out of the dumb shit question that some pushy person with a microphone just asked you, hopefully while offending as few politically active people as possible. In American politics, of course, people who are not politically active simply don't count, and the only important point for a politician is to not offend inactive people enough to make them active for the other side.

  "Political correctness is a mixture of mental judo, verbose blandness, and yoga, and is very useful for politicians who are trying to convince the voters that they are the least obnoxious of the various assholes currently running for office."

  "Adam, you are becoming a lot more wordy than you used to be. You're swearing more, too."

  "Current circumstances have deprived me of anything better to do with my time than to spend it on furthering your sadly neglected education. The minor profanity simply enhances the descriptive accuracy."

  The wind picked up a bit, and Adam adjusted the rudder and stern sheets, while I decided that the jib was okay for now.

  "The subject of this conversation was magic, not the speech patterns of assholes," I said. "Now then, the symbol involved may be a physical object, like the wax doll used in so many kinds of magic, but the most powerful symbols we humans use are words. We communicate in words, we think in words, we perceive the whole universe filtered through our words. And the people who believe in magic believe that if you can change the word, the symbol for a thing, you can change the thing itself."

  "Talk about being wordy . . ."

  "Take a neutral example, a group of people that nobody hates, like handicapped kids. Sometimes, because of some chemical screwup in a kid's DNA, or something going wrong while the fetus was in the womb, a kid is born wrong. It's usually nobody's fault, and certainly the kid didn't do anything wrong, but there it is. And in a lot of cases, there isn't anything we can do about it. Someday, maybe, the medical types will learn enough about the process and we can fix it. Or maybe not. We all feel bad about it, but what to do? The politically correct have an answer. They say that if we can't fix the kid, we can at least try to make him happy, and the place to start is to be less rude about what we call him. We won't call him `handicapped' any more. We'll call him `special,' and that will make it all better. In one swell foop, the whole problem of handicapped children is solved, and we don't have any of them to worry about any more.

  "Of course, we now have a problem with all these `special' kids hanging around, but we can forget about that since nobody will start an Association for the Advancement of Special Kids for a while. If sometime later somebody does get bitchy about it, we can always solve the problem again by calling the little gimps `challenged.' The fact that the kids involved still can't play like the other children doesn't bother them, but the kids themselves are not that stupid. What they know is that `special' is now just another word for `handicapped,' and nothing else has changed. What the kid never knew was that `handicapped' started out as a politically correct word for `crippled,' and `crippled' was once the politically correct way of saying `gimpy.'

  "I could give you dozens of examples of how these people are trying to make things go away by changing the symbols we use on them. Leman. Whore. Prostitute. Lady of the Night. Hooker. Each word was supposed to correct the problem, and if you didn't use the currently correct term, you were not only inhumane and insensitive, you were downright nasty and wicked. However, the change in wording hasn't eliminated the problem of women selling sex on a short-term basis, and those women who sell it on a long-term basis, called wives, are still horribly offended by the ladies who are still taking it in lying down. But don't give up hope, since I have no doubt that they'll be coming up with another new word soon."

  "Working girl."

  "Eh?"

  "Working girl. That's the new word for hooker. The good General Hooker's descendants can now rest easier, because of the kind ministrations of the politically correct," Adam said.

  "Thank you. As I was saying. Moor. Blackamoor. Nigger. Negro. Colored. Black. Afro-American. It's the same story again exactly. What should be perfectly obvious is that reality is not about to change just because we changed the symbols we used on it."

  "I think I see what you mean," Adam said. "Like the only way that you can get a dinosaur to move is to get another dinosaur to kick it. But don't bad-mouth these word switchers too much, Treet. Think about it. The entire United States Army Corps of Engineers worked their balls off for two hundred years, attempting to drain the filthy, disease ridden swamps in the U.S., trying hard to turn them into useful farmland, and they only got about twenty percent of the job done. Then the politically correct came along, and bam! There suddenly isn't a swamp left in the whole country!"

  "Yeah, but the mosquitoes are still a nuisance in the `wetlands,' and malaria is on the rise."

  "Details."

  "All this playing with word games takes the emphasis off working on the problems themselves. If we spent as much time and energy working on engineering solutions to some of these problems as we do on half-baked social `solutions,' we'd be a lot better off."

  The wind freshened up again, veering a bit more from the south. Adam played with the rudder and the main sheet while I tightened up on the jib.

  Adam said, "Most folks don't know how to work on engineering solutions. The people you're bitching about don't know how to do much of anything except walk around with signs designed to attract airtime on the news shows, and free airtime just naturally attracts politicians the way shit attracts flies. The people you hear making all the noise are the people who don't count. It doesn't matter what they do, since all of their time is always wasted anyway. The productive people in this world are already doing all they can. I mean, personally, I don't know of any really good engineers who are out of work. Most of us are working longer hours than we want to. Getting uptight about what the useless people do with their time is just being neurotic. Treet, your problem is that you don't have any sense of humor."

  "I don't think malaria is funny, so therefore I don't have a sense of humor. Remarkable."

  "Sure. You don't seem to understand that laughter is the normal human reaction to pain. Preferably, someone else's pain, but pain none the less. Think about it. Think about any joke that you thought was funny, and you'll end up with somebody having t
o endure pain."

  I said, "I don't feel like thinking about anything just now."

  "Then chew on this for a while. Consider the fact that we human beings are members of the only species on earth that expresses pleasure by exposing our fangs."

  The wind came in hard, and for a minute I thought that the back stay would part. It held, and then we were busy furling the sails, taking down the mast, and stowing it all as best we could.

  The waves were getting huge, taller than five-story buildings, and every time we went over the top of one it seemed like we were airborne for an inordinate amount of time. I was getting worried about something being thrown out of the boat (like me, for instance) when Adam broke out the boat cover and we both got busy fastening it down. This cover wasn't part of the boat's original equipment, since The Concrete Canoe had not been mounted on The Brick Royal's deck, but was rather in its own special, covered compartment. It was something the fishermen, or maybe Roxanna, had seen the need for and had had made. It was made of Super-Hemp, and we were very glad to have it. Once it was on, the boat might be upside down, but at least it would be floating and all in one piece. Having it on meant that we had to crawl around the bottom of the crowded boat in a few inches of water, but I got to bailing again while Adam took the anchor off its rope, replaced it with the fishing net the fishermen had left aboard, and trailed the net and about a hundred yards of the rope off our stern.

  "The wind's blowing from the southwest," he shouted. "We're heading in about the right direction, and I figure that a little drag on the stern should keep us pointing in the right direction."

  "I bow to your wisdom," I shouted back as I continued bailing.

  In a while, I could switch from a bucket to a can, and then to a sponge. Within a quarter of an hour, the interior of the boat was fairly dry, despite the torrential rain and spray coming down hard on the boat cover, inches above our heads.