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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 lack 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."

"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."

 

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Framed