“I’ll do it myself, damn you. It’s better doing it that way than to have a squad of Killers handling my children.”
“Come on! You’ve just spent four months in close company with a bunch of those Killers. They’re not such bad guys.”
“They are still Killers! My people don’t kill the way you and those hired guns of yours do!”
“Me? If you are referring to that cannibal I killed, well, just what was I supposed to do? He had just murdered a woman, and he was charging at me with a bloody axe in his hands! I waited till the last possible moment before I cut him down! I didn’t have any choice!”
“You could have run away! You could probably have outdistanced him without any difficulty.”
“Probably is not a very encouraging word when somebody is trying to chop you up with an axe! Running might have worked, but what was I supposed to do if it didn’t? What if that cannibal was faster than he looked?”
“Maybe you could have led him back to the others. Then one of the Killers could have done the dirty work.”
“So now it’s evil to defend myself, but okay to get somebody else to do my killing for me? You have a lousy concept of ethics, lady! Anyway, what if I had tripped, or the Indian had caught up with me, with my back turned and my weapons still at my belt? What then, huh?”
“Then you could have died! That’s what one of my people would have done, rather than be guilty of killing somebody else. We don’t kill!”
“Is that so? Then why haven’t I noticed that all of you are vegetarians? Why were you enjoying the roast meat around the campfire with the rest of us?”
“That’s not the same thing! Those were animals, not people!”
“That cannibal didn’t see much difference between the two! Killing is killing.”
“He wasn’t civilized, and neither are you! Anyway, those animals we ate were already dead when the Killers brought them in.”
“So now you’re back to having somebody else doing your killing for you! To hell with this! Shut up and go get my boys!”
“You don’t have any respect for life at all!” she said as she stamped out.
* * *
On the island, everything always happened when you wanted it to happen, without all the inevitable time lags that occur in the real world. Therefore, I was taken aback when six hours went by before Barb returned with my three sons. Maybe she was punishing me, or maybe she wanted to give me a chance to cool down. Whatever she had in mind, it didn’t work.
But when she finally got there, she was trying to be pleasant. Trying, but not exactly making it, and what little I know about kids says that they are a lot like dogs when it comes to picking up on the mood of those around them. We all tried to make the best of an awkward situation.
They were good-looking boys, blond and big for their age, but they didn’t seem to have the energy, the spunk, the just plain bad manners that you expect from healthy youngsters.
They were named Tom, Ian, and Jim, after me and my friends. I thought that was a nice gesture on Barb’s part, but that she really should have asked my opinion about it before she named them. When you name little people after big people who are still alive, they end up being called things like “Junior,” or “Butchie,” or “Little Tommy,” which doesn’t do the kid’s ego much good.
Still, it was done, and the best thing to do about it was to live with the situation, and use middle names when necessary.
I told them that they were welcome to our island.
They didn’t say much. They acted as though they were afraid of me, or of the world around them.
I said that my partners and I owned the whole place, and if there was anything that they wanted, all they had to do was ask.
They didn’t ask for anything.
I told them that we had horses here, and that we could go horseback riding in the morning, if they wanted to.
Apparently, they didn’t want to.
I talked about scuba diving and flying airplanes, but I didn’t get much of any response. Camping and fishing didn’t get me anywhere, either.
The whole thing was depressing. I mean, I know that I don’t know anything about kids, but I was a kid once myself, and back then I would have lied in the Confessional to get the kind of offers that I was giving these boys. It was like there wasn’t any “boyishness” in any of them at all.
I don’t know.
Maybe I was coming on too strong. Maybe I really was a barbarian, and they were the civilized ones. Or maybe they had been given too God damned many lessons in how to be a Smoothie.
Individualism, that’s what they needed. The three of them had been living together in one room for too long. I had each of them assigned a big suite of rooms, in three different corners of the palace. I gave each of them a half dozen women as their personal servants, in addition to the four Killers who were assigned to guard each of my boys around the clock. I made sure that all of their teachers would be Killers, too. The program might turn them into spoiled rotten brats, but they sure as hell wouldn’t be Smoothies for long.
* * *
When I got to my office in the morning, I found that I had been gone for only two days. There hadn’t been time for any management problems to crop up, so I could spend my time playing engineer. After four months as a construction worker, it felt good.
The architect had given me sketches of all the special machinery we would need in the eighteenth century, as well as lists of other supplies that would be needed to complete the job properly. It looked as though we would have to send about twenty cargo canisters to haul it all back there. Besides furnishings for the castle, there were the ordinary household supplies needed by three thousand people. Plates, cooking pots, silverware, towels and an almost endless stream of other things. I gave it all to my secretary, and told her to get it done.
Ian was busy working out the manning requirements for his Historical Core, so I got busy on a few pieces of machinery that we hadn’t considered before.
Feeding the people of our little town would require about thirty thousand acres of farmland, if what I understood about the productivity of eighteenth-century farming techniques was correct. Clearing the land of trees could be done with temporal swords, if we could do it privately, or the hard way, with axes, if the locals were around. But chopping down the trees was the easy part. Something had to be done with the tree stumps and roots, and after that, the soil would inevitably be full of rocks and stones that would take millions of man hours to remove.
I sketched up something I called a shredder, a simple two-wheeled vehical twelve feet wide that could be pulled with a farm tractor, a horse, or even by hand, if the ground was level. It contained six hundred temporal swords, a third of them pointing straight down, and the rest at a forty-five degree angle to one side or the other. As you pulled this over a field, everything under it for a yard down was sliced to bits a half inch across at most. Going over it a second time, at right angles to the first pass, should mean that you would be able to get a plough through it immediately. The rocks and bits of wood would have a lot of sharp edges, and it might be years before you could work in the fields barefoot, but the chips would round out eventually.
I calculated that one shredder should prepare about forty acres for planting in an eight hour day. I ordered ten of the shredders to be made up, along with an equal number of light farm tractors to be powered by something like Ian’s emergency generators. Then I doubled the number of tractors, since they could be used for dragging logs as well.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The Appearence of the Teacher
The next morning, there were a lot of changes at my breakfast table. Barbara, Ming Po, Ian and I, our usual “Gang of Four,” were there, but now my three boys had joined us as well, and that somehow made a dent in the usual free-wheeling conversation. We just didn’t feel comfortable enough with each other to get into a decent argument.
The maids were fully clothed now, as were all the other women around Camelot and quite possibly the whole island. I guess that the ladies had decided that running around naked didn’t generate the right atmosphere to raise young boys in. I had to agree with them, in a way, but a part of me missed the old ways.